When Warwick Thornton was 11 years old, he was sent from his home in Alice Springs to a remote missionary-style school run by Benedictine monks, in the monastic town of New Norcia, Western Australia.
It's a time that he is somewhat reluctant to discuss. "There was a point in my life where I needed some structure," he says.
For the young Kaytetye man, it quickly became an experience of survival.
"I – a kid who never went to school, who spent most of his life on the streets at night – was suddenly put into a boarding school where you wake at six in the morning, go to mass, you go to church, eat, you go to school, then you go back to church in the afternoon. Then you have to go to sleep and do it again, for 10 months of the year."
Thornton would eventually reject the school's Catholic teachings – especially after returning to Alice Springs, where he became a radio DJ for CAAMA (Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) before turning to filmmaking, which he likes to say "saved his life". But the impact of his religious schooling was profound.
"Walking into a church for the first time, and seeing a man being tortured – not a painting [but] a life-size sculpture – what mentally does that do to a child?!" he wonders.
These experiences, good and bad, inspired Thornton to write The New Boy, his fifth feature, which hits Australian cinemas this week following its world premiere in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where ABC Arts spoke to both Thornton and Cate Blanchett, who stars in and produced the film.
"Oh, it's great for the ego!" says Thornton with a grin. "The red carpets are all about the ego. And then there's the reality of the lights dimming, and then you shit yourself."
Mixing realism with the magical aspects of a fable, The New Boy is set in 1940s Australia and centres around an Aboriginal child (played by 11-year-old newcomer Aswan Reid) with mysterious 'powers'.
As the film opens, the boy is scooped up by police after attacking an officer, and dumped late at night on the doorstep of a remote mission run by renegade nun Sister Eileen (Blanchett), assisted by Sister Mum (Deborah Mailman) and workman George (Wayne Blair) — to be educated, inculcated with Christianity, and put to work (in the olive orchard and the wheatfields) alongside the mission's ragtag group of boys.
Initially treated as a new "lamb" to the flock, the "new boy" becomes an object of suspicion and then fear, as his ostensibly supernatural powers are revealed.
Magical realism aside, The New Boy is of a piece with Thornton's bittersweet 2009 teen romance Samson and Delilah and his 2020 confessional cooking show The Beach, in which he transformed personal experiences and struggles into art.
"I write from what I know," he says. "Writing from the truth that's inside you is a really powerful place to write."
From its very specific and very personal starting point, the film's narrative is animated by its far-reaching allegorical dimensions. Reid's character is an innocent, guileless figure, caught between his Indigenous spirituality and the European Christianity of the nuns. The cost of survival, for him, is high.
It's a story that resonates all-too-sharply with Australian colonial history.
"This is a movie about survival," says Thornton.
"[Australian filmmakers] make films for Australia, about Australians, and we try to make things that have a deeper meaning about who we are as a country, the conversations that we may like to have. All that's there, if you want to deep dive into this."
In the film's press notes, Thornton is explicit about the message of his film:
"It's like any Indigenous person through the last 250 years of colonisation. Your lore, your culture and everything has just been completely obliterated to extinction in a strange way. You have to adapt in this new world that is like a plague, like a virus that has completely taken over your life and shut down everything that you've believed in. Humans are able to adapt very quickly to survive in any situation, in any environment, in any landscape. In a strange way, that's what the New Boy is. He's not judging anybody. He's just surviving."
Collaborating with Cate Blanchett
Eighteen years ago, Thornton wrote a first version of The New Boy, featuring a Benedictine monk, which he says "came from a place of anger". Thanks to Blanchett's involvement, his passion project came back to life.
"There was a spark in this a long time ago, and I'd forgotten what that spark was. [But] because of you coming along," he says, gesturing to Blanchett, seated by his side, "it was one of those beautiful things where suddenly the universe goes: Now is the right time."
Thornton says the pair began discussing the project during the pandemic, after Blanchett phoned him, saying, "Life is too short, I really want to make a movie with you."
"I had read [the script] and thought, 'Oh, well, maybe this is just something that [my production company] Dirty Films can help facilitate. There's nothing for me, necessarily,'" Blanchett recalls.
"Then we got talking about, 'What if the priest were a nun?' In a way, that darkness or residual anger that may have hung over the project in its genesis, seemed to evaporate into sort of a greater benevolence."
Over the course of the film, Sister Eileen questions her own faith and conduct, drawing her and the New Boy closer together.
"I connected to the script, even though it's so far away from my experience, anything I understood," says Blanchett. "You have to find those points of connection."
For Thornton, there was never any question about the A-list actor fitting into his world: "It was more, 'Shit, will she expose me as the village idiot that I actually am? The daydreamer, the off-with-the-pixies storyteller, rather than the perfect soundbite filmmaker,'" he jokes.
"There were certainly times on set when I felt I wasn't worthy to direct her, because she'd ask questions I did not have answers for. And part of who I am is my honesty, and that's important to me, so the answer that she would get is, 'I actually don't know, Cate, why that part of the scene is there. I wrote it, and I actually have never asked myself that question.'
