Latest news with #AustralianNewWave
The Advertiser
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Riding the New Wave: how Aussie movies won the world
When Australian New Wave movies burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and peculiar colloquialisms. Sunday Too Far Away, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first big hit of Australia's golden era of cinema but Americans were especially mystified by it, producer Matt Carroll remembers. "They recognised that Sunday was a great film but they didn't understand it," he says. "It was pretty incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might as well have had it in Dutch." But French audiences were far more welcoming of the film at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the wife of an Adelaide car dealer who'd sold Carroll a Peugeot. "She said, 'oh yes darling, I know Parisian street slang, I'll translate it all for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues. "I remember sitting in the cinema and the first thing that comes up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was translated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'." In the huge screening room, "the whole audience just went crazy, absolutely crazy, and we got a huge sale to France", Carroll laughs. "It's the language of the bush," explains legendary Australian actor Jack Thompson, who portrayed the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley. "There's a wonderful camaraderie expressed in that movie. Sunday says something much more profound about the Australian character than a number of other movies that examined our victories and failures." Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, says "it was like a diary, it was just how people behaved - I remember, because as a teenager, I was in those sheds. "Sunday Too Far Away has a really important part in my career and in my memory; I'd worked on that wool press, I'd picked up that wool. I knew how tough it was … it was the world of working men." Thompson was a star of a slew of other New Wave movies, including Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River. Carroll recalls also feeling well qualified to be involved in Sunday Too Far Away, which was filmed at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn. "I grew up on a sheep property so I learned how to class wool. My honours thesis was in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to find a shearing shed, I knew exactly where they were," he says. "And Jack and I were sharing a house together, and I knew that he was a shearer, and I was there when the director said, 'I don't know where we're going to find shearers from'. And I said, 'Well, I know'. Thompson and Carroll recently visited Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far Away, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a key role in the era. "The SAFC was an important beacon in the growth of the Australian film industry," says Thompson. "Tale after tale important to our understanding of ourselves was told and financed by that entity." The New York Times described Australian New Wave as "capturing a moment of freedom and abundance that was over almost before we knew it" and "possessing a vitality, a love of open space and a propensity for sudden violence and languorous sexuality". "That's me," says Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan. "Used to be, mate," laughs Carroll, 80. As a young actor, it was like "riding the crest of a wave, it was stunning", says Thompson. "There was indeed a very focused vitality, a unique charm, unlike anything else at the time." Carroll, who also produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, says the 1970s was a remarkable period for Australian movies. "More than 220 films, that's more than 20 films a year. And when you read the titles, it's just staggering," he says. "We never had another period like that, with the inventiveness and the creativity." The SAFC's second feature, the enigmatic and menacing Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also turns 50 this year, became an icon of Australian cinema. "The great thing that happened after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans understood it," says Carroll. "And then Breaker Morant came along and they clicked with it and it had huge results, and then the second Mad Max was a giant hit. So those three films were key to opening up the American market." Thompson notes that Australia made the world's first feature-length narrative movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had a vital Australian film industry in the silent era up to 1927". "Hollywood and the American investment in theatre chains here was able to dominate the Australian film industry, and essentially, between 1930 and the 70s, nothing much happened in Australian cinema," he says. While Sunday Too Far Away was New Wave's first commercial success, 1971's Wake In Fright is widely regarded as the era's opening film. It was Thompson's first movie and the last for veteran character actor Chips Rafferty, who died of a heart attack before it was released. It screened at Cannes and received favourable responses in France and the UK but struggled at the Australian box office. It's the story of a teacher waylaid in a mining town where a gambling spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he participates in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is also subjected to moral degradation. It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson recalls, "and people were saying 'that's not us', despite the fact the book was written by an Australian". "Because when we were seen on screen (previously), we were seen as these pleasant caricatures, we weren't used to seeing it and we didn't want to see it," he says. During an early Australian screening, when a man stood