A flash of intuition saved Bill Bennett's life.
The Australian director of Kiss or Kill, In A Savage Land and The Nugget was driving to the airport early one morning in New Orleans when he heard a voice telling him to slow down as he approached an intersection.
"There was no traffic on the road, it was dark and I'd never heard a voice like this before," he said. "I had a green light up ahead and I wanted to accelerate to make sure I got through but this voice said 'slow down' again.
"So I slowed down then this huge truck ran a red light on a cross street and came through the intersection. I slammed on the brakes and it just missed."
That experience was so powerful that Bennett has made a documentary to understand what intuition is - interviewing research scientists, quantum physicists, psychiatrists and religious and spiritual authorities.
Certain there was nothing physical that could have warned him on a subconscious level - a rumbling on the road, a shadow or an animal scurrying away - he went looking for answers elsewhere.
After three years of work, the documentary PGS: Intuition Is Your Personal Guidance System has its world premiere in Sydney this week.
A former journalist who worked for Four Corners and 60 Minutes before making 16 feature films and nine documentaries, Bennett said he approached the subject with scepticism.
But making the documentary - interviewing 75 people around the world over three years - had changed his life.
"I'm no longer a sceptic," he said. "We all have intuition, whether or not we believe it or acknowledge it or not. I've come to believe it's a system, a part of us, like our circulatory system, our central nervous system or our immune system, except it works in the 'energetic' realm."
Bennett believes intuition is "wired into our physical system" in what many eastern cultures see as the body's energy system.
What he learned has made him happier and less fearful.
"I liken my life to being like a shopping trolley in a supermarket aisle," he said. "I've got dirt in one of the wheels and I'm bouncing off the aisles as I go down towards the yoghurt at the end which is what I want to get to.
"Now the dirt is making its way out of the wheel and I'm started to get a clear path."
Bennett said his perspective on filmmaking had changed.
"When I think about the bad films that I've made, they're the films where I didn't follow my intuitive impulses," he said. "When I think about the films that worked, they're the films where I have ... the good films that I've done came quickly and easily and without effort and they had a clear path through. Even though I didn't realise at the time, I was acting totally intuitively."
The best example is the 1997 road movie Kiss Or Kill, which Bennett wrote, funded and finished shooting in just five months. It won best film and director at the Australian Film Institute Awards.
"I've shifted from being a person who sets about achieving goals through force of will - through Type A personality traits - into being a person who is sensitive to the shifts and nuances around me and listens to my intuitive impulses and makes decisions accordingly," he said.
"What I'm now discovering is that in fact I'm now more productive because of that, which is really weird."
