By Julian Shaw
Warwick Thornton may be italicised as an Aboriginal filmmaker, but the sheer quality of his breakthrough 2005 short, Green Bush, scuttled any skepticism that he was a walk-up starter for indigenous development protocols in the arts due to a paucity of alternatives. A stunner of a short, with simmering emotions and crisp, unostentatious craft, Green Bush garnered lush plaudits, with Bill Gosden of The New Zealand Film Festival hailing the outback opus as “one of the year’s great short films…Thornton’s drama Green Bush is a masterpiece of unassuming wisdom.
The first time that FilmInk came eye to eye with Thornton, he was plying his wares with a jaded smile at The 2008 European Film Market, a carnival-like adjunct to the Berlin International Film Festival. Impossibly austere, powered by litres of espresso, and with a tone that ranges from steely officiousness to homicidal passive-aggression, the Market – where films are pre-sold, bought and rejected like hunks of meat – is not a place for the faint-hearted. Thornton though – in Germany with his award-winning 2007 short, Nana – was doing his best to keep up, despite the jetlag. “I pitched Sampson And Delilah ten times at Berlin to people who were on their Black Berry’s trying to sell their own films,” Thornton told FilmInk in 2009 with a ragged smile, lounging in a production duplex based in Sydney’s hip inner city suburb of Surry Hills. He looked the part of a cineaste, in a neatly pressed black cowboy shirt and a faded ARRI cap that holds back his dense head of hazel hair. He was also well aware of the blackly comic predicament of trying to sell high-powered film sharks the story of a petrol-sniffing kid on the lam in an Aboriginal commune. “They’re pretty scary, those market places – they’re hardcore,” Thornton laughs. “It’s about money. There are a lot of really beautiful, creative distributors who love films, and they’ve found niche films that they love and want to sell. But ninety per cent of it is about pure business: how much does it cost, who will star in it, and how much will it make?”
For the very reasons above, it’s astounding when a film as pure as Samson & Delilah emerges from the morass. Love it or hate it (and the film’s highly deliberate style will certainly send viewers careening in both directions), there’s no doubting the courage of Thornton’s restraint. While its premise might not have found a lot of traction in the latte booths at The European Film Market, audiences in Australia pushed the film towards major arthouse success, while that year’s AFI Awards (the precursors, of course, to the current AACTA Awards) served as another triumphant platform, with Samson & Delilah taking home six gongs (including Best Film and Best Director) from a whopping twelve nominations. And the icing on the cake? Samson & Delilah also won Thornton the award for Best First Feature Film (aka The Camera d’Or) at The Cannes Film Festival, which saw the film receive reams of international media attention.
“I knew I’d get there,” Thornton sighs of actually making his first feature. “I’ve thought about this film for ten years. I don’t like to write and do drafts. I think a film through, all the way from beginning to middle to end in the back of my head, and then it basically takes four or five days to write a first draft. I hate writing. It’s just painful to me, so I get it all out in one go. It might be, ‘Scene one: Samson wakes up. Scene 2: Delilah wakes up.’ It’s like that. It’s only probably twenty pages long. It’s like a sentence or three on each scene, and then I go back and fatten every scene. Here’s the truth: I actually can’t spell, and my head works three times faster than my hand, so it’s frustrating. My hand is three scenes ahead of the pencil, so it’s a rush in that sense. I just can’t spell very well, so I just write everything word for word the way it sounds. If you try to read my handwritten script, it’s like shorthand – it’s borderline gobbledygook.”
What Thornton wound up with on the set of Samson & Delilah was not a conventional ninety-page document, but rather a sparse road map of the film totalling about sixty pages. It’s easy to see that Thornton has a different cinematic grammar to most – and it’s hard not to wonder if he struggles to communicate his vision in the early stages of development, given that so much of his storytelling is visual. “Warwick writes on a very instinctive basis,” dynamo producer Kath Shelper explains of her main charge. “He’s rarely consciously making choices, to begin with, particularly about the structure of his scripts. He thought about the story of Samson & Delilah for years before putting pen to paper, and then when he did put pen to paper, it came out almost exactly as it is on screen, especially in the first section at the community. In fact, just the other day, we found Warwick’s original notebook that he wrote the script in, and it’s all there. The idea was to set it up in the beginning, like Groundhog Day, so that the audience is dying for Samson’s life to change at the same time that the character is. So, I guess you could call that an ‘intentional device’!”
The titular leads of the film – young first time actors Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson – have been spared the press trail, and you can sympathise with that decision after watching the film. The performances are animalistic, impulsive, and almost entirely non-verbal – it’s a kind of stark non-acting that mesmerises and repels in equal measures with its crudity and openness. An explanation is not necessary at all. Samson & Delilah submerges us deep in a Central Australian Aboriginal commune, where sensations of the outside world have been reduced to a pinprick. Samson bludgeons his right mind with whatever he can get his hands on, typically decanting the petrol from car tanks and bathing his senses in the noxious fumes. As a string of tragic events swirl through the community, Samson takes off on foot with his same-aged girlfriend Delilah, embarking on a passage of survival, flecked with despair and hope. As ratty outcasts in the desert, they are drawn together tenderly, ineffably, despite the brutality of the world around them. The film is very much in the style of Warwick Thornton’s previous work – uncluttered, polarising, shot through with emotion, and spectacularly lensed by the director himself (Thornton has previously acted as head cinematographer on several documentary and feature shoots). There is even a reprisal from Mitjilli Gibson as the matriarch of the community, whom viewers will recall from Thornton’s Nana.
Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson could barely make up the first line of an acting CV between them when they were plucked from the obscurity of their indigenous communities to star in the film. “When Rowan first rocked up, he had a baseball cap on,” Thornton recalls. “It was like, ‘Yeah, he’s got a good face, he’s got a good little wiry football body’, and the next time that I see him, he’s got his cap off, and he’s got this crazy hair! I was like, ‘Oh my God, that hair is so cool!’”
Despite casting on instinct, as well as the sensations brought about by McNamara’s bleached hanks of hair, Thornton was reassured on the first day of the shoot. “Rowan absolutely shocked me on the first day that we were shooting,” the director explains. “He did everything absolutely fantastically, with the minimal amount of dialogue between him and me. There was an absolute minimum of coaching and directing. On the first day, I was talking to him about, ‘Faster, slower’, and not, ‘Angrier, happier, go to that special place’…there was none of that business. All of this weight left my body after the first day of shooting. I just thought, ‘Oh God, these two kids can act!’”
In casting Delilah, Thornton was seeking a girl who could project an “inner strength”. He found this quality in Marissa Gibson, whose talent shone like the roughest hewn of desert stones during her audition. “Just by sitting and talking to her, I knew that she could hold anything together,” Thornton explains. “She isn’t fazed, and she’s really focused. That’s what Delilah is.”
Far too shy to be trotted out for press interviews, FilmInk readers will have to make do with these laconic comments from the young man who plays Samson. “My name is Rowan McNamara, and I act as Samson in the movie,” he says in the film’s press notes. “Samson likes hunting, sniffing and listening to music, but not his brother’s band. Oh, and he’s lover-lover for Delilah. I like acting, but not with girls, they just wreck it. Nah, only gammon [joking].”
Marissa Gibson, who had previously stepped onto film sets as an extra, is now a teenaged high school student living in Alice Springs. Gibson speaks three languages – Warlpiri, Luritja and English – and used her fee from Samson & Delilah to tour Japan, a country whose culture fascinates her. Her take on Thornton’s film, and her own character, is beautifully eloquent in its simplicity. “Delilah is a teenager who lives out bush on a community,” the young actress says. “She’s kind hearted, and respects her elders. She lives with her nana, who passes away – her family thinks that it’s her fault and punish her with sticks. Then she meets a guy, another Aboriginal teenager, called Samson. They fall in love…they don’t say it, but they feel it. Aboriginal people don’t say very much; we just use body language. They go into town, but have nowhere to stay because they’re from out bush, so they stay under the bridge in the creek. They try to get food, but they don’t have money, so they start to steal. Slowly, Delilah becomes another person. I hope that the film teaches people who don’t really know Aboriginal people that it’s different here, compared to other places. It’s hard to explain: we just live in a different world.”
Although many filmmakers on the rise are in an indecent haste to crank out their first feature film, suspecting that it will be a Willy Wonka-like ticket to a spangling career, Thornton’s approach has been reminiscent of his measured vocal delivery: slow and steady wins the race. “Ten years ago, there was no way that I could have made Samson And Delilah,” Thornton intones, leaning into FilmInk’s dictaphone. “I needed to grow as a human being. I needed to learn how to bloody direct – it’s not this child genius concept. For me, it’s just hard work. You’ve got to look at your mistakes and re-hone yourself. You have to take a look at your actors and characters and landscapes, and then reinvent yourself as a director to make all that stuff work. I wrote Samson & Delilah to be an incredibly simple and small film. I’ve never directed a feature before, so I didn’t want to go into an ensemble of 26 characters and 49 locations. I wanted to make a beautiful love story with a good ending. That was my brief. There is a bit of that mentality out there: ‘Oh my god! I’m 21 and I haven’t made my third feature yet!’ I know a lot of people like that. It’s a dangerous place to be. There’s nothing wrong with being 61 and making your first feature.”
Thornton knows that he would be on a hiding to nothing without Green Bush and Nana up his sleeve. “Short filmmaking was absolutely pivotal in my development,” the director enthuses. “It’s where I’ve made mistakes and learnt.” Kath Shelper picks up the thread: “Apart from the obvious benefits of practicing technique and methods, one of the most important and under-recognised elements of making shorts is getting to watch them with audiences around the world and seeing how people respond to them,” she explains. “You can see the bits that work and the bits that don’t work. I like to think that our short filmmaking has allowed us to be filmmakers who are more skilled at connecting with audiences. We’ve gotten better at gauging, on an intuitive level, what we think an audience will respond to. Both of us have been making short films for the last twelve years, and it was beyond time for us to do a feature length film! We felt very comfortable with each other and with our team, who we’ve worked with on the last couple of shorts. Samson & Delilah was a bit experimental and a bit of a risk, so nobody had too many expectations; we just quietly went off and did it. I didn’t know if it would work or not, and I’m sure that Warwick felt the same. We just crossed our fingers and hoped for the best.”
