The other side of the picture

Australian director Warwick Thornton has set pulses racing with his honest (and mostly wordless) debut feature – a love story offering a candid view of the life of the country's indigenous people. He talks to DONALD CLARKE

‘WE ARE ALL searching for our purpose in life,” Warwick Thornton tells me. “It turned out that mine was storytelling. Then, what do you know, I suddenly find myself in Soho.”

Thornton is in that central London enclave to discuss one of the most enthusiastically received Australian films of the past decade. Samson & Delilah(the ampersand helps distinguish it from the Hedy Lamarr epic) follows two indigenous Australian youths – he's a petrol-sniffing joker; she's somewhat more disciplined – as they make a disastrous journey from their rural hamlet to the comparatively urban surroundings of Alice Springs.

Almost entirely wordless, utilising an effective pin-balling anti-structure, the film offers European viewers a rare chance to enjoy an Aboriginal story that is not mediated through Caucasian eyes.

“Yeah. Australia is very much a veranda-based country,” Thornton laughs. “What I mean is that so many Australians live outside on the coastal rim, and the centre is perceived as uninhabitable. Well, we’re there and we’ve always been there. That’s us in the film.”

Dressed in a black western shirt decorated with cheerful Mexican skulls, Thompson does not look out of place in the media-clogged members’ club. You would, however, never mistake him for anything other than a proud indigenous Australian. Raised in and around Alice Springs as part of a “media savvy” family, he started out as a DJ on a public radio station founded by his mum. He soon developed a desire to travel, but fast noticed that the only way local kids seemed to escape the locale was by attracting the attention of an Aussie Rules football team.

“That certainly wasn’t an option for me,” he snorts. “Then some people I knew set up a video crew. They’d disappear into the sunset and return with all these amazing stories. I rapidly realised that was how I was going to get out of town.”

Thornton trained as a cinematographer and developed a very healthy career shooting for television and cinema. Mindful that “once a cinematographer moves into directing, no other director will want to hire him again”, he, at first, made only tentative steps towards auteur status. However, after fashioning a series of acclaimed shorts, he eventually took the plunge and embarked on his first feature.

There are many remarkable things about Samson & Deliliah, but the most notable is, perhaps, the sparseness of its dialogue. Many pundits raised an eye when it was chosen as Australia's entry for this year's best foreign language picture Oscar. After all, minutes go by without a single word being spoken. If there were an Oscar for "no language picture", then it would surely be a contender.

“Oddly, the silence gives it a truthfulness,” Thornton says. “Look, when I was 13, I simply couldn’t talk to a girl. When I tried to write dialogue for the kids, it became ridiculous. It seemed he couldn’t talk, and if he couldn’t, then why the hell should she. It forced me to do things, as it were, in big print. With no dialogue, the position of their eyes or where they were standing had to matter that bit more. If somebody was angry they had to show it physically.”

Thornton explains that, when he was preparing the film, he turned down quite a few potential investors. An upright sort of fellow, he felt uneasy about taking money for a project that might only appeal to a tiny audience. You can, I guess, see his point. Who, when it came to his second film, would want to back the guy who wasted a million dollars on an obscure quasi-silent movie that was watched by two critics and the lead actor’s mum.

As it happened, Samson & Delilahhas struck chords with punters all over the world. The picture won the Caméra d'Or (for best first feature) at the Cannes Film Festival and the best film prize at the Australian Film Institute Awards. In February, it added the Dublin Film Critics Circle's gong for best film at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival to its already heaving trophy chest.

“The different ways it’s been received in different territories is funny,” he says. “Look, we’ve all fallen in love for the first time. That’s universal. But everyone has a different outlook on teenage love. You notice that in the differing things people laugh at. The French laugh at different things to the people of central Australia, but they all understand the central idea.”

It must have been a trial of fire for the two young stars. Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson, both non-professionals when they were cast, travelled the world with the film. Teenagers from ordinary communities, they suddenly found themselves being thrust before snooty, soul-patch bedecked intellectuals at intimidating film festivals.

“Within the first week of shooting, they realised they had a large amount of power,” he says. “They started playing with that control, but I gently nipped it in the blood. I set myself up as a grumpy uncle.”

That sounds plausible. Thornton seems like a nice bloke, but, as you might expect from a man who’s done so much with such scant resources, he also exhibits a streak of steely determination.

“We had a really good screening in their home town,” he says. “Everybody laughed and cried. That made them feel unbelievably strong. Then we flew directly to Cannes and they’re walking the red carpet. People are stopping them in the street, and that really, really freaked them out. A few months later, they were at the Telluride festival [in Colorado] and they’d become completely used to it. They were swaggering about the place as if they owned it.”

Nonetheless, Samson & Delilahmust, surely, have annoyed some members of the Aboriginal community. The film is generous to its deeply flawed heroes, but it does focus on the wanderings of a petrol-sniffing delinquent and his distracted, unemployed girlfriend. Did any groups object that Thornton was not projecting a "positive representation" of the community?

“There was some of that,” he says. “Some people said we were airing our dirty laundry in public. The irony being they were invariably people who lived in cities and do not have a great deal of knowledge about central Australia, where I am from. We used to have 480 languages, now we have only 60 left. Those people who live in cities don’t always want to confront that. Now, I find this picture is a ‘positive representation’ of that community, because it is the truth.

“What’s more positive than the truth?”

Following the international success of Samson & Delilah,his young actors now find themselves under unexpected pressure. McNamara and Gibson will, Thornton believes, continue to act.

“But, being teenagers, they’re not sure what they want to do,” he says. “If they decide to become plumbers instead, we’ll give them the same amount of support.”

What of Thornton himself? Well, once again, this impressively moral director, currently planning a period piece set in a monastery, finds himself embarrassed by the eager attentions of investors.

“It is weird. There is currently no shortage of money,” he says. “A lot of people are really keen to invest. ‘Here’s the money for your next film. Here it is. Here it is.’ Jeez. Are you sure you don’t want to see the script first?”

We should all have such problems.