Wolf Creek 2: The return of Mad Mick

JOHN Jarratt – 'the nicest bloke you could ever meet' – had to go back to a dark place to reprise his role as a crazed killer on the loose in South Australia's Outback.

JOHN Jarratt – 'the nicest bloke you could ever meet' – had to go back to a dark place to reprise his role as a crazed killer on the loose in South Australia's Outback.

It’s been a while since John Jarratt was on television with wife Noni Hazlehurst talking about where to put the raised garden beds in relation to the barbecue in Better Homes and Gardens.

This sweet and non-threatening show about home decorating showcased Jarratt’s softer side. It was more than a decade ago, while he was still married to Hazlehurst (they are divorced but share two boys) and before his quintessential Aussie blokiness had been harnessed for a darker purpose.

It predated the 2005 watershed moment when Jarratt unleashed on the world the murderous and sadistic Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek. It has taken nine years but Wolf Creek 2 is about to give moviegoers a second encounter with Taylor and his house of horrors.

The real Jarratt seems a genial chap who grew up in country New South Wales and graduated from NIDA in the early 1970s. “I’m a good guy, this isn’t me,” he says. “I’ve got six kids. I’m nice.”

Back then he was part of a creative new wave of Australian cinema that produced a string of films that became cultural touchstones, like Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock and Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith. He was never a leading man. He filled a niche as a laconic Aussie character and made a career moving between film, television (he played Ned Kelly in The Last Outlaw) and theatre. In 2001, he found regular work in the hit soap drama, McLeod’s Daughters, in the role of Terry Dodge.

While doing McLeod’s Daughters an unknown director, Greg Mclean, rang. “He’d seen me in a play called Dead Heart, about black and white Australia set in this little settlement,” says Jarratt. “Bryan Brown played the role in the film and I did it in the play.” Mclean, who had only a short film to his name, wanted to cast Jarratt in Wolf Creek. Jarratt was intrigued but nervous.

“His background was in corporate videos, he’d never made a film, he had no money, he hadn’t directed anything before and he was going to shoot in digital – this was back in 2004 when digital was still pretty new,” says Jarratt. “And the two main English characters were going to be done by Australians. I was a bit worried.”

Mclean had drawn up a list of 20 possible actors to play the killer but the Dead Heart role had lodged in his brain. In it, Jarratt played a knockabout bloke who was also a corrupt and savagely racist cop. When they talked about Mick, Jarratt told him “I know this guy”; he was the sort of bush character Jarratt had grown up with.

“What he meant was, he totally understood Mick’s world view as he’d been around guys like that his whole life – aside from the serial killing, of course,” Mclean says. “Rough as guts pig shooters, really tough and occasionally violent blokes who lived close to the land.”

Mclean says he walked from their first meeting so happy that he was whistling, knowing he had found the right actor for the part. Jarratt was still hesitant but agreed and the film – made, he has said, for Mel Gibson’s lunch money – changed his life in ways he never expected. “Greg is really, really talented, he just exploded this story on to the screen,” he says. “The director of photography (Will Gibson) turned out to be brilliant. It was a great experience.”

Shot mainly in South Australia at Sandy Creek, Hawker, Port Germein and the Flinders Ranges, Wolf Creek had a $1 million budget, chicken feed in today’s terms. Money was so tight that Mclean, who wrote the film and directed it, saved money on extras by playing a police officer and an old man’s body.

It made more than $16 million, was released around the world and entered cinematic folklore as the first genuine Australian horror film, a kind of Texas Chainsaw Massacre set in the bush. The ominous clanging of the meat hooks on Taylor’s kangaroo truck has become the chilling sound of the terror that awaits.

“It’s because it’s so Australian,” says Jarratt. “There are a lot of horror movies out there and people kind of know what to expect but this has a very Australian character to it and I think people relate to that.”

The horrified fascination audiences had with Wolf Creek was egged on by the fact the nation had been engrossed by the Peter Falconio murder, the English backpacker killed and buried by outback loner Bradley Murdoch (who lived for a time in SA). Murdoch had flagged down Falconio and girlfriend Joanne Lees near Barrow Creek north of Alice Springs. This was the movie, right down to the plastic ties that trapped her hands behind her back as she fled into the scrub, that Lees should never see. Without being too precise, Wolf Creek billed itself as “based on true events”.

‘Isn’t he such a bad guy?” Jarratt says of Bradley Murdoch who snarled in front of the cameras as he emerged from the SA Supreme Court after his arrest. “He is the perfect guy to be Mick Taylor. Just look at him coming out of court that day.”

The surprise success of the first film meant a follow-up was guaranteed. Mclean said he deliberately created an ongoing horror character like Freddy Krueger who could be easily reprised. It took eight years to find the right script for Wolf Creek 2, during which time he made Rogue, a crocodile horror flick with a $26 million budget and Sam Worthington as the star.

