By: debbie lynn elias
With THE HUNTER, director Daniel Nettheim brings us an intensely fascinating and stirring character study of Martin David, a mercenary hired by a biotech company to track down the last living Tasmanian Tiger, extract its DNA, and kill it so that no one else can try to repopulate the species or use the DNA; i.e., the biotech company will “own” the rights to the tiger. Lensed in Tasmania, not only are the visuals stunning, but Willem Dafoe gives one of his finest performances as a man who himself, like the Tasmanian Tiger, may be the last of his kind. With the sensibilities of both a thriller and a drama, you will find yourself holding onto your heart and the edge of your seat in this tacit game of man versus beast, man versus man and man versus himself. I had a chance to sit down for an exclusive interview with Daniel Nettheim and talk about the Tasmanian Tiger, Willem Dafoe and shooting in the undiscovered country of Tasmania.
Daniel, this is a truly wonderful film.
Thank you.
I know you come from a television background. So, how was it not only jumping into a feature, but a feature like this with almost 100% exterior lensing and untold logistical situations thanks to the topography of the land?
Although I have worked in television for the past ten years, I’ve always been a great lover and student of cinema. I went to film school. My intention was always to make feature films in addition to television.
But you have to pay the bills along the way!
Exactly! [laughing] I also think that if anything, having done stuff for the small screen over the past decade, pushed me further to want to really make a wide screen cinematic experience. I was a little nervous that all that tv experience could have certain habits that go with it. Like, there’s a lot of compromise when you shoot television at that pace; you’re framing a certain way for television audiences; you’re using a lot of dialogue because people are often out of the room making cups of coffee or whatever. But I think that certainly when producer Vincent Sheehan was trying to finance the film, there was sometimes a bit of resistance. “He’s a television director. How do we know he can make films?” So being aware of these kind of prejudices, I pushed myself hard to make it a big cinematic, big screen experience. To that end, with the cinematographer, Robert Humphreys who’s an Australian guy, we went back and looked at the films of Werner Herzog like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, and we looked at some of the great 70’s Hollywood widescreen movies like Deliverance, The Deer Hunter and Five Easy Pieces, just to remind ourselves how the great filmmakers use that frame and use the landscape to tell a story. I’ve got to add one of my all time favorite filmmakers, my compatriot Peter Weir, so I went back and looked at Picnic at Hanging Rock. Thematically, the role of humans within a landscape is so strong in that film and I love the way he frames that landscape.
This is not your average, run-of-the-mill story. And Dafoe owns the character. He is Martin David. So, how did this story come to you and what led you to cast Dafoe?
Initially, it was novel by an author named Julia Leigh. As an Australian, I was very aware of this story of the Tasmanian Tiger which is kind of the premise. And it’s really only a starting point. It’s not about a man looking for a Tasmanian Tiger. But that is a premise for the dramatic and emotional journey that the character goes on in the film. Because in doing the adaptation we held on to the idea that the character was an outsider who comes to Australia, it kind of meant that we were looking for a non-Australian actor, meaning that we could look at all the great actors in the world and think, “Who would we most like to work with?” And then we think, “Who has the kind of CV that means they might realistically read a script like this?” Willem is an adventurous actor and if you look at his list of credits he goes between very large films and very very independent films.
And he’s also made films that involve doing the hard work in the outside, in the elements, in a rough exterior.
Exactly. And apart from that he’s got a great physicality, a great face. And it was also helpful that he’d made a movie in Australia before. So I was able to speak to a couple of people who worked on that with him who said, “He’s really a great guy. He’s a great collaborator. He really is one of the crew. You’ll never find him hiding away in a trailer.” They’re the kind of qualities you look for when you’re going to be spending seven weeks in remote Tasmania with someone. So, from the very beginning he was on the list of people I would have loved to work with. Increasingly when I was writing scenes, I would imagine his face in that landscape. [laughing] Kind of in an abstract way, but it does help to shape your understanding of the character. We got the script to him by his manager thinking it was probably a bit of a longshot, as much about scheduling as anything else, but we quickly got a positive response. I met with him and I invited him to come in and collaborate. As you said, he owns that character and it was always critically important for me that whoever we got to play that role took complete ownership of it. I still had a draft or two to do on the script. I spoke directly with Willem on the telephone to make sure that our instincts with what the character needed, were the same.
