Article by Matt Mulcahey
When Warwick Thornton ACS was eleven years old and running wild through the streets of Alice Springs, his mother sent him off to a remote Catholic boarding school to ‘sort him out.’ There, stepping into a church for the first time, Thornton laid eyes upon Christ’s tortured visage on the cross. That experience – and that image – served as the inspiration for the multi-hyphenate filmmaker’s latest work, The New Boy. ‘I don’t write from places that I haven’t been or lived or felt. I have to write stories and characters I have a connection to,’ says Thornton, who also directed and served as his own cinematographer. ‘When I was working on the film everyone around me said, “You know you are the new boy in the story, right?” At first, I would tell them, “No, I’m not,” but I think they were actually right.’
If the writer/director side of Thornton requires authentic connection to the material, then the cinematographer side craves a decluttered environment to create his lyrical images. On The New Boy, that meant a crew full of longtime Thornton collaborators working with one camera, one LUT, one shooting stop and just three lenses.
Set in the 1940s, The New Boy opens with the striking sight of a nine-year-old Aboriginal boy (played by first-time actor Aswan Reid) atop the back of a police officer in a stark desert landscape, choking the man to near unconsciousness. The boy is ultimately subdued by the mounted patrol and dropped in the dead of night at a remote orphanage run by an unorthodox nun, Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett). There, he is introduced to Christianity and put to work alongside the mission’s other young charges in the surrounding olive orchards and wheat fields. Soon after the nameless “new boy” arrives, a life-size carving of Christ on the cross appears at the orphanage as well, an event that inspired the film’s World War II-era setting. ‘The school I went to was run by Benedictine monks and it had those types of artifacts because they sent a massive amount of amazing paintings and relics from Spain to Australia in the 1940s as the Nazis were ransacking the world for anything worth its weight in gold and a lot of [actual] gold too,’ explains Thornton.
The New Boy debuted back in May at the 76th annual Cannes Film Festival before hitting Australian cinemas in July, completing a journey that began eighteen years ago when Thornton first began work on the script. Early versions featured a different title and a Benedictine monk at the centre of the story. At one point a French actor was cast in the lead, but Thornton couldn’t secure funding and the script eventually ended up “in the sock drawer,” Thornton’s favored home for unrealized projects. That changed when Thornton and Blanchett crossed paths at the Berlin International Film Festival in February of 2020. Though admirers of each other’s work, they had never met. When Covid began shutting down production work shortly thereafter, Blanchett reached out and the two began a Zoom relationship.
‘At first, we were having massive conversations about everything except cinema. We were trying to suss each other out in a way. I’m sure she was trying to figure out if I’m a pain in the ass, which some people say I am,’ laughs Thornton. ‘We got on like a house on fire and I thought, “I’ve got a couple scripts down there in the old sock drawer, and there is one that could work if we changed it from a priest to a nun.”’
One aspect of the project that didn’t change once Blanchett came aboard was Thornton’s dream location – a scenic hillside he’d discovered during his frequent drives from Alice Springs to Sydney. ‘It’s a three-day drive, but I prefer that to a three-hour flight in a strange way. I always have great ideas during that drive,’ explains Thornton. ‘The route I take is through a little town called Burra and whenever I pass through that area it always brings out all these amazing emotions in me. It feels like you are in Days of Heaven. It doesn’t matter what time of year; it’s magical even though it’s just bloody wheat fields.’
To transform those wheat fields into a 1940s-era mission – complete with living quarters and church – Thornton turned to production designer Amy Baker. However, when Thornton and Baker arrived at the idyllic locale in prep, they were met with an unexpected complication. ‘When I first found that spot I thought, “This is absolutely the most perfect place.” When we build the sets, every window will have a beautiful vista,’ laughs Thornton. ‘Then when we went back to scout, there were 150 giant bloody wind turbines in the distance. Nowadays you can paint them out, but it cost us a lot of money to get rid of them.’ Even with the towering environmentally friendly eyesores sullying his pristine panoramas, Thornton still raves about the location and Baker’s work constructing the sets. ‘Amy did an amazing job,’ says Thornton. ‘It looked so good that you started to feel like, “Oh no, there’s a better shot over here! Wait, there’s a better shot over there!” You could get a bit confused because you had too many great shots.’ The limiting factor to the infinite number of shootable frames was Thornton’s choice to go single camera. There may have been a beautiful shot in any direction, but Thornton could only select one of them at a time.
