Australian Cinema

In this interview, Indigenous Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen discusses his new film Limbo, efficient filmmaking, and holistic aesthetic design. The film opens at Film Forum (NYC) and LA this week before expanding across the US, courtesy of Music Box Films. Limbo also has a Canadian and UK distributor and will be released there later this year.

Read our review of the film Limbo. Read all of our Indigenous film coverage.

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“I consciously wanted that feeling that land has been abused in the same way these characters have been abused,” writer-director Ivan Sen told me about his new film Limbo. The film is set in Coober Pedy, an old mining town in rural Australia that’s been hollowed out in many ways — people live in caves carved out of the rocks, the land is full of holes from mining, and the primary mining industry has shut down. The film tells the story of white detective Travis (Simon Baker), who unenthusiastically rolls into town to decide whether to reopen a twenty-year-old case of a missing Indigenous woman. As he gets to know her family (Rob Collins and Natasha Waganeen), we learn of the emotional damage they’re living through because of the loss of their sister and have been living in the titular limbo, unable to move on with their lives.

Sen’s comment about the connection between the land and the characters is also essential for understanding how he approaches crafting a film and why Limbo is such a marvelous work of art: all elements were designed together to work cohesively. Serving as his own cinematographer, Sen decided to shoot the film in black and white to further make the landscape feel abused and the film feel out of time, like the characters are still “living in a memory.” That blurry line between the past and present extended to the production design, too: Travis drives an old 1960s car, listens to twenty-year-old police recordings on an old tape recorder, and eats at a diner that feels like it was designed in the 1950s, complete with black-and-white tile floors.

Ivan Sen pares down his crew for the film Limbo

Part of how Sen achieves this cohesive and efficient aesthetic is by paring down his crew (and budget). Sen serves as cinematographer, editor, and composer on the majority of his feature films, dating back to A Sister’s Love (2005). It gives him enormous control, focuses his attention on the collaborations he does have (e.g., with the actor), and allows him to shoot an expansive film like Limbo in just 15 days. Most films of this size would need double. It also means that he’s thinking about the locations, the lighting, the cinematography, the blocking, and the editing all while he’s writing the film, in pre-production, and production. 

His ability to keep his budgets down without sacrificing artistic intent is likely also key to his career longevity. Aside from documentarian Alanis Obomsawin (Canada) and Taika Waititi (New Zealand), few Indigenous filmmakers can boast as long and productive careers, especially while primarily working in the arthouse realm.

A brief introduction to Ivan Sen

Although Sen started out with the naturalistic drama Beneath Clouds (2022), for much of his career, Sen has worked within a genre framework. Like Indigenous filmmakers Warwick Thornton (Australia) who plays with tropes of the Western (Sweet Country, The New Boy) and Jeff Barnaby (Canada) who played with horror and other genres (Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Blood Quantum), Sen has focused largely, but not exclusively, on the detective film.

Sen is best known for his two feature films about the Indigenous detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pederson): his international breakout Mystery Road (2013) and its sequel Goldstone (2016). Jay Swan investigates crimes against Indigenous people because he wants to be part of the solution to an unjust, colonialist justice system, but regularly risks becoming part of the problem. He’s a knotty, flawed character with a tendency to let down the people he loves but a strong sense of right and wrong, which makes his struggles within the system all the more interesting. Swan’s story has since been adapted into the successful Australian TV series Mystery Road (in which Pederson also stars). More recently, Sen made the commercial sci-fi thriller Expired (2023) and is currently working on a commercial horror film.

Ivan Sen returns to detection fiction with his film Limbo

Limbo marks a return to detective fiction, but with a twist. The film centres around a white detective aware of his own complicity in a racist and colonialist system. He has to be slowed down by a car breakdown to start actually paying attention to what’s happening in the town and care. The film is also more explicitly an arthouse film than the more commercial Mystery Road and, to a degree, Goldstone. In Limbo, Sen favours long takes and wide shots where we can see the actors interacting with each other and understand them in relation to the land. The film is full of ambiguity and unanswered questions. It has already generated the dreaded “ending explained” articles that Sen attributes to meaning a film has found an audience that wasn’t quite its intended target.

