December 1, 2005 -- Australian filmmaker Greg McLean's "Wolf Creek"
is hitting theaters in the U.S. on Dec. 25. A huge hit at Sundance, "Wolf Creek" is supposedly
based on true events. "It was supposed to be the vacation of a lifetime in the Australian outback --
full of fun, sun and adventure. But what happened to a trio of twentysomething backpackers took
a wrenching detour into the dephs of unrelenting terror." Sounds pretty, cool, eh? Read on ...
Question: For a horror movie of this ilk it presents a very unique narrative style. Did you consciously set out to do something different?
Greg McLean: It is an unusually structured movie, it’s almost like one of the sole effects of the film is the structure, a special effect of the movie. Because horror movies are so cliché and there are so many of them we come to expect to know every single beat in the movie. The whole quest is: how do you make it surprising and interesting again? How do you make it so the audience doesn’t know what’s actually coming next?
Question: You were heavily influenced by Hitchcock and his penchant for creating likeable characters and isolating them. Isolation is the easy part, was it at all difficult to build a trio of lead characters the audience could latch on to?
Greg McLean: From the Hitchcock point of view, when I first started this I spent a long time really obsessed with his movies. If you’re doing a thriller or horror, he’s obviously the greatest filmmaker in that genre ever. You can learn everything you need to know from him about how to create suspense. Creating likeable characters and isolating them, it’s such a simple principal but unless you have those characters you believe in and care for, it doesn’t really matter what happens to them. So it’s about combining those basics of the Hitchcock set pieces and re-conceptualizing the clichés. People tend to try too hard and make presumptions about what audiences would find interesting, so generally you see actors who are cast in a role that is not believable, you don’t believe in the reality of that person. We took an enormous amount of care in casting people who were really great actors, who were actually able to perform and behave in a way that was really authentic and simple. The usual beats for this kind of movie in terms of set-up are in there, but it’s just done in a serious way as opposed to a fun way. It’s about not selling out the characters to the audiences as well, because you’ve really got to like them. Every studio wants more likeable characters but they want them to be funny, to have more sex - that’s not what life is really like. In focusing on the mundane for a period of time, the audience is able to relate to the simplicity and embarrassment of the kids. The mundane nature of long distance travel by car. All that stuff is there to disarm the audience, make them forget they’re in a horror movie and as soon as they forget they’re in a horror movie then they’re ready to go. You change the pace, change the rhythm and actually getting the movie towards what it’s all about. It’s a very long set-up. You’ll see this movie and go, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ You’ll think you’ve walked into some European art film because there’s nothing happening. But because nothing is happening, it’s truthful and it is interesting.
Question: You also build our empathy for them during their travel. For instance, when they’re at the Emu Diner and Ben is faced with three imposing good ol’ boys from the Outback.
Greg McLean: What that does is give you a sense of invulnerability. If someone did decide to get mouthy out there you’d be extremely vulnerable. Essentially it puts Ben responsible for the girls. Every guy watching that would know that horrible feeling, that kind of sense that you’re the protector and there’s this fear of power shifting away from you.
Question: Did you ever find yourself in a rut looking for a trinity of actors to fill out the characters of Ben, Liz, and Kirsty?
Greg McLean: We did, it took a long time because we took a huge amount a care. Ultimately, it was about the acting really. I first said at the casting: it doesn’t matter if they’ve done ten movies or none, they just have to perform in a way that’s completely unselfconscious, and be able to be confident enough on screen to not telegraph their performance, to be believable and be able to improvise. We eventually found three amazing people who had those qualities and we pretty much knew straight away that they were the right people. They had a truth to what they were doing. It wasn’t television-style acting. It was very simple, nuanced kind of performances, that was the focus all the way along with those guys.
Question: You found strength within Cassandra Magrath’s Liz to carry the audience through most of the film’s worst events. Was there anything in particular that inspired you for this character?
Greg McLean: I spent a long time looking at Halloween and Jamie Lee Curtis, she is the great heroine of that movie. There is a lot of Jamie and "Halloween" in the Liz character - in a sense of being what she needs to represent which is slightly more intelligent, thoughtful, and removed. She is basically set up as the character that is going to survive no matter what happens. Which is obviously the big trick there because she’s not. The scene where she’s at the beach, I think what it subconsciously says is: this story has meaning to this character and something will happen to her and she will survive and learn from it. When you completely deny that and destroy that idea it’s entirely shocking because we’ve told the audience, ‘Okay, we all agree that we know what we these signs, symbols and emotional beats mean.’ Then when you consciously rip it apart, you pull the rug out from under the audience and they’re just like, ‘Oh my God, that wasn’t supposed to happen!’ And what that really reveals is just how ingrained the structure of these stories really are.
