Lion (2016)

"I've had so many letters about the film bringing up emotions they never knew they had," he says. "I don't know if it's because it's a film about the primal connection we have with our mothers that it just unlocks everything. It's the love in the film probably, the unconditional love is a very powerful thing."



As he describes being immersed in the Hollywood awards season - the latest event being the glittering Oscar nominees lunch - Davis uses words like "amazing" and "surreal".



"The nominee lunch was fantastic," he says. "You had a bit more time to move around and socialise and connect with people. I got to meet Emma Stone and Casey Affleck and caught up with all the fellow nominee directors."



Davis' success is all the more remarkable for the fact he studied graphic design at Swinburne in Melbourne and later went to Italy to paint. "I basically just checked out for a while and just did painting and a bit experimental filmmaking," he says. "Then when I came back from that trip, I started directing commercials."



He moved into television - directing Top of the Lake with Jane Campion - before producer Emile Sherman saw him as the ideal director for Lion.



"I never wanted to be a director but I loved movies," Davis says. "My passion really was painting - I really wanted to be a painter - but my father bought me a Bolex camera for my birthday. I filmed some friends where I was living at the time and I cut this little sequence together.



"I projected it and I felt emotion. I suddenly realised that filmmaking was like painting. You could literally find an alchemy and a magic in an art-form. I just got completely obsessed with it after that."



Davis lives in Melbourne with his wife and three children, aged 12, nine and four. When he arrives home, with Lion having taken $16 million in cinemas in 18 days, he will get back to editing Mary Magdalene, which he shot in Italy. He says Mary and Jesus will be "very relatable, very human" in the film.



"It's going to be a film that people are going to connect with as well," he says. But as the likes of The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ have shown, there is also the potential for controversy with a Biblical story.



"You're not going to please everybody in this landscape so I'm sure there's going to be some controversy but it's not controversial really," Davis says. "I wouldn't have the same concerns as the other films before us, put it that way."



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PS: One of  his kids is called River. Just saying (It´s on the credits)