Daniel Nettheim talks Dafore, Neill and Tasmanian Tigers

With the Willem Dafoe starring drama The Hunter coming to Blu-ray and DVD on October 29th, The Fan Carpet‘s Holly Patrick was delighted to sit down with Director Daniel Nettheim about his debut feature.

Based on the novel by Julia Leigh, The Hunter finds Martin, a mercenary, who is sent from Europe by a mysterious biotech company to the Tasmanian wilderness on a hunt for the last Tasmanian tiger.

Can you tell us how this whole project came about? Obviously it is based on the book but what inspired you to make the film?

OK so quick potted history, I knew the author of the book, I went to the book launch, bought a copy of the book and read it shortly after and it resinated with me and sat in the back of my mind for months. I am always looking out for film projects when I’m reading stuff, there was enough stuff there that resinated with me and made me want to pursue it. I spoke to a producer and we talked about the pro’s and cons and drafted up a 15 page treatment to verify to ourselves that there was a film in there, and then we negotiated the rights with the author. There was a lot in the book that I thought was incredibly filmic, I loved the depiction of the landscapes, I loved the central main character journey, I thought there was a lot of great emotional stuff there. It was also a very literary, very internal novel that was not obviously ‘dramatic’ so I knew there were going to be challenges, I just didn’t know that it was going to take 8 years to get a draft.

Is that how long it took?

Yeah, There was 8 years and 8 drafts before we were ready to send it out to actors. From the moment that we finally premiered the film it had been 10 years since we’d acquired the rights. So luckily I was passionate enough about the material.

So when making this story into a film there are a lot of moments where the main character is quite isolated, in the middle of nowhere, alone- was there ever a worry in your mind that the film wouldn’t be entertaining enough for an audience?

That was a worry at the script stage definitely and part of the process of the adaptation was to find a balance so that you never put stay your welcome with the guy alone in the wilderness and get a bit bored by it and that there was always a bit of pressure and tension on him from somewhere. There was always a sense of threat and a sense of danger. But we still wanted to be able to find the beauty in those moments of isolation with a man alone in the bush. We tried hard to find the balance at the script stage and then we tried hard again in the edit to make sure that we had the right balance. It became obvious, there were certain points when we were doing the rough cuts where we noticed that there were way too many traps or way too many moments in the wilderness for way too long, we want to get back to the family so then we would push it the other way and we would think ‘oh the film’s lost all it’s poetry, it’s just action, action, action. We had to play around with it until I was satisfied that I had that balance.

Was the myth of the Tasmanian Tiger something that fuelled your passion for the project?

Not really. Like most young Australians I was aware of it and i’d seen the footage and I enjoyed the speculation about whether or not they were still out there or not but I was in no way a crypto-zoologist or somebody who was obsessed by that. It was only once we had started working on the film and actually going to Tasmania that I become aware of how alive this myth still was, and how passionate the belief was that this animal still existed. I thought that was really interesting because in a way if the animal still exists it let’s us off the hook from having killed it off in the first place. But then again by the same token if it is still alive then we don’t have to accept responsibility, it is kind of a wishful thinking that if it is still out there then we can be redeemed from the sins of our past. However it is probably better to admit that we were wrong and that we stuffed up and that it’s dead so that we don’t do it again in the future. I think that the ongoing battle in Tasmania to save the old growth forests from wood chipping is a continuation of the same debate. To what ends will we go to in the name of progress and development before it’s too late, at what point do we realise that we are doing irreversible damage. The film was not intended to be a ‘message’ movie, it’s an adventure film, it’s a thriller but there is such resinant, thematic stuff happening in the background that I thought that it really in riches the viewing experience to kind of reference that.

Can you tell us about your casting of Willem Defoe. I read that you went directly to him and didn’t audition any other actors for the lead role. Can you explain why you did that?

Well part of the process was ‘Let’s start at the top’ and then if we get a pass from him we will have to move from the next person to the next person and in fact to my surprise he responded very quickly and very positively which was amazing as I think that one of the many beauties to the role was that character was always intended to be an outsider, he was always intended to be a foreigner coming to Australia for that reason it opened the casting pool right up, we could make a list of anybody in the world that we would like to see play this role. We made a pretty varied list but I was drawn to Willem partly because of his age. The character was meant to be approaching the end of his professional career as a mercenary but obviously still incredibly fit. Willem is by no means approaching the end of his career as an actor but he is certainly older than 50, so he was in the right age bracket, but he is incredibly fit , he’s very disciplined. He’s a theatre actor but does a lot of Yoga and his body really is a finely tuned instrument which is the same discipline that our main character needed so it seemed to be a good fit and Willem certainly responded to that.

Where there any of his previous films that you had seen him in that made you think, BOOM I want him? And what stage during the 8 years did that revelation happen?

