Film Feature: Kokoda

HALLOWED GROUND

Amazingly, until 2006, a dramatisation of the Kokoda campaign had never been immortalised on film. That was until a gung-ho band of filmmakers and actors took on one of Australia’s most iconic wartime moments in the most inventive of ways.

When you think of the very Australian essence of mateship, there are few examples that measure up to the loyalty and sacrifice of soldiers at war. Yet, while several Australian war stories have been captured on film, it’s almost unbelievable that a dramatisation of WW2’s Kokoda campaign took more than 60 years to be immortalised on the big screen.

Synonymous with Australia’s identity, the story of Kokoda is grand, hallowed ground. Where some first feature makers may have shied away from such subject matter, not so a gung-ho collective of Australian Film Television and Radio School graduates of 2004 who in just two years brought Kokoda to Australian screens.

“It goes to the heart of the bond of mateship that’s almost impossible to define. That’s why I wanted to make the movie. That has to be the essence of the Kokoda experience.”

 

The challenge says director Alister Grierson - whose spit fire commentary on Kokoda history seems more akin to an academic than a brazenly confident director wearing bulbous fly-eyed sunglasses - was how to capture the essence of Kokoda from such a broad palette of experiences and historical accounts.

“What is the Kokoda story? There’s a thousand ways you could do it. And where does it finish?” Grierson says. “I think if you were Mr Spielberg you’d say ‘Let’s do this sweeping thing, open with 10,000 Japanese soldiers swarming the beaches’. We couldn’t do that. Part of the challenge for us was to find a narrative structure that would point towards the greater epic whole in a metaphorical sense.”

The team settled on a fictionalised story about a band of ten inexperienced Australian soldiers stranded behind enemy lines deep in the jungle of the Kokoda track after a Japanese attack cuts them off from their supply lines and all communications. Over the next three days, the men endure mortal wounds, malaria, dysentery and internal conflict. Surfacing from the jungle fatigued from lack of food and sleep the men bravely battle on regardless to join their fellow soldiers in The Battle of Isurava.



The cast of Kokoda



It was that deep seated sense of loyalty and sacrifice in the soldiers that overpowered their unimaginable hardship that inspired so much passion for the story.

“It’s got to go to the heart of the bond of mateship that’s almost impossible to define,” says Grierson. “That’s why I wanted to make the movie. For me, it’s that moment when they go ‘We’re going back’. They didn’t have to. I thought ‘That has to be the essence of the Kokoda experience’.”

 Grierson needed actors who not only shared some of their character’s traits but could step up to the rigors of a tight, grueling 26 day shoot. The resulting cast, formed over just six weeks was a mixture of exciting new talent and established faces led by Jack Finsterer (Strange Fits of Passion) and Travis McMahon (Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries) and including Tom Budge (Candy), Ewan Leslie (Dead Europe) Angus Sampson (Spirited) and veterans William McInnes (Look Both Ways) and Shane Bourne (MDA).



William McInnes as The Colonel



Winning a part in the film appeared to be every Australian male actor’s dream. The cast speaks in highly reverent tones of the subject matter and the experience itself.  

“As an Australian male I was absolutely wrapped,” says Jack Finsterer who plays platoon leader Jack Scholt. “There are films or stories that come along and you’re only involved to a certain extent.  With this one, every ounce of my being wanted to be involved.”

For Finsterer, the role had a strong resonance  - he shares his character’s name and German heritage and had relatives who fought in the Kokoda campaign.

“I felt they’d written this role for me, they just didn’t know it yet,” he says.  

For Travis McMahon, who plays the fiery antagonist Darko and whose grandfather also fought in New Guinea, the thought of not being a part of the project was unbearable.  

“I was horrified that I wouldn’t be in it. I don’t know what I would have done. I would have drank for days and then left the country and come back well after the film’s release,” he says half in jest.

“Once you read and understand what these boys went through up there, what they were up against, what they knew, you just feel so privileged and honoured to be able to stand up and have the opportunity to play one of them.”



Tom Budge as Johnno



Tom Budge who plays sweet natured Johnno felt a strong sense of responsibility towards the film’s subject. “The subject matter is really near and dear to me,” he says. “To honour those men is all that I care about.”

With the actual location in Papua New Guinea deemed too perilous for the shoot, Mount Tambourine, a partially suburbanised area of rainforest on Queensland’s Gold Coast hinterland doubles as the tropical, mud ensconced terrain of the Kokoda track. Watch the film and there’s a definite authentic aura of Kokoda.

“It’s that’s weird situation where you’re standing there and you look over your left shoulder and there’s a house and cows and you look over your right shoulder and there’s another couple of houses and some suburban shit,” says Grierson of the Gold Coast location.

“But straight in front of you is this fuck-off virgin rainforest. So you kind of go, if we shoot it all on an 80 millimeter lens then we’re clear. You could shoot anywhere, it’s the fuckin’ miracle of cinema.”



Jack Finsterer as Jack Scholt



Grierson along with cinematographer Jules O’Loughlin (who has since gone on to short a swag of features including Sanctum and Wish You Were Here), sound designer Adrian Bilinsky (Top of the Lake) walked the Kokoda track, recording the unusual sounds and unique lighting palette to replicate the environment.

Kokoda historian Peter Brune was enlisted as historical advisor, while an extensive array of historical accounts, photographs and war paintings were used to recreate the feel of the battle.