It would be easy to label Limbo as simply an important film, for its depiction of the still highly prevalent international problem of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, The issue got the spotlight in the US last year with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, but it’s been the focus of Indigenous films for much longer, in Canada and abroad. But Limbo is so much more than the subject matter it tackles: a sensitive character drama, a bold cinematic statement with a fully cohesive and thoughtful aesthetic, a great work of detective fiction, and a trip to a fascinating land, Coober Pedy, that feels almost like going to the moon.

After premiering in Competition at the 2023 Berlinale, Limbo screened at TIFF in September 2023. Before the film’s North American premiere, I talked to Sen via Zoom about making the movie, developing the aesthetic, and how he navigates wearing so many hats. 

Seventh Row (7R): What is the story behind why you wanted to tell this story with the film Limbo? I know you wanted to make a film in Coober Pedy.

Ivan Sen: It’s a film that has a relationship with some of my past work.

The treatment of Indigenous Australians by the Australian justice system is something that I find hard to let go of. It’s something that permeates throughout my whole extended family. It’s hard to ignore it. 

Limbo is another exploration of that but this time, looking at the intersection of the white justice system and the Indigenous experience.  In the past, I’ve had an Indigenous detective [Jay Swan in Mystery Road and Goldstone] who is dealing with the struggle between the two different cultures as he’s trying to solve a crime. 

This time, I found myself wanting to have another exploration into this territory. I was looking at that non-Indigenous versus Indigenous intersection of crime. I wanted to explore the aftermath of [a crime against Indigenous people by settlers], and the echoes that it leaves behind.

7R: Mystery Road and Goldstone are both about the challenges Indigenous cop Jay Swan faces as someone looking to rectify the oppression of Indigenous people by the justice system without becoming part of the problem. Did you find new opportunities by approaching a crime story from the perspective of a white cop, instead? 

Ivan Sen: I mean, you mentioned Coober Pedy and it’s interesting. Every time I write something, I find the location first – even more so these days. I try to design the film so it can feel like a complete whole through feeling. It starts with the writing process, the script and the words, right through the production design and cinematography, through to the end of the film. 

Every time I make a film, the design of the piece is the starting point. The white cop becomes a part of that as does the old black car he drives around in. The Coober Pedy Desert we’re shooting in and the characters of the Indigenous family are part of that, too. These are all strategically placed within the fabric of this story. A few years ago, I think I wasn’t as conscious of what I was doing as I am now. I’m more aware of the power of what film can be when you get even more sensitive to it. 

7R: Serving as cinematographer, writer, director, editor, and composer must give you an incredible amount of control. Director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton has said, “I know where I want the camera. Now, I don’t have to talk to somebody and explain to them where to put it. I can just put it there.” 

Do you think about how you’re going to shoot the film when you’re writing? Are you thinking about how you’re going to write it and shoot it at the same time while you’re scouting the locations? How do those different elements come into play throughout?

Ivan Sen: When I find the location for a film, I start writing a story based on that location. I go to the location and take hundreds and hundreds of photographs of the locations and work out the specific location for each scene. Knowing where a scene is set makes it much easier for me to fine-tune the script. From the very beginning, I look at where this story is and how this place informs who the characters are and the decisions that they make. 

Limbo is set and shot in Coober Pedy. The land is as destroyed and as damaged as the characters. I consciously wanted that feeling that land has been abused in the same way these characters have been abused. And, sometimes, the abuse is from themselves. That is a product of that place that is their environment and their story. 

It’s also a product of sound. I had very strong ideas of the sound, even when I was writing this film. I knew that there would be no music and that there would be a lot of sound from the actual location, and I thought of how that would find its way into the film and become an authentic soundscape because the sound had come from that location. We recorded a lot of the sound before we shot the film. I would just go out with my mics, sit in the desert, and record. 

