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Some time near the start of the age of COVID, Warwick Thornton got a phone call from a number he didn’t recognise. On the other end of the line was Cate Blanchett.
“Wok, we’ve never met, but life’s too short,” she said. “Let’s make a movie together.”
Warwick Thornton at the Light: Works from Tate exhibition at ACMI.Credit:Scott McNaughton
That must have been a pretty good phone call to get.
“It’s a rock’n’roll phone call to get,” he agrees.
In the two years since they have talked maybe 50 times on Zoom – “we still haven’t met” – about books, about music, about real-life characters. “We kept going around in circles in a beautiful way, kind of more getting to know each other rather than actually business,” the Alice Springs-born filmmaker says, adding, “I never see this as business, to be honest”.
Two months from now, they will start shooting The New Boy, in which Blanchett plays a nun in an orphanage for Aboriginal boys in the mid-1940s, “the kind of nun who would have burnt down the convent,” says Thornton. “She’s kicking against the pricks – if you were in an orphanage she’s the kind of nun you’d want.”
Cate Blanchett is “probably the greatest actor in the world”, as far as Warwick Thornton is concerned. Credit:AP
He wrote the first draft of the screenplay more than 20 years ago, he says, long before his debut feature Samson & Delilah won the Camera d’Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival and marked him as one of the most distinctive talents of Australian cinema. The Blanchett character was originally a monk, but he wasn’t wedded to that idea, or much else.
“Hey, I wrote it, but it was a pretty shit script, and then the second draft was even worse, and the third draft maybe should have been burned,” he says. “They take time.”