The Beauty of Reality: an interview with ‘Lion’ director Garth Davis

The inspirational drama Lion (opening in Toronto on December 9 at Varsity Cinemas and across Canada on December 21) might be the first feature film effort from Australian filmmaker Garth Davis, but it certainly isn’t his first time behind the camera.

A twenty-plus year veteran of television and commercials, Davis has most notably and prominently worked on Jane Campion and Gerard Lee’s critically acclaimed series Top of the Lake, which netted him an Emmy nomination for his directing abilities. He has become widely known as a visual artist outside the big and small screens, dabbled in documentary filmmaking, and picked up a Gold Lion at Cannes for his commercial work. To claim that Lion is his first truly major effort would be incorrect and far from the truth.

It’s still a leap for the filmmaker, however, going into a major, studio distributed award season film that’s getting a lot of buzz following its stellar reception from viewers at TIFF this past September, where it was the first runner-up for the coveted Audience Choice Award. But during our interview at the festival he speaks so confidently about his experiences that one could be forgiven for thinking he was a feature filmmaking veteran before the real life story of Saroo Brierley came along.

Based on Brierley’s incredible, once thought impossible quest to find his birth mother in the Indian village he grew up in, Davis’ film breaks the real life figure’s emotional journey into two parts. In the film’s first half – set in India – Davis follows five-year-old Saroo, played by newcomer Sunny Pawar. As a child, Saroo became separated from his older brother and mother and inadvertently ended up on a train that would take him thousands of miles away from home to the almost completely different culture of Calcutta, where he lived dangerously and tenuously on the streets in part due to not speaking the same language.

Saroo would eventually be adopted by an Australian couple (played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham) and move to Tasmania. Saroo, played as an adult by Dev Patel in the film’s second half, would be raised more or less as an Australian and go on to create a well adjusted life for himself. Over time, however, memories of what was left behind in India start to haunt him and questions swirl within the young man’s mind about his true identity. With the advent of Google Earth, Saroo began scouring landscapes, train schedules, and timetables to try and figure out the location of his old village, and potentially the location of his birth family. It was a process that took years and placed a major strain on Saroo’s relationship to his loved ones, including his supportive girlfriend (played in the film by Rooney Mara).

We talked with Davis the day after Lion premiered at TIFF to talk about how he perceived Saroo Brierley’s journey, the emotional depths of such an incredible story, the casting process, and how he was able to make Lion feel as authentic to its real life subject’s experiences as possible.

There’s something at the heart of Lion that speaks to how connected the world is today. This is the story of a man who becomes so obsessed with this technology that could help him find his family that at one point the informational overload both helps and threatens to consume him. What was it like recreating the mindset of someone that obsessed and that driven?

Garth Davis: I kind of saw Saroo’s life like a mirror, like this symmetrical mandala or a butterfly. He had this past and a family in the present, and to a certain degree it was always about figuring out at any given moment where those loyalties would rest. When it came to his obsession and quest to unearth his past, it could have come at the cost of his present family. He loved his adoptive family just as much as he loved what he could remember of his birth family, and that’s the tug-of-war that sort of fuels that obsession more than anything, and that period of his life was so fascinating to me; to look at just what was at stake for him and at what cost someone could keep searching for his birth family. Would you be willing to lose the family you have for the sake of finding your birth mother? I found that interesting, and definitely when you have the means to do what Saroo ultimately does, that can create something that looks quite obsessive to an outsider, but really its noting compared to what’s happening internally.

There’s also this kind of guilt of privilege that Saroo exhibits that also fuels this that I found really interesting. One of the biggest questions of the movie is, like you said, “What are you prepared to lose in this search?”

Garth Davis: I think the thing is that he never had any hope of finding home before this. He had tried every avenue, so at some point you have to move on, grieve for the loss of this family, and put it in a certain place. In many ways, he was able to go through life fairly well because for the longest time he wasn’t grieving, but he had this family in a place in his mind. When this idea came up with these students and Google Earth being invented, suddenly there was a way of finding home. As crazy as it was, I think that little seed of hope is a double edged sword. When you think of how you could be doing something as crazy as this idea is, you start to feel that guilt because you know there’s finally a new direction to search and approach from. A lot of people can be kind of blind to things going on in their own lives, and I think there had to be a point for Saroo when he thought, “I can’t just live this privileged life anymore. I have to just try.” I think the minute someone planted that seed of hope was the minute that Pandora’s Box opened for him in many ways.

Garth Davis on the red carpet for the premiere of Lion at TIFF 2016. (Photo by George Pimentel/WireImage)

As a first time feature filmmaker, did you find it hard adhering to the specific details of Saroo’s experience rather than being able to sort of carve your own path with the story?

Garth Davis: On the contrary, I happened to find it quite liberating because you’ve got a very deep understanding of things already in place. If you’re inventing a character or working from one that never existed, you kind of have to create all of these layers and constantly work on them to make them deep or interesting on screen. That’s all invented, and I actually prefer real life stories. Life to me is very curious. I’ve always been drawn to ordinary people’s stories, and I don’t really know how people as fiction writers can find ways of creating an entire cast of characters just out of the blue. In this case, it was really easy because we had a perfect story. This dilemma of this obsessive search meant that we had to compress some elements and make certain choices, of course, but on this film it was a lot easier than one might have expected.

What was it about Dev Patel that made you want to cast him as Saroo?

