Warwick Thornton on Outback Western Wolfram, indigenous history

A decade after his outback Western Sweet Country, First Nations director Warwick Thornton returns, with his new film, Wolfram, to the colonial frontier of 1930s Australia. Like Sweet Country, Wolfram is set in Thornton’s hometown of Alice Springs, and inspired by real family history, that of Thornton’s and David Tranter, co-screenwriter (with Steven McGregor) on both films.

Sweet Country traced the story of Tranter’s great-grandfather, one of the many Aboriginal men taken from their families to provide free labor for white ranchers. Wolfram looks at the female side of the same story of exploitation, at the young girls taken to work as child laborers in the wolfram, or tungsten, mines. The mineral, used to harden steel, became a valued commodity during the global military buildup of the 1930s. Australian miners found young girls particularly useful in maneuvering through the tight mining shafts. “My ancestor dug for tin with a teaspoon,” notes Thornton.

Wolfram follows two siblings who escape from their white master and set off across the desert, the “sweet country” of central Australia, in search of safety and a way home.

Sweet Country won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice film festival in 2017 and became a cross-over indie hit, grossing more than $2 million worldwide. Thornton’s last feature, The New Boy, starring Cate Blanchett, premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section in 2023.

Thornton spoke with The Hollywood Reporter, ahead of Wolfram‘s world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival on Tuesday, Feb. 17, about returning to the world of Sweet Country, reframing frontier violence through the eyes of Indigenous girls, and why he infused this story with a glimmer of hope.

With this film, you return to the same period, the 1920s, and the same location in Alice Springs, as your 2017 feature, Sweet Country. What made you want to return to that world?

Yeah, I’m not a big sequels kind of person. I’ve never done one before. But with this, it was two things. I’m obviously from Alice Springs, and the story in Sweet Country is directly connected to my people and the tribe that I come from, and to the general, central Australian Indigenous issues about the frontier, about the mistreatment of my people, and how beautifully and awesome we are. [laughs].

It’s awesome to tell these stories, because these stories have come from the conqueror, because he had the pen, so he wrote the history. We never had a voice in telling what actually happened to us. But we’ve become stronger storytellers, and audiences are becoming more universal, and they are interested in our stories.

So that was one reason to go back. The other thing was that Sweet Country has no redemption. Sweet Country is one of the toughest films I’ve ever made, one of the toughest stories I’ve ever told. It’s just a brutally hard film, and you walk away from it with more despair than hope. It had to be that way because we were telling the truth of what was happening to us at that point in our history as indigenous people from Central Australia. But Sweet Country was a downer of a film.

David Tranter and Steven McGregor wrote Sweet Country, and David is a close friend of mine. He comes from the neighboring tribe; he’s from the Awarai. I’m from the Kaytetye. And we’ve grown up together. He wrote Sweet Country, and it spoke the truth.

When they came to me with this new script, I was like: ‘I don’t know if I want to go down that path again, that really dark path with no redemption, no hope.’ They were like: ‘Just read it.’ And I did, and it had redemption. It has hope.

Why is that hope important for you in telling this story?

It’s something I desperately need, not only for storytelling, not only for my people, but for Australia.

Hope for my country, my community, hope for us as a nation. When telling these stories of indigenous history, I think it’s really important not to ostracize [white] audiences, as if to say: “It’s all your fault. You’re to blame for colonization.” So the question is, how do you make these films that can speak to people in a way so that they can learn about history and understand history, in order to actually move forward? Not by feeling ashamed, but not by ignoring or forgetting the history either.

What was your personal, family connection to the story of the film?

The children in the film are working in the wolfram [tungsten] mines. My great-grandmother did that. David Tranter’s grandmother did that. There’s a place called Hatches Creek, north of Alice Springs, where they were all enslaved. Because if you had a big, burly miner chasing these veins of wolfram [tungsten], you’d need a big, burly hole. But if you have children to do it, you only need small little holes to follow the veins of wolfram and tin. It was our grandparents, our great-grandparents, who did it.

