Warwick Thornton and Margaret Pomeranz In Conversation

Margaret: Look, I've gotta move on, but I just wanna, before we go to something else, the importance of landscape in your films.

Warwick:  I spent my life running away from video to shoot film, to be the ego DP, rockstar, you know, "I shoot film”. I spent my life fighting to shoot on film, and then suddenly film's dead, you know, long live film. And then I made this here (Sweet Country) and I just found that, I could have detested digital and I found it's so refreshingly relieving to shoot digital again. I felt that I could play again. Just shooting something in Alice Springs would take probably around about a 10-day turnaround to see rushes, to get a tick of approval, a neg report saying, colour: okay; focus: okay: scratches: none. So you'd always have to have everything completely on standby to, you might need to re-shoot it again, it might have a huge scratch through the whole thing. And then I felt really bad for me as a cinematographer that I actually liked this stuff because it was, you know, it was like, "Oh, you're cheating now." You know what I mean? It's become easy again. And it has its complications and it has a very different way to think cinematically. Composition's the same, but just the process of how zeroes and ones work compared to, you know, chemicals. And I really enjoyed it. It's easy, this sh*ts easy. It is, it's pretty easy. Especially when you find, Trish Cahill is a colourist who has done all of my films. She's a genius. You know what I mean? I completely hide behind her and she saves my ass every single shot. And with this stuff, it's just become so much easier and exciting 'cause I can play. I think I can play a little bit more it's less technical. So I could become much more creative in a way. Anyway. There's that little bit of cinematography we can talk about.

-Condensed excerpt from ACMI article “Warwick Thornton and Margaret Pomeranz In Conversation”-