Thornton filming his Caméra d’Or winning film Samson and Delilah.

“I won’t tell you what it’s about but it’s called Jason’s Story. It’s super, super scary. It’s really hard core.”

Interview by Matthew Eeles

Warwick Thornton’s cheeky chuckle is infectious.
You can’t help but feel happy for the boy from Alice Springs who graduated from the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and went on to win the Caméra d’Or at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.
When you watch the films he’s shot you can see, through his lens, that he’s a man of immense talent. He’s someone who’s in love with his country, his profession and most of all, his ancestry.
When I spoke to him on the phone about his newest film, The Darkside, I was taken aback by his laid back nature and passion for his craft.

Some of the spiritual encounters in The Darkside are quite unnerving. What inspired you to put a compendium of stories like this together as a documentary?
It was interesting because spirits, ancestors and ghosts in general have always been a part of my life and they’re a part of most indigenous people’s lives, especially that connection to ancestry.
When you walk through the bush you know there’s a lot of spirits floating around. They’re watching you. I’ve always been really interested in this kind of stuff and I wondered if anyone else thinks the same way and if we could make something really beautiful out of it, something that exposes it but also nurtures it in a sense.
Making it into a documentary was really interesting for me because I’m really interested in oral history because I think we’ve really lost a lot of oral history.
Most of the time if it’s not CGI or a re-enactment then nobody really wants to see it. But sitting down and telling kids what you remember about your great-grandparents or grandparents is really important because all of that stuff gets forgotten and lost because everybody is too busy on iPads and the internet. The irony of that is that the internet is also a great place to keep oral history alive.

What were some of the reasons a few of the original storytellers didn’t want to be filmed telling their stories?
I wanted to dramatise things, but not too dramatically. There’s a lot of re-enacted, bad, shaky-cam stuff around at the moment. I wanted to make things really beautiful and create an oral history situation where someone is sitting there telling their story while they’re having a cup of tea in the kitchen. I found that format to be really empowering but I also recognise that when you put a camera in front of someone telling their own personal ghost story, which some people may fear being perceived as whack, the camera can really clamp people up.
When this happened I thought, lets just record their stories, do a little edit on it while trying to keep it truthful to their story but make it much more succinct and then lets bring in an actor to play that person to re-enact the actual interview.
I didn’t think it would be like this at the beginning but when we told people we were going to bring actors in to play them they would say, “Really? You’re going to get an actor to play me? Can you get Cate Blanchett?” and that empowered them more to tell their story thinking that Deb Mailman or Sacha Horler was going to play them.

Did anyone change their mind and decide to tell their story themselves once you mentioned an actor was going to come in and do it?
No. But people did pull out on that basis. I said to some people to go and ask their parents or their elders whether or not it’s cool to tell this story. Some people said they were going to do that, went and spoke to a grandpa or an uncle or aunty and the elder would tell them they’re not allowed to tell it because it’s a little too close to the bone so they would pull out which was rightfully so.
A lot of people were really clear and adamant that they had done that already.
We also made it very clear they all had to be firsthand stories and no myths that came out of missions.

Did you get as many stories as you’d hoped for?
Yeah, heaps. We thought we’d maybe get around 30 to 40 and we got 140.

That’s great.
It was but it meant a lot more work for us. (Laughs). But it was great to have a lot of stories to go through. We obviously had to be a little hard and cull it down.
Originally we asked for the scarier, the better. When we started getting these stories coming in we noticed this real connection they all had and it was more about family and about the spirit world being much more nurturing. People often had spirits coming back to check on families much more than the spinning head in the cupboard. (Laughs).
That unique perspective of family orientated ghosts really excited us rather than the super scary stuff.

Did you get many stories that seemed to be completely over the top?
Yeah, there were a couple. You have to be really respectful though. You can’t just accuse people of making them up and if it’s not made up then I’m insulting them.
We got some incredible stories though. A man came and told me a story in Alice Springs about something that happened to him about three or four years ago and it was truly the most unbelievably scary story I had ever heard. I didn’t put that story in The Darkside because we’re developing that into a feature. The story is just so perfect and it’s just so scary.
I intentionally left that one out because I didn’t want to cut it down to six minutes.