Question: There’s a lot of truth behind Liz’s actions as well, she goes against the archetype of a slasher “victim,” how hard was it to avoid that pitfall?
Greg McLean: Incredibly hard, you have to avoid those movie moments. You really have to think about how things would be if they really happened. If you were in this situation, what could you do to get yourself out of it? As opposed to doing something contrived. Obviously there are a few pieces in this film that are contrived and you find are not realistic, but they had to be there. Like, would Liz really be going through all of those videotapes while Mick’s running around outside? The goal, though, is to do the opposite when you come to one of those movie moments.
Question: You have a background in art and landscape painting, how did that affect the overall look of the film?
Greg McLean: All of my background training in the visual arts and love of landscape painting, I guess it - in designing and storyboarding the film - allowed me to give depth to a film that would otherwise not have any depth. You can look at a landscape and in just the way the music is put over it and the way it is photographed. You can create atmosphere and emotion through that. There’s very rich context in which the characters can start playing in. There’s a level in which the landscape is part of the theme of the movie. This is an incredible, vast, isolated place that people come to. At the start of the film we experience Australia in a way that tourists come and see - it’s bright, light, and beautifully colored. Then the landscape towards the end of the film changes, it’s still beautiful, it’s still there, but it’s incredibly cold. It’s not warm and fuzzy, it’s incredibly dark and distant. This is the background on which we as people run around and do the things we do. Some of them are great, some of them horrific. Ultimately, the landscape sort of looks at these things and asks, ‘Does it really matter?’ What is the meaning of good and evil? Does it mean anything at all? When you look at it in the context of time and nature, does anything we do mean anything? Those are some broad philosophical and explicit things but they’re suggested by things like the rising and setting of the sun and moon, and the eclipse. All of these images are on a symbolic level all of the ideas in the movie.
Question: Nature is something to be feared and awed.
Greg McLean: Exactly.
Question: What were the true events that inspired you to write "Wolf Creek"?
Greg McLean: I wrote the original story five, six years ago and it was pretty much a standard horror thriller set in the Outback. Then over the years I heard about a couple of true cases that happened in Australia, one of them being the Ivan Milat case which is about a serial killer who would pick up hitchhikers on lonely highways and take them out into the woods and do horrific things to them. That case was influential in many ways because is had all of these elements that were so terrifying and scarier than anything I could possibly come up with. So that case influenced the Mick Taylor character a lot in terms of what he did, what his background was, mode of operation. Then more recently there was the Bradley Murdoch case taking place right now, again, a very similar character who lived in West Australia patrolling these lonely highways looking for victims who pulled over this car with two British backpackers in it and shot the guy and tried to abduct the woman, Joanne Lees. They just had all of these similarities and had all of these incredibly bad intentions. When people would meet him he’d be the nicest guy in the world because he had to be nice enough to get them to come with him in the first place. So that was the key quality that I took from those true cases. There’s other details too that are a blend of those cases. I also tried to blend clichés and icons from Australia - the Steve Irwin or Mick Dundee character, all of these big broad Australian characters recognizable in the States.
Question: Mick Taylor joins a long list of cinematic bogeymen, do you hope he’ll attain a similar prominence in the genre like, say, Leatherface or Freddy Krueger?
Greg McLean: I don’t think you can consciously sit down and say, ‘Okay this weekend I’m going to come up with the next great horror icon.’ Because if you could, people would be doing it every weekend! I think the successful characters have to come from some true place. Look at Mick Taylor in the movie, it’s conceivable that this guy could be real. He could exist. Also, even though we don’t know anything about his back-story really he’s a genuinely frightening character who is like a monster. In terms of what he does and what he gets up to. He transcends things, he’s not just a bad guy. He’s so evil he becomes this monster. And he just got more evil when John Jarratt started playing him.
Question: Was Jarratt someone you saw right away and knew exactly what you wanted?
Greg McLean: I had a long list of people I wanted to read for the role and had an idea of the quality he needed to be the character. John was the first actor I met and after ten minutes I knew that he was perfect. The difficulty with this movie is: how do you find an actor who can completely commit to doing that role and not judge the character? It would be very hard to do that performance because some part of you would be judging the character while you’re doing it. John immediately got that when we met. He said, ‘I understand this guy and how far I would need to go to make this work. It’s also about not judging him and being inside him. As soon as I heard that I said, ‘Alright, you totally go how far you need to go.’