up, pointed at the screen and protested "that's not us!", Thompson famously yelled back "sit down, mate. It is us". When Australian New Wave movies burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and peculiar colloquialisms. Sunday Too Far Away, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first big hit of Australia's golden era of cinema but Americans were especially mystified by it, producer Matt Carroll remembers. "They recognised that Sunday was a great film but they didn't understand it," he says. "It was pretty incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might as well have had it in Dutch." But French audiences were far more welcoming of the film at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the wife of an Adelaide car dealer who'd sold Carroll a Peugeot. "She said, 'oh yes darling, I know Parisian street slang, I'll translate it all for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues. "I remember sitting in the cinema and the first thing that comes up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was translated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'." In the huge screening room, "the whole audience just went crazy, absolutely crazy, and we got a huge sale to France", Carroll laughs. "It's the language of the bush," explains legendary Australian actor Jack Thompson, who portrayed the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley. "There's a wonderful camaraderie expressed in that movie. Sunday says something much more profound about the Australian character than a number of other movies that examined our victories and failures." Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, says "it was like a diary, it was just how people behaved - I remember, because as a teenager, I was in those sheds. "Sunday Too Far Away has a really important part in my career and in my memory; I'd worked on that wool press, I'd picked up that wool. I knew how tough it was … it was the world of working men." Thompson was a star of a slew of other New Wave movies, including Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River. Carroll recalls also feeling well qualified to be involved in Sunday Too Far Away, which was filmed at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn. "I grew up on a sheep property so I learned how to class wool. My honours thesis was in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to find a shearing shed, I knew exactly where they were," he says. "And Jack and I were sharing a house together, and I knew that he was a shearer, and I was there when the director said, 'I don't know where we're going to find shearers from'. And I said, 'Well, I know'. Thompson and Carroll recently visited Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far Away, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a key role in the era. "The SAFC was an important beacon in the growth of the Australian film industry," says Thompson. "Tale after tale important to our understanding of ourselves was told and financed by that entity." The New York Times described Australian New Wave as "capturing a moment of freedom and abundance that was over almost before we knew it" and "possessing a vitality, a love of open space and a propensity for sudden violence and languorous sexuality". "That's me," says Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan. "Used to be, mate," laughs Carroll, 80. As a young actor, it was like "riding the crest of a wave, it was stunning", says Thompson. "There was indeed a very focused vitality, a unique charm, unlike anything else at the time." Carroll, who also produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, says the 1970s was a remarkable period for Australian movies. "More than 220 films, that's more than 20 films a year. And when you read the titles, it's just staggering," he says. "We never had another period like that, with the inventiveness and the creativity." The SAFC's second feature, the enigmatic and menacing Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also turns 50 this year, became an icon of Australian cinema. "The great thing that happened after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans understood it," says Carroll. "And then Breaker Morant came along and they clicked with it and it had huge results, and then the second Mad Max was a giant hit. So those three films were key to opening up the American market." Thompson notes that Australia made the world's first feature-length narrative movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had a vital Australian film industry in the silent era up to 1927". "Hollywood and the American investment in theatre chains here was able to dominate the Australian film industry, and essentially, between 1930 and the 70s, nothing much happened in Australian cinema," he says. While Sunday Too Far Away was New Wave's first commercial success, 1971's Wake In Fright is widely regarded as the era's opening film. It was Thompson's first movie and the last for veteran character actor Chips Rafferty, who died of a heart attack before it was released. It screened at Cannes and received favourable responses in France and the UK but struggled at the Australian box office. It's the story of a teacher waylaid in a mining town where a gambling spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he participates in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is also subjected to moral degradation. It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson recalls, "and people were saying 'that's not us', despite the fact the book was written by an Australian". "Because when we were seen on screen (previously), we were seen as these pleasant caricatures, we weren't used to seeing it and we didn't want to see it," he says. During an early Australian screening, when a man stood up, pointed at the screen and protested "that's not us!", Thompson famously yelled back "sit down, mate. It is us". When Australian New Wave movies burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and peculiar colloquialisms. Sunday Too Far Away, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first big hit of Australia's golden era of cinema but Americans were especially mystified by it, producer Matt Carroll remembers. "They recognised that Sunday was a great film but they didn't understand it," he says. "It was pretty incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might as well have had it in Dutch." But French audiences were far more welcoming of the film at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the wife of an Adelaide car dealer who'd sold Carroll a Peugeot. "She said, 'oh yes darling, I know Parisian street slang, I'll translate it all for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues. "I remember sitting in the cinema and the first thing that comes up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was translated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'." In the huge screening room, "the whole audience just went crazy, absolutely crazy, and we got a huge sale to France", Carroll laughs. "It's the language of the bush," explains legendary Australian actor Jack Thompson, who portrayed the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley. "There's a wonderful camaraderie expressed in that movie. Sunday says something much more profound about the Australian character than a number of other movies that examined our victories and failures." Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, says "it was like a diary, it was just how people behaved - I remember, because as a teenager, I was in those sheds. "Sunday Too Far Away has a really important part in my career and in my memory; I'd worked on that wool press, I'd picked up that wool. I knew how tough it was … it was the world of working men." Thompson was a star of a slew of other New Wave movies, including Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River. Carroll recalls also feeling well qualified to be involved in Sunday Too Far Away, which was filmed at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn. "I grew up on a sheep property so I learned how to class wool. My honours thesis was in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to find a shearing shed, I knew exactly where they were," he says. "And Jack and I were sharing a house together, and I knew that he was a shearer, and I was there when the director said, 'I don't know where we're going to find shearers from'. And I said, 'Well, I know'. Thompson and Carroll recently visited Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far Away, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a key role in the era. "The SAFC was an important beacon in the growth of the Australian film industry," says Thompson. "Tale after tale important to our understanding of ourselves was told and financed by that entity." The New York Times described Australian New Wave as "capturing a moment of freedom and abundance that was over almost before we knew it" and "possessing a vitality, a love of open space and a propensity for sudden violence and languorous sexuality". "That's me," says Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan. "Used to be, mate," laughs Carroll, 80. As a young actor, it was like "riding the crest of a wave, it was stunning", says Thompson. "There was indeed a very focused vitality, a unique charm, unlike anything else at the time." Carroll, who also produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, says the 1970s was a remarkable period for Australian movies. "More than 220 films, that's more than 20 films a year. And when you read the titles, it's just staggering," he says. "We never had another period like that, with the inventiveness and the creativity." The SAFC's second feature, the enigmatic and menacing Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also turns 50 this year, became an icon of Australian cinema. "The great thing that happened after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans understood it," says Carroll. "And then Breaker Morant came along and they clicked with it and it had huge results, and then the second Mad Max was a giant hit. So those three films were key to opening up the American market." Thompson notes that Australia made the world's first feature-length narrative movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had a vital Australian film industry in the silent era up to 1927". "Hollywood and the American investment in theatre chains here was able to dominate the Australian film industry, and essentially, between 1930 and the 70s, nothing much happened in Australian cinema," he says. While Sunday Too Far Away was New Wave's first commercial success, 1971's Wake In Fright is widely regarded as the era's opening film. It was Thompson's first movie and the last for veteran character actor Chips Rafferty, who died of a heart attack before it was released. It screened at Cannes and received favourable responses in France and the UK but struggled at the Australian box office. It's the story of a teacher waylaid in a mining town where a gambling spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he participates in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is also subjected to moral degradation. It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson recalls, "and people were saying 'that's not us', despite the fact the book was written by an Australian". "Because when we were seen on screen (previously), we were seen as these pleasant caricatures, we weren't used to seeing it and we didn't want to see it," he says. During an early Australian screening, when a man stood up, pointed at the screen and protested "that's not us!", Thompson famously