Garth Davis: The thing about Dev is that he’s such a beautiful soul. He has this light in him, and I thought that it was important that people like Saroo because the character was going to be going to such a dark place. If you have a dark, serious actor in that role, I think it would be tough for the audience to hack it. I really felt that Saroo got this light from his family, and I really wanted that light in my actors. It was his spirit and outlook that I loved, and the chance to take him to a performance space that audiences hadn’t seen him in was something we both really wanted. Sometimes he can get typecast, and this was something he really wanted to play.

Dev Patel and Rooney Mara in Lion

What I find great about Dev’s performance is that unlike how actors can be said to “disappear” into roles, we’re watching a great actor play a person who’s disappearing by withdrawing from the world around him.

Garth Davis: Yeah, and I think what helps convey that is that the first half of the film is definitely an external story, and the second half is an internal one. The challenge for me was that Saroo wasn’t expressing what he was going through to anybody, so how do we express that and go inside his head? In all of the scenes adult Saroo has with his family, you can always feel something rumbling under the surface, and I invented with our writer Luke Davies the idea of Guddu’s ghost coming back so we had something to go along with this largely silent, interior world. I also used music a lot. I used sounds from the real village he was from. There were lots of visceral and textural experiences that he could play with while we were in the moment.

The first half of the film is a bold choice to follow around young Saroo as he tries to navigate India on his own. I can imagine even if you went to a studio with the kind of cast that you have in the second half of the film that people would look at you and wonder why they don’t show up until an hour into the film. Was that a challenge to sell a film to producers and financiers where the first hour of a two hour film involved a child actor and an entirely Indian setting? Was it a fight to keep that first half intact?

Garth Davis: There wasn’t a fight so to speak, but there were definitely a lot of discussions with people about that. But as a director I read so many scripts and so many of them sound the same. It’s nothing anymore to get a script that starts at the end and then goes back to the beginning before going back and forth. (laughs) I guess I just… I dunno… it all seems so systematic to me. At the end of the day, if someone talks about this story, I don’t want it to really sound like, “An Australian guy remembers his past.” He remembers everything, so that really doesn’t tell you anything. Really, this is the story of a little boy that gets lost, and everyone tells the story that way, and I felt like it needed to be told like this. To me, it felt like a contemporary mythic tale. It has this snowball effect. There was just a simple purity to it that reminds me of going back to early cinema and just trusting the story and the audience. It’s about slipping into Saroo’s experience to a point where you know what it’s like to struggle, become part of a loving family, and then move on into this modern world.

Sunny Pawar as Young Saroo in Lion

At the press conference for the film you said that “there’s no such thing as a five year old actor” because they react so naturally, so what was it about Sunny Pawar that impressed you to cast him here and give him the enormous task of anchoring the first half of the film?

Garth Davis: I had a very strong feeling of who Saroo was just from reading the story and imagining how resilient and streetwise he was. I knew what we needed in this kid. I saw so many children. It was really hard work. One day, and it sounds so simple really, he just appeared and I knew he was Saroo! It just works. It’s like family. It’s like landing at an airport and you’re coming through the gates, and there they are and you know it immediately. That’s how it really felt for me.

But that whole process of casting a child for a performance like this is so, so scary. I just suddenly realized in a very visceral way once we started that this five year old character is going to be holding this movie together for the entire first half because of the structure, and there was nowhere to hide. You have this shoot date, and you’re sliding towards it, and you just have to trust that you’ll get there and do that work. There was a lot of patience and praying involved. (laughs)

I had been working in television and commercials for about twenty years before coming to this, so I was able to find confidence in my abilities throughout the filmmaking process, but really the most stressful part was the realization that you needed a five year old taking control of the first half of the film. Everything else was really hard and ambitious because we were always shooting in difficult locations that would make things harder on ourselves, but it was really getting to a point where we had Sunny that I was most concerned about.

We had an acting coach from New Zealand by the name of Miranda Harcourt, who’s a genius and who suggested a lot of great exercises for the entire crew, and Vipin Gupta who’s a coach from India on hand to translate, and they worked really hard with us to create an environment where we could get those performances. It was a very difficult task, but they really came together with us in a spectacular way. And Sunny really grew throughout the movie and got a lot of opportunities that he never would have had.

Did you shoot the first half of the movie first?

Garth Davis: I shot the first half of the movie first because I really felt like everyone involved needed to experience India, and that when we got back to Australia we would find the rhymes. But it was also so Dev could take on some characteristics of Sunny, and I thought that was important. The little boy couldn’t take on aspects of adult Saroo, and I think that would have been unfair to Sunny. I also think that crews can also become a bit complacent if left to their own environments. If you’re Canadian and you’re shooting in and around your neighbourhood, you wouldn’t really see it from an outsider’s perspective. I felt that if we all went to India and did this, we could refresh our own place. How do I show where I live in a way that expresses how big of a change it all must have felt like to Saroo? The place that he goes to is a very 1980s suburban home with all this veneered timbre, but unless you want to have that feeling, you would never shoot in a house like that. (laughs) It’s not cinematic. I said to my DOP that we have to embrace those kinds of locations and choices. You have to embrace them to make the experience of walking into an average suburban house so moving.

How much experience did you have in India before shooting there?

Garth Davis: I had shot some commercials there before this, so I had been there a bit. Actually, when I was in 19 with my girlfriend in Vietnam, this fortune teller read our palms and she actually did say, “You will make a very big movie in India,” and I laughed and said “I’m probably never going to make a movie in India.” (laughs) That was a long time ago, and back then I thought she was a wacko, but now I keep thinking of that palm reader. But, look, I love humanity and I love life and I think India really encapsulates that.