"I used to be the sweet affable, couldn't-get-a-girlfriend kind of guy," Ben Mendelsohn said of his acting career. "Then we perfected larrikinism. And then it suddenly went to murderers, paedophiles and Death Star builders."
The 64th Sydney Film Festival turned into the Festival of Mendo over the weekend. The Australian star of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and five yet-to-be-released films including Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One, was lively company during a conversation with director David Caesar at a packed Festival Hub.
Mendelsohn spoke a little about new film Una, Benedict Andrews' psychological thriller that is screening in the festival's competition, and a little about The Year My Voice Broke, which screened in a program of restorations. Mostly he spoke about his long career since The Henderson Kids and surprising Hollywood success since Animal Kingdom - interrupted once when his father called to Facetime him, then again when an audience member dressed as a Star Wars imperial officer took a bow.
He was funny about not being able to get an acting job in the early 2000s. "I was pretty happy," he said. "I had a lovely girlfriend. She had a beautiful dog. I spent about two or three years just walking around Darlinghurst-Surry Hills with Tetsui the shar pei."
And he was reflective about Rogue One: "When you were six and seven and people tease you ... you do just wish that you could turn around and go 'Hey, don't worry about it Ben. One day you'll be in Star Wars'."
Mendelsohn was realistic enough to know why the Hub was packed. "I know you f---ers. You're not turning up in these numbers without a Death Star in there somewhere."
Una, the third film to screen in the festival's competition for "courageous, audacious and cutting edge" cinema, centres on a woman (Rooney Mara) confronting a factory manager (Mendelsohn) who sexually abused her when she was 13. After he has served time in jail and changed his name, she tracks him down to get an answer to the questions that have trapped her: did he really love her? Why did he leave?
Adapted from the acclaimed play Blackbird, Una features blazing, raw performances by the two stars as the confrontation heads in unexpected directions, interspersed with uncomfortable flashbacks, although opening up the play has diffused some of the potential drama.
The festival opened solidly with the world premiere of Warwick Thornton's documentary We Don't Need A Map, about how the Southern Cross has taken on different symbolic significance from ancient Indigenous history to modern white Australians having their tattoos removed after it became a symbol for jingoistic nationalism.
Thornton, the director of Samson & Delilah and cinematographer for The Sapphires, is everywhere in the documentary – shooting footage, interviewing, talking about the backlash to his provocative statement in 2010 that the Southern Cross was becoming the new swastika and even moving the knockabout puppets, "bush toys", that recreate historic scenes.
Over a loose but lively 85 minutes, We Don't Need A Map is a thoughtful and sometimes provocative look at the Southern Cross' place in Australian life, most powerfully in its sacredness for Aboriginal Australia.
Oscar-winner Laura Poitras' (CitizenFour) brilliant documentary Risk, about Julian Assange, was an early festival highlight. A heavily reworked version of the film that screened at Cannes last year, it features exceptional access to the WikiLeaks founder.
While Poitras and Assange were once allies, the director makes it clear that she has learnt she cannot separate the man from his cause. She shows a side to Assange that has him declaring the film a threat to his liberty.
The strongest competition film in the first four days has been Amat Escalante's The Untamed, a beautifully acted Mexican drama with sci-fi overtones.
It centres on four people whose lives are changed irrevocably by intense sexual desire, much of it tracing back to a slippery alien creature who lives in a cabin the woods. It's a hauntingly sexy film with David Lynch level beauty and strangeness.