yelled back "sit down, mate. It is us". When Australian New Wave movies burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and peculiar colloquialisms. Sunday Too Far Away, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first big hit of Australia's golden era of cinema but Americans were especially mystified by it, producer Matt Carroll remembers. "They recognised that Sunday was a great film but they didn't understand it," he says. "It was pretty incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might as well have had it in Dutch." But French audiences were far more welcoming of the film at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the wife of an Adelaide car dealer who'd sold Carroll a Peugeot. "She said, 'oh yes darling, I know Parisian street slang, I'll translate it all for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues. "I remember sitting in the cinema and the first thing that comes up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was translated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'." In the huge screening room, "the whole audience just went crazy, absolutely crazy, and we got a huge sale to France", Carroll laughs. "It's the language of the bush," explains legendary Australian actor Jack Thompson, who portrayed the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley. "There's a wonderful camaraderie expressed in that movie. Sunday says something much more profound about the Australian character than a number of other movies that examined our victories and failures." Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, says "it was like a diary, it was just how people behaved - I remember, because as a teenager, I was in those sheds. "Sunday Too Far Away has a really important part in my career and in my memory; I'd worked on that wool press, I'd picked up that wool. I knew how tough it was … it was the world of working men." Thompson was a star of a slew of other New Wave movies, including Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River. Carroll recalls also feeling well qualified to be involved in Sunday Too Far Away, which was filmed at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn. "I grew up on a sheep property so I learned how to class wool. My honours thesis was in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to find a shearing shed, I knew exactly where they were," he says. "And Jack and I were sharing a house together, and I knew that he was a shearer, and I was there when the director said, 'I don't know where we're going to find shearers from'. And I said, 'Well, I know'. Thompson and Carroll recently visited Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far Away, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a key role in the era. "The SAFC was an important beacon in the growth of the Australian film industry," says Thompson. "Tale after tale important to our understanding of ourselves was told and financed by that entity." The New York Times described Australian New Wave as "capturing a moment of freedom and abundance that was over almost before we knew it" and "possessing a vitality, a love of open space and a propensity for sudden violence and languorous sexuality". "That's me," says Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan. "Used to be, mate," laughs Carroll, 80. As a young actor, it was like "riding the crest of a wave, it was stunning", says Thompson. "There was indeed a very focused vitality, a unique charm, unlike anything else at the time." Carroll, who also produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, says the 1970s was a remarkable period for Australian movies. "More than 220 films, that's more than 20 films a year. And when you read the titles, it's just staggering," he says. "We never had another period like that, with the inventiveness and the creativity." The SAFC's second feature, the enigmatic and menacing Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also turns 50 this year, became an icon of Australian cinema. "The great thing that happened after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans understood it," says Carroll. "And then Breaker Morant came along and they clicked with it and it had huge results, and then the second Mad Max was a giant hit. So those three films were key to opening up the American market." Thompson notes that Australia made the world's first feature-length narrative movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had a vital Australian film industry in the silent era up to 1927". "Hollywood and the American investment in theatre chains here was able to dominate the Australian film industry, and essentially, between 1930 and the 70s, nothing much happened in Australian cinema," he says. While Sunday Too Far Away was New Wave's first commercial success, 1971's Wake In Fright is widely regarded as the era's opening film. It was Thompson's first movie and the last for veteran character actor Chips Rafferty, who died of a heart attack before it was released. It screened at Cannes and received favourable responses in France and the UK but struggled at the Australian box office. It's the story of a teacher waylaid in a mining town where a gambling spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he participates in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is also subjected to moral degradation. It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson recalls, "and people were saying 'that's not us', despite the fact the book was written by an Australian". "Because when we were seen on screen (previously), we were seen as these pleasant caricatures, we weren't used to seeing it and we didn't want to see it," he says. During an early Australian screening, when a man stood up, pointed at the screen and protested "that's not us!", Thompson famously yelled back "sit down, mate. It is us".
