In a medium dominated by same-old same-old stories – a talking animal here, a spandex-clad superhero there – cinema audiences are afforded precious few moments when they are presented with something strikingly new or different.
Recently we’ve had quite a few of them, thanks to a talented group of Indigenous Australian film-makers (including Wayne Blair, Stephen Page and Rachel Perkins) who have delivered a shot in the arm for local genre on screen. That is, genre as you’ve never seen it before.
We’ve seen dance movies, yes, but never an Indigenous dance movie; not until this year’s Spear. We’ve seen superhero stories, sure, but nothing like ABC TV’s Cleverman. We’ve watched noir films and westerns, but 2013’s Mystery Road was different.
Like Mystery Road, Ivan Sen’s latest film, Goldstone, is a technical knockout – sumptuously shot and beautifully edited and calibrated. Like other recent and great locally made films, Mad Max: Fury Road and The Babadook, it delivers a deathblow to the idea that “genre” is a dirty word, or exclusively the domain of youth.
“I’m trying to get closer to starting to redefine what genre means,” says Sen, talking over the phone between connecting flights at an airport, en route to Sydney from Hong Kong. “Genre doesn’t have to be this thing where we all know what it is and there’s no mystery to it.
“There’s an opportunity here that film-makers aren’t really taking, where we can take genre and add meaning and mystery. The stuff we’re used to seeing in street drama.”
Goldstone plays the opening night gala at this year’s Sydney film festival on Wednesday. It is the “spiritual sequel” to Mystery Road, which also had opening night honours – a first for an Australian feature and its sequel. Both follow a booze-addled investigator (Aaron Pedersen) sent by the feds, who cracks open layers of corruption inside a small town.
In Goldstone there are shootouts and a car chase, directed with a patience and pace that’s diametrically opposed to the point-and-spray fury of standard-issue multiplex action. Every shot counts; every bullet matters.
“Action shouldn’t be thought of as trash. Action has as much right to have weight given to it as anything else, like dialogue. For me, I treat action like dialogue. Or even intimidate scenes, where there’s no dialogue and it’s all non-verbal stuff,” says Sen, who wrote and directed the film.
“It was there in the script from the beginning, that approach that every second counts. Looking at film-makers at the top of their game doing genre stuff – a film-maker like Christopher Nolan – every half-second counts.
“You’ve got audiences with itchy bums. They want to be taken on a story and they want to be entertained. I don’t know if that kind of thing has influenced me, but I just think it’s an attention to detail which I’m evolving into. It’s working it’s way into my camera work, my writing, my music.”
Note repeated use of the word “my”. This isn’t the director taking credit for another collaborator’s efforts, because Sen is his own collaborator.
Writer-directors are relatively common in the film industry, but there’s an unusual twist in Sen, in that he also edits and shoots his own films – a tradition maintained since his debut feature, 2002’s adolescent drama Beneath Clouds.
As I watched Goldstone and listened to its rousing string and piano score – so beautifully timed from the first images of sepia-toned photographs onwards – I made a mental note to check who the composer was. Silly me; that was Sen too.
The film-maker has been asked many times by journalists over the years about being a one-man band. But what about from producers and financiers? Is all this job-juggling ever an issue? Has he been encouraged to relinquish certain duties?
“I’ve had a bit of pressure from Screen Australian from the editing side in the past, but that’s coming from individuals more than the whole organisation,” he says.
“My next two films, one of them is actually my production, so I’ll have pretty good control over that. But the other one, I’m kind of coming in on. That one I’ve gone in to the producers telling them: you get me the way I work or you don’t get me. And they are totally cool with that.
“How films are funded, there’s always a completion bond ... When films go off budget or whatever, these completion bond people come in and they make sure that the film is made.
“I’ve got a good relationship with those people. In the end, everything comes back to them, and they’re cool with me. One time they said to my producer: if you start running out of money, Ivan can just do that role too, don’t worry about it.”
Indigenous directors including Sen, Rachel Perkins (Bran Nue Dae, Redfern Now), Wayne Blair (Cleverman, The Sapphires), Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah) and Catriona McKenzie (Satellite Boy) have not just emerged as powerful new voices on Australian screens; they have become part of its backbone, and it’s impossible to imagine an industry without them.
“I’ve just been doing what I’ve always been doing,” says Sen. “But it’s great that there’s actually a network of films being produced and [Indigenous] film-makers who are being developed, and that these stories are getting out in the mainstream consciousness.”
• Goldstone screens at the opening night gala of the Sydney film festival on Wednesday, before a national release on 7 July
