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Fangoria
January 2006
Greg McLean Goes ROGUE
By Ryan Rotten
Greg McLean is tussling with one of Mother Nature’s finest, and most cinematically embraced, killers on his home turf. Its name is ROGUE. Or, if you want to wash away the somewhat ambiguous title, call it “that giant crocodile movie by the guy who did WOLF CREEK.” Just don’t compare it to the scores of direct-to-video nature-run-amok flicks that debut on a seemingly weekly basis on the Sci Fi Channel. ROGUE boasts a decent budget, one of the industry’s hottest FX houses and a handful of impressive actors laid out like a choice Las Vegas buffet.
McLean penned ROGUE years prior to writing and directing last year’s CREEK. Eyeing to make it his directing debut, he saw it shepherded into the hands of another helmer: Russell Mulcahy, who in 1984 set loose a mammoth-sized boar on the desolate Outback landscape in the stylish RAZORBACK. But the property was ultimately returned to its creator when ROGUE sank before being given a chance to swim. It was during this state of limbo that McLean penned and lensed CREEK; this inexpensive rural slasher that went back to the basics impressed Dimension head Bob Weinstein, who released it Stateside last December. Not only that, but they eventually ponied up a cool $10 million to help ROGUE stay afloat and add it to Dimension’s 2007 horror slate. Now, in the midst of the film’s Down Under shoot, McLean takes a breather to chat with Fango about his tale of an American journalist who embarks on an Outback jaunt to gain inspiration for a book on Australian tourism. What he runs across is some scaly trouble with a voracious appetite.
McLean says that he’s dealing with the unanticipated intrusions that come with filming in the wild—similar to his experiences on CREEK. “It’s all hard work, because we’re shooting nights and there’s real freaking animals everywhere!” he says. “It’s very hot and rainy weather in Australia’s Northern Territory. It’s a huge shoot is all I can say, something I am enjoying immensely. The time frame is different, I guess. It’s longer, the size of the cast [is bigger], production design is pretty huge and the visual effects are something I love, so it’s good to be able to work with them and learn from some amazing artists from all over the place.”
Concerning the film’s principal star (certainly in the eyes of Fango readers), the overgrown croc is being created via a combination of practical and CGI FX. Handling the latter task is Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital, which, with the assistance of actor Andy Serkis, gave a palpable personality to KING KONG’s big ape. There’s little doubt that they’ll be lending the same awe-inspiring naturalism to ROGUE. “With any film like this, the monster’s got to be amazing,” McLean notes. “So we’ve been focused on making this animal as realistic as possible, and having seen the most recent pieces—CG and practical—I’m blown away by how close we’ve gotten to making it look real. It’s also our handling of the character of the animal—how it looks and behaves—that will be scary.” As for the gore FX factor, ROGUE will not be sparse on severed limbs, according to the writer/director: “Expect peoples’ bodies getting ripped apart, as well as some intense atmosphere and one hell of a scary crocodile.”
And what of the meat—er, human cast? Having already tangled with a big croc in the 1987 Aussie thriller DARK AGE, local actor John Jarratt (CREEK’s sadistic Mick Taylor) is back in front of the camera for McLean, who says that he had to do little convincing to also attract co-stars Michael (ALIAS) Vartan and Radha (SILENT HILL) Mitchell to a “giant crocodile movie”. After all, they would be following in the steps of fellow Hollywood thespians Bill Pullman and Bridget Fonda (LAKE PLACID) and, even farther back, Robert (ALLIGATOR) Forster. Not to mention that, according to McLean, “Vartan and Mitchell had seen WOLF CREEK and really loved the performances and the style of the film, even though it‘s ostensibly a slasher movie. I guess they just really loved the characters and what they go through. But yes, it’s kind of funny when you think about it. A ‘big croc movie’ just sounds weird, and we’ve had plenty of laughs about this.”
For Mitchell, ROGUE should be a cakewalk. She established herself as a rough-and-tumble heroine able to hold her own against both monsters and Vin Diesel in PITCH BLACK, and followed up by starring in another Australia-lensed genre item, the high-seas chiller VISITORS. “Radha is from Melbourne, so we kind of have that in common,” McLean says. “She’s an amazing actor, and will bring so much to this film and her role in particular. Vartan is so freaking cool. We spoke on the phone after he saw WOLF CREEK, and he was so excited about the performance style and the realism, and wanted to be part of something like that. He’s been adapting [the role] to his personality, and it’s really good as a writer when the actors take what you’ve started with and bring as much truth to it as possible. That’s where things start to get really exciting.”
Ol’ Mother Nature is adding her own particular thrill factor and contributing a bit of Method to the male lead’s performance. “Vartan is really scared of the Outback,” McLean says. “We were in the water shooting and the cameraman—who was up to his butt in water, as was Michael—got bitten by some large slithering thing, and we all freaked out. Especially when he screamed, ‘Snake!’ It turned out there was a family of huge eels who’d moved into the boat and would not leave us alone. So Vartan had to climb in there with a flashlight and imagine a huge croc out there somewhere. It wasn’t hard to be scared after that. There’s a lot to be frightened of out here—particularly real crocodiles, one of which followed our boat during a location scout. It was a total JAWS moment; I turned to my director of photography and said, ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat.’ ”
He may also be hoping for a bigger gross, at least in the U.S., than greeted WOLF CREEK, which Dimension opened in the thick of a crowded Christmas season and has grossed a modest $16 million. CREEK received widely divided response from both fans and critics, but McLean—by now accustomed to this reaction due to the film’s lengthy festival career—says this was to be expected. And he views Dimension’s handling of his freshman effort, and its American reception, with high spirits. “I’m pretty happy with it,” he says, “as ultimately they took a film that cost us about $800,000 [U.S.] to produce and turned it into a film that’s grossed about 20 times that in the States so far. From anyone’s perspective, that’s gotta be pretty cool.”
© STARLOG GROUP, Inc. 2006
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