By James Mottram
Set in 1929, Sweet Country sees a middle aged Indigenous man (Hamilton Morris) and his wife take to the bush after he is forced to kill a white homesteader (Ewen Lesie) in self-defence. A posse, led by Bryan Brown’s local cop, is quickly dispatched to hunt the fugitives down. Among them is Fred (Sam Neill), a man of god and the voice of reason. We caught up with Neill at the Venice Film Festival to talk about the film.
You got one of the best laughs I’ve heard in the festival, with the “Jesus loves me” song.
There can’t be many laughs in this festival.
Well there aren’t, but it’s a funny moment. Was that improvised?
Yeah, the line at the end was improvised, but I asked Warwick, ‘you know, people used to tell stories, and they’d recite poetry, people used to entertain each other, play an instrument or something, I think the only thing that my bloke would know to do, whether they liked it or not, was sing.’ He said, ‘yeah, that’s a good idea.’
You are the kind of, I don’t want to say the one good character, maybe the one good white character. All the others are horrible, particularly to the Indigenous characters. But how did you look at your guy?
Yeah, he’s humane, and he recognises his Aboriginal neighbours and people who work with him as human beings, which is not common – not common then – in a country where Aboriginal people were fauna until 1967. Most of the other characters are either fucked up or conflicted.
A lot of them drink heavily as well. It’s probably not doing them a great deal of good either. A lot of them seem out of control. There’s an early shot of the March character [Ewen Leslie], he’s virtually gone through a bottle of whisky and he’s all over the place, basically.
He’s damaged goods. He’s been in the trenches. We all have a little bit of an idea of how horrifying the trenches must’ve been in the first war, you can only have an inkling of an idea, but I think we also tend to forget how much my parents’ generation suffered too. My father fought through the war, and he seemed entirely normal to me, but any man who came back from the war was damaged to an extent, and we tend to overlook that. And not just in the Second World War, but from Vietnam, or Korea.
This film is obviously dealing with White Australia’s relationship with the Indigenous people, but at the same time it also seems to be a much wider story of race relations now. Everything that’s been happening in America for example, and not just America, just seems to resonate in this film. Did you feel that as you were making it, as you were reading the script?
I was well cognisant that a) it was a true story, and b) it was the sort of story that needs to be told more in Australia. There’s been a lot of Aboriginal history, particularly post-European, that has been wilfully ignored. So I think it’s a film that can be taken at many different levels; ostensibly it’s a Western, with Western tropes, some of which are turned upside down – it’s not a white man in a black hat, it’s a black man in a white hat – look, I’m not a cinema buff.
There’s a lot that can be layered onto it, if that makes sense. Maybe it’s the sign of good filmmaking.
There’s a shot in it that’s actually miraculous. We were shooting the scene towards the end. And there’s a rainbow, and Warwick just said, ‘walk towards the rainbow’. And I don’t think any of us had any idea how that would fit into the story.
That’s not a digital rainbow, then.
That’s a real fucking rainbow.
Interesting.
It’s the sort of country where miracles happen. Later that night, it rained about five years’ worth of rain in about three hours. The whole place turned to soup. What had been packed by dry dirt was turned literally to soup.
Sweet Country is in cinemas from January 25, 2018. Read our review here.
