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Empire (Australia)
September 2007
Let there be croc
By Luke Goodsell
Scans thanks to mitchum!
Crikey! After years of being taunted by silly comedies and khaki conservationists, Australia's premier prehistoric reptile is biting back... and he's immensely pissed-off. Empire takes a chomp at the people behind the killer croc pic that will have Steve Irwin spinning in his grave...
Greg Mclean must be the least popular man with the Northern Territory Tourist Commission at the moment. Apparently not content with feeding screaming backpackers to a bloodthirsty psycho in 2005's outback slasher hit Wolf Creek, the Australian director has unleashed an even more fearsome predator for his sophomore feature Rogue -- an enormous seven-metre saltwater crocodile with an insatiable appetite for tour boats. At this rate you'll really never, never go there. "I might be banned from the outback forever," Mclean laughs upon reflection.
The scaly beast in question -- dubbed "Phil" by his director -- is a territorial character, trapping an unlucky gaggle of sightseers -- including visiting American travel writer Michael Vartan, local yahoo Sam Worthington and river boat captain Radha Mitchell -- on a tiny island far upriver, with the intention of making each and every one of them his dinner.
Hold up: "Phil"?
"After my agent," explains Mclean of his nickname for the creature. "He has a few crocodile-like qualities, you know. He doesn't muck around." So it seems. When Wolf Creek got lumped in with Saw and Hostel in the so-called "splat pack" hits of 2005, the young director found himself in the enviable position of having Hollywood pounding on his meat-locker door.
"You get heaps of scripts that are ready to go because everyone's keen to get the next thing, to get the new person attached," says Mclean. But the "giant crocodile" movie was too close to his heart. He'd written the script for Rogue long before Wolf Creek, had it picked up for development, and then watched as his pet project got wrenched away from him; only to stall.
"It was like someone taking your child and watching as they drag it off into the wilderness," says Mclean, sounding not unlike a pitch for one of his movies. "After Wolf Creek the rights [to Rogue] had come back to me. So I thought, I'm gonna go and make that movie, and do it the way that I wanna do it."
That way would involve a $25 million dollar budget courtesy of Bob and Harvey Weinstein, with top-drawer visual effects, final cut, and his choice of cast to man the ill-fated voyage upriver.
"In some ways it was kind of anti-establishment, because he'd been given the money by the Weinstein company and they kind of just stayed out of the way," says Radha Mitchell, who plays the all-Australian cruise boat captain. "He made his own movie."
"GREG [McLEAN] ALWAYS SETS OUT TO ENTERTAIN. HE LOVES TAKING AUDIENCES ON A RIDE." SAM WORTHINGTON
"The good thing about Greg is that he always sets out to entertain," adds Sam Worthington, Rogue's resident redneck and -- shhhh! -- star of James Cameron's forthcoming sci-fi epic Avatar. "He loves movies. He loves taking audiences on a ride."
"To be honest," he continues, "my thing was, I woulda played the croc -- I just wanted to be in." You get the sense that he's kinda serious, too.
"SWEETHEART" WAS A FIVE metre saltwater crocodile with a penchant for outboard motors and propellers, sinking several fishing boats in outback Australia during the 1970s. This legendary snapper -- along with journeyman Keith David's adventure movie Northern Safari -- formed the key inspirations for Rogue. Gazing into the fog of memory, though, Mclean unearths a more specific origin.
"When I was a kid there was a model of Tarzan fighting a crocodile," he recollects. "It struck me as being a really powerful image -- someone having a one-on-one with a crocodile." As Mclean visualised his film, he found himself sketching that very image in his early concepts; he'd been held in Tarzan's grip for all those years.
Oh, then there was that shark movie. It's not only in the poster for Rogue -- a swimmer struggling on the water's surface while a menacing obelisk spears up from depths -- that Spielberg's Jaws looms over Mclean's film.
"In terms of crocodiles," clarifies the director, "Sam is Quint [Robert Shaw's irascible shark hunter] in the sense that he knows all about them and he has a past with them. Radha is Hooper [Richard Dreyfuss's marine biologist] because she also knows them but she sees them in a way that she wants to respect them and look after them. And Michael is Brody [Roy Scheider's police chief] because he's the innocent bystander in this situation who's caught between these two warring forces. But it's a bit of a love story between Sam and Radha that Quint and Hooper don't have."
