I’ll have a relationship with him for the rest of his life, because we shared something. I want to feel something! I’m sorry, I think I’ve just got to that age. I don’t want to pour my heart and soul out on a set with people I don’t care about. Next he made Blaze, a film about childhood trauma directed by artist and first-time director Del Kathryn Barton, which he chose because they spent three hours talking the first time they met. Two years ago he was in Berlin with High Ground, a western-style true story from the 1930s of an Indigenous warrior taking up arms against white settlers after a massacre, made by first-time feature director Stephen Johnson. For the past few years, Baker has turned his back on syndicated series in favour of Australian stories. It’s a long way from Hollywood, in every sense. Especially the hotels.” The Limbo Motel where Travis stays is a luxe version of a miner’s dug-out, with dark stony corridors leading to rooms where you might easily imagine a rotten cop dying. “I’ve always been interested in the underground aspect of it and luckily nobody else had explored it too much in other films so I thought it was ripe and fresh. Just by going to Coober Pedy, being there, it just writes itself,” he says. “Everything I’ve done, it’s always been the landscape or the town. Sen, best known for Mystery Road (2013) through its extended TV spin-off, says his stories always begin with a landscape. Limbo is a mesmerising film, shot in a slightly faded black and white that makes the endless sea of mining craters look like the surface of the moon. Joseph points to a nearby makeshift grave. Leon is now supposedly dead, but Travis visits his former dug-out where his brother Joseph (Nicholas Hope) now lives. Local suspicion fell on Leon, a white prospector who was known to “like young Black girls”. Police showed no interest in the case, then tried unsuccessfully to pin it on the girl’s brother, Charlie (Rob Collins). Twenty years earlier, a young Aboriginal girl went missing from a party at a miner’s dug-out. Credit: Bunya ProductionsĪctually, Baker clearly brings considerable thought and intensity to playing Travis, a city cop who comes to Coober Pedy to investigate whether it is worth trying to reopen a cold case. Simon Baker with Natasha Wanganeen in Limbo. “It’s often just like allowing it to happen.” They talk about it like it’s this great high art.” He remembers how much fun he had improvising with Chloe Moretz in another of his TV series, The Guardian. I think there’s a lot of performance with actors performing what their role is as an actor. “It keeps you honest, it keeps you authentic and you realise how simple acting is. “I love working with non-professionals and I love working with kids,” Baker says at the Berlinale, where the film is in competition. Travis is a hard-knuckled, dour trooper who left the drug squad with a secret heroin habit he still services regularly, but the smile on Baker’s face as he chaffs a small girl – “you’re a cheeky one” – shines through his character’s weariness. The erstwhile star of The Mentalist – one of Australia’s best-quality Hollywood exports – is barely recognisable as that golden boy of primetime in Limbo, Ivan Sen’s sparse crime drama set among the digs and craters of Coober Pedy. One look at the screen and you can see that Simon Baker is right in his element with children.
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