By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Up Wolf Creek: Craig McLean back down under
Before its premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival, (and its fall release from the new incarnation of Dimension Pictures), Wolf Creek‘s Craig McLean has coffee and toast with The Australian’s Lawrie Zion: “Not everyone can see past the film’s grisly moments. One American reviewer said [the movie] would be nothing without its violence. “That [critic’s] an idiot, because the point of the movie is not violence,” McLean says. “What I’m fascinated with is the unbelievable randomness of [violence], that your life can be suddenly ended.” … McLean names British social-realist director Mike Leigh as an influence. “In a different way, if Mike Leigh shows a dramatic experience between people, the camera doesn’t just pan away from it. It will actually sit on the awkwardness of the moment where the characters don’t know what to do. I thought, what if you apply that kind of directorial technique to a B-grade slasher movie? So you take a B plot in which three kids go into the bush and get killed, which is every slasher movie in history. You shoot it like a Dogme film so it feels more real than real, and you make the acting like a Mike Leigh movie. At the same time you don’t shy away from the fact that it is incredibly Australian, and that it draws all its inspiration from true Australian crimes that we all know about… What it has going for it in the global marketplace is its point of difference. We’ve all seen lots of Australian movies where you get in a nobody American star to please some investors somewhere and try to make a half-American movie in Australia. As if you’re going to please someone by being more like them.”
