![David Gulpilil and Margaret Pomeranz are in Melbourne for the Melbourne International Film Festival. Photo: Photo: Eddie Jim David Gulpilil and Margaret Pomeranz are in Melbourne for the Melbourne International Film Festival. Photo: Photo: Eddie Jim](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/d4285e3b-d0dc-44fd-a9bb-34763eb438e8.jpg/r0_0_1024_682_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
![David Gulpilil and Margaret Pomeranz are in Melbourne for the Melbourne International Film Festival. Photo: Photo: Eddie Jim David Gulpilil and Margaret Pomeranz are in Melbourne for the Melbourne International Film Festival. Photo: Photo: Eddie Jim](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/63ab4fd0-2ddc-4f39-842d-b71386114b1e.jpg/r0_0_729_410_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
![David Gulpilil and Margaret Pomeranz are in Melbourne for the Melbourne International Film Festival. Photo: Photo: Eddie Jim David Gulpilil and Margaret Pomeranz are in Melbourne for the Melbourne International Film Festival. Photo: Photo: Eddie Jim](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/44e07ac0-d37a-42dc-aae2-ec832d8ce4c8.jpg/r0_0_420_279_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
![David Gulpilil and Margaret Pomeranz are in Melbourne for the Melbourne International Film Festival. Photo: Photo: Eddie Jim David Gulpilil and Margaret Pomeranz are in Melbourne for the Melbourne International Film Festival. Photo: Photo: Eddie Jim](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/94cbdf0d-693d-476d-8ffa-71091c7c7db5.jpg/r0_0_360_426_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
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Here's a sight you don't see very often: Margaret Pomeranz is struggling to get a word in as David flaps his arms around, telling a meandering but riveting story full of magic and mysticism.
"What about …" she tries, but he's off on a spiel about a giant bird that emerges from beneath the earth.
"Do you remember that time …" she nudges, but now he's crouching in the dewy grass of the Treasury Gardens, grabbing with his gnarled, skinny fingers at itchy bomb seed pods and moving them around on an imaginary map of the world. "This is America," he says. "This is England. And this one right here in the middle is Australia."
And this David is very much not Stratton, Pomeranz's on-screen partner for the 28 years in which they co-hosted SBS's The Movie Show and the ABC's At The Movies. It is David Gulpilil, the Indigenous actor whose 45-year (and counting) career is the subject of a major retrospective at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
It all started for Gulpilil when he was cast by English director Nicolas Roeg in Walkabout. It was 1969 and Gulpilil was just 16, but already a skilled dancer in his Maningrida homeland in Arnhem Land. "I want to visit Nic in England," says Gulpilil, who has been in touch with the 86-year-old director "a few times over the years". "I want to see Jenny Agutter too," he says of the English actress who also starred in the film that launched both their careers. He lets it slip that he also wants to have a chat with David Cameron.
After Walkabout, Gulpilil says, "I wanted to learn everything about filmmaking so I went to film school, with Phil Noyce. I wanted to become an actor, director, everything. And I am."
Gulpilil is like a one-man dreamtime, weaving stories out of thin air, flapping his hands like brolga wings, painting circles of narrative that lead nowhere and everywhere at once. "I'm going to buy this hotel," he tells me, and maybe he's serious. But probably not.
Pomeranz is hosting a session on Saturday afternoon in which the plan is to talk with Gulpilil about his body of work. She'd better be on her game: it's an amazing collection, with Storm Boy and Mad Dog Morgan and Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence and the suite of films he has made with Rolf de Heer among it, but there's no predicting where Gulpilil will take the conversation.
At least Pomeranz has had some practice. "Do you remember us doing this on stage at the Opera House 10 or 12 years ago," she asks.
"Yeah, yeah," he says.
"Wasn't that a wonderful hour? It was so magical. I looked at all your films, and you're just wonderful in everything. It's sort of like you inhabit the space."
And he's off again, inhabiting that space with another weaving tale, as he lays out the basics of a film he plans to make called Featherfoot, which may or may not be a sequel to The Tracker.
It might be nothing more than a dream, but only a fool would bet against Gulpilil bringing it to life one way or another.
David Gulpilil in Conversation with Margaret Pomeranz is at the Festival Lounge, at the Forum, at 4.30pm, Saturday, August 1. The Age is a media partner of the Melbourne International Film Festival.