West Australian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- West Australian
Riding the New Wave: how Aussie movies won the world
When Australian New Wave movies burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and peculiar colloquialisms. Sunday Too Far Away, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first big hit of Australia's golden era of cinema but Americans were especially mystified by it, producer Matt Carroll remembers. "They recognised that Sunday was a great film but they didn't understand it," he says. "It was pretty incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might as well have had it in Dutch." But French audiences were far more welcoming of the film at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the wife of an Adelaide car dealer who'd sold Carroll a Peugeot. "She said, 'oh yes darling, I know Parisian street slang, I'll translate it all for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues. "I remember sitting in the cinema and the first thing that comes up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was translated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'." In the huge screening room, "the whole audience just went crazy, absolutely crazy, and we got a huge sale to France", Carroll laughs. "It's the language of the bush," explains legendary Australian actor Jack Thompson, who portrayed the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley. "There's a wonderful camaraderie expressed in that movie. Sunday says something much more profound about the Australian character than a number of other movies that examined our victories and failures." Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, says "it was like a diary, it was just how people behaved - I remember, because as a teenager, I was in those sheds. "Sunday Too Far Away has a really important part in my career and in my memory; I'd worked on that wool press, I'd picked up that wool. I knew how tough it was … it was the world of working men." Thompson was a star of a slew of other New Wave movies, including Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River. Carroll recalls also feeling well qualified to be involved in Sunday Too Far Away, which was filmed at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn. "I grew up on a sheep property so I learned how to class wool. My honours thesis was in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to find a shearing shed, I knew exactly where they were," he says. "And Jack and I were sharing a house together, and I knew that he was a shearer, and I was there when the director said, 'I don't know where we're going to find shearers from'. And I said, 'Well, I know'. Thompson and Carroll recently visited Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far Away, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a key role in the era. "The SAFC was an important beacon in the growth of the Australian film industry," says Thompson. "Tale after tale important to our understanding of ourselves was told and financed by that entity." The New York Times described Australian New Wave as "capturing a moment of freedom and abundance that was over almost before we knew it" and "possessing a vitality, a love of open space and a propensity for sudden violence and languorous sexuality". "That's me," says Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan. "Used to be, mate," laughs Carroll, 80. As a young actor, it was like "riding the crest of a wave, it was stunning", says Thompson. "There was indeed a very focused vitality, a unique charm, unlike anything else at the time." Carroll, who also produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, says the 1970s was a remarkable period for Australian movies. "More than 220 films, that's more than 20 films a year. And when you read the titles, it's just staggering," he says. "We never had another period like that, with the inventiveness and the creativity." The SAFC's second feature, the enigmatic and menacing Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also turns 50 this year, became an icon of Australian cinema. "The great thing that happened after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans understood it," says Carroll. "And then Breaker Morant came along and they clicked with it and it had huge results, and then the second Mad Max was a giant hit. So those three films were key to opening up the American market." Thompson notes that Australia made the world's first feature-length narrative movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had a vital Australian film industry in the silent era up to 1927". "Hollywood and the American investment in theatre chains here was able to dominate the Australian film industry, and essentially, between 1930 and the 70s, nothing much happened in Australian cinema," he says. While Sunday Too Far Away was New Wave's first commercial success, 1971's Wake In Fright is widely regarded as the era's opening film. It was Thompson's first movie and the last for veteran character actor Chips Rafferty, who died of a heart attack before it was released. It screened at Cannes and received favourable responses in France and the UK but struggled at the Australian box office. It's the story of a teacher waylaid in a mining town where a gambling spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he participates in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is also subjected to moral degradation. It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson recalls, "and people were saying 'that's not us', despite the fact the book was written by an Australian". "Because when we were seen on screen (previously), we were seen as these pleasant caricatures, we weren't used to seeing it and we didn't want to see it," he says. During an early Australian screening, when a man stood up, pointed at the screen and protested "that's not us!", Thompson famously yelled back "sit down, mate. It is us".
