Australian director, screenwriter and cinematographer Warwick Thornton won the Cannes Golden Camera Award for Samson and Delilah in 2009. Now he’s back with his third feature film, The Rookie, participating in the Un Certain Regard program. The film tells the story of an aboriginal child who arrives at a remote monastery run by an apostate nun. The presence of a new boy disrupts the delicately balanced world in this tale of spiritual struggle and the price of survival. The film stars Cate Blanchett, Deborah Mailman and Wayne Blair and is produced by Kat Shelper, Andrew Upton, Blanchett and Lorenzo de Mayo. Veterans are sold in Cannes.

How has the Cannes Golden Camera influenced your career?

It was an important moment in my journey through storytelling and filmmaking. Ironically, cinema can be a lonely place and it can be a lonely world, but this confirmation gave me the confidence to keep going.

I heard that The New Kid is a very personal film.

When I write films, I can only draw on what I personally felt. If I don’t have a personal understanding, then I feel like I’m imitating someone else’s story. Mostly I tell stories out of instinct, and my instinct is that I know what I’ve experienced and what drives me. There’s a lot of me in The New Boy baby. There is also a lot of me in Samson!

How did Cate Blanchett and her husband Andrew Upton get involved in The Rookie?

It all started with a very interesting phone call from Kate, where she said: “Warwick, life is too short, we should make a film together.” And I thought: shit, shit, shit!

What about Wayne Blair and Deborah Mailman?

I have worked with both of them over the years and they have been an inspiration to me. I made films for Wayne, and Deb was in Sapphires, which Wayne directed and I directed. They are beautiful, my old friends.

The music for the film was written by your fellow Australians Warren Ellis and Nick Cave. What did you tell them that you want?

I told them that I needed a very small, nourishing soundtrack – almost no music. And by the end of the assembly of the picture [two weeks later], I changed my mind and told them I wanted as many points as possible. And that’s what they gave me! They have done the most phenomenal job – now they are at the peak of their creativity, and we were lucky enough to become a victim of their genius.

Please tell us about The Rookie actor Aswan Reed.

I was horrified that I had found this child. Who was going to keep this movie for me? The heart and soul of the film. When we found Aswan – which was a miracle – I wrote a note to our investors describing my excitement: “Oh my God, close the gate. We found a sprite, a spark, a golden light in a dark room that we remember as a movie. We are thrilled to introduce Aswan Reid, who is sure to be the star of the new golden age of Australian cinema. He is incredibly bright, smart and talented. It’s not that he’s living the life of a Rookie, but he’s a Rookie. Life imitating art. Or is it art imitating life. Our blood pressure dropped after we found Aswan.”

Your mother, Freda Glynn, was a media pioneer and you have children who also work in the film industry.

My mom taught me that all you need in the dark is your voice. Your voice will light up the room. This knowledge that my mother taught me, I passed on to my children.

What’s next for you?

I just finished writing a new script. I’m not sure if this is good. It needs time to age like a good wine.

Fiction readers often ask for a ride. To be “touched” is the great passive verb of the experience of art: we are consumed, we are overtaken. If we take this phrase at face value, we get most excited when we participate least—when we surrender to the power of the work of art, trusting the artist, or even that larger and more nebulous power we call “story.” take us where we couldn’t foresee.

Markets also move by forces we don’t fully understand. Although Adam Smith rarely used the phrase in his writings, his metaphor of the invisible hand—true to the image—slowly took on a life of its own. The idea that the market has an independent power that governs itself better than any single individual dominated the twentieth century and became especially prominent after World War II, when the gospel of deregulation swept the world. As Ronald Reagan put it, “the magic of the market” worked. Yet the invisible hand appears only once in Smith’s landmark work.”Wealth of Nationsas part of a withering evaluation of good intentions. A true capitalist, writes Smith,

pursues only his own benefit, and in this, as in many other cases, an invisible hand leads him to achieve a goal that was not part of his intention. . . . In pursuing his own interests, he often promotes the interests of society more effectively than when he really intends to promote them. I have never seen much good done by those who were willing to trade for the public good. Indeed, this is a pretense, not very common among merchants, and very few words are needed to dissuade them from it.

Smith argues that even if an investor wanted to improve society, his brilliant ideas would be less effective than the combined flows of supply and demand. Money moves in mysterious ways, and whether the effects are harmonious or just random, they are felt in everyday life: a good mortgage deal one year can mean foreclosure the next. This impersonal force can be felt as a god whose whims we obey. Maybe even as an author moving characters across the page.

In a sense, money has always fueled romance. The plot is based on loss and gain, whether it is Jane Austen’s fiancé’s passive income or the excruciating poverty depicted in Knut Hamsun’s novel.hunger“. But as money has become a global system—a vast web of transactions that is fascinating precisely because it has no brand image, no physical presence—the task of depicting it has become more difficult. The big banks and mythical financiers of the nineteenth century were useful symbols dramatized in the novels of Dickens, Balzac and Zola. Since the 2008 crisis, global finance has stuck in the public imagination forever, and writers have again tried to capture its insipid totality. Zia Hyder RahmanIn light of what we know”, about a banker who watches a classmate dangerously stray from the path of prosperity, connected the illusory world of finance with the war on terror. John Lanchestercapital” Studied the street of London houses – literally the capital of the inhabitants of this row – to map out city life. For the most part, however, markets elude representation. How can the novel capture this opaque, omnipotent, and essential force?