Sweet Country was about our grandfathers, who were taken as children to become slaves on cattle stations, on ranches. All the boys were taken to the cattle stations, and all the girls were literally sent off to the mines.

Sweet Country is a bit of a dicks out kind of film, it’s about the blokes. There are a lot of guns and sweat. They’re fighting with their fists, all that kind of stuff. For me, it was so much more empowering to make a film about female characters. And female characters who don’t cry, because there’s no time to cry. You have to keep moving. Maybe you can cry when you’re a grandmother, because you finally feel safe. As a child, you’re not safe, and you don’t have time to cry. You have to just keep surviving.

This is a drama, but it has definite Western vibes as well.

Well, the general concept of a Western is, you know, some retired gunslinger who’s done some bad things, and is trying to make right, setting up a ranch, and vowing to never use their gun again. And then suddenly they have to do that one last job. There are very few Westerners from a child’s perspective, let alone an indigenous child’s perspective. Maybe the closest would be True Grit. The Western is sort of stoked with a forge full of cliches. Watch a Western and pretty quickly, you know what’s going to happen. So it was interesting to try to look at that world from a child’s point of view, how survival looks for them.

The visual style of the film is very striking. You shot this in Alice Springs, right? I didn’t realize there were so many flies there.

You’d literally be coughing up about 15 flies a day. It got so bad that it was just easier to swallow them. I’m the cinematographer too, and I wanted to make this a brutalist film. I wanted a tough, rough cinematic visual style. None of this floaty stuff, but getting right in there, with lens flares in the hot sun and lots of flies. Showing a place where, visually, you don’t want to be.

Did you find any resistance in trying to get this film financed? You mentioned colonialism, and the BBC just released an audience study that warned about too many “preachy” stories about colonial history.

Yeah, I read that. How typical is that of the BBC and the British in general? It’s their empire, so they would say, wouldn’t they? It’s the “don’t talk about the war” thing, don’t talk about what we stole. Don’t talk about what we did to people. Don’t talk about the smallpox we brought on the first fleet. Come on, you bastards! You’ve got to know your history before you can actually move past it. You need to understand it before you can actually make a change. The BBC makes stuff like [Caribbean-set] Death in Paradise, where there’s a white guy bloody being the head of the detectives. They’ve gone through five detectives, but they can’t get a Black one?

So yeah, morons. Don’t get me started. But you know what? Let the BBC do that, because then it’ll be up to the indigenous storytellers and the indigenous filmmakers to tell the fucking truth. Now that we’ve actually got the cinemas, we’ve got the screens, we’re going to use them in the right way.

There was a big gap between Sweet Country (2017) and your last film, The New Boy (2023), but now you’ve had two features in three years. Is it getting easier to get your stories made?

Well, I don’t ask for much money. You know, 4 million, 5 million Australian [dollars], that’s like $2.5 million – $3 million American. It’s nothing. So I don’t ask for much money, but I do have total control, and people always get their money back from me. Most of my films had unknown actors. I worked with Cate Blanchett on The New Boy, but mainly it’s not stars. You can’t sell my films with the poster; it’s got to be the quality of the story that gets you into the cinema. But if I keep them small and I keep them tight and run more on the quality of the storytelling, I think I’m in a safe place.

How has the global market changed for indigenous stories since you released Samson & Delilah back in 2009?

Well, you know, most countries in this world were conquered or colonized in some way, shape, or form. And people, this younger generation, are interested in those stories. Because they are so much more educated than these village idiots who hate “woke.” Those are just lazy fucks. The younger audience really wants to understand their history, and they have much stronger ideas of what was right and what’s wrong with the world.

There’s a space in between the really old generation, you know, the octogenarians, who are really interested in their history, and then these really young, 14-24-year-old kids who are interested and want to know more. So if you give them a point of view on history, your point of view, rather than what was written in the history books, or on a plaque with some guy on a horse with a sword, they’re interested in that. There’s a change coming, and it’s awesome. It’s fantastic.

You know, someone gave me the keys to the cinema, so I’m gonna project my films, tell my stories. I say bring it on!