You also bring out something in Willem that I don’t recall seeing in any of his 60-some films. And that is the paternal side of him; especially his relationship working with Finn Woodlock [who plays “Bike”]. What did you do in terms of helping to establish that relationship? What did Willem do, because Finn and Finn with Willem, is just magical?
The real challenge there was just holding back. These were charming kids. We didn’t overly rehearse the scenes together. Willem met them about a week before the shooting so they could just get comfortable being around him. They are charming sweet kids and it’s very easy to like them. It’s very easy to be warm towards them. That was an obstacle for Willem, if anything, because his character is initially meant to be reserved and detached. He asked me to keep an eye out and let him know if he was coming across too paternal or too engaged or responsive. We had to chart that unraveling quite closely. And then apart from that, that journey was there in the script and Willem’s tendency as an actor is really just to play each scene and play it scene by scene and focus on the specific actions in that scene and allow the script, and me as the director, to take care of the bigger picture. So, if the scene was about reading a map or setting up speakers in a tree, he would really focus on the physical task and the accuracy of the task.
You captured that beautifully on film with your framing; the minute little details of each act, each thing that he is doing movement he is making. Which is interesting in terms of the subject of the tiger and also the characters of Mindy [played by Sam Neill] and Martin, as all three are similar and you see this great continuity and parallel amongst them. Each one is meticulous and methodical. Detailed, very closed, and each slowly opens and reveals the inner self. The tiger slowly appears. Martin slowly opens his heart. It’s beautifully done and a credit to your framing and lensing with so much of that.
Before I got into filmmaking, my background was in photography and graphic arts. So before drama, before actors, I had strongly developed an aesthetic sense. I am really into using the frame to tell the story. The shots aren’t lined up by accident. The cinematographer and I had quite a detailed strategy about how we would use the frame to tell the story. Not just in the inter-relationship between the characters and their journeys but particularly the relationship between Willem’s character and the natural environment. When is he comfortable with it, is he being over-powered by it, and when do we want to remind the audience that human activity is just an insignificant kind of little blot on the face of the planet when compared to the kind of indomitable forces of nature.
The whole ecological message is very subtly and beautifully done. You don’t shove it down anyone’s throat. You come to appreciate it as the character of Martin appreciates it, which I found a lovely, lovely way to approach it.
It was always important to us that this remained first and foremost a character story and not let it be richly, thematically laid, as you mentioned. As you say, we discover the world of Tasmania through the character of this outsider; who begins quite impartial to what is its political situation and he has an ambivalent or paradoxical attitude towards the environment because he understands nature, he understands how to work within it, he understands how to use it, how to survive in it, but his business down there is essentially quite destructive. But he doesn’t question the morals of what he’s doing. This is where the character comes from in the beginning. The conflict that we depict between the loggers and the “Greenies”, while hinted at in the book, were really quite expanded a bit in the film for two reasons. One of them being that the more we visited the island looking for locations, the more we realize that we can’t tell a story set in the Tasmanian landscape without referencing that very current, very topical and very political debate. Do we save the forest? Do we chop them down? Which also ties in completely to the story of the tiger and what happened. It was shot down and killed through the greed of the early settlers wanting to clear farming land and protect their sheep without any kind of environmental consciousness or an awareness of the destruction they were causing. That story continues to this day with what’s happening with the forests down there. And the other thing is it helped us dramatically as well because it allowed us to create that kind of pervading sense of tension in the background that would put pressure on the character, that would create conflict. So that really aided the drama.
So, let me ask you. Do you think there is a Tasmanian Tiger still alive?
