Film (Creature) Feature: Crocs & Shocks

After redefining the horror genre in Australia with the smash hit Wolf Creek, writer/director Greg McLean heads into new, but equally bloody waters with the killer crocodile flick Rogue and takes actors Radha Mitchell and Michael Vartan along for the ride. By Jim Mitchell.

Few Australian creatures represent humankind’s uneasy interaction with nature, as ferociously as the crocodile. Enmeshed in our cultural psyche, it’s surprising that these brutal and relentless creatures haven’t torn their way through more Australian films.

“I grew up watching classic horror movies like Jaws and Alien, The Exorcist. They were the films that I was in love with,” says McLean on the line from his Melbourne base. “When I first started writing screenplays I just thought ‘I’d really love to see one of those films - a big, old fashioned suspense thriller – done in Australia. Why shouldn’t we have a really thrilling horror story set in Australia?”

That long held wish was granted after Hollywood moguls Bob and Harvey Weinstein (the American distributors of Wolf Creek which grossed a very respectable $US50 million worldwide) agreed to bankroll Rogue based on a script McLean had written seven years before Wolf Creek. The Weinstein’s kicked in $25 million, a far cry from the previous film’s $1.38 million budget.

While much broader in scope, the result is a rollicking thriller or a “big ride” as McLean aptly coins it. Rogue is just as simple as Wolf Creek in concept; a group of tourists, a travel writer and a tour guide on a river cruise in the Northern Territory fight for survival after a monstrous, fiercely territorial rogue salt water crocodile rams their boat leaving them stranded on an isolated island as the tide creeps in. The croc hunts them down.

American actor Michael Vartan, best known as CIA agent Michael Vaughn in TV’s Alias plays unlikely hero Pete McKell, a US-based travel writer who gets much more than he bargained for when he jumps on board that seemingly innocuous river tour. “I’d never been to Australia,” says a chatty Vartan from his Los Angeles home. “People often underestimate the power of location but Australia was one of the main draws for me. For Christ’s sake, I had the Southern Cross tattooed on me!”

Increasingly prolific in Hollywood, former local actress Radha Mitchell (Pitch Black, Melinda and Melinda) returned to Australia to play intrepid, no-nonsense, tour guide Kate Ryan. “There’s certain things about her that I admire,” says the straight talking, playfully dry Mitchell of her character, from her base in Los Angeles. “It's cool to think of a girl who’s out there driving boats and hangin’ out with crocodiles and she’s not scared”.

Both leads reveal they were initially unsure about signing onto Rogue but were won over by McLean’s charisma, vision and of course, a little film called Wolf Creek. “There were a lot of things I could think of I’d rather do than spend four months in the outback’," says Vartan. "All the hardships and all the things that I was warned about, the month of night shoots, the taipan snakes, the crocs everywhere in the Northern Territory, all those things sort of disappeared after I saw Wolf Creek and spoke to Greg.”

Despite Rogue’s magnification of the drama, news reports of crocodile attacks occurring in the Territory during the shoot re-enforced the chilling reality of its premise. “As we were shooting stuff you’d then read the papers in the Northern Territory the next day and see a story that was just really eerily similar,” says McLean. The most amazing report says McLean, one that echoed the plot of the film, was that of a man stranded on a sand bank, stalked by a 5 metre crocodile. “Literally this croc was just coming up every half hour to have a go and this guy barricaded himself in this little tree. That’s an every day thing in the Northern Territory.”

We don’t want to give too much away, but it’s safe to say that the plot calls for the key cast to come into uncomfortable and distressingly close contact with the angry predator.

For Michael Vartan, that meant three weeks wrestling animatronic crocodiles while drenched in putrid water. “Hands down that was the hardest three weeks I’ve ever had in my life,” the actor recalls, noting that his years on the action-heavy Alias served as good preparation. “It was the most intense, grueling experience. I was wet for three weeks with mud and blood.”

Radha Mitchell didn’t get off lightly either. She too had to endure long water drenched stints “covered in prosthetics that took two hours to apply with all these sticky bits of broken skin and bones hanging out,” she says. “I was covered in sticky blood, and lying in this water with bones floating around in it. It smelt like a public toilet. It’s a bizarre kind of work!”

The actress even relished the chance to be rescued as a damsel in distress. “It might be a particularly female fantasy,” muses Mitchell. “But I liked the fact that even while being a damsel in distress, I wasn’t a glamorous damsel in distress. I’ve got scratches, my nose has been chewed off, and I’ve got half a leg.”

This is an edited extract from a feature first published in Filmink Magazine, November 2007.