Of course, it’s also about the budget. When you’re writing, you’re thinking about how you’re going to realize that on the screen because you don’t have a huge budget. It’s always about being efficient in the first place. Efficiency is a funny thing that has crept into the way I work. When I work, there’s nothing wasted. For example, we shot the film in 16 days.

7R: That’s incredible.

Ivan Sen: Looking at the scenes that I cut from the film, I think we could have done it probably in 14 or 13 days, even. That’s almost a philosophy for me, too: the design of the art. 

Sometimes, you hear stories about these great films that have been bad nightmares: over-budgeted and over-scheduled and blah blah blah. I think that the actual efficiency that goes into making a film, not only in shooting but in post-production, that’s part of the whole fabric of the artwork. Otherwise, I feel like it’s not real art. It feels as if you didn’t know what you were doing. 

When you can go over budget and over time, you can manage to scramble your way into a masterpiece. But I don’t believe in that approach, especially not anymore. 

I think good art is all about preparation and efficiency. That creates a very relaxed and comfortable environment to produce in. 

I know it’s been the opposite for a lot of other films over the years.

7R: It seems like you have a very economical way of shooting. I love your blocking and the way that the actors are positioned in relation to each other in the frame. It brings so much meaning, It feels like a lot of thought went into each of those shots. That also means you can get these wonderful long takes. I imagine, if you have actors who can do it, and you’ve got great actors, that’s an efficient way of shooting, too.

Ivan Sen: Yeah, that’s part of the process, too. The casting is always huge, like everyone says. The casting is so important. And that’s probably the main role of a director for your film: to make sure you cast it right. 

For me, it’s about finding the moment where the drama is and then letting the drama roll on for as long as possible until it is finished. Then, we move to another moment and do everything with the camera to preserve that. 

The space between the characters and the space between the words, it’s all come from growing up in the country, and in a place like Pedy. That’s how people react and interact. There’s always always a huge bit of space between them, and there’s no need to go too close. There’s no need to say too much, either. 

Because the land is so vast, you feel like you are just a small fragment of the landscape. You have a natural tendency to not try to dominate it or push your ego onto it. It’s this ‘the king is the God is the land’ thing that is part of my whole Indigenous perspective, as well.

7R: What is your process for planning what the film is going to look like? You’re talking about getting to know the location and taking stills. Is that part of your screenplay? And what does that process look like throughout?

Ivan Sen: It takes a little bit of time to make connections between the elements that will make up the film. I knew that I was going to have this white, damaged cop arrive in the town. He would interact with this damaged family who didn’t trust him, who didn’t trust anyone to do with the government. And I knew I would set it within this incredible and damaged landscape. 

Having figured out those elements, I worked out that the black and white was very suited to this location. It helped to create this kind of living-in-a-memory, nostalgic kind of feeling. The film can feel like it’s now or it’s in the past. 

I knew I’d have the cop drive an old 1960s car to help portray the film as a kind of memory that people are living within. You can see this connected with this case that happened. It’s the story of a girl disappearing twenty years earlier. It’s as if, since that moment, the family has been living in a memory, in her memory, living in their own memories. They haven’t really progressed. Hence the name of the film, Limbo. The cop also has this connection [to that feeling because he’s used to] being by himself. 

When you make something, you don’t always remember when those key moments came to you, when you got them. But as I’m writing the script, I’m developing the production design and all the elements that make up the feel of the film by going with my feelings.

7R: How did you approach shooting the film in black and white?

Ivan Sen: Originally, I wanted to shoot on PowerFilm 35 mm. But in Australia, it’s very different from the United States. Film has kind of become extinct. There’s no professional filmmaking process of developing and scanning here in Australia, anymore. It becomes really difficult because of that. 

I did get a couple of Pedy shots on test rolls. I sent them to LA. It got scanned in LA. But you can imagine, to do that, it’s a big deal. There are a lot of risks involved. And timing is such a major issue, too. I think if we had shot on film, I wouldn’t see any rushes until we finished filming. 

I felt that the digital colour didn’t match the story. It didn’t feel right. Colour film had a kind of texture that I felt couldn’t work for the story. Then, I started to look at digital black and white. I started taking photos and turning them into black and white and seeing that the landscape had incredible contrast out there. This really worked with black and white.

