Miranda Otto, Noah Taylor, a stolen car and the Outback? It must be the ’80s

In a busy pub in Adelaide, Dylan River is turning back time for his chaotic crime caper comedy Thou Shalt Not Steal, on Stan* from October 17.

The air is thick with smoke, as virtually everyone in the room sucks on a dart. A fistfight breaks out and no one blinks an eye. A man leers at a woman’s breasts, says something lascivious and doesn’t get cancelled.

It’s 1981, or thereabouts, and the Land of Promise Hotel in Hindmarsh has been transformed into a bar in Coober Pedy. And if the past is a different country, the outback of the 1980s is practically a different universe.

So, why the ’80s, given the 32-year-old River wasn’t even born then?

“I just like the cars,” he says. “I love mechanical stuff. I own a couple of 1970s Fords. I actually have one of the cars that’s in the show sitting in my yard now. And storytelling before mobile phones, it’s harder but more rewarding. Also, I grew up with a father [acclaimed filmmaker Warwick Thornton] who was a teenager in the ’80s and I’d always hear stories and wish I was around at that time.”

Robert snr (Noah Taylor) takes a moment in his caravan-cum-mobile chapel.Credit: Stan

River’s story, co-written with longtime collaborator Tanith Glynn-Maloney (the pair were responsible for Robbie Hood, the SBS series about a wayward 13-year-old Indigenous boy and his gang), centres on Robyn (Sherry-Lee Watson), a runaway from a juvenile detention facility in Alice.

Precisely what she’s in for is never explained – “I’m 17 and I’m a thief,” she says in her opening monologue – but it’s likely nothing much more than trying to fill the gaping hole of boredom by taking someone else’s car for a joyride.

“Alice Springs is a pretty wild town,” says River, “and in the ’80s it was especially wild. And usually, having fun was doing something illegal – although innocent, it was illegal.”

Robyn is on a mission to fulfil the last wishes of her grandfather: to return a sporting trophy to the father she’s never met. She soon crosses paths with Maxine (Miranda Otto), a sex trafficker with a trunk full of loot; the travelling preacher, singer and sly grog peddler Robert (Noah Taylor); and his tender-hearted and possibly soft-headed son Gidge (Will McDonald – like Watson, an alumnus of Heartbreak High).

From left: Miranda Otto as Maxine, Sherry-Lee Watson as Robyn, Will McDonald as Gidge and Noah Taylor as Robert snr.Credit: Stan

“She’s an Outback taxi driver with entrepreneurial skills,” Otto says of Maxine in a break between takes in the Adelaide pub.

“She’s a shady lady,” says Taylor, perched beside his co-star on a worn-out sofa in a not-very-fancy green room, and resplendent in stained singlet and the shortest shorts seen this side of a 1970s Stubbies commercial.

His Robert, he adds, is “just generally a hopeless character. He’s a petty crook in a way, and a single father – not a good father but I don’t think he’s a bad person. He’s a flawed individual.”

“I think the whole show is about these slightly pathetic, deeply flawed characters, scrambling around in the Outback on their way down to Adelaide, against this amazing landscape,” says Otto.

The landscape is a central character in this show as Maxine and Robert chase down Robyn and Gidge and the missing money. The eight-part series is, says Taylor, “deeply indebted to the Australian road movies of the ’80s”.

“And there’s a lot of nostalgia on the screen, I think, for a time in Australia that’s kind of gone in a lot of places,” adds Otto.

Is it gone in the places you’ve been to while filming it?

“No,” says Taylor. “Have you been to Coober Pedy lately?”

Though Adelaide doubles for the real thing for the pub scene, the production did much of its filming on location. “We actually did that road trip,” confirms River, who was born and raised and still lives in Alice Springs. Though logistics sometimes meant doubling one place for another, he was determined to stay as close as possible to the real trip from Alice Springs to Adelaide, about 1500 kilometres on the Stuart Highway. “I’ve driven it so many times in the 15 years I’ve had my licence,” he says.

Taylor describes Thou Shalt Not Steal as “a good-natured crime caper” with plenty of nods to the Ozploitation cinema of the 1980s.

“It has a bit of Bonnie and Clyde, and I think all road movies have an aspect of The Wizard of Oz in a way, too,” he says. “I guess it’s an ancient story, of heroes on their journey being pursued by wicked people and all that sort of stuff.”

Otto came to the project off the back of some heavy work, including an episode of Fires in which she and Richard Roxburgh played parents grieving the death of their son, and the Disney+ series The Clearing, inspired by the true-life case of the Family (Otto played the charismatic cult leader).

River’s show represented a welcome change of pace. “I’m always looking for things that are kind of different to the last thing I did,” she says. “So if I’m doing something heavy I’ll often go to something really broad as some kind of antidote.”

She knew River’s work from Robbie Hood and Mystery Road: Origin, and was keen to work with him. “When I came on board there weren’t even really scripts, just an outline of what it was going to be, but I thought it sounded like a really fun, original take on an era that I have a lot of nostalgia for.”

Dylan River, the co-creator and director of Thou Shalt Not Steal.Credit: National Gallery of Australia

Otto and Taylor both began their careers in the 1980s; The Year My Voice Broke (1987), in which Taylor plays the feckless Danny Embling, remains one of the greatest Australian films of that or any other time. They first worked together in The Nostradamus Kid (1993), and first rode the dusty roads of the Outback in Stavros Kazantzidis’ road movie True Love and Chaos in 1997.

Though they have a lot of runs on the board, River sees a certain symmetry between them and his young leads. “They were Will and Sherry in the ’80s,” he says.

With its fart jokes, sexual innuendo, occasional moments of bloody violence, old-timey country music, spaghetti-western vibe and general sense of mayhem, Thou Shalt Not Steal is unashamedly broad and frequently hilarious.

“I was really just trying to write and create something that I wanted to watch,” says River. “It’s my bent sense of humour for the most part.”

At the same time, he confesses, “I was definitely looking to reach an audience I haven’t reached before because I feel like Indigenous filmmaking, for the most part, hasn’t quite reached more of a commercial audience. With Mystery Road, as much as I put my heart and soul in it and I was following people who had done it before me in terms of style and what it is, I kind of felt like you’re preaching to the converted. And the approach with this was looking to crack a new audience.”

It’s not that Thou Shalt Not Steal is a political wolf in comedy sheep’s clothing. Well, not exactly. “But, you know, our main protagonist is Robyn – she is a criminal, she’s Aboriginal,” River says. “So, with that, currently, there’s political subject matter, I guess.”

His aim, he adds, was to “suck people in” with the light and movement, and before they know it “they may learn something along the way, and they’ll be so deep into the story and invested that they kind of go, ‘oh shit, I didn’t think of that or look at it that way’.”

And why not? After all, no one ever said thou shalt not indulge in a bit of sleight of hand in service of getting your message across.

All episodes of Thou Shalt Not Steal are available on Stan from October 17.

*Stan and this masthead are both owned by Nine.

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