At one stage very early on I had a picture on my wall of Willem in Platoon, he was in the jungle and I think he had the green hat on and I think that is maybe when I first got the idea, having seen this still of his face in the jungle. He has a great expressive face. I knew that we were going to have whole slabs without dialogue. We needed somebody with a very expressive face.

His face is amazing, I get so drawn to it. It’s very distinctive.

Yeah, yeah that was definitely an attraction for me.

There are some stunning shots of landscapes in the movie. What were the pitfalls of shooting in your chosen location?

The pitfall is that you can’t control it and I think that we had wanted to control or tried to control it we would have been frequently trapped so we just decided that we had to let the weather be our friend and work with it and not try to fight it. Whatever conditions the weather was offering up were the conditions that we would shoot in and they would become the conditions that the character was experiencing in the story. I think that one of the things we had to our advantage is that we didn’t have any lengthy dialogue scenes that were set outside, as you wouldn’t get any consistent enough sunlight, it would be cloudy one minute, sunny the next  and that would have been a nightmare to edit. All of our big dialogue sequences were inside the house. With the sequences outside if the weather changed that was fine as it is just what happens and it was actually very helpful to show the passing of time. The fact that you can get all four season in one day, snowing in the morning and then sunny in the afternoon quite literally, was really helpful for showing the passage of time. The other thing we did was to make ourselves very adaptable, there were certain scenes in the script where I knew it would be beautiful to shoot it on a foggy day or on a sunny day so when we checked out the weather report for the next day we would see that there was a possibility of snow we would say ‘right we are doing that scene tomorrow’. It was all also helped by the fact that Willem’s character only had one outfit.

So no wardrobe nightmares then?

No not at all, we had wardrobe simplicity. It was the same with the beard. We decided that he was going to have a beard that was one length the whole way through so that when I’m back in the edit room I can move any scene and put it back somewhere else without any continuity problems. That definitely saved us a lot.

Good thinking!

Had your career in TV prepared you for the world of film-making?

So much of what you do as a director on set is about problem solving and really being in the moment. You have to be very quick at coming up with an answer about what’s happening in the script and making it fit to what’s happening in a certain location or any number of things. The more I’d worked in television the more experience I’d had of these encounters, the more times I’d had to have come up with a solution the stronger my instincts had developed about where to place a camera when covering a scene. Every day that I’ve been on set over 10 years helped. When I first started directing it was such  painful experience, really nerve wracking being on set and I used to dread it and not be able to sleep the night before but after a while it just became just another day in the office with all your friends, your office does change from one place to another each day but there are a certain amount of things that you need to get through and you just do it. Being on set these days is a pleasure and I do like the challenges but it is instinctive, in a good way, so all of my previous experience had prepared me. I did have to remind myself to think on a very cinematic scope because of the big screen experience. I went back and watched a lot of wide screen cinema from the 1970’s and 1980’s and watched old westerns to remind myself…

OMG I love old westerns!

Yeah! Likewise… Just to remind myself of how great film-makers use the screen. So it was good and I really pushed myself to aim higher.

What do you think the biggest challenge was for you to transition from TV to film?

The biggest challenge was a perception challenge, when the producer was trying to get finance for the film overseas, people know me in Australia but people don’t know me in the US. He had sales agents saying ‘Look I’m more interested in a film-maker who has done one short film that’s been to the Sundance festival than someone who’s done 100 hours of television’ and I just think go figure. That’s crazy talk! For me I could only see my experience as an advantage. There are big prejudices and still are against people who work in television and I just have to prove them wrong.

There you go then, a challenge!

Yeah, yeah I definitely got a challenge. It was probably helpful.

Do you think that the Tiger that Martin is hunting comes to represent his own character and was that a conscious decision?

The film comes to a point where he forms an identification with that creature, the last of it’s kind, stalking the wilderness alone, hunting, killing and waiting to die. I didn’t want to be too overt with the symbolism but that was a hard one to avoid really. In another way the tiger symbolises the mistakes of our past and by the same token the possibility of redemption. I think that part of the great duration of this myth in Australia that the tiger is still alive is because it’s lets us collectively off the hook for it’s demise, then we don’t have to take responsibility for it. That is also a dangerous thing, accepting it’s extinction means taking responsibility and facing up to parts of nature that are still under threat. As i said earlier this was not intended to be a message movie, it’s meant to be a gripping Thriller but there are a lot of interesting thematic residences that you can play with there.

The family aspect to the film is very important to the narrative, how did you go about casting for that and what were you looking for?

With the kids I was really looking for kids with instincts and personality traits that were close to those of the characters in the script. With kids if it all goes to shit you can’t rely on training or technique because when they are 6 or 7 years old they just don’t have that. You can only fall back on their natural instincts. We did a pretty thorough search and I think having instinctive, responsive, intelligent kids was helpful but ultimately I was looking for kids that were similar to the characters. The girl that played Sass was naturally very bouncy, exuberant and talkative little girl and the boy played Bike was actually completely opposite to his character he was naturally very talkative and energetic and it was really hard to get him to stay still but when he did the results were really amazing. Coincidentally they looked very similar to one another and they both looked a little bit like Francis O’connor who was playing their Mum. It was a  really long process of casting but I was really happy with what those kids did.