“No, a sequel wasn’t a no-brainer, that’s why it’s taken this long,” says Jarratt, who also had a role in Rogue. “Greg wanted to do something that was worthy of being a successor to Wolf Creek so he wanted the script to be just right.” So he was happy to wait? “No, I wasn’t happy to wait, I wish it had been sooner,” Jarratt laughs. “It’s been a long time between pay cheques, but I understand.”

What follows isn’t a Wolf Creek 2 spoiler; in fact the producers are at pains to ensure the plot doesn’t leak out before the film opens later this month. Suffice to say that Mick is back, with a vengeance, and that the opening sequence with the Flinders Ranges near Port Augusta identifiable in the background is a gift to anyone who has had a speeding fine.

The outback is integral to the story and Mclean chose South Australia again because of its epic landscape. The set was based in Hawker for a few weeks which gave access to fields, forests and deserts within a few kilometres. “The main challenge was the heat, it was hot in a way that I haven’t experienced before,” Mclean says. “The whole area is also a wildlife park so there were thousands and thousands of kangaroos which caused different kinds of problems.”

Jarratt says the character of the laid-back roo shooter whose friendly charm conceals the psychopath beneath was a gift. “It was already there, written in the script,” he says. “He’s what Paul Hogan would be if he wasn’t a good guy.” He based Mick on his father who grew up on the land in an earlier era when the Australian vernacular was identifiably local. Mick’s speech is peppered with references to galahs, rabbits and wallabies.

“My father (Bruce) was a very good man but everything about Mick is Bruce and all of my relatives know and understand that,” he says. “It’s the songs and the culture and the sayings and the mannerisms.”

Jarratt this time gave Mick a backstory that helped unlock his motivations. He is a roo hunter but business is drying up and he is angry at being left behind. “There’s been a big influx of tourists, backpackers, into the north of Australia and the place has been overrun by ferals,” he says. “He’s angry at all these people coming into his part of the country and taking over so he decides to use these ferals for a bit of fun.”

There is a sexual overlay to the terror that makes it all the more horrifying. Mick doesn’t have much luck with women, Jarratt says, and every few weeks he has to drive to the coast to buy some. So why not have some fun? “He gets this idea that he can have these toys out here to play with,” he says. “It’s his country and he makes the rules.”

Filming horror isn’t pleasant or easy. Parts of this film are so scary even those who made it were frightened. Mclean says the character of Mick pervaded the making of the film. “The set is definitely affected by that,” he says. “You have to access a darker space to create a character and a film like this.”

On set, Jarratt says he isn’t usually much of a method actor but the five-week South Australian shoot was so demanding he wasn’t able to relax, or mix too closely with the other actors. “It’s a bit of a schizophrenic thing so I have to stand apart a bit,” he says. “I mean these things are anathema to me so I have to work it up. I can’t be sitting around having a coffee between takes and then the next minute I’m cutting them into pieces.”

Mclean says Jarratt was terrific on set. “The greatest irony is that John is the nicest bloke you could ever meet, seriously,” he says. “And he plays one of the most twisted, evil and sadistic bastards ever seen, to perfection.”

Before the first Wolf Creek, Jarratt had already been singled out by one of the eccentric geniuses of the film world, Pulp Fiction creator Quentin Tarantino. One day, coming home from the airport after filming an episode of McLeod’s, Tarantino called. He was in Australia on a publicity tour for Kill Bill and wanted Jarratt to join him at the premiere that night. “He had seen something I was in and decided I was his favourite Aussie actor and he wanted to meet me so we had a drink at Circular Quay,” says Jarratt.

“It was all very surreal. He knows more about Australian film than you or I, he has seen more Aussie films that anyone I know.”

Since then, Tarantino has written Jarratt into a scene – an odd and unnecessary scene, it must be said – in Django Unchained in which he and Tarantino appear together, both inexplicably speaking with Aussie accents. Tarantino also requested a signed Wolf Creek poster. Through him, Jarratt has met Hollywood producer Bob Weinstein, half of the Weinstein Company. All Weinstein said to him was, “you’re a scary guy”.

For good or bad, Mick Taylor is to Jarratt what Walter White in Breaking Bad is to Bryan Cranston; he is the breakthrough role that will be each actor’s epitaph. Jarratt acknowledges the doors it has opened but is also resisting the tendency to become typecast. “Look, it’s a double-edged sword,” he says.

“I know everyone knows me as Mick Taylor and that’s great but it has definitely cost me some roles.” He worries casting agents and producers have boxed him in too much as a crazed outback killer. Jarratt thinks they need to be more open to what an actor can do. “I think the public is fine with it but some producers – I’m getting on my soapbox here – can’t see past it,” he says.

“They see John Jarratt and they go, ‘no, he’s Mick Taylor, that’s who the audiences will see’ and they don’t have the imagination to move on.”

Last year he filmed the next Jack Irish telemovie for ABC TV release this year, with Guy Pearce, and he would like more work of the sort that recognises him as an elder statesman of his craft. “I think they should just put ‘veteran’ in front of actor when they talk about me,” he says. “Then they can turn me into Michael Caine.”

Wolf Creek 2 screens from February 20