People just don’t laugh when their family is violated, and you don’t shrug it off. You band together and you defend together. It’s a funny, primitive instinct.

Oh yeah – I watched Knife in the Water, saw the shot, and repeated it. But even if I hadn’t seen that film, inevitably the camera would’ve ended up on top of that mast, I mean if you think of it there are only so many dynamic shots on a boat.

Most Australians live in the cities on the east coast, where contact between black and white occurred as much as 200 years earlier than on the west coast – and where 95 percent of Australians are able to live 95 percent of their lives without ever seeing an Aboriginal face.

So when I read this story, it unlocked a volcano of unanswered questions, because the questions had never been asked. It was an opportunity to come to terms with the lot of repressed history – and history of repression.

Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn’t feature.

Making movies is eating candy. It’s a very expensive candy, so you value when you can do it. So when you can do it twice at once, it’s like, you know, a kid in a candy store!

The first trip just provided the basis for the whole movie, because I realised this was a movie about the indomitable human spirit.

But usually you're waiting around for these editors to do stuff and you get really bored. It was better for them to wait for me!

You know, you go to Hollywood and work internationally, and just the little jokes no longer make you laugh. I was alienated from my own culture.

Well, I grew up in a small country town.