Film review: After walking the Camino de Santiago in 2013, Aussie Bill Bennett wrote a book about the experience, The Way, My Way: A Camino Memoir. A film distributor got in touch saying there could be a movie in it. After all, Camino flicks had become their own arthouse genre.
Bennett didn’t think so. He wasn’t being humble – he had written and directed a dozen-plus features in Oz and further afield. The book, in which he pondered the experience of having walked the historic trail through northern Spain and how it changed him personally, was enough.
“I got to Santiago at the end of 800km and the essential question that I had was unanswered, and that question was: ‘Why am I doing this?’” he tells the Listener via Zoom. “I thought that I would write the book to help me find that answer. But if I thought there was a movie in a book, I would have done it by now.”
The distributor persisted and hired writers who worked up a draft script. “And they were dreadful … so finally I said, ‘Okay, look, I’ll take a swing at it. But I didn’t want to make a film about myself.”
Solution? Treat himself as a fictional character and cast veteran Aussie actor Chris Haywood, who had appeared in some of his previous films, in the role. As for the folk he encountered on the Camino from Italy, Hungary and Scotland, and who he stayed in touch with – would they like to be in a film, as themselves?
“I really wanted it to be a truly authentic experience. So, I thought the only way that I can do that is with the real people that I walked with 10 years earlier.”
So, of a dozen or so speaking parts in the film, only three are professional actors, including Bennett’s wife, long-time producer, and actress Jennifer Cluff, who was cast essentially to play herself.
Bennett was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2018 and isn’t walking as much as he used to. He also suffered a long-term knee injury in a car accident in 2000, something that burdens his film character.
Bennett shot the film on the trail with minimal crew and equipment. It took him back to his early film-making days.
“I wanted us to be invisible on the Camino. I wanted us to be nimble, agile, to work to shifting light and weather conditions. We had to have as tiny a footprint as possible, and still be big enough to get the production value of a major motion picture. I think we found that balance.”
The resulting film has much offbeat charm. It’s sure to be lapped up by past and potential Camino “pilgrims” on both sides of the Tasman.
But won’t this and the many previous Camino films, just contribute to excess tourism in a place where people are hoping to hike in contemplative solitude?
No, says Johnnie Walker, a Spain-based Scottish Camino proponent and guidebook writer who appears in the film as himself and was a consultant.
“I do not believe that there’s any evidence that these films cause a spike in pilgrim numbers.” If anything, it’s a consumer warning.
“The one thing that is very levelling about walking on the Camino de Santiago is I get as many blisters as the next person; as many shin splints as the next person – just the same as Bill does.”
The Way, My Way is in cinemas now.
