On January 2 1990, Luke Davies decided to turn his life around.

It was a far more colossal new year’s resolution than most Australians would make in the first week of that new decade: Luke had ten years of self-destructive addiction and heroin abuse to start undoing.

At that point, Luke had become a “horrible and untrustworthy person full of hatred and resentment to the world because the world got in the way of me getting drugs,” he told Hack.

There was a lot of work ahead of him.

Twenty-seven years later, Luke’s story is the ultimate parable of redemption, recovery and victory: the “scurrying little street junkie” squandering his life away in Sydney has now become a world-renowned, Oscar-nominated screenwriter for the critically-acclaimed film Lion.

He’s clean, recovered, and has become a bona-fide name in Hollywood - his next project will be a Western starring Tom Hanks.

Luke is the focus of tonight’s Australian Story on ABC TV, but tells Hack he’s anxious about the documentary portraying his glamorous career as his life’s defining success. It isn’t, Luke says; breaking his addiction was.

For me the redemption story is 27 years long of waking up and pinching myself.

“I wake up every morning pinching myself basically thinking, ‘this is incredible. I should’ve died, but I didn’t’. Something changed and I somehow survived.

"I have a constant sense that life is an extraordinarily improbable and beautiful experience because of its rarity. Because we’re here for so short a period of time.”

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Whatsapp Real-life 'Candy' and 'Dan' from the film 'Candy', Luke Davies with then-girlfriend Megan Bannister in 1986.

From addiction to writing Candy

Luke says he started off smoking a lot of weed as a teenager and dealing to his friends; his experience with drugs escalated from there.

“Smoking weed is what all teenagers do, so it’s not like that should lead to this other thing. Why did I take self-medication to levels of extreme idiocy for ten years? I wish I knew.

“It was all so innocent. There was no point where I said I’m going to take a step that is going to lead to many many years of extreme catastrophe in all directions.

“I wanted to be a writer, and I found myself in this parallel life of horror. I just sort of thank my lucky stars that one day something changed and I got out of it. But it wasn’t before a lot of years of real despair.”

As Luke started to use heroin, he met Megan Bannister - a young artist who would become his wife and the basis for a character he would later call Candy, in the best-selling novel and film of the same name.

Luke says his life with Megan evolved into a passionate bubble of drug abuse.

“We were so in love and it was kind of delusional but it was also glorious. We created this little oasis where we could egg each other on and support each other and go deeper. It was kind of like us against the world and that’s the relationship I ended up depicting in the novel and film Candy.

“The us against the world thing can feel good when you’re in the middle of it but it was also really destructive and we were bad for each other.”

‘I felt in my bones, I can see this film’

After Megan eventually left him, years of recovery and then writing Candy, Luke moved to LA to try and crack the film scene.

“The first five years were really difficult. I couldn’t get a meeting, I couldn’t get an agent. Half the time I couldn’t pay next month’s rent, and I often thought, ‘what am I doing here? I should go back to Australia.’

Luke says being approached to write the screenplay of Lion, an adaptation of Saroo Brierley’s autobiography about searching for his long-lost biological mother in India, was a massive turning point for his career.

“[The story of Lion] is incredibly, spine-chillingly amazing to me. I felt so fortunate to get the job of writing the screenplay, because the minute I read the book I felt in my bones - I can see this film, this is going to be incredible.

“I did this research trip with Saroo, he showed me all the places where the real things happened, the train station where he got lost, the orphanage where he wound up. The most amazing part of that trip was meeting his mother, because I felt all of her pain and grief and sorrow and joy. All mixed in together.

She lost her boy for 25 years, he walked out of her life one night and she didn’t know what happened to him. And now she knows and can piece it all together.”

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Whatsapp L-R: Dev Patel, Luke Davies, Nicole Kidman, Sunny Pawar and Garth Davis

Looking back

This wouldn’t be a powerful story of redemption and recovery without some introspective, profound life lessons. Here’s what Luke says about his story.

I have a constant sense that life is an extraordinarily improbable and beautiful experience because of its rarity. Because we’re here for so short a period of time.

“The best thing I ever did was to give up drugs. I’m not saying all people should give up drugs because most people don’t have problems with extreme drug addiction. I did. When I gave them up I turned away from this situation where I was a shell of a human being, that’s what I’d become.

“I had to come out of that and I learned that it was okay to embrace the world, I just had to not do this one thing that had led me into self-destruction for ten years."

Luke tried halving the amount of drugs he took but said “a completely addictive temperament” made cutting back impossible.

“I lived this life that was full of horror and I learned at some point that if I don’t take that first drug then I’m not going to take the second one. And if I don’t take the second one I’m not going to take the third one. So I prevented the possibility of heading back to the kind of catastrophic life that I used to live.

“I’m not saying that I’m a preacher and know the answers. But at a certain point I found a little gap of breathing space and I did my best to not take drugs again and so far it’s worked really really beautifully.”

Watch part one of Australian Story's 'Candy Man' two-part exclusive tonight at 8:00pm on ABC TV.