The Guardian - Back to home. home. The making of Wake in Fright: 'I wanted people to watch the film and be sweating'. Watch Wake In Fright movie trailers, exclusive videos, interviews from the cast, movie clips and more at TVGuide.com. Watch Wake In Fright Online at Couchtuner. This new adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s classic Australian novel will tell the story of John Grant, a young school teacher. Wake in Fright is the, watch WAKE IN FRIGHT online, story of John Grant, a bonded teacher who arrives in, WAKE IN FRIGHT watch free.

The making of Wake in Fright: 'I wanted people to watch the film and be sweating' Film. There are many, perhaps countless, reasons to return to the director Ted Kotcheff’s 1. Wake in Fright, truly one of the greatest motion pictures ever made in Australia.

· Watch Wake in Fright - Trailer 1 online. "Wake in Fright" is widely acknowledged as one of the seminal films in the development of modern Australian cinema. Watch Wake in Fright (1971) - Wake in Fright is the story of John Grant, a bonded teacher who arrives in the rough outback mining town of Bundanyabba planning to stay.

Some 4. 5 years later it refuses to shrink into irrelevance, as if the film were some colossal plant still thriving in the desert. Themes around drinking, gambling, suicidal ideation, homosexuality and the us- and- them divide between city and country (a particularly topical subject in the wake of Donald Trump’s election) imbue Wake in Fright with an urgency we must now assume will never go away. You can’t even call it a period drama; too little has changed.

The story, about a wisecracking schoolteacher psychologically pummelled by sun, beer and strangers (adapted from Kenneth Cook’s novel of the same name) is based in the middle of an arid, boiling hot nowhere. In the fictitious town of Bundanyabba (aka “the Yabba”) snooty John Grant (Gary Bond) sticks out like a sore thumb. Wake in Fright to get TV treatment in two- part series for Network Ten. Kotcheff, a Canadian who subsequently directed many other films, including First Blood and Weekend at Bernie’s, was also (and still is) an outsider to Australia. In a sense, while making the film, much of it shot in Broken Hill, he was a real- life version of the schoolteacher – albeit one who actually liked the locals. The director, now 8.

Australia next week for Monster Fest in Melbourne, admires the hard- knuckle men he met. Particularly, he says, “their fortitude in the face of the most inhospitable circumstances in the world to work and live in. I loved their camaraderie.

I loved their humour, their generosity and their support of each other. It was extraordinary.” Wake in Fright marked the first big- screen performance from Jack Thompson and the last from Chips Rafferty, who was born in Broken Hill and died the year the film hit cinemas. Rafferty is unforgettable as the slightly menacing, pint- devouring sheriff who can barely conceal his contempt for Grant, the visiting Plato- reading intellectual. Wake in Fright director Ted Kotcheff said he wanted to ‘recreate what I felt and saw – the heat, the sweat, the dust, the flies’. Rafferty’s career was forged in a string of famous performances (such as in The Overlanders) inevitably casting him as the quintessential Aussie man’s- man (that baton was passed to Thompson, who has run with it ever since).

And what’s more fair dinkum than practically inhaling beers?“Chips had no uvula,” says Kotcheff, laughing. You know what a uvula is? When you’re drinking you go (points to his throat) gulp gulp gulp.

He had no uvula. So the beer was like, pouring straight down. There was no stop between the mouth and the stomach.

No hesitation either. Gulp. It’s down.“He drank a lot of beer in these scenes. A lot of beer. So I asked our prop man to stock up on non- alcoholic beer.

On the very first day with Chips, he had a scene where he drank two pints in one take. He poured the first down then spat a bit out in disgust.

He said, ‘Ted, what is this?’ I said ‘It’s non- alcoholic beer.’ He said ‘I can’t act with non- alcoholic beer. I need real beer.’”The director did the maths.

Rafferty needed to consume two pints of beer in one shot. Four or five takes were required of that shot, which meant eight or 1. Every other scene they filmed that day also involved drinking. Kotcheff estimated Rafferty would be required to down 3. When the director informed the actor of his calculations, reiterating his case for non- alcoholic beer, he received a stern rebuke: “You look after the directing, Ted, and I’ll look after the drinking.”Kotcheff says the inimitable tippler “didn’t show even the slightest scintilla of inebriation. He never stumbled on a word or anything. It had no effect on him whatsoever.

I kept saying, how the hell does he do that?” A moment in the film that has elicited a similar question over the years (perhaps more “what the hell?” than “how the hell?”) is Wake in Fright’s kangaroo hunting sequence. In it, a group of rambunctious blokes, including John, get sloshed and go out shooting roos at night. The scene marks a crucial turning point for the protagonist, who breaks bad and embraces the yahoo (believes Kotcheff) inside all of us. The director was a vegan back then and is vegetarian now.

Adamant no animal should die for making a movie, but knowing the scene was fundamentally important, this left him in a quandary (computer- generated imagery, of course, was far off into the distance). Kotcheff decided to tag along with a group of hunters on their nightly routine, telling them he was making a documentary. Wake in Fright was set in the fictitious town of Bundanyabba, and filmed in Broken Hill. Photograph: Ted Kotcheff. On the evening this stretch of jaw- dropping cinema was filmed, the hunters asked Kotcheff where he wanted the animals to be shot. If we shoot them in the kidney, a hunter explained, the roos drop dead on the spot. In the brain, they do a big leap and then die.

In the heart, they take three hops and collapse. The director, mortified, informed them to just go about their business and pretend he wasn’t there.“We started at 8 o’clock and it was just horrific,” he remembers. There were 1. 6 of them. They shot the roos, skinned them, cut their heads off.

I was up there beside the camera, on the back of the truck, next to a big light. Suddenly I heard a thump beside me. La Solitudine Dei Numeri Primi Movie Watch Online. My British producer had fainted. Ex Wives Of Rock Season 1 Episode 12. He was so horrified he just collapsed.”Wake in Fright: rewatching classic Australian films.

Wake in Fright made an indelible print on Australian culture. It did nothing shy of helping kick- start contemporary local cinema, a seminal production in what would later become known as the Australian film renaissance of the 1.

Its themes are still pertinent, to say the least, to the Australian experience. And its thick, clammy, sun- kissed look set a visual template for countless subsequent films.“I wanted to recreate what I felt and saw – the heat, the sweat, the dust, the flies,” says Kotcheff. I said to the set designer and the costume designer, ‘I don’t want to see any cool colours.

I don’t want to see blue or green. Ever. On anything. All I want is red, yellow, orange, burgundy and brown. American Dad Season 7 Episode 14.

All the hot colours. On costumes, sets, everything.’ I wanted people to watch the film and be unconsciously sweating.”•Ted Kotcheff will appear at Monster Fest 2.

Melbourne, which runs from 2. November until 2.