And then it started to make sense for all other aesthetic elements of the film. By taking the colour away, I could give this story a sense of memory and living in a memory.  It just felt right in the end, like I keep saying. It suited the film in many different ways.

I didn’t even tell our investors that I was shooting in black and white because I shot the film in colour. But everyone in the cast and crew knew, by the first day of shooting, that we were in black and white world. I didn’t tell the producers. They found out through, I don’t know, the grip or the gaffer or something. I know that black and white has all these commercial pressures associated with it.

But I wasn’t going to have any of that stop me from doing it. Black and white, within a digital projection medium, is not pure black and white either. And because of that, it’s always a bit difficult. For example, some projection systems are better than others. It can be a difficult thing to release a film in black and white and have it be pure black and white. It’s not like in the old days when you had a black-and-white projectionist and film print.

7R: There are a lot of outdoor locations, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t production design. Partly because the film Limbo is in black and white, you get these wonderful textures in the locations. There’s the texture of the rocks of the caves they live in. In the indoor locations, we get textures from the fabrics of the curtains or the tiles on the ground in the cafe.

Ivan Sen: That’s a choice, you know. Like the tiles in the cafe? I walked in there one day, and I thought, ”Wow, look at these tiles on the floor. This is beautiful. And they’re black and white.” 

I feel the world in its natural state is already fantastic and awe-inspiring as it is. The natural production world is already fantastic as it is. When I say, natural, I mean, existing with all the human interaction with the natural world. So I look for those locations in real life. I don’t like to touch them at all or touch them too much. If I have to, it’s just a tiny bit, to tweak them towards the design of the film. But I think the authenticity of reality says something about a place. 

I don’t get why you would want to go in and totally redesign everything. I think all stories have a source within the reality of the world. If you try to rearrange all of that, for the sake of having a production design budget, I don’t quite get that. Why would you manufacture something, when, in essence, in the real world, it’s all there? The real world is beautiful. And it’s real. I like to tap into that. 

In Limbo, all of the locations are real. I mean, I bought some key props. As I was writing the film, I bought the old tape recorder, the car, and all the lamps in the film. I took those down to  Coober Pedy in my car. Those key props were used to dress the actual locations.  For me, it’s all designed already, because it’s been chosen. I chose it specifically for certain scenes, but we didn’t have a designer going in there throwing his ego around the place. And that can happen. 

I’m not anti-collaboration at all. I really value the collaborations I have a lot: the collaborations with the actors, my gaffer, and my grip. They’re some of my best friends. The people you cut out, you just leave more space for the relationships that are there to get stronger and more intimate.

It’s a way of working that I’ve gradually headed towards. I don’t think I could ever go back to a normal kind of style of production. The next film I’m planning is a horror film. 

You were talking about how those elements come together. That’s where I’m at, at the moment, with my new film. I’m writing the film, I’ve got my location, and I’m filling it out. I’m filling out the characters and the actual story. The location, specifically, has a big influence on how the story is going to go. I’m surrounded by equipment here, where I am [in his office]. There are all kinds of equipment and that is a part of the design, as well, behind the camera. I’m in the midst of that design process. It’s probably at a more highly tuned level than Limbo. 

I’m continually pushing toward really being in control of all elements of the film. Especially since this is a commercial film, I want it to still have a very strong sense of being its own unique piece of work.

7R: How did you approach the pacing in Limbo? We meet this detective who is in a rush at the beginning. He’s got an alarm clock on the first two days. Once he gets slowed down by not having a car, that’s when the alarm disappears, and he starts participating. At some point, the perspective starts to shift toward the other characters, and as the film progresses, it feels like it’s speeding up as we and the characters get more emotionally involved.

Ivan Sen: I think that feeling of increased pacing has more to do with how the screenplay works. As it gets you more involved, you become more emotionally invested in the characters. You feel more about what’s going on. As the script reveals more, your brain is becoming busier. That feeling of time goes faster as you become more involved in the fabric of how the film softly climaxes towards the end. 

