SFTH: Ted Kotcheff - Outback to Basics...

In Wake in Fright a young schoolteacher (Gary Bond) finds himself stranded in a remote Australian town. Over the course of a long week he is thrust into a world of fighting, hard drinking and machismo that changes him forever. On the occasion of the film’s re-release the director Ted (First Blood) Kotcheff talks to Tony Earnshaw...

Many people have looked for the message in Wake in Fright. It has a 'Heart of Darkness' feel to it, the end of the line, civilisation versus wilderness. And it pre-dates Deliverance. What’s your take on it?

TK: I set out to [make] an odyssey of self-discovery about a sensitive, educated man who succumbs to the shadow side of his own nature. He starts out feeling terribly superior to all the men out there but he finds that his sense of superiority is unwarranted because he does things that he never dreamed of to prove his virility. In a sense he becomes one of them. He finds that education and civilisation are a very thin defence against the yahoo in all of us. We’re all in the same existential boat; we’re all capable of things that are morally culpable. 

How did Wake in Fright come to you?

TK: In 1967 I made a film called Two Gentlemen Sharing about the racial situation in London at the time. The writer of it was a Jamaican called Evan Jones. As a result we became very good friends. One day in ’69 he came to me and he said ‘Ted, I’ve just been hired to do an adaptation of a book called Wake in Fright. It’s a lost week in the outback of Australia. And I can tell you something: you’re gonna love this book. It’s right up your alley.’ So I read it and I loved the intense atmosphere of it. They hired me and that’s how it came about. 

Were you nervous of the material?

TK: Nope. Only in the sense that I was a bit trepidacious [about] making a film about a world and a culture that I knew so little about. However, being a Canadian when I arrived in Australia I discovered that the outback was not that dissimilar to northern Canada: the same vast empty spaces that paradoxically are not liberating and not freeing but claustrophobic and imprisoning. In both of those of course there were identical hyper masculine societies. That opening shot in Wake in Fright, which I always value – you look in every direction and all you see is 500 miles of nothing. And you feel ‘Oh my God, I’m trapped!’

How did you cast Gary Bond and what made him right to play John Grant?

TK: First of all I had offered that part to Michael York. He passed on it. Then I happened to go to see Evita in the West End of London and there was this actor playing the lead, Gary Bond. He was like a young Peter O’Toole. He was so wonderful in it that I thought ‘That’s him. That’s the character as I see him. That’s John Grant’. 

Did you have to sell the film to him?

TK: No, he bought into it. He immediately saw what it was and didn’t take much persuasion to do it we talked about it. None of the actors did. Donald Pleasence was a friend of mine. I saw him in The Caretaker by Harold Pinter where he plays a character not that dissimilar from the defrocked doctor that he does in Wake in Fright. It’s one of his best performances that he’s given on celluloid. 

Wake in Fright is released by Eureka Entertainment. Special thanks to Steve Hills – and to Ted Kotcheff.

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