Perth Now
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Riding the New Wave: how Aussie movies won the world
When Australian New Wave movies burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and peculiar colloquialisms. Sunday Too Far Away, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first big hit of Australia's golden era of cinema but Americans were especially mystified by it, producer Matt Carroll remembers. "They recognised that Sunday was a great film but they didn't understand it," he says. "It was pretty incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might as well have had it in Dutch." But French audiences were far more welcoming of the film at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the wife of an Adelaide car dealer who'd sold Carroll a Peugeot. "She said, 'oh yes darling, I know Parisian street slang, I'll translate it all for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues. "I remember sitting in the cinema and the first thing that comes up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was translated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'." In the huge screening room, "the whole audience just went crazy, absolutely crazy, and we got a huge sale to France", Carroll laughs. "It's the language of the bush," explains legendary Australian actor Jack Thompson, who portrayed the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley. "There's a wonderful camaraderie expressed in that movie. Sunday says something much more profound about the Australian character than a number of other movies that examined our victories and failures." Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, says "it was like a diary, it was just how people behaved - I remember, because as a teenager, I was in those sheds. "Sunday Too Far Away has a really important part in my career and in my memory; I'd worked on that wool press, I'd picked up that wool. I knew how tough it was … it was the world of working men." Thompson was a star of a slew of other New Wave movies, including Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River. Carroll recalls also feeling well qualified to be involved in Sunday Too Far Away, which was filmed at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn. "I grew up on a sheep property so I learned how to class wool. My honours thesis was in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to find a shearing shed, I knew exactly where they were," he says. "And Jack and I were sharing a house together, and I knew that he was a shearer, and I was there when the director said, 'I don't know where we're going to find shearers from'. And I said, 'Well, I know'. Thompson and Carroll recently visited Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far Away, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a key role in the era. "The SAFC was an important beacon in the growth of the Australian film industry," says Thompson. "Tale after tale important to our understanding of ourselves was told and financed by that entity." The New York Times described Australian New Wave as "capturing a moment of freedom and abundance that was over almost before we knew it" and "possessing a vitality, a love of open space and a propensity for sudden violence and languorous sexuality". "That's me," says Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan. "Used to be, mate," laughs Carroll, 80. As a young actor, it was like "riding the crest of a wave, it was stunning", says Thompson. "There was indeed a very focused vitality, a unique charm, unlike anything else at the time." Carroll, who also produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, says the 1970s was a remarkable period for Australian movies. "More than 220 films, that's more than 20 films a year. And when you read the titles, it's just staggering," he says. "We never had another period like that, with the inventiveness and the creativity." The SAFC's second feature, the enigmatic and menacing Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also turns 50 this year, became an icon of Australian cinema. "The great thing that happened after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans understood it," says Carroll. "And then Breaker Morant came along and they clicked with it and it had huge results, and then the second Mad Max was a giant hit. So those three films were key to opening up the American market." Thompson notes that Australia made the world's first feature-length narrative movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had a vital Australian film industry in the silent era up to 1927". "Hollywood and the American investment in theatre chains here was able to dominate the Australian film industry, and essentially, between 1930 and the 70s, nothing much happened in Australian cinema," he says. While Sunday Too Far Away was New Wave's first commercial success, 1971's Wake In Fright is widely regarded as the era's opening film. It was Thompson's first movie and the last for veteran character actor Chips Rafferty, who died of a heart attack before it was released. It screened at Cannes and received favourable responses in France and the UK but struggled at the Australian box office. It's the story of a teacher waylaid in a mining town where a gambling spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he participates in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is also subjected to moral degradation. It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson recalls, "and people were saying 'that's not us', despite the fact the book was written by an Australian". "Because when we were seen on screen (previously), we were seen as these pleasant caricatures, we weren't used to seeing it and we didn't want to see it," he says. During an early Australian screening, when a man stood up, pointed at the screen and protested "that's not us!", Thompson famously yelled back "sit down, mate. It is us".