“You just can’t do a Kokoda project that doesn’t become authentic,” says Grierson.  “As soon as you get any background on the material you become emotionally involved.”

But making a war film on a limited budget was challenging to say the least. Grierson, who incidentally went on to make the much bigger budgeted James Cameron-produced Sanctum in 2011, won’t reveal the budget but says such limitations caused him to make “compromise became a creative positivity. What you discover is that that kind of environment forces you to make really creative choices and your movie becomes leaner and tighter all the time.”

On occasions, there was only time for one take and faux ammunition had to be conserved.

“Neighbours would have more time to shoot than we did,” says Budge. “They’d say ‘You can’t do another take’ and that’s a scary fucking thing if you don’t think you’ve got it. Alister would say to us in rehearsal ‘Boys the budget’s really low. We only have so many bullets’ which is a worrying thing to hear at a start of a war film!”



Kokoda uses a splash of horror to show the horror of war



Preparation for the cast was intense beginning with a two week rehearsal period which included copious reading of historical accounts and a three day boot camp led by SAS officers where the actors “bonded” and patrolled the bush for hours on end.

“I love that sort of stuff. I love working hard like that and getting dirty so to speak,” says McMahon. “Everyone was just so into it, passing around the books on Kokoda. Everyone was just feeding as much information that they could into themselves. Then you put on your slouch hat, pick up your gun and you’re there, you’re going to war.”

Placed on a harsh diet to simulate that of the constantly hungry soldiers and with bodies caked in mud, the actors were given an idea of the hardship the soldiers experienced. Both Finsterer and McMahon would run at the end of a long day’s shoot to replicate the weight loss of their characters.

“I lost seven kilos all up because I didn’t want to look like a relaxed Aussie up there,” says Finsterer. “Before we started shooting I just put myself through as much physical training as I could. I just ran a lot and I hate running!”

Budge, however, was having none of that.

“I didn’t put any effort into looking like any body type because I’m a skinny bastard anyway,” he says. “The soldiers had a lot of hard, physical, tough experiences and I thought it was important that I looked like I was fucking tired and not good at it. These weren’t your well trained soldiers; they had no training at all. They were the most ordinary of blokes so I thought it was important to look ordinary and I think I got away with it too!”

The cast also got a taste of the chaos and fear that the soldiers experienced during extended fire fights with exploding mortars, squibs and flying bullets coursing the air around them. The fear on the actors’ faces is often real.

“All of a sudden all hell breaks loose,” says McMahon. “It gave us a real insight and understanding of the daily grind of fighting.”

For Grierson, the scenes recalled the horror of battle. “I can’t comprehend that level of 24 hour, 7 day a week tension that the soldiers lived with let alone the terror they must have felt in battle, controlling those emotions to actually work through the process in the firefight to function in a positive way. It’s beyond my imagination.”

What was undoubtedly invaluable was time spent with members of the actual 39^th Battalion.

“What I took away from them was how these ordinary men living ordinary lives, did extraordinary things. You’d pass them in the street and you wouldn’t even know,” says Finsterer. “What absolute heroes they were. The degree of sacrifice that they made is beyond my comprehension. That had a profound effect on me. It absolutely steeled my will to do the best job and the most committed job that I could do.”

McMahon says the discussion the cast had with the veterans understandably touched a raw nerve.

“One of the fellas was probing and probed a little too far and I got a sense of what it was like up there by the veteran’s emotional reaction. It was like ‘Stop right there, that’s enough’.”

With an all male cast brandishing guns, did competing egos and testosterone overload plague the set?

“I was really worried about a bunch of boring fuckwit men getting excited about shooting their guns,” says the blisteringly honest Budge. “If we went down that path, then the movie would have been a piece of shit. Luckily, we had this amazing cast of the sweetest, most evolved modern men. They weren’t worried about looking a certain way or being blokey bastards, they were much more sensitive about the whole thing.”

Grierson believes it’s inevitable that in today’s political climate people will attempt to attach a political agenda to Kokoda. To do so, he says is fruitless.

“It was about telling the story as honestly and as truthfully as we could in a way that’s respectful to the men who fought in Kokoda,” he says. “War is a vile, vile enterprise for people to engage in and it brings out the best and worst in people. I don’t want anyone to grab onto the movie in some sought of nationalistic, chest beating, jingoistic kind of bullshit way. Nor do I want people to read it as some sort of commentary on Australia’s political and military involvement in the Middle East. That’s not its intention.”

Participating in Kokoda, had on all accounts a profound effect.

For Jack Finsterer, the experience was both physically and emotionally draining.

“I threw myself into it body and soul, 100%,” he says. “I felt completely exhausted by the end of the shoot and happily exhausted. I arrived back and I just said to my agent ‘I can’t go for any auditions’.”

For Tom Budge, the film was a revelation.

“Before I did this film I was always a very ill informed blanket pacifist. I absolutely had no fucking clue. It was like ‘War is bad’, that simple kind of thinking,” he says.

“I researched so much stuff and got such a big picture of what these guys went through and it gave me such a pride that I’d never had in Australia. I hope that people can feel proud about their history and what we are now because of that.”

Kokoda airs Saturday April 20 on Channel 9, 11.55pm (AEST).

This story was first published in Filmink Magazine, May 2006.