And the upshot of all this risk? Well, per Thornton, it’s about love, and films about love have been known to sell tickets before, however unlikely the milieu that they come from. “This film is a journey into love,” he explains. “Samson and Delilah, however, have a completely different concept of love. He has this Neanderthal concept – throw rocks, then decide that he’s moving in. Hers is Mexican love music, beautiful violins and strings, and a huge romantic concept. His is a brutal way of love, and the film is about how that can connect with her vision. It was important for me to make a love story. Not that Aboriginal culture is in any way different – I like the idea of love not being black or white. Love doesn’t have a culture; it transcends all cultures, walls and boundaries. It was integral for me that a wider audience really connect to the film. My characters go down these dark paths, and go through these horrific times, but when the sun comes out at the end and you see the light again, it makes the light so much more beautiful.”
Does Thornton’s Aboriginality, while a unique trademark, induce any fears of being pigeonholed? “Not really,” he shrugs modestly. “I embrace my Aboriginality, and I’ve got something unique to say. So why wouldn’t I use that? This love that these two kids have is quite unique in a sense, so to not use that setting as something unique wouldn’t make sense. It would be worse to ignore my heritage than to embrace it. There will be a time when I have a lot of stories, and they won’t necessarily have to be Aboriginal stories. They can be anybody’s stories, and when they arise, I’ll have to make the decision on whether they’re set in an Aboriginal community or not. But I do have a firm belief that if you don’t know too much about a culture or people, then you shouldn’t muck around with it too much. I mean, I could make a film about a Jewish couple in a synagogue, but I’d be kidding myself. It’s a dangerous place to get it wrong. But if I’m becoming a voice for my culture…that’s scary, eh? I think that there’s an opportunity, not to cash in or to use that, but every step of my journey through filmmaking has to be a step up, or at least a step in the right direction. That’s the problem: there’s an incredible amount of first time feature filmmakers in this country who made a feature but would never make another one. There are a lot of directors who have made one bloody film, so I’m being incredibly careful about that journey. A lot of people get the opportunity, and they’ll write this monster that they have no control over. I want to make fifteen features! The first one won’t turn you into an auteur! You’re not going to be one of the greatest filmmakers ever from one film. It’s a life and a journey.”
For Thornton, it comes back to the adage that artists should tell the stories that they know – and that sometimes means painting an ugly picture of your own kind. The Aboriginal community at the centre of the story is a listless dead zone, where snorting up fumes from paint or petrol is the only kick on offer. Samson wanders around without anything even remotely resembling a father figure, searching like a hyena for any trouble that he can roll himself into. His blonde hair might blaze in the sun, but Samson’s eyes are glazed like soup bowls, either rolling back in his head or widening licentiously whenever his gal pal Delilah arrives on the scene. “I was in two minds about that,” Thornton admits of Samson’s deeply unsympathetic surface qualities. “There is the truth about how hard these communities have it. Every community has beautiful stories and terrible stories, and every street in Sydney has the same thing. Am I being too hard on my people? This film is for Aboriginal people as well as a wider audience, and I needed to go as hard as I did with my own culture because I’m talking to them as well. It could have been all singing and dancing and happy, but it would have been a very different film.”
Thornton flirts with repetition by bludgeoning us with many shots of Samson high off his gourds, inhaling the whiffy fumes of a petrol bottle that he guards with his life. “Well, it’s a vicious cycle, and that’s the point,” the director explains. “To understand Samson, you have to spend days with him. You have to understand that whole cycle. Even for an audience, it gets tough and almost boring,” Thornton admits. “My goal was not to get an audience bored, of course, but for them to understand that he is bored, and to feel his boredom. I really wanted to take them through three cycles of three days. You are feeling Samson’s cycle.”
Given that Thornton – who would subsequently direct 2013’s The Darkside, as well as serving as DOP on the smash hit, The Sapphires – provided introductory speeches at screenings ahead of the film, does he feel that Samson & Delilah should speak for itself, without any apologies or disclaimers? “Absolutely! You can’t go to every screening and talk to everyone in Australia about the film,” the director exclaims. “It’s our baby, and now we’ve given our baby to Australia. It’s sort of like, ‘Go! Fly away!’ It’s a bit weird.”
Does Thornton hope that the film will make its biggest impact with the sort of troubled Aboriginal communities that he has now become famous for turning his lens on? “Absolutely,” the director replies without hesitation. “All my films have been quite hard on my mob. I never want to look at my mob through rose-coloured glasses. It’s not a wake-up call, but the only way that our mob will get better with the things that we’re bad at is to make a change. We shouldn’t be expecting anyone else to do it for us. So with Samson & Delilah, we have the sniffing and the lack of parenting, but if a community recognises itself in there, then it needs to make changes. When they watch the film, they might think: ‘We need to stand up and be stronger.’”