Question: How long did it take to shoot "Wolf Creek"?
Greg McLean: Twenty-five days on a 1.3 million Australian dollar budget.
Question: Did you choose to shoot digital for budget or for aesthetic reasons?
Greg McLean: I originally wanted to shoot it on mini-DV, like very low quality digital video because I was working on a couple of different scripts and was having trouble getting anything greenlit. It was getting really frustrating, so I pulled out the script for "Wolf Creek" which I had been working on and told myself I needed to rework it into something that can actually get shot. It’s obviously difficult to get money for movies in Australia, there are not many places to go. In the States there’s a number of doors, you keep knocking and one will eventually open. Eventually, I told myself that the script has to have a very limited amount of characters, about the same time I saw some of the Dogma films like Lars Von Trier’s "Breaking the Waves" and "The Idiots." I was really blown away by them and the whole Dogma 95 manifesto that was obviously saying, ‘What are the basic elements to make a movie?’ What if you could free yourself from the huge budgets and constraints of eighty million dollar films and is it possible to make a compelling film with just digital video and a bunch of actors. That’s where I started production-wise. I wanted "Wolf Creek" to look like a recreation of a real crime so we shot on digital video so then I worked and worked on the script until it came popping along. A lot of the good ideas happened there during that phase where I started playing with the traditional structure. I thought, why not try to tell the story like a piece of journalism? Make it quite cold and cynical and very observational so the audience feels like they’re watching a visual version of a piece of journalism. This obviously changes towards the end when we get more manipulative, but the initial set-up says you’re watching something that really happened so sit back and watch it unfold. This is even more terrifying than trying to scare the audience and that aesthetic went through the music and sound design.
Question: There’s an almost dutiful sense of research behind some of the torture scenes, like the “head on a stick.” Was this common knowledge to you or did you look for interesting way to kill people?
Greg McLean: That’s real! That whole sequence is taken from the Milat case. When I read that I couldn’t believe it. That’s what he did to some of his victims, and that’s probably some of the worst stuff I’ve heard my whole life. That’s very real which is even more disturbing.
Question: Explain to me your whole approach to on-camera violence, every director within the genre - from Argento to Craven - has one, and each is palpably divergent.
Greg McLean: My approach to the ugliness in "Wolf Creek" was the same way Mike Leigh would unflinchingly hold the camera on moments of incredibly intense human drama. I thought, what would it be like to do the same thing and hold the camera on someone who’s being tortured? What is it like to not look away? Part of the goal, for me anyway as a storyteller, is to not look away because what we do in our real life is not stare, it’s rude to look at a situation unfold. We tend to look away and go back into our own world. It’s more rare and more interesting to not look away from that darkness - keep the audience looking at it. The positive thing to come of this is that you make your own judgments about what you’re seeing. Obviously it’s screwed up, but deal with it because the world is so full of real violence, especially the last five years. We think we get violence with a lot of television shows but what I think we see in news reporting, and shows like CSI, is we think we’re seeing violence. It’s actually not, these programs are always panning away. It’s a homogenized version of it. I think there’s a value of examining it for real because it says, ‘Okay, this is what it looks like and this is how bad it really is.’
Question: That said, were there any scenes in Creek that were particularly difficult to get through?
Greg McLean: The hardest was the first torture scene in the shed. That was incredibly hard for the crew and for the actors, as well, because they completely committed to it. We shot that scene over a span of two or three nights and it was unbelievably hard for Kestie, who plays Kristy. She and John had to have an incredible amount of trust between them, and they had to have a trust in me that I would look after them and make sure they were okay. Essentially it was up to them because they worked out what they wanted to do together as actors in the scene and encouraged each other to do more. Kestie would tell John, ‘The more intense you are the better my performance will be and I will just react to what you do.’ They were allowing each other to go all the way which was brave of them. At one point while shooting that scene, because the shed was so small, the crew and me had to be outside for the wide shot. It was just Kestie and John in there. I was listening on the headset and watching on the screen the scene unfold and, at one point, I literally sat up from my seat and thought something had gone wrong. I thought John had gone crazy and Kestie really wants to stop. I was going to go running in there, it was really quite bizarre and at the end of the take I ran in there and they were both like, ‘What are you talking about? We’re doing what you asked us to do!’ It was so convincing and so believable I thought he was really hurting her. I reacted how the audience will react, which is: how do I make this stop?!