With her clear eyes and athletic frame, Radha Mitchell is at once suited to the nature-loving tour guide and yet too pretty to have been barbecued for three decades in the Australian sun. "l was interested in how [Greg] saw me as this crocodile chick," she laughs, considering their first meeting when she was glammed up, in LA.
"She's a great actress," offers Mclean. "I wanted to cast someone who could believably be a kind of outback, country girl."
"The only crocodile lady that I met had no teeth and tattoos," a bemused Mitchell responds. "But I wasn't going to knock my teeth out."
Later, she remembers one of the many stories told on Rogue's set. "There was one guy who was fishing und drinking a beer. He saw a crocodile and he took his time to casually pick up his beer. The crocodile was coming after him and he didn't put the beer down, so the crocodile just got him." Now that's a quintessentially Australian way to die.
"I LOOKED INTO A BABY CROC'S EYES AND THEY WERE COLD. I COULD TELL THAT IF THEY TOOK THE TAPE OFF ITS MOUTH THAT IT WOULD DEFINITELY BITE ME." RADHA MITCHELL
To sink into character, Mclean and his cast hung out at a crocodile farm, an experience Mitchell won't forget. "We held a baby crocodile -- it was so cute," she glows. "And then I looked into its little eyes and they were just cold; I could tell that if they took the tape off its mouth that it would definitely bite me."
Mclean's admiration tor the reptiles ended strictly at respect. "They're amazing. But they're also wild. And all they're doing is trying to think of a way to get you."
Inhabiting their predicament wasn't too much of a stretch, then. "Those things can rip the shit out of you," illustrates the ever-direct Worthington. "Being put on this sinking island, tormented and hunted down -- it's pretty easy to put yourself there; you're just having to react."
WITH PRODUCTION WRAPPED
in the Northern Territory, the crew moved to the outer Melbourne suburb of Warburton and into the studio, home of the final showdown between "Phil" and his human nemeses.
"They were like, 'You're gonna love it, you'll be shooting in Melbourne'," says Mitchell of her birthplace. Any suggestion of city comfort would be short-lived, however. "We were in a lake and it really was freezing cold and there were eels swimming around."
"It's cold and who knows what's in there," says Worthington. "It looks like you're swimming away from a croc but all you're doing is swimming as fast as you can in order to get warm."
Conditions in the studio-built crocodile's lair, by all accounts, weren't much better. "I had to sit there for two hours with all this goo stuff all over me," says Mitchell. "Every scar had to be stuck on, and then I had to be covered in sticky blood. I had to lie down in this muddy water and the thing smelt like a public toilet."
Even the reptile had its diva moments. Remembers Mclean: "Michael [Vartan] was fighting with the animatronic croc -- and it's a big machine, it's like being in front of a hydraulic tractor. So it's snapping and going off and going crazy and Michael's getting all excited and then suddenly it just kind of freezes -- shuddering as if it's being electrocuted. Everyone just stopped and were like, 'Oh my god, what the hell's it gonna do, is it gonna explode, is it gonna attack Michael?' It was the funniest thing because it was as if he'd kind of beaten it and he walked around for the rest of the day like, 'Yeah. I smoked that bitch's ass.'"
"Oh he was a monster, a monster!" roars Worthington of the croc, with the delight of a kid seeing his first big screen T-rex.
A couple of animatronic crocs are surely small fry compared to his current day job in the employ of one James Cameron, no?
"I'm not allowed to say," he chortles, knowing it won't be the last lime he's grilled on the matter. "I can't say anything!"
Oh come on, Sam.
"I can say I've been having a ball and that's about all I can say. I absolutely love it."
Can't he just make something up for the internet? Sam Worthington says there are giant space monkeys piloting 40-foot hyper-cruisers?
"Then I'll find out I've been fired."
AS ROGUE OPENS IN AUSTRALIA -- traditionally a difficult market for homegrown horror -- Mclean remains optimistic for his baby. "I think [reviewers] go into it expecting to see the greatest piece of shit they've ever seen. Hopefully people will be surprised. I find it so rare that I get surprised in movies -- it's too rare, you know -- so I love it when you go, 'Holy shit. I'm being totally thrown for a backflip here.'"
