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Herald Sun
November 8, 2007
Wolf Creek director Greg McLean makes Rogue
Rogue should hold its own with audiences despite being snubbed by AFI judges, but its cast had to deal with some harsh conditions for their art.
By Claire Sutherland
Michael Vartan is freezing.
His lightweight suit and once stylish loafers offer little protection against the unseasonally cold Warburton night.Sadly for Vartan and his fellow Rogue cast members, this private lake in Warburton is standing in for the steamy Northern Territory, so olive oil is being sprayed liberally to replicate sweat, and shivering is discouraged.
Caroline Brazier, playing a panic-stricken American tourist, is being stoic. A few weeks earlier the cast had endured a steamy 50C as they filmed in the Territory.
"I made a pact with myself that I would never complain about the cold after that heat," she says.
"That f---er never mentioned anything about shooting in that," Vartan adds, referring to director Greg McLean.
"That was absolutely insane. I've been to Vegas when it's 52C, but that's just going from one casino to the next. This was really intense, the harshest climate I've ever worked in."
Vartan is the sole American on set and despite the tough shoot he's having a ball.
A year later, in Melbourne to promote the film, he laughs off McLean's assertion his star rang his agent on day one to try to weasel his way out of the movie.
"I never thought about quitting because I'm not a quitter," he says in mock macho accent.
"This is how the project was pitched to me by my agents: 'How would you feel about going to the Northern Territory for four months to do a giant crocodile movie?' Well, I'd rather stick needles in my eyes, frankly.
"But I spoke to Greg for a couple of hours and we had a really great chat. Then I saw (McLean's first film) Wolf Creek and thought, 'Well, this would be an amazing opportunity to work with someone clearly very raw and talented who just likes to make good, scary movies'."
And the alleged panicked call to his agent?
"4pm on the first day it was 53C with 98 per cent humidity. I had a mini breakdown inside. I said, 'F--- me, I can't do this for four months!' Then I turned around and saw Heather (co-star Heather Mitchell). She was just looking at the beautiful landscape. She seemed so happy and I thought, 'You just have to suck it up. You can't be the token person who needs to get off the boat for no reason'."
According to his other co-star, Radha Mitchell, a few days is all it takes to get used to the heat.
"So, with global warming coming, don't worry, you do get used to it," she says merrily.
The boat in question is the Suzanne, now retired from the movie business and plying a trade as a night cruiser on Djarradjin Billabong in Kakadu National Park.
In Rogue, Vartan plays one of nine tourists, two locals and a dog who are stranded on an island in a Northern Territory tidal river after the Suzanne is put out of action by an aggressive croc.
What would he do in real life?
"I've spent many a night thinking what would I actually do. I would learn how to climb that tree in a hurry. I would probably throw the dog in," he says.
Mitchell plays the feisty tour guide and captain, and Wolf Creek's John Jarratt returns to the McLean fold as a lonely widower.
Mitchell met McLean at an Australians-in-film function in Los Angeles and thought Wolf Creek "a really fun film" -- an opinion that can only raise the question of what Mitchell does for kicks. Pulls the wings off flies, perhaps?
One of the most intense and graphic horror movies in Australian history and the film credited with starting the so-called torture-porn movie trend, Wolf Creek was McLean's bloody calling card, a calling card an actor could be forgiven for throwing out with the junk mail.
Not Mitchell.
"That didn't put me off. It put me on," she laughs. "I thought it was like a really macabre version of Y Tu Mama Tambien and had charm and humour and at the same time was twisted, very twisted. I liked his point of view; he was taking horror to the next level."
But she's quick to point out Rogue is a different kettle of croc. This time the terroriser is an animal displaying unusual, but not unheard of, behaviour.
McLean says he wrote Rogue before Wolf Creek, but the latter was a cheaper option for a first-time director to get off the ground.
"Rogue's tonally very different because it was me playing with my first ideas about the kind of movies I'd like to see made in Australia -- a big, high-production value film that was Australian-made with amazing effects and great acting. I wasn't seeing what I wanted to see," he says.
"Wolf Creek and Rogue had very different ambitions and very different goals and this was definitely to make an old-fashioned matinee-style thriller."
Not that he denounces his controversial Wolf Creek beginnings.
"I'm totally comfortable with the content of the film and how intense it is and I'm proud of the achievement of making a really effective horror film," he says.
"But when you make a film, your whole world becomes that film. You spend two or three years just trying to achieve that particular thing, and when you do something differently, like this film, you look back on that other film and think that was a different person doing that."
Filming of Rogue started at three locations in the Northern Territory -- Katherine Gorge, Yellow Waters and Red Lily Billabong in Kakadu. In the film they are merged to create one waterway.
McLean calls his film one enormous Northern Territory postcard, but when it came time to put actors in the water, a croc-free zone was required. Hence the Warburton lake. A warehouse in Maidstone, recently vacated by Charlotte's Web, was used to create the croc's lair -- the strewing of real animal bones giving it an authentic aroma only the actors could appreciate.
Mitchell describes a Greg McLean shoot as like being on a school camp.
One night in the Territory, cast and crew celebrated her birthday and a crew member's impending marriage with a party.
"Some crew members and some of the cast did a male strip show and Stephen Curry won for being extremely sexy and funny and for going the full monty," she says.
With a $25 million price tag (compliments of US producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein) Rogue is the most expensive horror film made in Australia, and probably the third most expensive local film after Moulin Rogue and the forthcoming Australia.
With a big advertising and promotional push and McLean's Wolf Creek credentials, it's likely to be the most successful Australian film of the year in terms of box-office takings.
But not in terms of peer acclaim.
The film missed out on all but a visual-effects nomination at the recent AFI Awards announcements.
"They seem to have this exclusionist point of view. I'm not an expert but there's a certain kind of movie they want to reward and I think they think this movie is going to do fine without them endorsing it, so they don't feel it needs that kind of support," Mitchell says.
"Personally, I think Greg's done an amazing thing -- he's brought all of this money into Australia, he's made this movie with an almost exclusively Australian cast, all-Australian crew."
McLean, himself, is bleeding for his crew -- in particular composer Francois Tetaz, who wrote an eerie and beautiful score for the film.
"The Australian audience was ready to see an Australian-based movie that was genre-based and they embraced it. Is the Australian film establishment ready to embrace the idea that commercial film can be good as well? I think we've just proven possibly not," he says.
"It's unbelievably strange and I'm scared to examine it further because I'm scared of what I might find; I'm scared I might find incredibly small-minded folks and I don't want to believe that.
"I'm the last person to cry sour grapes. I'm sure there are lots of great feature films entered into the AFI Awards that didn't get nominations and it's not that we should because we're a big film, it's just conspicuous in its absence for extremely talented craft areas. It's a little bit strange."
© Herald Sun 2007
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