Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/760821
DGA QUARTERLY 27 PHOTOS: (L-R) MARK ROGERS/LONG WAY HOME PRODUCTIONS; KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES R AW N F R O M the memoirs of Saroo Brierley, the Indian-Australian businessman who used the internet to forge a globe-crossing path back to his birth mother 25 years after their accidental separation, The Weinstein Company's Lion is a story of finding advanced technological solutions to an essential human problem. In bringing it to screen, meanwhile, first-time feature director Garth Davis had to resourcefully deploy a range of cinematic techniques to make Brierley's quest, with its wide geographical and chronological span, emotionally intimate and immediate. In 2013, fresh from his work on the acclaimed New Zealand-noir mini- series Top of the Lake—for which he earned an Emmy nomination—Davis was pitched Brierley's tale by Lake producers Iain Canning and Emile Sherman. The connection was im- mediate: "I just became obsessed with the story," Davis says over the phone from Italy, where he's already shooting his second feature, the re- DAVIS OPTS FOR EMOTIONAL IMMEDIACY | BY GUY LODGE Seeking Humanity in the Schematic G E N N E X T ligious drama Mary Magdalene. "It was a very instinctual thing: I just felt drawn to it in a way I thought I could really investigate." But while the emotional pull of the material was obvious—and giv- en force by a painstakingly selected cast, running the gamut from the director's Aussie compatriot Nicole Kidman to luminous young Indian discovery Sunny Pawar—the for- mal challenges of dramatizing Brierley's quest, much of it un- dertaken via a mouse and moni- tor, were trickier. "Computer screens can be incredibly boring, so I had to fi nd the poetry in it," Davis ex- plains. "I had to reduce it to its core essence, to make sure all the Google Earth scenes were emotionally charged, that the audience was making discov- eries in that imagery at the same time Saroo was." His e orts yielded the most striking scenes in a visually rich fi lm, as the adult Brierley (played by Dev Patel) is shown walking the streets of Canberra and the virtual landscape of his Indian homeland in dream- like tandem. "It took a lot of designing," says Davis. "I started to see a lot of rhymes, a lot of patterns in the story. India is like an external story, while Australia becomes an in- ternal one. It was like a mirror, like yin and yang. That was my way into visualizing it. "For instance, the scene where FOCUS D » In yin-and-yang fashion, Garth Davis treated the Indian scenes in Lion as "an external story," versus the Australian locales as "internal."