Greg McLean has come up with a fresh twist on the slasher-horror movie. The one-time opera director talks to Donald Clarke
Wolf Creek is everywhere. Strolling down London's Oxford Street, I count 12 buses carrying advertisements for the satisfyingly gruesome Australian horror film. Greg McLean, its young director, is understandably feeling rather pleased with himself.
"Yeah, I can't believe it. It's great, isn't it?" he enthuses. "It's on 3,500 buses and another few thousand underground stations. I've got a photo of a bus on my phone."
It is an unlikely success story. McLean, a one-time opera director, who counts the films of the Danish Dogme movement among his main influences, knocked together Wolf Creek with a mere $1.4 million (€1.14 million) culled from private investors and government grants. Somehow or other the film attracted the attention of Dimension Pictures, the fearsome Weinstein brothers' genre division, and was picked up for US distribution. In November Wolf Creek, a small film from a smallish country, will open on 2,000 screens across America.
"Harvey Weinstein heard about this little Australian film and started yelling at his people: 'Why the f**k don't we have this?' " McLean says. "You hear all these stories about the Weinsteins, but, you know, they were incredibly good to me. They did this amazing deal and all of a sudden the story is in all the trade papers. I have had people trying to hire me ever since." It is easy to see why Wolf Creek attracted the attention of the notoriously volatile producers. A gratuitously unkind carve-up in the tradition of such unpleasant classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, McLean's film details the unhappy fate of three young backpackers in the Australian bush. When the kids' car breaks down in the middle of nowhere they are rescued - though anyone who has seen the poster will suspect that rescue may not quite be the word - by a bluff joker played by the veteran actor John Jarratt.
Though there are some worrying omens about the place, the viewer could conceivably watch the first half of Wolf Creek without realising he or she was watching a horror film. Then - with a jarring suddenness that reveals some artistic courage on the director's part - we cut to the aftermath of carnage. One of our heroes lies bound in a shed. Another is being tortured. Nice.
"Yes. The film is in two acts, rather than three," McLean explains. "We have a 40-minute set up and then straight into the final act. I thought it was interesting to take out the middle act, which would be when they are being attacked. Audiences are trained to go a particular way and the challenge is finding new ways to tell the story that they don't expect."
The film begins with a message telling us that what follows is based on a true story. There have indeed been several notorious cases of backpackers being murdered in the Australian interior, but I suspect that McLean is being a little cheeky here. This is surely - like the similar message at the beginning of the Coen brothers' Fargo - something of a tease.
"Yes, a little bit," he laughs. "It actually began with the idea of a killer with a big hat and a knife. I just thought of him some years ago and drew this sketch. And then he popped into my head when I heard of the true cases. Horror films are always that little bit more frightening when you believe this stuff really happened. But really this is more about Crocodile Dundee than the real perpetrators." By which he means, I take it, that Jarratt is playing a monstrous, poisoned version of the archetypal Australian good bloke.
"Yes. I guess every country has this stereotype of itself that is annoying. And I wanted to play with that. John is really seen in Australia as this jolly Australian guy. He has this home-handyman show on television, so he is the most unlikely guy to become a killer. I don't know who the version would be here." Gardening-show host Alan Titchmarsh? "Well I don't know who Alan Titchmarsh is. But if you say so. Imagine Alan Titchmarsh as a killer."
IN SO FAR as there is any particular way a horror-film director should look, Greg McLean does not look like a horror-film director. Neat, handsome, with prematurely grey hair, the articulate thinker probably felt quite at home in earlier times working on opera with Baz Luhrman.
He went to art school before studying direction at Australia's version of Rada, but always intended to move into film. This is his fifth script and the first that has made it into production. Would it be fair to suggest that he took up horror because he felt it was a genre that favoured low-budget production? Moving into slasher cinema via opera does remind one of the careers adviser in Monty Python who proposed that his client work his way into lion taming via banking.
"To an extent I did realise that, yes, it did suit the low budget," he admits. "But remember The Shining was directed by the same person who directed Barry Lyndon. The same person who made Jaws made The Colour Purple. Having stumbled into horror, I am assumed to spend my life in a basement covered in jelly watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That's not quite how it is."
Whatever his motivation, McLean demonstrates a real touch for the genre. Using hand-held digital cameras, he gives the film a gritty documentary feel that lends the violence a worrying realism. While playing at respectable films festivals such as Cannes and Sundance, Wolf Creek took some punters by surprise.
"Oh we have had so many walkouts it's unbelievable," he says. "When it is on general release and has a certificate then people have a better idea what they are seeing. But at festivals and so on the reaction has been amazing. At a Melbourne screening we had two people pass out.
"There was another woman at Sundance whose heart began palpitating and she had to leave. Then she went back in again and she just began feeling sick again. We had somebody throw up at Cannes." He says all this with a disturbing amount of glee. He must surely have had a few punters denouncing him as a dangerous pervert. Feminist viewers might well see the several mutilations of women as evidence of a worrying strain of misogyny. Greg laughs heartily.
"Ha ha ha! Look, I can only speak as a guy who has just made a horror film. I don't think I have any sinister misogynistic feelings towards women. In a way women are just that bit more vulnerable and that is useful if you are making a horror film. Yes I suppose some people could see this as a film made by people who have problems with their mummies or whatever. But I really don't think I have."
As if to prove the point, when we have finished our interview he leaps up and sprints for the nearest underground station. Where is he off to? "Oh nowhere, I just have to get a photograph of a poster in the station for my mum." Sweet.
Wolf Creek is on general release