Warwick Thornton is the writer and director of Samson and Delilah, the Aboriginal teenage love story that has gained widespread acclaim as it continues on the international circuit. The film won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, the premier prize for debut features, and has been a runaway hit in its native Australia. After its crowning as the Best Film at the hands of the Dublin Film Critics Circle at this year’s JDIFF, we talked to the film’s antipodean creator.
I suppose I should say from the outset that I really enjoyed your film – the opening shot was one of the best I’ve ever seen. Did you have any specific aesthetic direction you wanted to take with the film?
I come from a documentary background, so I wanted a certain amount of realism in the film. One of the most important things for me was that, as an audience member, you would just go on this journey with these kids, so when writing it, it was very, very clear that whenever protagonists or antagonists would pop up, whenever other people were injected into their lives, that would happen in real time – it would happen to you at the same time it happens to them.
‘Minimalism’ is a tag which has been thrown at this film, but there is also your documentary sensibility which, I think, lends it a certain resonance that goes beyond broad, artistic labelling. There is a unique directness with which you address the audience, would you agree with that?
The tricks of cinema are incredibly subtle. Audiences are quite intelligent and they know when you’re manipulating them a little bit too much with the editing or the basic composition, so I purposefully made it a much looser concept, not trying to play too many tricks… That opening shot – for me, one of the most important things about storytelling is, in that first five minutes, creating that sense of place. So you’ve got this song that says: “sunshiny day”, this happy song, but we’ve got this lethargic, sort of slow-motion shot of this kid waking up in squalor, he starts sniffing petrol… The shot’s way too long for an opening shot, generally, but I wanted to keep that shot way too long so that people thought: “well, I’m not going to watch a conventional piece of cinema, it’s something a bit left or right or a bit weird”. That’s a task in editing, to get the film to really play at its own pace.
Realism is something which is quite important, I suppose, as far as Australian cinema is concerned, I don’t know, would you agree that Australia hasn’t been represented in “the right ways”, historically, on an international level.
Yeah, you know, there are some beautiful films from Australia out there, but there are these indigenous issues that people have been too scared to deal with.
I remember watching Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, this really fantastical film and then, at the end, this intertitle was shoehorned in detailing quite historically the plight of Aboriginal children in Australia. It seemed a little artificial…
Yeah, it was a bit confused, there was a lot of history Baz had to tackle. I really enjoyed Australia, you know, because I was going to watch Moulin Rouge in a desert. I kind of knew what I was getting into, cos it’s a Baz film, Baz makes these kinds of films and if you understand that you can enjoy it. Otherwise you’d kind of be in trouble, in a sense. But, absolutely, you know, one of the key successes of Samson and Delilah is that, in cinema, these kind of children have never really been seen in Australia. You see them on the 5 o’ clock news. There is a hunger in Australian audiences to go on this journey with them and learn more about these kids that audiences hadn’t had access to before.
To what extent were you working towards, perhaps, a politically motivated cinema which would represent these marginalised communities in a more sincere way, in terms of Australian cinema?
I initially set out to make a teenage love story, and what I wanted to do was humanise these kids because they’re generally used as a political issue. That’s the only way they’re portrayed – a political football between federal state governments and mayors and the police and that kind of stuff so I said: “Right, I’m going to make a teenage love story about these two incredibly beautiful children and how they fall in love, the unique way they fall in love,” but knowing very well that I cannot make that film without bringing up all those obstacles and issues and problems in their lives. So it was secondary to the concept of a teenage love story, but I knew that I had to get that kind of stuff right, and when people started seeing the neglect of these kids, people started saying “Well, what’s going on? What can I do to help?”
There’s a universality achieved, I think, through the lack of dialogue which, occasionally, makes for deeply uncomfortable viewing, as far as conventional cinema is concerned, but as a result you’re forced to reflect more clearly on what’s happening…
There’s a gorgeous thing that happens when two people can go into Samson and Delilah and come out with two completely different concepts of the “unspoken” dialogue because it hasn’t been fed to them by the film. They’re making their own minds up. I mean, you’re thinking what Samson’s thinking and what Delilah’s thinking and it’s really kind of beautiful in that way – we’ve all gone through love and pain and happiness and the way you’ve grown up and the way you see the world is how you’ll see how Samson and Delilah are, in a sense. So you have these very different kinds of emotions and reactions from very different people. I really like that. You know, as soon as you take out all that really cheap dialogue like “I’m angry”, “I’m happy”, “I’m sad”, “I’m tired”, you get actors to start acting it rather than just saying it. It almost comes back to the novel, in a way, where the imagination of the audience has a lot more weight in the film than the basic act of storytelling.
So, a great strength of the film is that it isn’t didactic, even though it’s dealing with these themes and issues which are typically approached by filmmakers in a sort of prescriptive, self-righteous way. A huge part of that is the skill in the performances of the two principal actors who, I understand, had never acted before?
Yeah certainly, I mean, they’ve never acted but they have grown up in these communities. They were both 13 when we made the film and they’ve got these 13 years of research and rehearsals for the roles. Neither of them have sniffed petrol or anything like that, but they’ve got cousins who have and they’ve got a lot of people around them who have, so they have an in-built instinct, I suppose, to be Samson and Delilah. It was a 90-page script: every look and every song was in there, to the point where I was writing the lyrics to the songs versus actually writing the dialogue, so it was incredibly complicated and precise. All that stuff was there, and the two kids gave me the timing, which was incredibly beautiful to watch. I never said “do that faster” or “hurry up”, they played the timings themselves.
On to the experience of winning the Camera d’Or… This film has been received so well on an international level, it must be fantastic to come from making a very Australian film, in terms of what it deals with, and having it recognised on the international circuit?
Absolutely. After finishing the film, I was so proud of it and there was this clear, decisive thought in my head that I wondered, you know, am I blowing smoke up my own arse? I knew that I really liked it, and I knew I was really proud of it but, as far as an audience was concerned, maybe it was just a load of tripe, you know? As a writer/director, you just can’t tell. The film was released in Australia at the same time that we flew to Cannes, and basically, in this one week, we had this massive box-office hit in Australia and we won the Camera d’Or. It was almost like going into a coma, in a sense, with this pure tranquility of happiness. (laughs) Because you never know, you can play with these formulas and you can write from the depths of your heart and become a storyteller, but whether anyone will like what you do… you don’t have any control over that. It not only transcended language, but it transcended culture – seeing all that stuff, France loved it and Australia really loved it, and we had screenings in Alice Springs for the communities where about 6,000 people walked up to the football field for an outdoor, free screening and everybody loved it… It just worked incredibly well. The other thing about Samson and Delilah is that there are Samsons and Delilahs in London, in Dublin, in New York, in Sydney, in Central Australia: they’re teenagers who’re in love and they’re neglected and they need a little bit of help.
Samson and Delilah is on release this Friday.
Words: Oisin Murphy