So tell me about the feature you’re developing. Is it definitely happening?
Yeah. We’re on our third draft at the moment. I won’t tell you what it’s about but it’s called Jason’s Story. It’s super, super scary. It’s really hard core.
Another thing we’re also telling people is that if they tell us their story it could be turned into a movie a play or a novel or something. There’s so many outlets for good stories.

What kind of reaction did you get from actors like Sacha Horler and Bryan Brown when you presented them with this project?
They were all in from the beginning but everybody said they were really scared of what we were doing because it required a really raw performance. There’s no wizbangery and very little editing in each piece because we were trying to create that piece of oral history.
The actors had to really learn their lines and they really had to perform to keep the audience engaged. The story is fantastic but telling the story is even stronger.
They all pulled it off and they were all awesome.

In my opinion, Aaron Pedersen plays one of the more interesting storytellers and gives one of his greatest performances with Steven’s story. Was his performance based on the real life Steven or was it completely improvised?
Well Aaron is actually playing a cousin of his, so he knows the original storyteller.
Every actor got the original recording of the story and then they got the transcript that we had condensed to make the story much more succinct.
I spoke to every actor about listening to the person’s voice to build with and to make sure they keep it truthful to the way that person sounds and acts.

Well Aaron definitely did a fantastic job. Was he aware that it was his cousin that had shared the story with you?
Well Aaron is also a cousin of mine so I pitched it to him as a story I had got off Steven and that I wanted him to do it. He thought it was awesome because they know each other really really well.

Did anything out of the ordinary happen during the filming of The Darkside to any of the cast or crew?
No, but people were really concerned about telling other people’s stories and especially true stories. When you start talking about spirits and that sort of stuff somewhere in another dimension an eye opens and starts listening to what you’re talking about. Most people said, “Ok, I’ll do the story but what I want is for whoever’s country we’re on to get an elder to come in and do a smoking ceremony after we record just incase we awaken something and it goes home with us.”
We made sure we smoked the crew and the actors after most of the stories.
But we definitely didn’t see any ghosts. Thank God. (Laughs).

Did you film many stories that didn’t make the final cut or were they all included?
We did shoot a few other stories which we’ve included in our app called The Otherside. Some of the stories I thought would be better told using the augmented reality function of the app where you can see a ghost tell the story.
We’re also developing it into a TV series for the ABC so there are definitely a lot more stories we didn’t actually record but will include them elsewhere.
We have a website called The Otherside (www.theotherside.com.au – truly impressive – Ed.) where you can hear other people’s stories that weren’t filmed. They were still amazing stories but they just never made this cut.

Will the TV series use the same style of filming as the movie?
The style and form will become unique to The Darkside in a sense.

And what will your involvement in it be?
Well I’ll direct it and shoot it. I don’t want to say too much.

There’s a great online accompaniment to The Darkside including an interactive website and app. How important do you think it is to partner a film with this kind of technology?
Well it’s kind of horses for courses really. There are certain films that really benefit from providing people with updated information and then there’s other films that really lend themselves to harnessing the power of new technologies and to reinvent story telling. I think The Darkside is a perfect example of that.
Sometimes you can get a Disney film that comes with a website that’s full of things that are unnecessary. Whereas The Darkside has used it really well to create new forms of storytelling.
There are definitely other films that I’m developing that I wouldn’t invest a tenth of the time, effort and creativity in creating those digital platforms because it’s unnecessary.

There was quite a bit of acting going on from behind the camera from the film’s humble director. You’ve written, shot and directed movies so is acting the next step for you?
Definitely not. (Laughs). That’s why I started behind the camera. I have been forced into acting for a short film with Nash Edgerton. He asked me to be in a short film that he did called Bear. I play a ranger with a big gun and that was my first foray into acting.
I always new I’d have to ask those questions off screen and I did that on purpose. I was very happy with it because it didn’t have to be shot. (Laughs). I didn’t have to put my ugly mug on screen. I’m like an overgrown gnome.

If you have a story you’d like to tell you can head over to http://www.theotherside.com.au where you can find a recording device to tell your story and upload a photo or image that represents your story.