He may seem completely out there, but Wolf Creek’s villain is a lot more like you and I than we might care to admit, says writer-director Greg McLean.
John Jarratt with director Greg McLean on the set of Wolf Creek 2 John Jarratt stands in the doorway, a rifle slung over his shoulder, a slouch hat on his head, a flannelette shirt on his back. He is – unmistakably, iconically, and after a gap of more than eight years – once again Mick Taylor. Today, the sadistic serial killer at the heart of Wolf Creek is preparing to off an elderly couple in a derelict farm house about 90 minutes’ drive north of Adelaide (though it feels a lot more isolated than that). But first, his director has to frame the mayhem perfectly.
”Let’s just open the door again,” Greg McLean says from his seat at the far end of the hallway. Suddenly, the place is flooded with harsh light, as a wave of heat from the desert pours in.
McLean surveys the scene on his monitor, then glances at the screen of his laptop, on which the final scene of John Ford’s legendary 1956 western The Searchers is playing. If you’re going to quote from a classic, it pays to get it right.
In the set-up of his own shot, McLean is looking to echo the moment when John Wayne is framed in the doorway of a house into which he is not invited, with the desert at his back and, then, at his front. He’s aiming, for ”a direct inversion of that idea of the lone hero wandering out into the west”.
”This film is a western in lots of ways”.
In fact, the 43-year-old writer-director insists, Wolf Creek 2 is a whole bunch of things other than the horror film most people imagine it to be. ”It’s a comedy,” he tells me at one stage, before correcting himself. ”In my mind – and I could be delusional – it’s more of an action-suspense film with moments of horror.” Pause. ”Comedy is maybe going too far.”
Wolf Creek, released in 2005, cost $1.4 million and has made, McLean has said, somewhere north of $60 million globally. He could have made a sequel immediately afterwards but making the first was such a slog that going back-to-back would have been ”unthinkable”. Then again, he adds, ”If I knew then what I know now about how long it takes to get a sequel up I’d probably have said yes.”
This time he’s had a budget of about $7 million, which means he gets to stage car chases and to blow up a truck in quite spectacular fashion (and with a rather large nod to another cinematic reference point, Steven Spielberg’s 1971 film, Duel).
At one stage it was slated as a $13.2 million production, with Geoffrey Edelsten due to kick in $5 million, but in December 2011 the disgraced former medico pulled out on the eve of production.
”It was hugely embarrassing for us, that whole thing,” McLean says. ”But luckily he didn’t get involved; that’s how we view it.”
In returning to the scene of his first success, McLean feels he’s breaking new ground (”we don’t do horror sequels in this country”) even as he’s turning over old. He didn’t want to make a ”cheesy kind of sequel”; he’s not even terribly interested in ”gore and blood and stuff”, nor in making ”a stupid slasher horror film”.
”I’m more interested in why the character of Mick Taylor connected with Australian audiences,” he says. ”It’s not because it’s a horror film. It’s because Mick is about something else deeper and darker in the psyche of Australian people. People saw something truthful in the character.”
He’s not referring to the ”based on a true story” aspect of the films – a claim that, in all honesty, seems a little more tendentious in the sequel than it did in the first, with its unmissable nods to Bradley John Murdoch and Ivan Milat – so much as a psychological truth.
His villain is, he insists, ”the shadow part of the Australian psyche”, the bit of us we like to pretend doesn’t exist but, when we see it in fictional form, recognise all too well.
”The Australian culture is bright sunny beaches, Crocodile Dundee and all that kind of shit, and the shadow side of that is xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, racism, all that kind of stuff that we squash down but is alive and well,” he says.
In person, McLean is such a pleasant, affable guy it’s hard to imagine any of that kind of stuff in him, squashed down or otherwise. But whatever secrets he harbours in his dark places, he says he knows there are Mick Taylors out there for real.
”He’s based on a real guy,” he says, and I nearly fall off my seat and into the hard South Australian dirt at this news. ”Not the serial killing part, but every other element of him.”
McLean says he met the proto-Mick when he went to the Northern Territory to do some research for the script that eventually became Rogue (written before Wolf Creek, it became McLean’s vastly more expensive and less successful follow-up in 2007). He joined an outback safari tour, and in a group of Swedes, Canadians and Japanese, McLean and the tour guide were the only Australians. ”And this dude basically had this unbelievably un-PC way of talking to these people. He would literally pick out the nationality and a physical trait or something, and these people didn’t know how to take him. He would say the most incredibly sexist, racist things to these people, to their faces.”
It was, McLean says, ”funny, but tilted two degrees that way it was evil”. He says it reminded him of Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film Wake in Fright, ”that aggressive friendship where you’re not quite sure if someone is going to punch you or hug you”.
”It’s part of our culture, but that guy did it in a way that was really shocking and hilarious and scary.”
Of course, the landscape factors heavily into this equation too: it’s beautiful but it’s alien – and vast. And in all that space, no one can hear you scream. Or tweet.
”In an age where we have Twitter, Facebook, the internet and everything, when people lose their technology it’s very scary,” McLean says. Naturally, that’s precisely what happens to his hapless travellers.
In the new movie, before things get ugly there’s a stunning aerial shot of Wolf Creek (which is actually Wolfe Creek, a giant meteorite crater – the second-largest on the planet – in Western Australia) in which its beauty almost palpably wrestles with its threat. It’s a far-from-uncommon duality in our relationship with the Australian landscape, one in which isolation, lack of water, venomous creatures and sunstroke are never far from the next Instagram moment.
And for Mick Taylor, a man who sees killing tourists as his patriotic duty as well as a bit of fun, that threat represents opportunity. ”You’re vermin,” he seethes to one of his victims in the sequel. ”It’s my job to eradicate you.”
With a message like that, McLean is growing used to people telling him that his films are terrible for tourism. But, he says, ”The fact is people are going to see this movie all over the world. People will see how beautiful this country is, but unfortunately they’ll also see that if you come here you will die.”
For Wolf Creek 3, he says, warming to the theme, ”I’ll have to get Tourism Australia involved. There’s got to be some way we can work in a campaign around that.”
How about ”People are dying to see this country”? You know what? It just might work.
Wolf Creek 2 opens on February 20.
Karl Quinn SMH – February 15, 2014