Question: There’s a voyeuristic approach to that scene as well because we’re on the outside looking in.
Greg McLean: That’s right, from the moment Liz wakes up, the audience becomes her until the moment she dies. It’s like a powerful switch because we identified with her so heavily in the first part, when it becomes her story and how Liz gets out of this situation we are essentially her, and we’re literally seeing it from her point of view. It’s a powerful switch. If she doesn’t get out you don’t get out and you desperately want her to get out of this situation.
Question: Were there any challenges to doing a film like this due to your limited shooting schedule and budget?
Greg McLean: It was quite an experience because obviously I had been waiting so long and working so hard to get a film going. Basically on the first day of shooting I told myself, ‘Look, this is probably the only film you’re going to make your whole life.’ I just reminded myself to enjoy it and consciously not let anything stop what we’re trying to do. On a daily basis there are things that happened that could’ve potentially derailed the movie. We went to one location to shoot the crater scene and we found a fantastic spot that hadn’t rained there for five or six years. It was a completely dry and dusty Outback Australia setting. We get up there to shoot four weeks later and it rained for about a week! Halfway through shooting that scene - which was supposed to be shot in sunny, bright weather - it’s suddenly overcast and raining every day. We couldn’t stop shooting because we’d never get that day back, so what I did was incorporate that into the script. They get to the crater and it’s raining. We had our actors comment on the weather and it becomes a key part of the movie now because they’re saying how it’s raining and it shouldn’t be. What it says thematically is: this weather is unusual and heralds the bad things to come. The biggest thing, I guess, is to avoid potentially derailing things like this and make it work creatively. Make the script better by incorporating them and avoid missing a day filming. Roll with it. And I think it turned out real well because that scene has rolling thunder, the actors are wet, they get stuck in the car and I think it makes the movie that much better.
Question: There’s a definite sense of dread the minute the trio’s car breaks down. It almost has an air of the supernatural because of the stopped watches as well. It appears that Mick has honed in on this phenomenon and uses it to his advantage. What’s your take on it how does it fall into your theme of realism?
Greg McLean: It definitely has a supernatural vibe. There’s also the red herring about the alien activity that Ben mentions. What creeps into the movie is the suggestion of otherworldly forces, which is really great. When you’re in that location and people start talking about UFOs and that kind of stuff, your mind just runs wild with possibilities. By opening the possibility of something supernatural going on in that location, in that part of the world, it becomes creepy on a different level. It also prepares you for the idea that something supernaturally bad is coming your way. There are things that could have a logical explanation, but by the bizarre coincidence of two things you suddenly go, uh-oh, there’s something deeply wrong.
Question: Was your music selection incredibly important in conveying the true horrors that were unfolding in the film?
Greg McLean: The movie is in two parts, there’s no second act. It’s a forty-five minute set-up and a climax. We definitely wanted the first half to feel like a documentary. There are two music cues in the first half, one of them is the “Eagle Rock” track and we tried forty-five different songs for that sequence. We tried contemporary stuff, we tried some classical…a few weird selections. But I definitely wanted a rock ‘n roll track. Something from Mick’s era. I wanted it to be something he might listen to and there’s something very creepy about having a happy song like that to be in this kind of movie. I think on some level you hear that song and you think it’s some kind of a trick. It’s too good to be true to listen to a pop sequence like that. You know something is going to get fucked up. That’s the effect it has on me anyway. As for the rest of the movie, we wanted to be as observational as possible so there’s no swelling score in the first half. When the change in tone comes there’s pretty much music throughout every scene because once we’re in the shed we’re connected with the characters emotionally. So we wanted to start off with how they were feeling. Frank Tétaz, the composer, and I started looking at a lot of films thinking about the way the music is used in that movie and avoid a lot of obvious cues and stuff like that. We wanted to counterpoint to create some kind of effect. The more intense and action-y the sequence the more subtle Frank takes the music cue. What the movie starts to do is stop selling the horror to the audience and stop trying to tell them its scarier than it is and just letting them watch it unfold. It’s even more disturbing for an audience because the storyteller isn’t saying, ‘This is scary and you should feel disgusted.’ We’re just saying, ‘Here it is, it’s happening.’ Watch or don’t watch.
Question: So, you’re avoiding the idea of broadcasting the scares?
