It's a film that will show the arrival of the first European settlers from an Indigenous perspective. A epic drama that Phil Noyce, who brought another seminal Aboriginal story to the screen in Rabbit Proof Fence, calls Australia's Braveheart.

A band of filmmakers - two based in Los Angeles - and Indigenous elders have spent a week in a western Sydney hotel next to the Blacktown drive-in theatre planning a bio-pic of the Indigenous warrior Pemulwuy.

Planning an epic drama about Pemulwuy: writer Jon Bell (left), director Catriona McKenzie and executive producer Phil Noyce. Credit:Mark Rogers

A member of the Bidjigal clan who was considered a "cleverman" - with supernatural powers - he is revered in the Indigenous community for leading the opposition to the British taking over traditional hunting grounds from the early years of the colony until he was shot dead in 1802.

When Pemulwuy's skull was dispatched to Britain, Governor King that called him "a brave and independent character" who had been "a terrible pest" to the new colony.