Wolf Creek - Q&A with Greg McLean

Chris Tilly catches up with the writer-director to discuss his terrifying debut feature.

Sep 16 2005

Greg McLean is a writer-director whose debut effort is without doubt the most terrifying film experience of the year. Telling the tale of three backpackers who experience a terrible ordeal at the hands of a malevolent psychopath, 'Wolf Creek' has already received rapturous acclaim at both the Cannes and Sundance festivals, and with the film hitting UK cinemas today, Time Out decided to catch up with McLean to discuss the making of a horror classic.

You recently attended London's FrightFest, so how did that go?

It was great. I'm in pre-production on another movie so I wasn't initially going to be able to make it, then I decided I've got to get over there to support the film, and I'm so glad I did. It just went off. The audience was so into the film, and they were getting all the gags, it was just amazing – one of the best screenings I've been to. And it sounded really loud too, so you could here every bone crunch, which was great.

Where did the idea for 'Wolf Creek' come from?

About 10 years ago, I had the idea to set a thriller in the outback. I'm a big Alfred Hitchcock fan and there's this great quote where he said: 'The only thing you need to make a suspenseful film is to create some likeable characters and then isolate them.' And one of the most isolated places in the world is the Australian outback. I came up with the idea of a very evil bushman character, sort of like a bad 'Crocodile Dundee', and then just set about writing treatment after treatment and draft after draft of the script. Then similar true stories happened along the way. So I did lots of research into different cases and tiny elements of those found their way in, but primarily the story was around before those things happened.

So it's not based on a true story?

The story in the film is an amalgamation of several other stories, and I made the bad guy an amalgamation of several other characters, including the guy that 'Crocodile Dundee' was originally based on. He ended up getting killed in a police shoot-out, so elements of him and a few others are in there. There are very similar characteristics in those people, so I put them into my one character.

Was it important to capture that fear of isolation as well as the fear of the killer?

Well I think there's a general fear of isolation, but there's nothing quite like the isolation of the outback – because its so vast that if you get stuck there – it's so hot out there you can die in four or five hours. Just this year there was a British woman who was on tour at Ayers Rock, and walked home from a BBQ, went the wrong way, the sun came out and later that day she was dead. The landscape is so brutal, and it is a very, very different world out there. Parts of it can be pretty scary, but at the same time it's also very beautiful – you've just got to be aware of the dangers, just like if you're travelling anywhere.

How did you get the cast together?

We did a really broad casting around Australia for the three lead characters, and I pretty much said to my casting agent 'I don't care what they've done – they can have done twenty movies or no movies – as long as they can be incredibly naturalistic and believable as people.' I was definitely trying to cast actresses who looked like real people, and as soon as I saw the tests of these three, they shone through. They were also very confident onscreen. As for John Jarrat [psycho Mick Taylor in the film] he was actually the only guy I met for the role. As soon as I met him I knew – within 20 seconds. He started talking about shit and let it be known very quickly that he knew the character better than anyone I'd ever meet, because he grew up in a very rural, very outback environment. He was telling me stories about the very brutal nature of growing up in that place, in terms of drinking and shooting – it was just a very brutal place to grow up. And him telling me that was his way of saying 'I know where this guy is coming from, I know his world, and I can do this.' He convinced me and he's very convincing in the movie.

Did he take the character in directions you weren't expecting?

From when he was cast and during the whole process of pre-production, he was constantly coming up with ideas and lines. There are about five or six lines in the movie that he came up with, so he contributed an enormous amount. And he took an incredible amount of ownership of the character – he gave it everything he had and I think it's a really remarkable performance.

Did you enjoy the shoot or was it tougher than you expected?

I'd say that so far, it's the best experience of my life. Primarily because I've been trying to get films made for so many years. It was incredibly hard work and we had some pretty amazing odds stacked against us to pull the film off. We had 25 days to shoot the movie, very little money and we couldn't go over time, so we had to be very well prepared. But that was great because we storyboarded everything and planned it all to the nth degree. Things still went wrong, but I decided that I was never going to have this experience again, and so I enjoyed it like it was the only film I was ever going to make in my life. I approached every single shot like that – I put every little bit of my soul into the movie.

And what's it been like travelling the world publicising it?

Incredible – it's hard to describe. You dream of making a film, and then you've done it and people are responding to it. It's really odd. You become slightly accustomed to it pretty quickly, but you still don't get over the idea that it's you doing it; it's like an out-of-body experience. When I was at Cannes, I went to a lunch and suddenly Harvey Weinstein is introducing us and Robert Rodriguez and the 'Sin City' cast in the same breath. You're suddenly in a photo shoot with Benicio Del Toro and thinking 'What the fuck is going on – this is insane!' It's really amazing and it's a privilege because I've got lots of friends who have been working as hard as I have on film and just haven't had the opportunity yet, so I'm deeply aware of the wonderful situation I'm in.

And what have reactions to the film been like so far?

There have been people who hate it, but for a film that's as disgusting and nasty and generally unpleasant as 'Wolf Creek' is, it's had alarmingly good notices. I’m shocked and concerned that people are liking it so much because it's fucking fucked up. It's wrong. It shouldn't be seen – why would you want to watch that stuff?

The online community seems to have embraced it as well – is that a nice bonus?

It's been great – it's just such an amazing new media and I can't believe how great the internet has been for this film. Very early on we cut a little teaser trailer to put it out there, and suddenly there were 350,000 downloads of it. How could that ever have happened before? Then we sent out a few stills and suddenly it had a presence in the world that it never would have had without the net. And it's made it possible for a filmmaker or writer to directly access the fans and talk to them and for the fans to directly contact you. There's a relationship there that you never would have had previously.

What's going to be next for you?

I want to work in all kinds of genres. My background is kind of odd for someone who has just made a horror film because I studied at art school and wanted to become a painter, then I directed theatre after that and after that opera. It was like 'Hamlet' then 'The Magic Flute' and then 'Wolf Creek', so I guess something went wrong! My aesthetic take is broad and I've written a comedy and a drama and all sorts of things. I'm a fan of horror directors who work in all different types of storytelling and dip into the genre. And often I think they make more interesting horror films because they're not just making a horror film. They make it more truthful and I think the acting is often of a higher calibre. I'm talking about things like Stanley Kubrick doing 'The Shining' or Spielberg doing 'Jaws' or Hitchcock doing 'Psycho' or Ridley Scott doing 'Alien'. These are great visual storytellers who decide to tell a story in the key of horror, if you like. Who bring to it a thematic resonance that wouldn’t normally be there if it was just someone trying to throw some blood at the screen.

So do you know what your next film will be?

Actually, it’s a horror film! Its early days and we're just setting it up so I can't say too much, but it's going to be horror and it's a passion project that I've been working on for many years.

Will it be shot in Australia?

Yes, definitely – I'm going to keep it real.

'Wolf Creek' hits screens today and is reviewed here.

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