Wolf Creek 2 set to scream into Australian theatres
IT HAS taken Wolf Creek director Greg Mclean the best part of a decade to get the sequel to his phenomenal debut off the ground. Will it be a howling success?
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IT HAS taken Wolf Creek director Greg Mclean the best part of a decade to get the sequel to his phenomenally successful, R-rated feature debut off the ground.
But if the home grown horror meister is feeling any pressure, he isn't showing it on location at an abandoned farmhouse about an hour and a half's drive out of Adelaide.
"Hot? This?," says a remarkably unharried Mclean, pulling up a chair in the open-sided catering tent where portable fans spray a fine mist over cast and crew.
Conditions here, on the red-dirt outskirts of Port Wakefield are mild when compared to the production's last location, a remote spot in the Flinders Rangers where the temperature regularly topped 40 degrees.
A $7 million budget - almost six times that of its predecessor - has allowed the filmmaker to explore the country's interior much more thoroughly second time around.
"When we made the first film, we were limited by money and time,'' says Mclean, approximately half way through the seven week shoot.
"With this one, we have been able to go to the places we originally wanted to go to."
Mclean admits he would have preferred to have shot Wolf Creek 2, as intended, three years ago - when production was delayed by an investor's late withdrawal.
But ultimately, he says, the audience will decide whether or not the wait was worth it.
"If it sucks, it wouldn't matter if it had taken 20 years to get it made."
It might be for the benefit of cast, crew and assembled media, but outward appearances suggest Mclean is quietly confident Wolf Creek 2 will live up to the hype generated by its predecessor, a surprise hit that inspired a new wave of Australian genre films.
His faith is supported by a string of positive early reviews that came out of the Venice Film Festival, where the film was selected to screen as part of the prestigious Midnight Program.
"Horror fans are very loyal once they find a character or situation they like," says Mclean, pointing out that the proliferation of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter has only served to intensify the Outback experience.
"It's particularly isolating today when people are so connected. You drop them into an environment (where there is no reception) and suddenly the anxiety level goes up 100 per cent. "
Even the cast and crew struggled with the limited reception they experienced in some of the more remote filming locations.
Mclean resisted the pressure to rush out a sequel after Wolf Creek took a whopping $28 million at the local box office.
"If I knew then what I know now - how long it would take to get this one up - I probably would have just said yes,'' he says.
Instead, he followed-up with a long-planned crocodile thriller, Rogue, starring Sam Worthington, Michael Vartan and Radha Mitchell.
With hindsight, that might have been a mistake - the 2007 creature feature underperformed at the box office - but it did give Mclean time to hone Wolf Creek 2's screenplay.
"The first movie was really just a relentless sledgehammer to the head. It just said splat. End," he says.
"This is really a much more entertaining movie, I think, because it explores the comedic aspects of Mick Taylor's character. There are horrifying things in the film but it has a tonal difference."
Wolf Creek 2 was never going to be able to repeat the successful formula of its predecessor - because by now, we all know the bad guy's identity.
"You can't play the same gag,'' says Mclean.
"In the first movie, it was the guy we last saw in Better Homes and Gardens. That was the context. Oh, there's that funny guy. Oh my God, he's knifing someone in the back now."
Mick Taylor is the focus of Wolf Creek 2, says Mclean, largely because he was the most interesting thing about the first movie.
"Not that we are explaining him because there is an element of this character we just can't explain. But we definitely spend much more time with him."
Mclean also promises more humour in the sequel.
"There will be laughs in the first five minutes of the movie, I guarantee it. It's not comedy, because it goes to a very dark place in the end, but what he is doing is entertaining."
Like Wolf Creek, which was influenced by the stories of Ivan Milat and Bradley Murdoch, Wolf Creek 2 is based on real events, but Mclean doesn't want to name names.
"It will be pretty obvious when you see the film."
But the original inspiration for Mick Taylor was a crocodile safari operator Mclean met while researching Rogue, which actually predated Wolf Creek.
"He is like this throwback to a kind of personality that doesn't exist much anymore. That's part of the appeal."
Mclean believes Crocodile Dundee's psychopathic cousin resonates so strongly with audiences because he is a physical manifestation of dark side of out sunburnt culture.
"Xenophobia, homophobia, racism, sexism - he's the ugly, shadow side of the Australian personality. Like that guy on the bus in Melbourne that abused that woman for singing that French song. If you have seen the video of that guy's face, you have seen what Wolf Creek is about and why it resonated,'' Mclean says.
"That mentality that sees people as being less than because of some difference, that's the horror in this movie. "
Wolf Creek opens in Australia on February 20.
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