Greg McLean: That’s right, the audience is so smart and sophisticated these days with all of the movies and television show, on a narrative level audiences are clever. You have to be sophisticated these days to create something genuinely interesting. I think we made a decision to approach the music with truthfulness and not making it obvious. What would the sound feel like if you were in that environment?
Question: The sound design reflects that as well.
Greg McLean: And the sound design and music are closely linked. Our sound designer, mixer and composer all worked together through the mix. Sometimes we found a cue that was written that wouldn’t work and we opted to make it a sound design moment instead. I think design is one of the most underused tools in movies. The power of not having music is strong. Music is the lazy director’s out, something to rely on if he doesn’t know how to play a scene. There’s so much overuse of music in movies.
Question: How do you think shooting "Wolf Creek" in Australia made your experience and, ultimately your film, unique?
Greg McLean: In terms of that, basically, I had complete control of the movie, which is rare. I had final cut and shot the film I wanted to shoot. I was the writer as well as the producer so I could make the changes I needed to make. I sat in the edit room with the editor and we did our own little test screenings to see what worked. As a filmmaking experience, I’ll be lucky if I ever have another experience as perfect as that. What I mean by “perfect” is having the time to experiment and not having twenty people send me notes every day. There were no notes because it was basically my co-producers and me. Essentially they would protect the artist while making the movie. The film that’s being screened is exactly the film that came out of the editing room. When Bob and Harvey picked it up they were great. They did some screenings and there were some comments from people who said it was slow at the start. I actually believe that’s one of the best parts of the movie, I think people are commenting on it because it’s unusual. Producers or studios would push to get into the action a bit more or sooner. When people see something they haven’t seen before they comment negatively because it doesn’t remind them of some other film and therefore it must be bad as opposed to just trusting that it’s okay to take the time. Bob and Harvey thought it was cool and wanted to send it out like it is. They said they loved it. I mean, we weren’t making it for everyone. We had hopes people would dig it and it would go somewhere, but ultimately we’re just trying to make the best film we possibly could.
Question: "Wolf Creek" comes in the wake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "The Hills Have Eyes," when you sat down to write it were there any conventions you were trying to avoid and trying to achieve?
Greg McLean: I think "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" was a fairly large influence. Some people think it’s the scariest thing since "Massacre," I don’t personally think it is. I definitely set out to be as uncompromising as that film is and as unapologetic. "Massacre" is just the most remarkable, brutal comment - it’s actually an anti-comment because it’s saying nothing about what happened. It doesn’t say, “And these people were bad and they died in a shoot-out with the cops.” It ends with a psychopath waving a chainsaw on the highway, and it doesn’t tell you what to think about that! I’m glad we actually got to make a film and not have to explain it. You make of it what you will. These things do happen and there are people out in the world that act like that. That’s just part of life. You can make this film any day of the week, but you’d have to do it with private money. You have to do it in a way that you can. The other thing is that it’s hard to make a film with a countercultural comment and get it seen in the mainstream media today. If you look at "Massacre," it’s a remarkably bleak thing to say. To put it out there and make people look at it, it’s almost illegal. Going back to the earlier question about shooting in Australia… There wasn’t any attempt to please anybody when we make this movie. I was aware of the fact that it was a film so low budget it was probably the only time I can say something countercultural which is that evil gets away, the bad guy doesn’t get punished, the lead character who tries hard fails. These are things you’re really not allowed to say. This concept of the western capitalist ideal of “you work hard you will overcome the odds,” all these core beliefs of our culture, by making a comment like this is the reason it’s attractive to young people because they have a sense that these beliefs are not true anyway. By seeing a horror film that shatters those conventions they sense something truthful about the chaotic world we live in. We’re sending out and marketing films about happy smiling people while we’re also reading about torture, death and carnage.
Question: It falls in line with what horror veterans like Wes Craven and George Romero talk about in the documentary "The American Nightmare" which looks at the correlation between the horror films coming out of the sixties and the Vietnam War…
Greg McLean: Exactly!
Question: But what’s interesting is this rebel voice is coming not from America but from a country where people perceive it as a happy haven where nothing really happens.
Greg McLean: I’m a friend of Adam Simon who directed that documentary. It had a big impact on me because I remember talking with him about the relationship between the chaos and the culture. These movies were born out of the unconscious and the nightmares of the culture at the time. In retrospect I think there’s something in the dichotomy between what we tell ourselves and the kind of movies we put out there.
-- Conducted by Ryan Turek
