News Flash: 24 May 2009

The AFI congratulates Warwick Thornton, the cast and crew of Samson & Delilah, as well as all the team at Footprint Film, for winning the Camera d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Described by the jury as "the best love film we've seen for many a year", it's a great honour for any filmmaker, and an exciting day for all involved with the film.

“That kind of lie that tells the truth”

By Rochelle Siemienowicz, 6 May 2009

On first glance it sounds like an overnight success story: an Indigenous short filmmaker from Alice Springs wows local critics with his first feature, a low budget drama that he wrote, directed and shot himself, out in remote central Australia. The film, Samson & Delilah, is then selected to screen in Un Certain Regard at Cannes – an announcement made just in time to bolster the film’s Australian theatrical release.

Surprising? Perhaps a little. Sudden? Not at all. In fact, Samson & Delilah’s director, writer and cinematographer Warwick Thornton has been working in the Australian film and television industry for 20 years, slowly building his craft as DOP, storyteller and director. He’s no stranger to prestigious international film festivals either. His short film Green Bush premiered at Sundance and won Best Short in the Panorama section at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2005, while most recently his short film Nana won the Crystal Bear at Berlin in 2008. You might have seen his work as a cinematographer on Rachel Perkins’ Radiance, or on the recent SBS documentary series First Australians. But it’s only now that Thornton has felt ready to make a feature film.

“I started when I was 18, twenty years ago,” he says, “but there’s no way I could have made this film before. I needed to grow as a human being as well as a director and cinematographer and get more knowledge about how this stuff works, how cinema works. That idea of the boy genius – I don’t believe in it. If you want to make something original you’ve got to live a life.”   Kath Shelper, the producer of Samson & Delilah, is also quick to point out that Thornton is no flash-in-the-pan newcomer. “Warwick is probably the most trained and workshopped filmmaker in the country,” she jokes. “Between CAAMA traineeships, film school in Sydney and all the workshops he’s done through the Indigenous Branch [of the AFC] he should be called Dr Thornton because it would add up to a PhD. Even though he can’t spell!”

After collaborating on short films, and now making their first feature in tandem, Thornton and Shelper seem to have developed a humorous but respectful rapport. They look tired but elated when the AFI catches up with them on their publicity tour in Melbourne. Here they talk us through the process of writing, funding and shooting Samson & Delilah – a beautiful and important love story about two Aboriginal teenagers who have to find their way out of lives riddled with addiction and abuse. It’s a piece of cinema that’s already being touted as a landmark Australian film.

AFI: Congratulations to both of you on the film. It’s an amazing piece of work, and one that obviously has a big strong idea underneath it.   Warwick Thornton: Thank you, yes there is that underlying idea, and that’s about our [Indigenous] kids – that lost generation who are written off once they start petrol sniffing. They’re written off by their own community, let alone by the white community. There’s this perception that sniffers are brain-damaged and there’s nothing we can do about it – well that’s not true. I wanted to show how beautiful they are, and that they can love, and they can have lives. That’s the beginning of the story.

AFI: Although viewers might be aware of the petrol sniffing crisis, the 
film offers a visceral and eye-opening experience of what that’s really like – an experience the audience wouldn’t otherwise have.

Warwick Thornton: You never want to blame audiences for any form of naivety because they haven’t had access to these stories. They’ve only ever seen the 60 Minutes concept of it. So that’s the importance of writing and making films, the beauty of cinema – it’s that kind of lie that tells the truth. It opens doors and gives people access. Whether they want to walk through that door is up to them.

AFI: Tell us about the writing process.

Warwick Thornton: I actually hate writing. I hate putting pen to paper – and it is pen and paper, I don’t use a computer or anything like that when I’m doing scripts. The quicker it is the more painless it is. So I think about a film for a couple of years – there’s about three in my head right now, shuffling around – and I begin with structures and have defined endings, so that by the time I pick up a pen it’s all there. I don’t find the writing part of it is a discovery or journey or anything. That discovery journey happens in the noggin.

Kath Shelper: We actually found Warwick’s original A4 book that he wrote the screenplay in. With ‘Scenes’ written at the top of the page, and then one line per scene. ‘Samson wakes up’, ‘Samson goes outside’…and it’s all there.

AFI: So you always knew that this film was going to have an ending that was hopeful, and uplifting, even though it’s a very tough story?   Warwick Thornton: Yes, always. For me personally I think Samson is going to survive. As an audience, and as a writer, I need that light at the end of the tunnel. The film is full of questions but there is hope. And it’s important that there is hope. Because if it’s a tragedy like Romeo and Juliet, well there’s no hope and you walk away and you won’t take a step forward and go ‘what can I do, and how can I help? And how can I take this in my life and use it to be stronger?’.

AFI: Can you tell us what the budget for the film was, and how you went about raising the finance?