But it's beautiful, it's part of the journey of making movies, that you don't understand and there's certain things that you haven't thought about, even though you've written your own bloody script."
Reflecting on the part she played in shaping the story, Blanchett says: "There's a sense that actors are somehow passive objects to be moved … [But] when you have those conversations, asking questions about your character, or the circumstances of a story, the director gets an opportunity, I think, to work out what it means to them in the present. Because it's so hard to imagine this by yourself."
Celebrating spirituality
Amongst the many questions the film throws up are those surrounding the New Boy's ambiguous and at times dangerous powers, which manifest as an orb of light that crackles from his fingertips.
Though these powers are never explicitly labelled in the film, Thornton compares the New Boy to a ngangkari: a kind of traditional healer, found across several First Peoples cultures in Central Australia, which the filmmaker has described as a person with "special powers that can be used for good or evil". (In his 2015 video installation Way of the Ngangkari, Thornton likens them to the Jedi knights from Star Wars.)
For Thornton, who has two uncles who are esteemed ngangkari, sharing this kind of cultural knowledge in his art remains a careful balancing act.
"There's secret and sacred, and then there's open stuff. The orb in the film is fictitious [rather than] an actual spiritual thing. You want to be very careful playing with that sort of stuff, because what is open in my community might not necessarily be open in another community.
"But you need to expose a certain amount of yourself, and the truth in you, to explain what you mean. If it's all locked up, and you treat your audience like, 'Well, I can't tell you anything, and you wouldn't understand anyway,' you're in the wrong business of telling stories."
While everyone living on the mission is wary of the New Boy's powers, the film itself offers a different perspective, depicting them with wonder and reverence.
"Maybe he's a ngangkari who has never been taught how to use his power. He's using his power for maybe the wrong reasons, not to heal, but to get to the front of the queue, to get to the porridge first," says Thornton.
As in his 2013 film The Darkside, which recounts a collection of Indigenous ghost stories, Thornton is celebrating the supernatural in The New Boy — a marked contrast with the typically Western response of violence and fear (which is demonstrated by other characters in the film).
Thornton says this reverence is in "all Indigenous communities – and not necessarily Indigenous communities, too, but those [communities] that see spirits as loved ones and ancestors, and celebrate a connection rather than wave the cross at them and tell them to be gone because they're all evil and angry. The Mexican Day of the Dead is such a beautiful realisation of that. And a lot of Hindu and Asian cultures have that as well. It's like, you feed the spirits and you love the spirits and you connect with the spirits. They do get pissed off occasionally, when you don't.
"It's [a matter of] understanding and connecting, rather than disempowering [or] standing in the way."
This connection is particularly felt in a sequence late in the film where a hymn sung in traditional language by the Hermannsburg-based Central Aboriginal Women's Choir lands as an eruption of beauty and hope.
"It's [at a point] where he [the protagonist] is starting to actually connect [with the Christian faith of the nuns], starting to use the word 'Amen' – it's that connection between Indigenous spirituality and Catholicism and Christianity," Thornton explains.
"The Hermannsburg choir, that's the absolute epitome to me [of] that connection being made and actually working in a way; it's singing in traditional language, but singing Christian hymns that were probably written 200-300 years ago."
Becoming a calmer storyteller
While Blanchett is an undeniable force in the film, at its heart stands Reid's commanding performance, as well as that of the seven other adolescent First Nations boys cast as his schoolmates, who are all making their film debuts – a potentially terrifying prospect for a director.
"There was an epiphany on the first day at dawn, when we'd had breakfast: I'm on set and it's calm, and then suddenly a bus pulls up, and eight children, screaming and giggling, walk out. All the blood drains from my face. I go, 'Warwick, what were you thinking, you idiot?!' You know, [the show-business rule about never working with] animals and children – and there's a shitload of children in this film!
"But after the first scene and the first take, I looked up to the sky and said thank you to the universe, because these kids were just brilliant, from day one."
This peacefulness seems to emanate from Thornton in conversation, and he describes himself as a much "calmer" storyteller these days.
"When you're 23, when you write a film like this, you're writing a film like throwing rocks, you know what I mean? And you're obviously going to hurt people – or people are going to run away, and [so] they don't get hit by the rocks. Whereas being an older storyteller and filmmaker, you get a lot more done by just using your voice," he explains.
"Anger is an awesome energy, but then you need to turn that energy into a positive energy. Some people find that peace in storytelling earlier than others. But it does take time."
Thornton is still far from definitively answering any of his own probing questions, including just what faith means to him.
"Faith and spirituality wakes you up in the morning. It gets you out of bed, it keeps you going during the day. Spirituality is the dreams you have at night. Then there's science, which is the reality of waking up, having to live.
"I'm so excited that I don't have any answers. I have questions, we all do. But we're not allowed to make the movie that is Life, the Universe, and Everything According to Warwick Thornton, because that would be… Obviously, the answer is 42.
"I will tell you when I die, you know what I mean?"
The New Boy opens nationally from July 6 but is in previews from July 1.