Q&A with director Matthew Thorne on the making of his film ‘The Sand That Ate The Sea’

Last night Australian director, Matthew Thorne released his highly anticipated short film ‘The Sand That Ate The Sea’, a film that explores myth, family and grief through the lens of Andamooka, an Opal mining town in South Australia. Here, Thorne discusses influences, themes, casting and more…

 

What was the catalyst for this film?

Matthew: The film was the response to the death of my father. But also a desire to return to country. I had not been out in the South Australian desert since I was young, when I had some time in Marree and Oodnadatta as a kid. I wanted to go back there, to that land I knew from my childhood, and tell a story that was as mystic and otherworldly as the works of the Latin American Magical Realists.

When I was in South America I felt a deep connection between the presence of ‘God’ in that land, and the presence of some deeper spirituality in the Australian Desert. I wanted to bring that feeling to Australia and to a story told here.

What were your greatest influences for this film?

Matthew: I am particularly influenced by a more classical language in Cinema. I like slow films; magical, and human films. Films that require more work on the part of the viewer.

There is something also in how I grew up with a Theatre Director for a Mother, and how that shaped me and my approach to life. The theatre was always about living within a heightened depiction of reality, through that elevated construction theatre is able to pierce back into something even more human within us. I often want to bring that to the films I make – this sense of the heightened state of the world. A kind of magical realism.

And so that innate desire and love for that type of story led me towards the great masters of cinema that blend the world of magic, with the world of the real; Fellini, Bunel, Bergmann, Antonioni, Koreeda, Wenders, Jodorowsky, Tarkovsky, Ozu…

There was absolutely a desire to bring that heightened form of cinema making into the language of Australian cinema, which I believe is often so built in the image of a contemporary Hollywood approach… or in a purely realist manner.

What would you say are the main themes explored in the narrative?

Matthew: The film for me is absolutely an examination of how the sins of the fathers fall to the sons. How we live in the shadow of this great expanse of time, and within that veil are all the actions of our life and the lives around us. We are suffocated by that in some senses, and I think that his what the character James goes through. He is caught in the web of his familial experience, and unable to fully be alive because of that.

But if I am honest, I am not sure that is what passes to the audience – I think to a viewer it is more an indirect exploration of grief and how that shadow can hang over people’s lives. I think that is also in the film.

The film is set in a very small, tight-knit community and draws upon incredibly sensitive & personal experiences – what was the community’s level of involvement and reaction throughout the filming process?

Matthew: The community was the most important part of the process for me. Without their involvement I could not have made the film. I meant that practically as well as ethically. Andamooka is a remote community, and this was a very low budget production so the concept of bringing up a large crew to make the film was impossible.

Our only choice was to draw from the people that we had around us – to draw from the community. I would say in the end 70% of the crew were people from the community, most of whom had never worked on a film in their lives. It had to be a work we made together, and the elements that have the most emotional resonance – and perhaps meaning – tend to be the elements that are closest to the stories and experiences of that community.

What was your approach to casting?

Matthew: Casting for me is always about working with community. The goal is deep authenticity through working with as many of the local people almost entirely from the community of people in Andamooka – and the few actors we did cast in came to live in the community for an extended period of time before we went to production. There is something that I think can only be captured in the nature of real people – and it also makes for an interesting challenge as a Director, pushing you to get performances from people who have never performed before.

What role do you see the landscape playing in the film?

Matthew: As I have travelled I have felt more and more that the land works on us the people, and not the other way around.

We have a certain hubris about our human power, but in the end I feel all humanity is just the result of circumstances – and one of the greatest influences on circumstances is place… and by extension land.

Our adaptions both physical and mental, our culture, our dress sense, our language, our identities are shaped intrinsically by the land. I wanted to feel that in this film, to show the way that the land had an old, eternal power. How it changed constantly, but with such a slow dedicated procession, that the natural flow of land becomes imperceptible to the human experience. Yet it overrides everything else around it. It is the ultimate power in life I believe.

What was the process for your collaboration with composer, Luke Howard?

Matthew: Luke is like family to me, and I am very blessed to get to work with him in a truly open, collaborative way.
Luke is also patient with me and gives a great deal of time to translating my garbled non-musical direction into very clear musical intention. Often our relationship consists of Luke and I simply sitting in his studio and jamming together almost like we are in a band ourselves.

Our leading force in making this work together was to make an Album first, and a soundtrack second. I think Luke has absolutely achieved that.

This film is also accompanied by a photographic body of work is this how you approach all of your projects?

Matthew: It absolutely was never my goal to work on this project in an intertextual way. It just seemed to come from what was enjoyable during the process. There is a certain technique and usefulness in carrying a camera as a Director on a set. The camera has a way of refining your vision and focusing your attention to what you most want to see in a moment or a scene. To be constantly around your camera is -I think – to be constantly in touch with your own inner intention.

From that process, I discovered the project began to grow and take a greater shape as not just a narrative short film work, but as this piece that fell more in the world of Art practice. A story told not just in one series of images, but in several different depictions.

View the film here

Matthew Thorne is a member of The Pool Collective, a pool of interdisciplinary creative resources that link vision to expression across all mediums.