STAYING IN
‘It’s an odyssey of self- discovery. We are all capable of things that are morally wrong’
THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND Over 40 years after it was made, Wake in Fright is finally getting the release it deserves in the UK. Henry Northmore talks to Ted Kotcheff, director of this uncompromising Aussie drama
W ake in Fright is a powerful film. Gary Bond plays John Grant, a teacher who gets trapped in ‘The Yabba’, a rough mining town in the middle of the Australian outback, where he gets dragged into a world of drinking, gambling and violence. ‘It’s an odyssey of self-discovery and he finds his sense of superiority is completely unwarranted as he does things he would never have dreamt of to prove his virility,’ explains director Ted Kotcheff. ‘He discovers that education and civilisation are very thin defences and that we are all capable of things that are morally wrong.’
Virtually ignored on release in 1971, Wake in Fright was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival but died at the box office and vanished for almost 40 years. The film’s editor Tony Buckley embarked
30 THE LIST 20 Mar–17 Apr 2014
Despite such
on a five-year search for the film via Dublin, London, Australia and New York, and eventually tracked down a surviving print in a warehouse in Pittsburgh. Marked ‘for destruction’, it would have been lost forever if he’d arrived just one week later. After Buckley spent three years restoring the negatives, it’s now viewed as one of the most important films in Australian cinema. is actually Canadian and was living and working in Britain at the time. He was hired via his association with screenwriter Nathan Jones, who was adapting Kenneth Cook’s source novel. ‘I hadn’t been to Australia at all, so obviously there was some trepidation,’ explains Kotcheff. ‘However, when I arrived I discovered the outback wasn’t too dissimilar to northern Canada, with the same vast empty spaces standing, Kotcheff
that, paradoxically, are not liberating but claustrophobic and imprisoning, and in both there was the same type of masculine society.’ The film delves deep into the male psyche. ‘When I arrived in Broken Hill, where the book is set, I took out the editor of the local newspaper and one of the first things he said to me was: “Men outnumber women in this town three-to-one.” So I asked, “What do they do for human contact?” “They fight.” And he was right. This was the late 60s. I had long hair down my back and a handlebar moustache and wherever I went, people wanted to fight me, but the fighting had nothing to do with belligerence. They were just desperate for the human touch.’
The film features an infamous scene that uses real footage, shot my Kotcheff, from a kangaroo hunt. It’s still incredibly