‘I’ve done so many films with two or three cameras and the pressure always mounts to shoot faster because naturally you’re getting more angles. Then you walk away from the scene going, “We went through three different setups with three cameras, so I know we must have got something to cut. I don’t really know what the hell it is, but we must have got something,”’ says Thornton. ‘By having one camera and decluttering the whole system, for every single shot the camera could be exactly where it wanted to be rather than compromising. We never had to say, “Can you move that other camera three feet backwards and two feet to the left because you’re in our frame?”’
For his lone camera, Thornton chose the Panavision Millennium DXL2 and its 8K Red Monstro sensor, manned by operator Jules Wurm. ‘Jules is a really close and beautiful friend who started off loading for me and then went to focus pulling and now operates,’ says Thornton. ‘I grew up in that system where you started at the bottom carrying boxes and worked your way up. So, I always try to give the people around me a leg up if they’re interested [in moving into a different role].’
Thornton largely kept the DXL2 at the camera’s native ISO of 1600, typical of his preference for defaulting to standard settings. ‘I believe in using the native ISO. [That number is set] by people who know what they’re talking about,’ he says. ‘You just have to be careful because grain can raise its ugly head and bite you on the ass. The 1600 native is pretty clean, but it can collapse when you push it really hard and then poor Trish Cahill, the colourist who does 90 percent of my films, has to fight to keep the continuity of the grain.’
‘We’ve got a duty of care to the actors we work with and when you start playing with lenses wider than 50mm, you start warping faces. When you’re working with someone like Cate Blanchett, you’ve got to behave yourself.’
Thornton’s quest for a simplified workflow extended to his on-set color pipeline, which featured a single LUT borrowed from his filmmaker son, Dylan River. ‘I’m actually a LUT thief,’ laughs Thornton. ‘I’m incredibly petrified of new technology. I wish I could just use my old Panaflex Gold with some Kodak in it. Dylan shot a film called A Sunburnt Christmas and created a beautiful LUT for it. I’ve basically stolen that LUT from him and I’ve used it on every film I’ve done since. I think of the LUT as being like a film stock and over the years I have really learned how that LUT behaves and so I’ve stuck with it.’
Thornton estimates 95 percent of The New Boy was shot on just three Panavision anamorphic lenses – a 50mm E Series, a 75mm C Series and a 200mm Macro Anamorphic Prime, selected after extensive tests at Panavision Sydney. ‘I’m not a person who needs 10 boxes of lenses. I think it’s an incredible waste of money,’ says Thornton. ‘Give me three lenses and I can make a film.’ Thornton lists the 50mm E Series as his “go-to” for The New Boy. ‘We’ve got a duty of care to the actors we work with and when you start playing with lenses wider than 50mm, you start warping faces. When you’re working with someone like Cate Blanchett, you’ve got to behave yourself,’ says Thornton. ‘If you want [the field of view] of something to be like a 27mm or 32mm, then just take 10 steps back with the 50mm and you’ve got the same thing without the warp.’
The 50mm may have been on the camera most frequently, but it was the 200mm Macro Anamorphic Prime that became Thornton’s favourite piece of glass. Developed in the late 1990s, the lens is a macro-option to match the Panavision Primos. ‘I always forget to get a macro lens and it always bites me on the ass. Those older Panavision lenses are beautiful, but they have terrible minimum focus. Some of them are like six feet. There’s always a close shot of something like a drop of blood on the ground and my 1st first AC Claire Bishop, who is an amazing focus puller, will be like “Warwick, the minimum isn’t close enough for that,”’ says Thornton. ‘So, for The New Boy, Jules suggested that 200mm macro lens and I just fell in love with it. I wanted to steal it and keep it forever because it’s magical.’
Thornton also opted for simplicity in terms of previsualization. Though his compositions have a geometric precision, Thornton doesn’t shot list, or storyboard. ‘Because I’m the director as well as the cinematographer, I’m not having that dialogue with another person to try and work out what their magical vision is,’ says Thornton, who has lensed all of his feature films. ‘If it’s a particularly difficult sequence and I want to use the camera in a very specific way, I’ll draw some stick figure people, but that’s more so for the grips. I’ll tell them that I want the camera to go from A to B, but I never tell them how to do it. I don’t say, ‘I want to use this specific crane or this specific gimbal.’ I leave that up to them.’