I think all screenplays do that. Some films do tighter cutting towards the end to amplify that. But I think if you look at the pacing of Limbo, it’s all the same from the end to the beginning. There’s no real change in the pacing of the editing. 

And there’s that spaciousness of giving moments the time to breathe and give weight to things. I think it’s important for the audience to engage with the story by feeling it more, by giving weight to the things. I think it’s the weight given to moments and to smaller characters. For example, I really wanted to feel that the children were an important part of the film.

I was just watching a horror film the other day because I’m doing horror research stuff. There was a child in the film, and to his detriment, they didn’t give that child any weight. I think if you’re going to put elements within a film, they all need to have a certain amount of weight, or you can just get rid of them.

7R: Can you tell me about your collaboration with the actors? Simon Baker’s character is often positioned in the back of the frame. He’s turned away from us or in shadows. That allows the people who are part of the tragedy to come to the fore, even though he’s technically our protagonist.

Ivan Sen: Yes. And he was very conscious of the fact that he’s a white guy coming into town, too. Initially, the character doesn’t want to help. Simon was very conscious of not becoming this white saviour character. I was, as well. We were very conscious of not letting him overrule the scenes where he interacts with the family and the other characters because he does get a lot of his own time. 

It was important for the audience to feel more connected to the family so you could understand his feelings of being more connected to the family, by him doing less within those scenes. The audience is feeling his slow connection because he is not taking up that space. He’s allowing that to come to the fore. It was something that he was always aware of as we were filming. 

Having Simon Baker as the lead freed me up. I didn’t have to worry about his performance too much. Instead, I could just let him be very creative in how he was going to play the character of Travis. He trusted me, and I trusted him. It was a very comfortable, peaceful, mostly peaceful shoot.

7R: When you’re talking about giving space to all of the supporting characters, and the other actors, what does that mean? Is that about taking the time to do multiple takes, or letting the scene play out slowly?

Ivan Sen: I cast the actors very early. For example, right now I’m casting my characters as I’m writing this next film. For me, it’s really difficult to write the film without knowing who the actors are going to be. It informs the whole process from the beginning. 

Because there are not many people in the film, they’re all given an equal kind of weight within the story, within the fabric of the script. People like Rob Collins, who plays Charlie, and Natasha Wanganeen get their moment. Even though, in the end, you might say that this is Travis’s story, it’s just as possible to say that the story belongs to the family and the victim. That was always the intention. 

That pushed the film more towards a drama even though we’re playing with the fabric of what might be a police story. From the very beginning, I wanted this to feel like a drama. And that involved giving weight to the characters that Travis is there to interact with. 

7R: Let’s talk about the scene where Travis gets invited for dinner with the family. It’s a wonderful scene. The kids give it such energy and tenderness between the characters. A lot of groundwork has to be laid throughout the film to bring us to that moment where we can feel that. It also feels so different from the rest of the film because it’s in this domestic space that he’s been invited to, as opposed to all these places where he’s sort of intruding as the outsider cop and is often outdoors.

Ivan Sen: Yes, and there are those lighter moments there, as well. The kids were always there as a hook or turning point for him to get connected to the point where he personally wanted to help solve a crime and bring some resolution. 

I spoke to Simon about the kids as being this thing that connects him because Travis has a failed relationship with his own son. He finds an attraction to Zach, the boy, and the other kids. When he first gets to town, you would never imagine that he would be having dinner with his family that way. 

It’s a slow build-up of moments throughout the film where he connects with the kids and the mother. He sees the family from all angles, including Charlie’s angle, which is so important. He understands how this family has been separated, how the kids have been separated, and the effects of the trauma from their parents. That was also part of the fabric of the script. 

I’ll often put the script through a dictation program, so I can listen to the script. I will lie in a dark room, close my eyes, and just listen to it as if it’s an ebook. That’s where you find the problems and find those moments where people start to change. You can recognize the connections with other people. They progress or they go another way. I lie there and listen, feeling it. I think feeling is all you can do, really. 