IN “Trust”, Hernan Diaz takes a unique approach to the problem. The book, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and will soon be adapted into a TV series starring Kate Winslet, manipulates the mechanics of the story itself, presenting four narratives that are interconnected like birdhouses. Diaz’s title hints at his intentions: financially speaking, a trust is an agreement that allows a third party to hold assets for the beneficiary. (For example, a bank may manage an inheritance until the heir reaches a certain age.) This, of course, requires the belief that the bank is a stable and even benevolent institution. Diaz’s novel suggests that such a contract maintains the narrative world. History, like the dollar bill, can only do its job when we accept its value, when we know we are in good hands. Once we ask a question, things get more complicated.

“Trust” begins with a novel within a novel: a book by a writer named Harold Wanner called “The Bonds”. It tells the story of Benjamin Rusk, a descendant of a Golden Age New York family who “enjoyed nearly every advantage from birth”. Rask is a restless young man, indifferent to secular luxury; nothing seems to interest him until he discovers the magic of the stock market. Fascinated by the ticker, he turns his legacy into a financial juggernaut, a firm that trades in “gold and guano, currency and cotton, bonds and beef.”

Rusk is a taciturn character, devoid of personality and defined mostly negatively: he is “an inept sportsman, an apathetic club member, an unenthusiastic drinker, an indifferent gambler, an indifferent lover”. Even his interest in money is somewhat abstract. But this empty, barren quality reflects his vocation, an incomprehensible craft that remains almost monstrously real:

If asked, it would probably be difficult for Benjamin to explain what brought him into the world of finance. Yes, it was complexity, and also the fact that he regarded capital as an antiseptic living thing. It moves, eats, grows, reproduces, gets sick and can die. But it’s clean. This became clear to him over time. The larger the operation, the further he moved away from its specific details.

The fortune goes to Rusk easily; the question is what to do with it. In classic romance fashion, he decides to find a wife. Enter Helen Brevoort, the only daughter from a dysfunctional but respectable family, a mathematical prodigy who performs in the expatriate salons of Europe. Helen and Benjamin get married, but Helen cannot reciprocate Benjamin’s love – there is always a cold “distance” between them. Her talents and imagination are neutralized and then channeled into philanthropy, the classic pressure valve of capital accumulation. When Benjamin makes even more staggering profits by shortening the time of the 1929 crash, the Rusks become social outcasts and Helen falls ill with a mysterious illness. When the story comes to a tragic conclusion, the reader looks up and finds that they have only gotten through a quarter of the novel.

Diaz is an author who confidently, often gleefully, rejects literary trends. His first novelOn distance” (2017), was published when he was in his forties and was working as a scientist at Columbia University; the manuscript was recovered from a pile of slush and received a Pulitzer nomination. The book is an unusual western in which the protagonist, a clumsy Swede named Haukan, gets on the wrong boat – in San Francisco, not in New York. He spends the rest of the story traveling not west, but east to find his brother. The standard trails are present, from treacherous gold diggers to endless carts, but the form is jumbled; Diaz evokes the pleasure of recognition without falling into cliches. He creates a rich odyssey of American oddities: turn the page and a new mad scientist or religious cult might emerge.

Diaz does not endow Hakan with much inner peace; we rarely get access to his thoughts, and his conversations are hindered by a language barrier—a sly twist on the strong, silent type. In the same way, Bond, a novel within a novel, has no dialogue with its characters and can therefore be taken as a summary, a sketch waiting to be developed further. But this text is only the first piece of the puzzle. The next section is a manuscript entitled “My Life” written by one Andrew Bevel. Bevel’s life, told in the first person, is clearly reminiscent of Rusk’s – he is a wealthy New York financier who profited from the collapse, whose wife died of an illness – but the details begin to blur and diverge. Stranger still, a curious irregularity begins to appear in the text, as if the letter were taking notes to itself:

More examples of his business acumen.

Show his pioneering spirit.

There is something clever and rather funny about this maneuver – looking into the unfinished manuscript of the memoirs of a vain billionaire, one feels a surprising intimacy, even when one recognizes the flaws in the subject’s imagination. Understandably, Bevel’s Life exists to correct his fictionalization in The Bonds, which portrays him as callous at best and coldly villainous towards his wife at worst. Unfortunately, Bevel seems to be unable to find evidence of her compassion: “She touched everyone with her kindness and generosity. Examples.” The reader takes great pleasure in this detective work when he wonders how the two “books” are connected and why. Although their specifics differ, there is a common belief in the almost religious power of market forces. that runs through every aspect of life, it is truly the knot where all the disparate strands of human existence come together.” But how can we trust it, or even be sure that all the strands are connected?