As to his relationship with the tourism board, he's confident they'll be won over. "I take great pains to show how incredible the place is," he says. "I'm sure other people will see it and think, Wow, is that Australia?"
For now, Mclean is en route to the Northern Territory to attend Rogue's world premiere -- at an open-air theatre by the river's edge. "Make sure they send you," chirps Mitchell, before Empire realises the possibility that attendant journalists will be thrown into the black water. "I think that's some kind of publicity stunt they have planned," Mitchell admits. "Catch the film, get eaten by a crocodile."
> Rogue is released on August 23 and reviewed on page 43.
ROGUE
Chomper first and characters second make for a good monster movie rather than a great one
By Chris Murray
Scan thanks to mitchum!
RELEASED August 23
RATED M
DIRECTOR Greg Mclean
CAST Radha Mitchell, Michael Vartan, Sam Worthington, Stephen Curry, John Jarratt
SCREENWRITER Greg Mclean
RUNNING TIME 93 minutes
PLOT A routine boat tour around the Northern Territory waterways -- complete with a US travel correspondent -- takes a turn for the nasty when a rogue croc decides he's a little more hungry than usual. Nothing a bit of relentless munching on tourists can't fix.
THERE'S THREE KEY INGREDIENTS IN making a great monster movie. A) Come up with a good reason for the cast to be in their place of peril. B) Make us feel something -- love or hate will do -- for these hapless folk. C) Deliver a bloody good monster. Greg Mclean, who burst onto the world stage offing backpackers in Wolf Creek, only manages to get the last ingredient right. Luckily, he does it with enough gusto that Rogue makes the grade as entertaining monster fare. As such, it might even chomp its way past Aussie audiences to take a bite out of the global box office.
Like Wolf Creek, the non-killer set-up is pretty underwhelming. In fact, it borders on caricature of cliche as we meet an American travel writer in the shape of Alias's Michael Vartan. He's out of his depth in the Northern Territory, has lost his luggage, can't get decent mobile reception, and is attracting "Piss off, Yank!" stares from all and sundry. Of course, he hops onto a boat bound for disaster, along with a passenger manifest of stereotypes needed for such a trip. Among those on board are Radha Mitchell's knockabout sheila tour guide, Stephen Curry's camera-loving boozehound and John Jarratt's grieving widower. Sharing the waterways are rednecks in the form of Sam Worthington and Damien Richardson.
IT'S NOT LONG BEFORE WE MEET THE STAR OF THE SHOW, AND FROM THIS POINT ON THE CROC ALONE IS WORTH THE PRICE OF ADMISSION.
To its credit, the film doesn't muck around too much with what no one wants to see -- it's not long before the motley crew meets the star of the show. Let's be clear: from this point on the croc alone is worth the price of admission. Yes, it's a pity we don't care much for the whiny passenger humans. Yes, it'd be nice if the dialogue was more sophisticated than, says, an episode of Playschool. But Mcleans ability to turn this mess into a "Who's gonna get it next?" adrenaline rush can't be denied, with the movie executing a right-angle turn from the perfunctory into the inspired. Unlike the grim Wolf Creek, this time it's more about fear and excitement than dread and gore, although there's enough crimson to satisfy garden variety gorehounds.
Hats off to the effects whiz-kids doing Mclean's bidding. They haven't come up with some CGI anaconda farce, nor is this a simple robotic jaw-clapper. Instead, the best of computers and animatronics meld seamlessly for a real beast that moves, smells and acts exactly like the dangerous reality we've been weened on.
The frenetic use of camera, sound editing and dialogue-free acting during the nail-biting climax will have you rooted to your seat, tense, taut and totally at the mercy of Mclean's next move. For that, it's a minor triumph of action directing. Closer attention to the real reasons why Jaws is still the high watermark of monster royalty (hint: it's not C) would have made this great rather than good.
VERDICT
Even though it's a cliched trip into familiar territory, the real reason we're along for the ride has enough bite to sustain the journey... just.
* * *
© 2007 Emap Consumer Media Limited
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