Making a film is such an intimate process for me, these days more than ever before. That process is where you feel out the story and feel out the type of film that it is. You have to feel out who the film is for, too, instead of just blindly making a film. Who is the audience? I don’t just blindly make a film. I progressed past that stage a long time ago. 

For example, the next film I’m making is for a special audience. It’s for a younger, horror film audience. But it can also be attractive to other types of audiences, as well. 

7R: How did you think about the audience for this film Limbo?

Ivan Sen: For Limbo, it was a film that always felt like a drama, like a crime drama. I squarely picked out the international arthouse audience. It wasn’t aimed at the Marvel audience. So it was great to go to Berlin and premiere the film there in the competition because that’s kind of where I was aiming at. 

7R: What happens in Canada a lot with Indigenous film is that, especially from a funding perspective, there can be enormous pressure to cater to the settler audience. And on the other hand, a lot of people are making films because they’re hoping to effect change. And that means, to a degree, you must be able to get a settler audience to want to watch the film. I know that that can lead to challenges of how much you want to explain versus how much you don’t. I’d imagine, you want to make the film for Indigenous people, as well. 

Ivan Sen: When you make a film, and you google your film, you can see the name of it and the words, ‘ending explained’, that sort of thing. I think the amount of those results you get kind of judges of how you know your audience. There are audiences that this film is not aimed for but some of them will get exposed to the film. And some of them won’t understand certain aspects of the film because it’s not within the normal kind of fabric of conditioning as a usual filmgoer. 

People who aren’t international arthouse fans are often looking for more answers and less ambiguity and ambivalence. At the same time, I think if you want to tap into the total commercial audience because it’s such a big audience, you can still, probably drag along a fair chunk of an art audience, as well. But you do need to focus on that main audience as a priority. Otherwise, you end up with a film that nobody likes or nobody wants to watch. It’s not one thing or the other. But I’m very aware of that these days. 

I know a lot of Indigenous people who are looking to become filmmakers. And some of them think very commercially, and they end up finding it very difficult to get funding. They feel lost. They want to help change perspectives towards Indigenous people, but they’re caught in this commercial way of thinking. They’re thinking about the films that seem to be called successful arthouse Indigenous films. If they’re working in commercial films with bigger budgets, it can be even harder to figure out how to get your message through.

There’s a guy I know, an Indigenous filmmaker, who is totally confused. He’s almost given up because he can’t find a place for himself to get a film made. The way that he thinks, his aesthetic perspective, is something that doesn’t quite fit that box. If he wanted to make a film, he might have to just make a totally commercial one with nothing to do with Indigenous things. He’d have to just go to Hollywood and pitch an action film. 

But in saying all that, this horror film I’m working on, I’m not selling my soul with it. There are things younger audiences expect to have within a horror film. But there is still space there where you can play, to create a piece of art, and I think that challenge becomes an art form within itself. It can be on 3000 screens and still be a work of art.

The funny thing is, I think horror has such a big potential because of this surrealist aspect of it. You have a lot of scope to be creative which you don’t have in other genres. A lot of serious filmmakers just focus on art drama and that’s it. I think you can do more. I’m always looking to evolve and push things.

Related reading/listening to Ivan Sen’s film Limbo

More Australian Indigenous film: Read our glowing review of Ivan Sen’s film Limbo. Read our interview with Indigenous Australian director-cinematographer Warwick Thornton on Sweet Country. Listen to our podcast on Australian westerns, which includes an in-depth discussions of Sweet Country. Read our review of Wayne Blair’s Top End Wedding. Listen to our podcast commemorating the career of Indigenous Australian actor David Gulpilil.

More interviews with multi-hyphenate filmmakers: Read our interview with writer-director-cinematographer Sophie Deraspe on her film Antigone. Read our interview with the late Indigenous filmmaker Jeff Barnaby who wrote, directed, edited, and composed music for his films. He discusses his second feature Blood Quantum. Discover our interview with writer-director-actress Elle-Maija Tailfeathers on her film The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open.

More Indigenous: Read all of our Indigenous film coverage.