It’s something of a strange irony that one of the most important Australian films ever made – a film that helped launch the Australian new wave, and influence major local talents like Bruce Beresford, Fred Schepisi and Peter Weir – was actually directed by a Canadian. Ted Kotcheff is the filmmaker, while the film is Wake in Fright: a bleak, dusty, beer-soaked odyssey about a pompous school teacher stranded in the desolate outback town of Bundanyabba. Thought to be lost for more than thirty years, the film was recently rediscovered and digitally restored, going on to enjoy a successful run on Australia screens in mid 2009.
Now, three years later, Wake in Fright has made its way back to North America. In anticipation of its opening on October 5th, we spoke to Kotcheff after screening at the Fantastic Fest Film Festival.
Tom Clift: First, let’s go back to the seventies. As a Canadian (and self-confessed hippy), what made you want to tell a story about hard drinking Australians in the outback?
Ted Kotcheff: One thing that I’m always attracted to is people who don’t know themselves, and go on this journey of self-discovery. Maybe it’s my own concern about…I often figure “why did I do that, what’s driving me?” In The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, the film I made after this one, somebody says to him “why do you always go running around like you’ve got a red hot poker up your ass?!” People don’t know what’s driving them. Sometimes we unconsciously put ourselves in situations where we have to encounter ourselves and end in self knowledge, which [the protagonist, played by Gary Bond] does in the end…he realises that he’s not superior to other people, and that we’re all in the same existential boat. Everybody. So I liked the theme of it. But I liked also the horror; men being bad, doing bad things.
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