That approach extends to lighting as well. ‘I never tell gaffers what light to use,’ says Thornton. ‘They know their lights better than me. I just go, “I want something big and hard,” or “Warm it up a bit”.’ Thornton makes the occasional exception to that rule if someone tries to pull out a particular LED unit. ‘My gaffer Andy Robertson kept trying to offer up those S360 ARRI SkyPanels and I’d just say, “Mate, you use those to light a tennis court,”’ laughs Thornton. ‘They’re not my kind of light. I like hard lights.’ Delegating some of those decisions to his crew was necessary with a schedule like The New Boy’s. The crucial opening scene of the child being captured by horseback patrol – shot in slow motion – was photographed in just a few hours from dawn to noon. ‘I believe one of the most important things is creating an immediate sense of place for an audience,’ says Thornton. ‘This movie has a big opening that’s meant to feel epic and it’s there to say to the audience, “You’re going to go on a cinematic experience.” It’s not going to be a film with pages and pages of dialogue in a flat in New York. It’s going to be a visual film.’
Thornton had to quickly acclimate the audience to the new boy’s powers as a ngangkari – or healer – an ability represented by a glowing orb of light. During the boy’s first night at the orphanage, he crawls under his bed and by simply rubbing his fingers together the light appears, hovering in front of him. On set, Thornton hand-operated a practical bulb on a rod – painted out in post – to provide interactive light as well as something tangible for his young star to play to. Finding the right bulb required some rummaging by Thornton and gaffer Robertson. ‘We started off thinking an LED bulb would work, but the ones we had didn’t offer 360 degrees of ambiance,’ explains Thornton. ‘So, Andy went to the truck and dug around in some boxes covered in cobwebs and came out with a tiny little peanut bulb from maybe the 1960s or 70s, a little screw-in bulb that you’d have in an aluminum torch.’ Thornton also wanted an accompanying lens flare, which took a bit of trial and error to find. ‘I love Panavision lenses because they have the most rocking lens flares possible, especially the old E Series and C Series, but, strangely enough, we couldn’t get any flares with that peanut bulb from any lens except the E Series 100mm, which only worked when the focus was about six to eight feet way away,’
Though not quite harkening back to the era of 50-year-old peanut bulbs, Thornton did prefer more vintage, harder units for his day interiors, rather than LEDs. Many of the exteriors were photographed at dawn or dusk, meaning day interiors were typically shot between 10:00 am and 3:00 pm, when the sun was overhead and not low enough to provide directional light through the windows. ‘We would generally punch in 9Ks and maybe a 6K or two,’ says Thornton. ‘We’d basically start every scene with the lens at a T5.6 and have a look at the monitor and then start working. Almost the whole film was shot at 5.6, except for a couple of night sequences. Those interiors were all about placing people in the right spot and using the windows to our advantage, going quite hard with the contrast, and letting it fall off in the background. Those shots are about the characters, not the back wall.’
For night interiors, Thornton strove for stark naturalism, with scenes often illuminated by an on-screen bare bulb. Placing the actors in the right spot was again crucial, as was rigging the light so that it could be easily lifted and lowered in the frame for adjustments. ‘It gave us this 1940s noirish kind of lighting – a three-quarter key with a great shadow,’ says Thornton. ‘That type of downlight can be brutal, but if the character is in the right place, it can be really beautiful.’
Thornton employed hard light symbolically throughout the film, including several scenes where Blanchett’s Sister Eileen faces moments that test her faith. ‘I thought of that light as the “cold light of day,”’ Thornton says. ‘She is exposing herself to God. She’s right out there in the full flood of the sun – or in this case the full flood of one of those big old brown Mole Richardson 10Ks spotted up on her – and she can’t hide.’
Metaphoric luminance was also used for a key scene toward the end of the film as the new boy – his ngangkari gifts fading as his indoctrination into Christianity takes hold – stands in church before the crucifix, his face bisected by shadow and harsh sunlight. ‘There are two different worlds happening on his face. You can say that the dark side is Christianity, and the bright side is Aboriginal spirituality, or you can say it in reverse,’ Thornton says. ‘There’s a balance that has to happen with those types of images. A film can very quickly turn into a visual wank and become self-important or self-indulgent. There is a director in me that’s worrying about character arc and audience understanding, but then there’s also the cinematographer in me who wants to make a film with no dialogue and just tell the story through images and light.’
The challenge of balancing that duality is part of what keeps Thornton behind the camera on his directorial efforts despite the rarity of that arrangement. ‘I started in documentary, so there were a lot of directors/camera people then – the sole figure out on the great Western plane with their camera. I come from that world,’ says Thornton. ‘To me, cinematography is a craft. You’ve got to work at it. And I feel like I’m going to be working at it for the rest of my life, but I love that struggle to make beautiful things.’