Mystery Road season two: Director Warwick Thornton says there was ‘no excuse’ on not making something powerful

The first season won audience and industry awards and was a ratings hit. Its new director says there were “no excuses” on not making something powerful.

Australian filmmaker Warwick Thornton had never done TV before.

As the director behind two of the most accomplished Australian films of this century – Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country – Thornton had only ever worked on the big screen.

But even as he signed up to direct half the episodes of the second season of acclaimed TV drama Mystery Road, returning to the ABC on Sunday at 8.30pm, he knew that a smaller canvas didn’t mean creative compromise.

“When we went into it, we said ‘we have no excuses’,” he told news.com.au. “If we want the best action scene, we do the best action scene. If we want the best landscape or the darkest characters, let’s go for it.

“We don’t have an excuse because we have all the tools and toys to do whatever we want.

“We have such an amazing country – we have incredibly amazing writers and incredible people like at the ABC who will back that, so there’s no excuse to not have something visually stimulating and powerful. It’s all there in front of you, you just have to do it.”

Thornton is a newcomer to the Mystery Road franchise, and at this point it is a franchise. The character of Jay Swan, a troubled and gruff but fair detective played by Aaron Pedersen, originated in Ivan Sen’s 2013 film Mystery Road, followed by its feature sequel Goldstone.

In 2018, the character made the jump onto TV in a six-part series with Pedersen reprising the character and Rachel Perkins as director. This time, Jay Swan was investigating the disappearance of two cattle hands from an outback station alongside a local cop played by Judy Davis.

Mystery Road season one was both a critical and ratings hit

The TV spin-off was a hit, garnering high ratings, critical praise and accolades from both the publicly-voted Logies and the industry-awarded AACTAs.

The second season returns with Jay Swan in a different town, investigating a different crime – this time, a headless corpse washed up in the mangroves that may intersect with the drug syndicate Swan has been chasing, and possibly a nearby archaeological dig.

Keeping track of the various subplots is one of the new filmmaking elements Thornton had to contend with.

“In a feature, I usually work with six actors and this had about 38 of them, all with incredibly important storylines that intertwine and connect, each of them handing over certain parts of the mystery in each episode – classic Agatha Christie concept.

“That’s the stuff I wasn’t versed in, having that many characters and having to understand who they are at that point in each episode and the repercussions of what happened before and where they need to be when they walk out that door, when they get out of that car.

“That’s the stuff Wayne knows really well. He came with a lot of knowledge I didn’t have. I learnt so much.”

The “Wayne” Thornton was referring to is Wayne Blair, who was an onscreen presence in the first season of Mystery Road and has also directed films including The Sapphires and last year’s Top End Wedding.

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Wayne Blair and Warwick Thornton on location in WA during filming

Blair has been a steady presence in front of and behind the camera for more than two decades and also counts Redfern Now among his TV credits.

Thornton directed the first episode and the last two while Blair took the helm on the three chapters in between. Thornton was also the director of photography on the whole season, bringing his eye and visual sensibilities to the series.

The result is a show that is textually rich, making the most of the soaring Australian landscapes. You could almost call it “cinematic”.

And that’s where Mystery Road season two was first shown – in a cinema.

The first two episodes were screened as part of the Berlin Film Festival in late February, one of two prominent film festivals (the other being Sundance) that was able to go ahead before the coronavirus pandemic shut down the film industry.

Thornton thought it ironic that he signed up for a TV series and “suddenly you’re at the Berlin Film Festival and there are two sold-out screenings in a cinema”.

With COVID-19 keeping everyone at home, it’s a great time to sink into a series such as Mystery Road, but Thornton said that while “poor old cinema is collapsing as we speak” he believes that once the world comes through it, “there will be a bigger hunger to have that cinematic experience”.

“We’ll all be sick of our televisions and iPads. We’ll want to go back to wide screens and popcorn and telling people to turn off their phones. We’ll want to experience watching something together.”

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Jada Alberts joins Aaron Pedersen for the second season of Mystery Road

Filmed on location in Western Australia in Broome and Dampier Peninsular, Mystery Road is a Bunya Productions series, which is how Thornton got involved. Bunya made his previous film, Sweet Country.

But Thornton has a confession to make.

“I will tell you the absolute truth and that’s I’ve never seen the features and I’ve never seen the first series,” Thornton admitted.

“I know Ivan’s work and I know Rachel’s work but when they asked me to direct the second series, I purposely didn’t watch the first series.

“It comes with a beautiful provenance and legacy, but I didn’t want to do the same thing. I know Rachel is a brilliant director, but I didn’t want to be too tainted.”

Thornton said he was given access to the writers during the six weeks pf pre-production and one of the things he asked of them was “less talking and more shooting”.

So expect the second season to lean more into neo-western conventions.

“Let’s not get bogged down in a detective standing at doors and asking ‘where were you the night of the 26th at 7pm?’ and instead he knocks on the door and someone on the other side has a shotgun and tries to kill him,” he explained.

“It’s not just the Americans who are allowed to play with westerns. We have an amazing landscape and these towns that think they’re lawless. It’s all here.”

Americans don’t have a monopoly on westerns

For Thornton, an Alice Springs-born Kaytetye man, telling Australian stories is his raison d’etre and Mystery Road is part of that.

That’s evidenced in his body of work so far, from the beautiful but complex love story of two Indigenous teenagers in Samson and Delilah to the story of an Aboriginal farm worker forced on the run after killing a white man in self-defence in Sweet Country.

They’re both films that engage deeply with the question of Australian identity and the myriad, not always easy, experiences that make up the fabric of this country.

“We’re Indigenous writers and filmmakers. That’s what I do for a living and that’s what Wayne does and that’s what the writers have been doing.

“We have a responsibility foremost to entertain, but there’s a certain form of education and there’s a certain form of creating or handing over knowledge to an audience of what’s happening in the outback.

“We have a responsibility to tell those stories and to make those stories important to a wider audience.

“Through Jay Swan and through all those other characters, you’re making not just bloody perfect entertainment, there’s a subsidiary education about our country, its past and future.

“There’s a hunger for our history and a hunger about which future we are looking at. When people watch these stories, they have better knowledge and maybe they’ll choose a better path.”

Mystery Road season two starts on ABC and iview at 8.30pm on Sunday, April 19

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