Filmmaker Warwick Thornton is a maverick blend of country and punk rock. Long hair, a wide-brimmed hat, messy short-cut beard. The 50-year-old powerhouse director/cinematographer from Australia’s Northern Territory makes films every nine years or so and oozes that kind of ‘Big Terrence Malick’ energy. So it’s an altogether pleasant surprise to see him bring his talents to the small screen.
Thornton is an extreme cinematic talent, the director and cinematographer behind the 2009 Cannes Film Festival ‘Golden Camera’ award winner “Samson and Delilah.” Most recently Thornton delivered the immediately canonical Australian western and 2017 Venice International Film Festival Special Jury Prize Winner “Sweet Country”. In the same year he also delivered the forthright and essential documentary that challenged white Australia’s ownership of the Southern Cross, “We Don’t Need A Map.”
Now comes the second season of the acclaimed “Mystery Road” TV series, the spin-off of Ivan Sen’s “Mystery Road” and “Goldstone” with the show set in between the events of those two films as it continues to follow Aaron Pedersen’s detective Jay Swan. Staying in the Australian outback, albeit contemporary, this sunburnt noir is set on the fringes in underrepresented communities.
Rachel Perkins helmed all six episodes of the first season, but isn’t returning for the second. Instead, Thornton was approached by producers Greer Simpkin and David Jowsey to be a part of the show’s second season as a director and cinematographer alongside first season performer and directing talent Wayne Blair (“The Sapphires”). Thornton, however, couldn’t watch a frame of what had come before once he joined the crew:
“I’m gonna tell you the truth right now. I didn’t watch any of Ivan’s films, and as soon as they asked me to direct the second series, I didn’t watch the first series that Rachel directed, which by all [accounts] was absolutely brilliant. I knew that Jay Swan was going to be Jay Swan. And I knew that as the start-up director for the second series, that I can’t come in and start kicking cans around and start changing everything because it’s brilliant already. I wouldn’t have been able to get away with it, and I shouldn’t actually stamp my mark on it in that way. What I can do is start looking at style and form as a craft rather than [say] ‘hey, let’s set the next one in space. And we just defrosted Jay Swan [LAUGHS]'”
For Thornton, despite never seeing a frame, the writing of Aaron Pedersen’s Jay Swan provided such clarity after two films and the first series that style was going to be a key entry point into the way that he approached the series:
“Jay Swan comes with an absolute providence and lineage as a character. There’s this internal monologue that you don’t hear, but you see on his face. He is righteous, and he knows the difference between right and wrong and he has incredibly stoic morals. That is absolutely the Atlas pillar holding up the whole universe of ‘Mystery Road’. Every time it’s a new town with new characters, [and] old characters who keep following through but as long as you have that [Jay] there, we can start again in that world.”
Once Thornton was signed on, he joined the writers for six weeks of pre-production and gave them one precise brief – less talking, more shooting:
“Jay Swan doesn’t say much, but he’s damn good with a gun, and he’s such a fearful character to all the baddies. They don’t want to talk to him they want to shoot him. The baddies don’t have a sort of [Bond villain] monologue while they’ve got Jay Swan tied up about how they’re going to take over the world. They just try and put bullets in him.”
Rather than merely a solo man with no name, a massive part of the dramatic appeal of Jay Swan is that we’re watching him struggle to maintain any semblance of a regular type life:
“Imagine being married to him. Imagine being his daughter. That was interesting to look at that; the repercussions for all the people around Jay Swan. It’s great to be a lone wolf, with perfect morals. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, the law is the law – that kind of ‘Judge Dredd’ concept. But what was interesting was working with the characters around him, who love him but he doesn’t show emotions back to. That was really interesting to me.”
In the second series, Jay’s latest mystery takes him to the northwestern peninsula of Australia, where the arid desert landscapes fall off into the ocean. Thornton calls himself a ‘desert blackfella’ in his documentary “We Don’t Need A Map,” and it’s easy to wonder if that ‘fish-out-water’ element of this series was something he uniquely applied:
“Jay wears cowboy boots, and they don’t really work well with mangrove roots. [N]one of us were comfortable in those big mangroves because it was full of crocodiles and psychopathic jellyfish, so it came across naturally. The first take we did literally Aaron [Pedersen – Jay Swan] fell over in the mangroves. And Aaron’s like ‘I’m right. I’m right.’ You know because Aaron’s bulletproof in real life let alone playing the character Jay Swan. It was just all there anyway.”
Thornton’s formal influences began in the design phase. He and the whole filmmaking team developed an aesthetic intent with a little bit more of an edge for the series that they called ‘tropical noir’:
“Literally before every take, we’re pouring a bucket of water on every actor so they’re hot and sweaty and you see that sweat on the chest on the forehead, and you can smell the primal soup that they’re walking through. The whole series is full of fans and sprinklers. Everyone is so hot and bothered that they could just crack and pull a gun out and shoot someone.”
This madness is not an unfamiliar feeling for someone who grew up in Alice Springs:
“They call it ‘going troppo’. The build-up of the wet season through Darwin across to Broome and then across to Cairns everyone gets to this point where they’re just teetering on madness because of the temperature and the only respite is the shopping centre because they’ve got great air-conditioning.”
Thornton relates to the world of Jay Swan and the contemporary friendliness that makes it harder to spot the bad people:
“I was born in 1970 in Alice Springs, and that’s pure wild west as far as I’m concerned. Absolute pure racism. The irony is that you’d be called a ‘little black bastard’ or a ‘coon’ all the time and back then it was what it was. The thing about growing up then is that I knew who the racists were, and I knew how to steer clear of them. And nowadays you do’’t know who the racists are because it’s uncool. They’re still there, but they’ve kind of learnt not to say it. I had a really weird safe western experience because you knew who the arseholes were and they were blatant arseholes.”
Now that his stint on the show has concluded, I asked if Thorton had gone back to revisit the original films or first series. He admits: “No I haven’t yet, but we’re in the time of a virus, so it’s the perfect time to write country and western songs and go back and watch.”
After his most successful feature and documentary, and now “Mystery Road” continuing to show off Thornton’s prowess in a new medium it begs the question what’s next:
“This country (Outback Australia) is so incredibly beautiful. I can’t see myself making a film about university students in a share house in Newtown because I just don’t have a connection. But I do have a connection to that mountain range and that horse and the landscape of racism.”
The second series of “Mystery Road” is coming to ABC and ABC iView on April 19th.
