SWEET COUNTRY
Sam Neill’s latest character
Warwick Thornton has a new title for muchloved Kiwi actor Sam Neill – ‘‘the foundation of the New Zealand constitution’’.
Describing the septuagenarian as ‘‘a beautiful human being’’, the Australian film-maker says he just knew Neill would be the right man to play ‘‘nurturing, caring, Godfearing station owner’’ Fred Smith in his latest movie Sweet Country.
‘‘Fred is kind, but slightly naive to his surroundings and the world he’s grown up in. He has this romanticism that God will provide. That’s Sam Neill.’’
The ‘‘surroundings’’ in Sweet Country are late 1920s Outback Australia. Neill’s Smith is drawn into the search for his right-hand man Sam Kelly (Hamilton Morris), who has disappeared after the death of nearby landowner and returned soldier Harry March (Ewen Leslie).
While some, like Bryan Brown’s Sergeant Fletcher, are keen on swift justice, Smith just wants to make sure his old friend ‘‘comes back alive’’.
Thornton says Neill does have that ‘‘incredible quality to play a nasty bast..., but he also has this consummate ability to play any character and his face is so kind and his voice so beautiful and warm that he was just perfect for the character.’’ Sweet Country offers the former Christ’s College boarder an opportunity to belt out a little bit of gospel. Did he require much persuasion? ‘‘No, not at all. He said he knew some gospel songs already from his days in Christian schooling – which was hilarious.’’
Although only loosely based on historical events (a story passed down to the movie’s coscreenwriter David Tranter by his grandfather), because ‘‘real life doesn’t really fit into a three-act structure’’, as Thornton puts it, the director was committed to making sure Sweet Country reflected, ‘‘how the law worked and humanity worked at that time in Australia’’.
‘‘I thought it was incredibly important to recreate authentically a stage of history that you don’t learn in school and that you’d be hard-pressed to find a book about in a library. Suddenly, you are creating a document, because this isn’t a story that has been told before. It might become something that is taught in schools, or available from libraries one day.
‘‘As an indigenous storyteller [of Aboriginal extraction, Thornton was born and raised in Alice Springs], I think it is incredibly important that, when you do have access to the cinema, you speak the truth. That’s for myself, just as much as for the people watching it.’’
But yes, he admits, giving his ‘‘accused’’ character the surname Kelly and including a screening of The Story of the Kelly Gang within the story were definitely deliberate acts. ‘‘Ned Kelly is that ‘loveable larrikin’ who is sort of the foundation of Australia. Of course, if Ned Kelly was alive today he’d just be a byline on the news that some guy just robbed a 7-Eleven.
‘‘To me, that’s the sad thing. We prop him up because he wore that silly helmet. Here, we have a guy, Sam Kelly, who is Aboriginal and is innocent, and they all want to hang him. That’s how society and racism works.’’
Thornton says the Kelly Gang movie didn’t originally feature in the script. ‘‘I came up with it on the second week of shooting and it freaked the producers out a bit as well, especially wanting to fire up a vintage projector and create this strange dynamic about how a country thinks about itself – propping up a murderer and then looking to execute an innocent man.’’
First screening at last year’s Venice Film Festival, Sweet Country has already won plenty of plaudits and awards, with some viewers comparing it to classic westerns like John Ford’s The Searchers. Was there a particular example of the genre that inspired Thornton?
‘‘I couldn’t give you a film or a name – it’s kind of a subliminal melding of all westerns in a way,’’ explains Thornton. ‘‘I’m completely, incredibly well-versed in the genre – I’ve pretty much seen every bloody western there is, especially when they first came out on VHS at our local video shop.
‘‘I know how westerns work, but I also like shades of grey in humanity. A lot of examples of the genre work on the basis that the good guy wears the white hat, the bad guy wears the black one, and never shall their morals meet – even in the middle of the street. Which I think isn’t true – good guys are bad guys and bad guys are good guys – there are all these shades of grey in their morals.’’
Known more as a documentary maker until his powerful 2009 feature debut Samson and Delilah, the now 47-year-old Thornton is a rare director who also likes to do his own cinematography.
‘‘I have this beautiful, romantic love- affair with the camera and I think there’s a little bit of ego involved in being able to say, ‘right, I’m going to shoot my own film’.
‘‘I think it creates a really interesting dynamic, but I also think I work a lot harder. When I’m on set, it’s 110 per cent about the actors, so the cinematography side gets left behind.
‘‘Because of that, I do a massive amount of pre-production where I’m only thinking about the cinematic journey of the film – the textures, the colours, the composition, the lens selection, the depth-of-field selection, even down to the height of the camera for every single scene.’’
Thornton admits though that, on Sweet Country, he had an ‘‘ace up my sleeve’’.
‘‘My son Dylan [Rivers, the movie’s second-unit director and director of photography]. If it had really fallen to pieces, I could have relied on him to just sort of look after things. He was always there, so I could sort of pass the ball to him and say, ‘can you sort this out man? He made me look awesome.’’
Thornton is also full of praise for one, or rather two, of his younger cast members.
Identical twins Tremayne and Trevon Doolan play the key role of young Aboriginal boy Philomac. Thornton found the pair at a local school and saw irony in one of them being an extrovert, the other an introvert. He then used those traits to his advantage.
‘‘I designed it so that every time Philomac was stealing something, I’d use the extrovert and then whenever he got caught, I’d swap them and put the introvert in.
‘‘So there’s this poor kid in central Australia going, ‘yeah, I worked on a movie and all I did was get in trouble’, and another one going, ‘yeah, I worked on a movie and all I did was steal everything’.
Working on three scripts – ‘‘two of which are in really bad shape’’ – Thornton believes Australian cinema is actually in a good place at the moment, depending on which way you look at things.
‘‘Financially, things are a disaster. We don’t have the money to buy into the hysteria about how fantastic our films are. Our movies are empowered by winning awards at festivals and telling the truth about who we are.
‘‘We need to hear our stories, our accents and see our faces, because otherwise we’re just going to all think we’re Americans. At the moment, I think that things are actually working really well, if you perceive that as the measure of success and not making a s...load of money.’’ When I point out that, on this side of the Tasman, Taika Waititi actually managed both with 2016’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thornton laughs. ‘‘Taika is such a rockstar. He can ebb and flow between a $100m popcorn movie and just a beautiful, empowering story about culture, nationality and the true voice of a nation. When I grow up, I want to be Taika.’’
❚ Sweet Country (R16) is screening now.