By Keith Austin
The Sydney Morning Herald
SYDNEY — Benjamin Gilmour wears many hats. You might know him as the clean-cut, clean-shaven ambulance paramedic in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. He’s also that bloke with the pink safari suit, equally flamboyant burlesque-dancer girlfriend by his side, driving around town in an immaculate, pastel yellow 1954 Plymouth Belvedere.
To the Pashtuns of the remote tribal areas of the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, he’s the turbaned, bearded Westerner who came into their lives under intense secrecy and at great risk to life and limb to make a movie about them.
“I was certainly born in the wrong century,” says the 32-year-old, sitting in his much-beloved “hunting lodge” in Darlinghurst. “A lot of what I do is trying to re-create times gone by … I love driving around in my car, putting on some jazz or swing music from the 1920s or 1930s. It makes me feel like I’m in that era. I love creating these little moments of fantasy for myself. In a sense, I live my life like a series of period films.”
The hat that Gilmour is most well-known for these days, though, is filmmaker and author. His debut movie, Son Of A Lion, is released this month and Warrior Poets, the book about the making of the film, is already on shelves.
Not bad for a career paramedic whose previous film experience, before filming in Pakistan, was working as unit nurse on a Sharon Stone movie when he was living in London.
Gilmour, a former Shore schoolboy who started travelling at 18, lives in an eclectic, retro-fashionable apartment in Darlinghurst that really does look like an alpine ski lodge. There are vinyl Henry Mancini LPs on the turntable and ‘60s-style op-shop furniture. A tour of his two-storey home reveals stuffed owls, shrunken heads, tribal masks, old mounted antlers, ethnic musical instruments and other souvenirs from his extensive travels.
Life before London and “Shaz” Stone consisted of learning to be a paramedic (“scraping bodies off the highway up in Ballina and growing up very, very quickly”) and travelling. His first trip was to India, where he worked with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta for a while, caring for the sick and “pulling maggots out of people’s ears”.
“That,” he says, “was the hardest, grossest thing I’ve ever done … I was amazed by these nuns doing it. I had a lot of respect for them … they didn’t preach, they just lived it. It was an extremely rewarding time.”
It was a period of searching and “meaningful travel” that led to Gilmour developing a passion for India and the Middle East - and an unplanned motorbike expedition into Pakistan that changed his life: “The tribal areas of Pakistan are like nowhere else that I’ve travelled to … it just captured my imagination. It was 1001 Arabian Nights preserved … and I’ve never come across hospitality like it - phenomenal.”
After that visit, Gilmour took advantage of his freezing spare time on the London film set to write Bullet Boy, about Niaz, a youngster who wants to go to school but whose hardline father - played by a real-life former mujahideen - wants him to make guns as he does. It was the first draft of the script that would become Son Of A Lion.
He says: “The filmmaking process was very interesting and I learned a lot from it but in clinical terms it was quite dull. All I was doing was dishing out paracetamol and looking after ‘Shaz’.
“I did get to direct a second-unit camera on one or two scenes that were medical related, though. I thought the director was quite sensible to get the unit nurse to direct something the unit nurse was familiar with … seeking authenticity just as I did later with the Pashtuns.”
When he returned to the tribal areas later, Gilmour was disguised as a local and filmed secretly using a few sympathetic locals as his actors, using their native tongue. It was dangerous work - tribal people were being regularly killed in the hunt for al-Qaeda militants and suspicious dealings with outsiders were punishable by death. So why do it?
“Well, I didn’t make a film for the sake of making a film,” he says. “I made it because I was offended by the way the media and politicians were depicting the ethnic Pashtuns of Pakistan and Afghanistan and so I saw the film as a device and a tool, one of the best tools, to reach the masses.
“On a small scale, as a paramedic, I could go on through life helping little old ladies with their fractured hips or drunks who’ve fallen over in the street, and I would be doing a good job - and that’s why I’m still doing it and why I can be satisfied that I’m contributing to a better world.
“With film, though, you can reach vast numbers of people and influence them and I saw this as an opportunity to do that.”
Son Of A Lion is in selected cinemas from August 21.