New Statesman
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
Picnic at Hanging Rock's vision of girlhood
Photo by GTO / Album - Image Once voted the best Australian film of all time, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir's 1975 film adaptation of the 1967 novel by Joan Lindsey, might seem, on the surface, an unconventional choice for a cinematic national treasure. Light on plot and vague in its explanations, it's a film of woozy, art-house strangeness. But the dream-like imagery and the mystery at its core cast a spell over viewers, and it became a key film of Australian New Wave cinema, helping drive forward a postwar cinematic boom. Fifty years on, both the novel and its cinematic sibling endure. Echoes of the film's distinct style can be found in everything from the films of Sofia Coppola to the fashion of Valentino, and even Gen Z's ultra-feminine 'coquette' fashion trend. Set in 1900 at an elite girls' boarding school in a remote corner of Australia, the story feels both specific and strangely timeless: a glimpse into a fleeting moment long gone, when Australia was still new to its colonisers and the larger world had so much to be discovered. Opening on Valentine's Day, the pupils at the school – an anachronistic, grand Victorian manor set in the outback – are dizzy with excitement at the prospect of a picnic on nearby natural monolith Hanging Rock. But this excitement is short-lived when three of the girls, and teacher Miss McCraw, mysteriously vanish while exploring. Though one, Irma, is later discovered alive by local boys Albert and Mike, their disappearances begin a chain of tragic events. Lindsay's book is brilliant in its weirdness. From the start, it envelops the reader with an all-knowing atmosphere of impending doom, inviting us to accept that there are mysteries we cannot comprehend. The film is one of those rare adaptations that remains uncannily faithful to the book, without being reductive. It's unusual to find the atmosphere of a novel captured onscreen; dialogue is lifted almost verbatim, and reading it after watching the film makes it difficult to entangle what has been seen, and what has been read on the page. It's only towards the end of the novel where book and film diverge, with the novel ramping up the tragedy and melodrama and pulling the threads of various subplots together. The film prefers to say less, to keep things simple. The 'exquisite languor' the novel describes, the textures on the page, translate perfectly to the screen – the film has lingered in our cultural imaginations in no small part due to its seductive aesthetic, its iconic visual language. The opening scenes are a riot of young girls lacing themselves into white corsets, surrounded by surfaces laden with trinkets. Miranda, one of the young women who goes missing, is described lovingly as a 'Botticelli angel'. They're almost smothered with girlish stuff – roses and cards and pressed flowers, all tastefully soft-lit. Yet under it all, there's a menacing sense of simmering passion. There's something febrile in the way the girls flock around each other, the unselfconsciousness with which tragic young orphan Sara Waybourne recites a love poem for Miranda. Modesty might dictate that they can only remove their gloves, due to the heat, once they've passed through the nearest town, but there's no placidity here, under the layers of frippery. Light floods every scene (until, in some of the grim final scenes, it doesn't). Golden and diffuse, deceptively gentle at times, it has a painterly quality. This isn't surprising, given the cinematography takes inspiration from the Australian impressionists of the late 1800s such as Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts, who portrayed the same kinds of surroundings that the girls would have moved through in hazy, shimmering brushstrokes. Corsets and long skirts, stockings and boots are woefully inadequate for an Australian summer, but shots of the girls lounging on baking rocks, or half-hidden by luscious ferns, are visually startling and lovely as well as historically accurate. As in many of these pictures, the contrast between these artificial refinements, and the landscape they're placed in, is jarring. Beyond the school and the surroundings of the rock are lawn parties, where a band plays 'God Save the Queen' and the guests drink champagne. These colonial trappings seem more than faintly absurd in the arid and mysterious surroundings. Meanwhile, back at the rock they cut into a heart-shaped Valentine's Day cake that would seem more at home at a child's birthday party, iced exuberantly and bursting at the seams. It is soon forgotten, swarmed by ants. Symbolism like this abounds: nature, despite attempts to colonise and tame it, is full of mysteries we can't even imagine – and arrogance can only lead to a downfall. The strange mix of unfamiliar nature and beribboned girlhood, enchant and disorient viewers. The experience of watching it is easy to submit to, as the sounds and images wash over the audience. Dialogue is spoken as if characters are in a trance, or reciting a prophecy. 'What we see, and what we seem, is but a dream: a dream within a dream,' a languorous voiceover intones at the start. The fragile pan pipes of the soundtrack lull us further. But there's a hallucinogenic shift when the girls reach the rock – the music building, synths operatic and soaring, as they leave their recognisable world behind, and we are plunged into the realm of the unknowable for the rest of the film. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This central unknowability is compelling: not just the mystery of the missing girls, but both the film and the novel's attempts to grapple with a larger sense of the incomprehensibility of nature's vastness, and our relative tininess within the universe. Time is so flimsy; throughout the film and the book, the stopping of clocks is a regular motif. Irma comments, dreamily, on how the faraway people on the ground look like 'ants' from their vantage point on the rock, and how 'a surprising number of human beings are without purpose'. Unfathomable patterns are set in place, they are merely pawns within them. But they don't seem to be alarmed; Miranda, the enigmatic centre of their group, even seems to be prepared for her fate somehow, hinting to Sara that she will be gone soon, and murmuring, on the rock itself, 'Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place.' Girlhood then, in the film, is both a place of innocence and a place of tragic possibility. I felt it too, as a teenager living with one foot in the day-to-day life of rural Wales, and another in a dreamy universe of my own making, of all-consuming friendships, albeit with diaries and mixtapes in place of the pressed flowers and Valentine's cards strewn around the opening scenes of the film. In fields and school corridors I was often bored, but sometimes had the eerie, prickly feeling that there was more to the universe than met the eye. The girls who go missing do not seem quite of this world, with the preternatural beauty of cherubim and their strange, distant statements on time and human nature. Maybe it is this which allows them to vanish into thin air, some kind of receptiveness to mysteries beyond human comprehension. But there's no escaping a more prosaic kind of girlhood, the trappings of their social status as elegant young women-in-training. The vanishings grip the community around the school because of the beauty and youth of the girls. When Irma is found, the doctor assures the adults that she is 'intact'; Mrs Appleyard is surprised at the vanishing of Miss McCraw, thinking her 'masculine intellect' would surely render her immune to any mysterious silliness. Such an environment of repression is a perfect setting for hysteria to take hold. Perhaps it's this acknowledgement of girlhood's complexity that appeals to young women more than anything else in the film. When Irma returns to say goodbye to her friends she isn't greeted with love, but with a sullenness that erupts into hysterical violence, the girls descending upon her as if to tear her to shreds. On one hand, girlhood is ribbons and ruffles. On the other it's viciousness and strangeness. It contains an energy, always under the surface, that can't be repressed forever. Anyone who's ever been a teenage girl, or met one, can attest to that. The tension bubbles throughout the novel and film, and finally breaks through, with devastating effects. With everything falling apart, the film that started drenched in such sunny radiance tips into pure nightmare. Hints of psychedelia become stronger and more twisted, the colours grow darker. Mrs Appleyard descends into her own vortex of cruelty and madness, and the sense of claustrophobia as things crumble spectacularly is all the more powerful given how happy the earlier scenes were. One of the final images of the film – Mrs Appleyard sitting dressed in a lavish funeral outfit, the photographic negative of the white lace gowns elsewhere in the film, manic eyes fixed on an indeterminate point ahead of her – is deeply unsettling. Like the ants devouring the cake, there's a nastiness under the surface niceness of civilisation. One way to keep people invested in a mystery, enchanted by it, is to keep it very much as a mystery – we never find out what happened to the girls, either in the film or in the original edition of the novel. When an 'excised' chapter offering concrete explanations was published in 1987, the reaction was largely negative (I've read it; I wouldn't recommend it). Rewatching it, I was reminded of how fervently readers on social media have taken to the novel I Who Have Never Known Men, another story without a neat conclusion, in which the appeal is in the untangling of the universe's mysteries rather than a neat plot. Narrative-wise, there's always something appealing about a mystery we can feverishly speculate over ourselves. Perhaps it's best to leave some of them unsolved, with the beauty being in what's unknown, and in the interpretations that spring up around them. [See also: There is no contemporary fiction] Related
The Advertiser
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Advertiser
Like Home and Away on crack: will Aussies bristle at toxic beach Ockers?
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk! "I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk! "I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk! "I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic." Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage. Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up. He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage. But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn. "Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face. But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach. It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point. As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind. Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real. Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978). Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek). Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits. "When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend. "So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian." But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians. "This isn't a critique of Australia," he says. "It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis." Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity. The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark. But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places. At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss. Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus. "We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that." Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours. He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack. "Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it." What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