Eeek did you have a big room full of kids on audition day?

Well I did have kid after kid after kid. The boy who we ended up casting had actually only come in to be with his sister who was auditioning for the role of Sass and he was sitting in the waiting room and the carting director saw him and said ‘ Hey do you want to come in and sit beside your sister and help her?’ but secretly she was filming him and his sister didn’t up getting a part in the film and he did.

You always hear about stuff like that don’t you? I bet he’ll go on to be a massive actor now and this will be his big break!

Maybe, maybe he was great, really good at it.

What is your favourite moment from the film?

My favourite moment from the film, well my favourite thing that we shot is not actually in the film, it’s only in the DVD extras…

Oh well there you go, there’s a little plug!

Well yes. There is a scene in the film where we use a Bruce Springstein song that was in the first draft if the film and we never knew if we could clear the rights for the song or not.

Oh is that’s why it not included then?

No no it is, it’s a song called ‘I’m on fire’ and it’s the scene were he finally gets the generator working and the music starts on a record player. This scene was not in the book and from the moment we included the scene in the script and it was on the page we just knew that we had to make it happen. Before we were even able to finance the film the producer was already chasing down the rights to the song and it was about two years before he got the answer that Bruce was prepared to let us use it. We had to send him the scene and a description of the rest of the film and then there was probably another couple of years of negotiating the fee for the record companies and the whole time we were looking for alternative songs in case the deal fell through but we could never find any song that was good enough. Even when we shot the film we didn’t know if we were going to be able to use that song and even in the edit we weren’t sure if we were going to be able to use that song.

So did you just plonk it on there and hope for the best then? ha.

[laughs] Yeah, yeah! Well when we finally got the rights approved just before we had to do the final lock off.

Gosh how long does it take?

Years, you know everything’s slow. Because of all the work that went into getting that song, I’m really prod of that scene and I think it works brilliantly emotionally and it’s a beautiful song and it resinates so well with the story. It is definitely something I am very happy with. There s another scene that I really love. My other favourite moment was when it actually started snowing on the day that I really wanted it t snow. It only snowed one day for the whole 6 weeks and that was the day that we were up on the top of this mountain and it blew a blizzard and it looks amazing on screen. It is the kind of production that you can’t fake. That is when you are rally at the mercy of nature and a snow machine just won’t do it. Not on a big wide landscape like that. That is when I felt that nature was really looking after us that day.

What is the best thing about being Australian?

Err I am probably the wrong person to ask as I’m kind of ambivalent about being Australian. I can tell you that there are great things about living in Australia like the spectacular natural environments, there’s lots of open space, it’s a very privileged lifestyle. The downside is that in a global sense it is very isolated, it is very far away from most other places. I am always very acutely aware of that whenever I travel to more crowded places like north America or western Europe. But being Australian… It just what I am, I can’t look at it in a detached way.

It is great to see Sam Neill back on the big screen, I love him, he reminds me of watching Jurassic Park as a kid, how did you go about casting him?

It turns out that he and Willem are old friends. They worked on a couple of films together in the past. We didn’t actually know that when we were first thinking of Sam for the role. Someone suggested Sam and I loved the idea because the part was so different to the kind of character that he normally plays. I think that we must have mentioned to Sam that we were considering working with Willem and we also mentioned to Willem that we were thinking of working with Sam and they were both really pleased about that as I think they were both bon vivonce, you know they both like a nice glass of wine and good quality food and a good chat. We shot for a couple of weeks just with Willem and then when Sam arrived there was a great vibe. We were going out to dinner and the whole thing lifted to another level.

So lovely. Did you all get really close on set?

Yeah defiantly. It is because we all went away for 7 weeks to a tiny isolated town in Tasmania and yes it was definitely a very close experience with the cast and the crew. These things always are. It is a very intense process shooting a film like that.

Willem doesn’t strike me as someone who has a massive ego which must have made things a bit easier?

He definitely doesn’t. Both Sam and Willem were very humble people and there was no star pretences or ego games. Willem was remarkable like that he was never hiding away in his trailer he was always on set. He was his own stand in. We would be saying ‘ Can we have someone to stand in for Mr Defoe please’ and you would hear a voice saying ‘Hey well I’m here and I’ll do it’ (laughs). He was gregarious and a great story teller and I think he really likes the process of making films which is great for us.

What was your favourite moment during shooting? Is there anything that stands out?

It was definitely the snow moment for me. That was my favourite moment on set as well as being one of my favourite moments to watch in the film. You know you can try and control everything but there are certain things that you just can’t control and that is when you know that there is a kind of magic taking place. 

The Hunter Film Page | The Hunter Review

THE HUNTER IS OUT ON BLU-RAY AND DVD ON OCTOBER 29