![]() Sen wrote the anti-hero cop for Baker and moulded the script so that it suited the actor’s approach to the role. He likes the dramatic aesthetic, and also valued working with Baker, a committed Australian actor who has a high profile overseas from films like The Devil Wears Prada, with Meryl Streep, but who chooses independent Australian works like this one, in which he wears an unflattering buzzcut. Limbo is a stark thriller that unfolds without flourish, and Sen is more satisfied with it than anything else he has done. There is a field there and they negotiate their interactions on that field.” “Most are pretty casual, except there is a history there. His portrayal of the uneasy tolerance between black and white people, and their mutual acknowledgement of their different lives, comes directly from experience, and he remembers watching similar interactions as he was growing up. We had no problems other than the weather it was very windy.” “It’s big enough and people stick to themselves a lot. “There have been a lot of productions out there that have used the moonscape and the desert,” Sen says. ![]() He is not surprised by the international popularity of Coober Pedy as a location, or that a team of United States celebrities – including disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong and Bruce Willis’s daughter, Tallulah – are currently there filming the reality show Stars on Mars, with Star Trek’s William Shatner as their host. “There aren’t many places in Australia where you can shoot in black and white properly, with a full tonal range. The film was shot in black and white partly for technical reasons – Sen is not a fan of digital colour – but primarily because Coober Pedy’s vast expanses of white ground provided a dramatic stage that gave images and characters a strong presence. “So it was something I had planned from the very beginning – and I actually called the film Limbo, which has this connection to the experience of being not far enough above ground to be heaven or far enough underground to be hell.”Ī dramatic stage: Ivan Sen wrote Limbo with Coober Pedy in mind. “Especially the underground living experience and the culture within it,” he says. He doesn’t write first and then find a place for a setting he wrote Limbo with Coober Pedy in mind. Sen visited Coober Pedy some years ago and immediately decided to use it as a backdrop. I was going to be a cop after high school and applied after Year 12 and I didn’t get in.” “But essentially Jay Swan, the Indigenous detective, has come from me. ![]() “I’m from the country and I just write what I know pretty much, as well as being influenced by research and other people’s experiences,” he says. He and fellow Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton ( Sweet Country, Firebite) have made black cinema more mainstream, even though Sen never shies away from the tensions between black and white Australians in a country town. Sen, who is committed to telling Indigenous stories, has spent the past decade exploring outback noir on screen with great success. “He’s a man looking for salvation and finds himself in a situation to do something about it.” “I don’t know if Travis is a hero or anti-hero. He goes out on a high artistic note with Limbo, a stylish, stand-alone character study and murder mystery about a jaded detective, Travis Hurley (Simon Baker), who arrives in the outback town of Limbo to investigate the cold-case murder of an Aboriginal woman 20 years earlier. “I think if you are talking procedurals and police in a rural area, there are limitations creatively that are put upon you.” “Personally, it is not something that I am going to keep pursuing – it was kind of nice to do that but I think I will maybe let it go with this film and get back more into the straight drama world,” Sen says. Sen didn’t write it but he was executive producer. Last year came the 2022 prequel, Mystery Road: Origin, introducing the talented Mark Coles Smith as Jay Swan. His breakout 2013 film Mystery Road – starring Aaron Pedersen as Detective Jay Swan, the rough-around-the-edges Indigenous man who knows his community – was so popular it became a three-season ABC TV series, and also led to the 2016 spin-off film Goldstone, with Jacki Weaver. ![]() Limbo, a moody police procedural, is something of a swansong in genre for writer and director Ivan Sen, who has helped pioneer an era of Australian screen noir that blends the toughness of the outback with the flair of a western.
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