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Feb 24, 2017 Web Exclusive By Kyle Mullin

A lost boy sets out across the perilous backstreets of Calcutta, defying the odds and finding an adoptive Western family. Years later he makes an equally compelling journey across a digital landscape, traversing Google Maps to find his way home again, and reunite with his mother.

The inspirational sweep of that story for Lion helped Luke Davies secure an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film— released at festivals this past falls and in theatres in January— has also been nominated for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (for Dev Patel, who plays the real life protagonist Saroo Brierley as an adult) and Best Supporting Actress (Nicole Kidman, who plays his adopted mother).

Below Davies tells us about turning Brierley’s autobiography, A Long Way Home, into an Oscar darling.

Kyle Mullin [Under the Radar]: Congratulations on your nomination. It must be very exciting.

Luke Davies: It’s surprising and lovely.

I’ve read that the 2008 Pixar film WALL-E was a big inspiration for the first part of the film— both depicting an adorable, tiny protagonist setting off on a horrific landscape. But what were some of the influences for the latter portions of the film?

Yes, I did want to let people know that was an influence, but then I had to go to great lengths to say “Surely you have to remember that our little Saroo is on this landscape filled with child predators.” And while the first hour of WALL-E is very whimsical and lovely, there was a similarity there between the two films. But for the second half of the film, I wanted to give it the sense of an epic and obsessive journey.

Apparently as you were preparing, you spoke with Saroo’s birthmother, Kamla, and that every question bought her to tears. How did you both get through it?

She told me about, what you’d call in America, a dead beat Dad. There’s an intense scene in the book about Kamla going to the house of this guy that had left the family and taken up with another woman, and I think she wanted to guilt him into doing something to protect his kids, and this huge fight erupted. It spilled down into the streets, and the father yelled at her while gesticulating with a spatula, and he cut her face open. It was a horrible story, and little Saroo is watching this thing happen, the blood spurting out of his mother’s face. So it was just one of the incidents I was asking for tiny details for.

But in a way, talking about that made Kamla less distressed than asking about the nuts and bolts of the dark grief, taking her back to the moment of the panic of losing Saroo and his brother, and the trips to the hospital and police station. The fear it it, for a single illiterate mother that worked in a quarry, carrying a rocks, who didn’t trust the officials in India because she was of the lowest caste of society. And that caste is treated like vermin. Asking questions about those early weeks of her overcoming her fears to go see these officials, in order to do the most important thing imagine, which is “Where the hell are my kids?” That distressed her way more.

She also cried a lot at the joyful stuff, the 25 years later stuff, the moments of Saroo coming back, that first evening and the next day. I think she’s been in a constant elevated state in the four or five years since then. The whole thing was weirdly awkward, not only because I was making her cry a lot, but also because it was this tiny room and there wasn’t any furniture. So I was sitting with an interpreter on the bed, and Kamla was sitting on the bed along with Saroo, and it was a tiny space, and it was all being filtered through an interpreter, who wasn’t crying. It was an exhatusine situation on so many levels. But it was also intensely gratifying because I felt there was a light bulb going off over my head. The grief and sorrow and joy was just electric, and I knew the film had to feel in the end— the same way it felt seeing her that day.

Is that where some of the purity of the story comes from? Because apparently that’s what drew you to this project.

Yes, I believed that in the beginning, and now in the end as we show it to the world. I believe deeply deeply what our beloved director Garth Davis told me early on, when we were having conversations about the structure of the film and so on, he said: “I want you to remember that I see the spiritual centre of this film being the two mothers. They are the thing that holds the film up.” Saroo’s journey is incredible, this cinematic visceral thing we all care about, but it’s completely filtered through the love and desire and fundamental goodness of the mothers. They are like goddesses, they lure people in and make people cry because of their unconditional love for the child in his utter vulnerability.

Is the chance to work on projects that explore such purity and vulnerability rare?

I think so. This is the most purest, most elemental film I’ve ever been involved with. Most stories, especially in our Western culture, are complex because we live in a psychologically complex time filled with lots of white noise, interruptions and obstacles. There’s plenty of great movies about that complexity. This film is not one of them. The thing that attracted me to this is the sense that you’re watching an ancient myth stripped back to its barest elements. Yet it’s also a very modern myth because of the technology, because of the fact that this story could never have happened before ten years ago, when Google released Google Earth. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if Saroo hadn’t used Google Maps to find home.

Your earlier films, like Candy, weren’t such pure fables at all. So this must have provided a nice contrast?

Yes. And by purity I don’t mind mean it was easy to write. The memories, flashbacks, the sense of how long Saroo’s journey took, how his girlfriend Lucy figured into it, all of that was complex. It was an amazing journey to solve those challenges.

But yes, Candy was my life story during my very miserable early 20’s. I wrote the novel Candy, as a thinly veiled autobiographical first novel. And the Candy screenplay took years to write. I didn’t know I was a screenwriter, and no one was going to give any money to this low budget film about heroine addicts, but we kept believing we’d get it written, and I’d written a million different drafts, and it was probably never going to happen. But then one day Heath Ledger read the script and said he loved it and wanted to do it, and at that moment the film financed itself. We were lucky, because it was the third last film he made before he died. But yeah, that was a long complex process, a dense and complex script. It’s that thing I was talking about earlier: not just the self medication of the Western world, but the commercialisation and the way we try to numb ourselves, that film was about all that, and how the self medication of drug addiction will devastate a love story.

That’s a film about all that white noise, complexity, and Lion is not about that. It’s about incredibly simple pulses of love.

So what’s next for you?

I’m deep in two projects. One’s called Beautiful Boy, it’s finished, and directed by Felix Van Groeningen, who did this beautiful film called Broken Circle Breakdown. It was nominated for best foreign film a few years ago at the Oscars. It starts shooting in a few weeks, with Steve Carell in the lead role, and it’s a father son meth amphetamine drama It’s an amazing story for Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production company.

So I’m not working on that anymore, because it’s in preproduction and has started shooting. What I am working on is a TV adaptation of Catch 22, a miniseries that me and David Michôd, my roommate and friend who shot a film for Netflix called War Machine, starring Brad Pitt, that hasn’t come out yet. We’re moving to TV, it’s new territory, and it’s terrifying, I’ve written the first episode and we’ve begun shopping it around, and I’m about to write the second episode too. The beautiful Lion experience, of getting nominations, feels preposterously unexpected, which I’m lapping up and enjoying, but I’m also mostly just home in L.A. trying to work everyday on Catch 22.