Kath Shelper: It was $1.6 million, and raising it was pretty painless actually. We were really lucky. Once Warwick had written the first draft – it had just streamed out of him – and we’d done another little polish of it, we were thinking that we should start going out to look for money. Sally Riley had been lobbying within the AFC to get money in the Indigenous branch to fund a low-budget feature in the same way that they were doing the IndiVision films. And when the AFC was sort of coming to the end of its time, Maureen Barron, who was the chair of the AFC, said to Sally ‘I want to find the money to fund an indigenous feature. That’s the one thing I want to do before we finish.’ And then they put out a call for applications, and we were like, oh, gorgeous timing.

Warwick Thornton: Here’s something we prepared earlier!

Kath Shelper: So we got that money, and that was leverage for other people to come on board – Miranda Dear, who we knew from SBS and had moved over to the ABC, and Kim Dalton, and then we got a big chunk of money from the lovely people at the NSW Film and TV Office, and the Adelaide Film Festival. So we were very lucky. We decided at the outset that we wanted to make a film in a very small way with the smallest possible budget. The fact that we weren’t looking for a lot of money made it a lot easier.

Warwick Thornton: And that complemented the script, complemented the whole idea. You take money from people and there is a kind of edge that should try and make their money back. We actually could have got more money but we needed to keep it small because it’s a film about teenage petrol sniffers.

Kath Shelper: The other thing was that having a smaller budget gave us so much more freedom to not have a completion guarantor. And because it wasn’t a lot of money, people trusted us. We had some kind of track record with our shorts, so all of the funding bodies just left us alone to make the film we wanted to make and so the only pressure we had was the pressure we put on ourselves. We didn’t have anybody scrutinising how we were spending the money, or what ratio we were shooting, or what was the quality of the rushes.

AFI: You achieved an incredible on-screen result for such a relatively low budget.   Warwick Thornton: Sometimes you realise that you’re better off – that you don’t need the techno crane and the truck full of lights. Often what happens in directing and cinematography is that if you don’t really know what you’re doing, you’re not confident, so you spend money to back it up and decide on the day how to do things. Whereas with a smaller budget, the creative side of it gets more exciting because if you’ve got one little box of lights, how am I going to do it? It makes you work harder, but I believe you get a better image because you really have thought hard about placement and concept.

Kath Shelper: It makes you really do your homework. And the other thing is that it sets a precedent for the rest of the crew. When people rock up to a set where Warwick is shooting the film himself, and he’s got one camera on his shoulder and literally a box of redheads and two reflector boards and he’s running around and setting it up himself, and then shooting it, when people come to set and see that, it sets a particular tone for how they will do their own roles. It creates a really beautiful working environment.

AFI: How long was the shoot?

Warwick Thornton: It was six weeks, and we actually finished ahead of schedule. We did a five-day week instead of the usual six-day week because of the kids [the lead actors]. And because the crew were so small and doubling up roles and working incredibly hard, they needed a good weekend to live a life outside the set. With six-day weeks you see your crew sort of collapse and start to dissolve by the fourth week, ‘cos they’re only having one day a week off. They’ve generally got a hangover on that day and they have to do their washing.

Kath Shelper: Warwick’s talking from personal experience! He says ‘I want to get pissed on Friday night, sleep in on Saturday, do washing on Sunday and go back to work on Monday.’

Warwick Thornton: Whereas on those six-day a week shoots you get this grumbling crew on Monday because they haven’t had a proper weekend, and by the last week nobody’s really talking to each other and they don’t even want to rock up to the wrap party. Whereas we had this crew with a spring in their step, going ‘yoo-hoo! Let’s go!’

AFI: How have the community in Alice Springs experienced the film?

Warwick Thornton: We had an amazing outdoor premiere in Alice the other night. Two and a half thousand people rocked up. And it was the prettiest screening. They built a screen in the middle of a creek and the whole mountain range was lit from behind and the gum trees… It was a real feeling of people coming together, because there is this sort of divide in Alice Springs where you’ve got the businessmen, and the aldermen, and the mayor and then there’s my mob from town camps and outlying communities and all of them coming together to watch this film about Alice Springs and central Australia. So it was really respectful and positive and everybody had a good laugh and a good cry. I was a bit petrified. I wish I could do it again and know that it was going to go so smoothly so I could just enjoy it!  What's coming up next is there's been this central land council in Alice Springs having meetings of all the delegates and the chairmen of all the communities around central Australia, so there's going to be around 70 of them there. It's going to be screened to them and they will be asked 'Do you want the film to come to YOUR community?' So we're going to start a travelling roadshow because there will some who will say 'no, we don't want to show our kids that one', but there will be others who say 'Yeah, we want to show our kids that because they'll learn something'. As I've said before, there are communities that have the most amazing diversionary stuff - schools, shops, incredible food and promoting healthy living, and then there are other communities that are really neglected wastelands. To have them all together might create this dialogue between elders.

Samson & Delilah is in national release from May 7

Photographs used in this story by Mark Rogers.

Story by Rochelle Siemienowicz.