Warwick Thornton’s new colonial Western is a family-driven survival story
While watching Westerns as a boy Warwick Thornton had a lightbulb moment wanting to be a cowboy but, ultimately, identifying with the Indians.
Ever since Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson & Delilah won the Cannes Festival’s Camera d’Or for best first feature, the Alice Springs born and raised Kaytetye man’s films have been a fixture at international film festivals.
His upcoming colonial Western, Wolfram, marks his sixth time at the Berlin Film Festival and his first film in competition. In our Berlin interview Thornton, 55, recalls how his previous competition berth had been with Sweet Country in Venice in 2017 when it won the festival’s jury prize.
“I remember saying to journalists then how their reporting could lead to half-a-million dollars’ worth of advertising for a film, whether they like it or not,” Thornton says. “At least a couple of million people know about it. There’s a symbiotic thing between festivals and directors and journalists, which I really love and respect, and being in competition here is empowering for the film.”
Not everyone has Thornton’s gift of the gab and he’s also very funny, as viewers of his 2020 cooking series The Beach can attest. While he naturally discussed Wolfram’s serious intent at his film’s Berlin press conference, he also had the press pack in stitches as he threw in an hilarious anecdote about how a plague of blowflies hindered the shoot.
“40,000 blowflies can’t be wrong,” he muses. “You know, they helped toughen up the film. I was counting about 15 flies a day that I would breathe in. For the first couple of days, you’d try to spit them out and the poor little darlings would to be in your saliva, and they’d be on the ground by about the fourth day. It was too hard to cough them up, so you just swallowed them and got on with it. We’re making a hard-arse film that has its roots in survival and struggle, so bring the flies on!”
‘Soldier Blue was one of those films where we realised that actually we’re the Indians’
Shot around Alice Springs, Wolfram follows on from Sweet Country and is set four years later in the 1930s. Both films were co-written by David Tranter, Thornton’s friend since childhood. They grew up together and were inspired by watching Westerns – “anything with Charles Bronson” – as well as Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly starring Clint Eastwood and Soldier Blue.
“Soldier Blue was one of those films where we realised that actually we’re the Indians,” Thornton says. “We always wanted to be the cowboys, but we’re the Indians.”
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As well as Westerns, he was inspired by family history.
“My great-grandmother and David’s grandmother worked as child miners in the desert,” Thornton notes, adding that Tranter’s mother and grandmother had told him how they worked, who they worked for, and how they were stolen. Ultimately, Thornton was happy to make Wolfram, because unlike in Sweet Country “the characters are not victims, they’re survivors”.
The film has numerous storylines that gradually intersect. The most prominent of these stories concerns Deborah Mailman’s Pansy as she searches for her two children, Kid (Eli Hart) and Max (Hazel May Jackson), who unbeknown to her have been enlisted, because of their size, to chip away at the walls of a tight mine shaft and remove chunks of the ore used to make wolfram, now more commonly known as tungsten.
Kid and Max manage to escape with an older boy Philomac (Pedrea Jackson), though a band of outlaws including Kennedy (Thomas M. Wright) and Casey (Erroll Shand) are in hot pursuit. Meanwhile, Pansy, unable to find her kids, sets off with her baby and new partner Zhang (Jason Chong) on a horse and cart for Queensland, to start a new life.
“They’re going to Queensland, because they think Queensland’s safe,” Thornton says.
Thornton, who studied cinematography at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, shoots all his own films. Praising Thornton’s talent, Deadline notes how Wolfram is “saturated in the heatwave colours of Australia’s scorching Red Centre, with its searing blue skies and bright orange sands”.
It seems the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree as Thornton’s son, Dylan River, 34, who shot The Beach, is now an accomplished filmmaker who has directed on the TV series Mystery Road: Origin and Thou Shalt Not Steal, among other projects.
Thornton jokes that initially he didn’t want his son working on Wolfram.
“He’s stolen all my jobs,” he says. “He’s stolen all my awards,” he adds, then he admits that Dylan did some second-unit work on the film when they were running out of time, as well as stills photography.
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“I’m incredibly proud, hey, incredibly,” he says. “He’s a gentleman. He didn’t spend as much time as I think he really wanted to with me when Penny (filmmaker Penelope McDonald) and I split up. So I didn’t have much time to have that father-son stuff, or to teach him about filmmaking. But he just had it all, anyway. I’m so proud of that, because it came from his soul, not from being taught.”
It’s been reported that The Forest could be a follow-up to The Beach. Might Thornton consider filming in the Daintree? “It actually could be shot there. But that would be a higher negotiation with the community from that place, and that place would scare the shit out of me, because I don’t know the difference between a palm tree and a stinging tree.”
Thornton now lives in Adelaide where Wolfram was shown at the Adelaide Film Festival as a kind of test run.
“After the screening we decided that we had to find a balance to give the audience hope,” he says. “In re-cutting it we found that hope a little earlier than what we were doing.”
The Adelaide Film Festival Investment Fund gave him money to help complete the film.
“Part of their deal was (for us) to go to the Adelaide Film Festival, which we’ve done a couple of times,” he says. “It’s a great, symbiotic relationship.”
Wolfram was also financed by Screen Australia in association with Screen Territory, NITV and Screen NSW.
“No one wants to pay for the whole thing, but everybody wants to chip in, which is a beautiful thing and I love that about our industry,” Thornton says.
Helen Barlow is a Paris-based Australian freelance journalist and critic. In 2019 she received the La Plume d’Or for her services to French cinema. She is a voting member of the Lumiere Awards.
Wolfram opens the Gold Coast Film Festival at HOTA, Surfers Paradise, on April 22, with Warwick Thornton and Deborah Mailman attending. Thornton will attend the film’s Adelaide premiere at Palace Nova on April 26. The film releases nationwide on April 30.
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