Ivan Sen’s new Australian film, Toomelah | 2SER 107.3
Daniel Connors plays Daniel in Toomelah. Image: Curious Films.
Aussie filmmaker Ivan Sen has built a name for himself as a maker of thoughtful, moving films about indigenous Australia.
His newest film, Toomelah, screened at Cannes Film Festival in May to an extended standing ovation that had the non-actor cast in tears.
The film was shot on the mission Ivan’s mother grew up on. The story follows a young boy, Daniel, who drops out of school and gets caught in the crossfire between two gangs.
Ivan dropped in to the studio and had a chat with Kate Aubusson and me about making films as a one-man band, the blurring of fiction and reality, and Aboriginal rom-coms.
NV: Why Toomelah, of all places? What was it about that area that drew you back?
IS: Toomelah, it’s an indigenous community in north-western NSW, and it’s pretty isolated, but I always had a connection there because my mother grew up there and all my family are there. I always wanted to go out and make a film there but it took me a long time to work out how to go about it. I knew I wanted to go and do something that capturesd a slice of life, and not use a conventional approach.
NV: So how did you come up with this story of Daniel and his adventures and misadventures?
Initially I didn’t know what the story would be about. But one day when I was out there during the writing process, doing the research, a little boy walked into this yard and started arguing with these teenage boys. He had a bowknife in his hand and threatened to slice all their throats with it, one by one, individually. He was a tiny skinny little boy with a huge mouth and he had an amazing face, and I thought, wow, this kid’s got something. My only challenge was to try to harness it, and get him to work for me.
NV: And how did you convince him to do that?
Well, he was keen from the very beginning. But we just had to sort out who was the boss, and we did that very early on! After I found him, I followed him around all over the place, and went to school with him.
KA: So he was pretty up for it, for this film experience, but the rest of your cast, they’re all non-actors, how did you approach them? Were they similarly keen?
I just did the same thing, I kept looking around to see who had a strong voice and a strong face and went from there. Some people were too shy. But it was a pretty difficult process, the whole casting thing, because there’s only 200-300 people living there at any one time, so it was kind of limiting, the amount of people I could choose from.
But on the whole I think they did an amazing job, and their performance in front of the camera was pretty cvlose to how they would normally act. They’re very specific in their behaviour there and their accents, all of that. By using totally all of the people from there they were able to become comfortable with each other, and they knew me. The only difference during the filming was that I had a camera there, because I literally went in there by myself—
NV: One man band?
Yeah.
KA: So that was it for crew?
Yeah, just me.
KA: Wow.
And so that was a huge undertaking.
NV: To say the least!
KA: Well I guess that would have worked really well in catching the candid moments, if you don’t have a crew of fifteen people, or a trailer…
And you can move very quickly, by yourself. The problem is that it’s a drama and you have to put words in people’s mouths and get them to say them, so it was difficult, I had to feed lines to them the whole time, so I would have one eye on the sript and one eye on the camera. I’d call out peoples’ names and then calling out the lines, and that’s how the whole acting process happened.
NV: Did you ever find there was a blurring in the minds of your cast over what was real and what was part of the story?
Yeah, yeah. That happened a lot. They would get their own ideas as well, and start going off on tangents. There was a scene, down by the river, where the little boy Daniel starts throwing stones while this other guy is fishing. But the guy who was fishing really wanted to catch a fish. But it wasn’t part of the script, he just had it in his mind that he wanted to catch one for the camera. So when I tell Daniel to throw those stones near him, this guy who’s fishing, he’s just totally abusing Daniel. His face is so real because it is real. He picked up a stick and runs after him. And if he caught him he probably would have hit him with the stick.
NV: It’s interesting that you say while shooting you were feeding them lines, because I was wondering how the process works when you’re developing a story that’s so naturalistic. How much of that did you have a preconceived idea of, and how much of that was following Daniel around and taking snippets from his life that fit the story?
I didn’t want to come in with my own ideas, I just wanted to observe the environment and put it into a structure. I wrote down every bit of dialogue I heard out there, and I had notes and notes of lines and lines that I heard out there. So instead of putting my own dialogue into the film I put those lines into the script. So everything in the film is pretty much from my observation out there, not from my own experience or my own ideas.
NV: I did find it interesting that you said Daniel was such a mouthy kid, because there’s a real stillness in the film, and almost a lack of dialogue that works really nicely. He’s soft-spoken and it is just in what you see. Was that always your intention, to strip it back?
I don’t know. Before I made this film I made a film called Dreamland, an experimental film in Nevada where the main character said nothing. So for me, this is a lot of dialogue!
NV: This is a wordy film!
I am a fan of non-verbal dialogue, and I think it’s very powerful and there’s maybe more purity to it as well.
KA: That definitely comes through in your films, and I found when there was dialogue, from Daniel especially, it was a lot of bravado, it wasn’t what he was thinking or feeling but what he was trying to project. He was a tough guy. There’s these funny scenes where he’s trying to bluff that he’s had all these sexual experiences, and it’s all fabrication and its in the quieter moments that you see what’s actually going on in his head and what he’s actually feeling.
Yeah, a lot of those moments it’s more with the older people. With the younger people it’s creating this illusion that he’s a big man. And that’s totally just so he can protect himself.
NV: A lot of the issues in this film are very political but it doesn’t come off as a political story.
I didn’t go out consciously chasing issues or trying to show those issues to the audience. But there is one issue I did consciously put into it and that was the continued effects of the stolen generations, and that’s something that affected my own grandmother pretty much in the way that you see it in the film.
NV: That she was taken from Toomelah?
Yeah, my grandmother’s sister was taken when she was 10, 11 years old. And the bus came out o take them to the dentist like in the film and didn’t come back. And 50 years later she was spotted on Mike Willacy’s show, back in the 80s or something. So they had a big happy reunion and that lasted for couple of months and then they realised they didn’t actually know who each other were. And then they had a few months before auntie passed away. My grandmother really didn’t recover emotionally from it at all.
When I went to the Toomelah screening I just felt like everyone there from the community just felt like they were validated in some way. That they were held up, their lifestyle and culture had been captured forever, kind of thing. It’s hard to describe. It was this sense that, we are someone and we are somewhere.
NV: And that someone’s telling the story.
Yeah because everything’s just— the stuff about the stolen generation in the film is something in Toomelah that’s not talked about. And all the younger generation don’t know about it.
NV: Why is that?
People just don’t think to talk about it. Just too busy living day to day lives. And the people that used to talk about it, the older people, are all dying away. Something like Toomelah can bring things together and present them as a whole and be a reminder for younger generations where they come from and about the place they call home.
NV: Kate and I were trying to work out how many happy indigenous films we’d seen, and we couldn’t think of too many—
KA: Success stories, those rousing stories, and we were wondering if that was a concern for you, that there aren’t too many…
NV: Positive…
KA: Feel-good, that seems like a silly way to put it—
Rom-coms?
KA: Samson and Delilah would have been a little different if it was a rom-com!
Yeah, but I think the key word is there’s not a lot of films, full stop. And if you don’t have a lot of films, you won’t have a lot of variety. I guess Bran Nue Dae and The Sapphires, they’re kind of lighter films and people do respond to those as well. But as time goes on— my next film’s not a rom-com, it’s a murder mystery, a detective film about an Aboriginal detective that has to solve these murders in a small town like Moree. And it’s a bit of a Western as well.
This interview was first broadcast on 2SER 107.3′s weekly film program, Celluloid Dreams.