I began the project as a cynic because I’ve read the scientific evidence and they tell us it’s impossible [to exist] once the breeding level gets below a critical mass, a species like that can’t survive. However, when you look at the maps of Tasmania, one-third of the island is completely uncharted, the World Heritage Area, with dense impenetrable forests. So, if there was a surviving population who was smart enough to hide from people, they would have plenty of places to do it. And once we got down there, I guess I was kind of seduced by the passion and the conviction of a lot of the locals that [the Tasmanian Tiger] is still out there. We spoke to many very sane, sensible people who claim to have seen one over the years, as well as many stories about driving home from the pub late at night [boisterous laughing] which you kind of give less credit to. It is an enduring myth in Australian culture that is still out there. It’s become like the Loch Ness monster or the Yeti. But in a way, it’s kind of a dangerous myth because it lets us off the hook. If it’s still out there, we don’t have to accept responsibility for the tragedy that’s going to happen to this beautiful creature.
You shot this film on location, in the outback, in the brush. That had to be technically challenging with the crew, the equipment, and also, with your love of nature and part of the film’s message, how do you not leave a huge carbon footprint from the film crew out there.
Oh yeah. Sure. We had to tread very delicately getting permission to film in Tasmania. There were lots of areas we could not film in. None of the area classified as World Heritage Area would let us in to shoot. And completely understandably. This a very fragile ecosystem. Neither are you allowed to fly choppers into or even over huge areas of the land because people come from around the world to walk, to have bush walks and camping trips, and part of the beauty of this experience is how remote it is. They don’t want technology coming in and ruining peoples’ [experience]. In Tasmania, its main industry apart from forestry is tourism. There’s a lot of the land that is owned by forestry, the State Forestry Commission. They are the people that chop down a lot of the trees. So they have less of a problem with us going in there. In the end, a lot of the places that we went to you could pretty much drive to within 100 meters, get to a location, look around and see 270 degrees of what looked like completely untouched wilderness area. But right behind you are the vehicles.
We were a very light and portable crew. We didn’t take a lot of big trucks with us. We barely had any artificial lighting at all. On most days, all the grips’ equipment and lighting equipment could be carried in a couple of utilities [boxes]. We had to stay on pathways when we were going into the wilderness. They are very strict about that. You couldn’t go off the track. Very often we were transporting the gear on hospital stretchers for hundreds of meters. It looked like a wartime operation. And we were shooting 35mm film so we weren’t bogged down by a bunch of cables and equipment. We were very portable with the camera as well.
We were living the experience of the character in the film, so we were completely subject to the whims of nature. In Tasmania, the weather can change drastically four times in an hour. You can have four seasons. At the beginning of all the long walks, there are signs saying you need to have clothes for all weather because it can change so suddenly. Some of the scenes you see in the film where we’re being bucketed down with snow, five minutes later we’re all standing there in full sun, waiting for the clouds to come back so we can have lighting continuity. We knew this about Tasmania in advance so we tried to make the weather our friend, not our enemy. We knew we couldn’t tame it or control it. So, in that way we always had stand-by scenes up our sleeve. If the weather does one thing, we shoot these scenes. If the weather does something else, we go and shoot something different. It was very helpful that Willem’s character wore the same wardrobe the entire time in the forest because we could very easily jump from one scene to another simply by changing a few props around or putting on a hat. And also in the edit, I could move things around without continuity problems.
What did you personally take away from the experience of making THE HUNTER?
I took away a number of things, professionally and personally. I took away a lot of confidence as a filmmaker and as a storyteller because during the development of the script we encountered resistence against certain things that happened in the story as well as the idea of making a film where you’ve got a lot of scenes of a guy alone in the wilderness with no other people. People were trying to convince us it would be boring, it wouldn’t sustain audiences’ attention. My instincts were, “no, this will be really beautiful and the audience will stay with it.” So it was empowering. I was prepared to change things in the edit that weren’t working but to see that this kind of vision worked, as a filmmaker I think I developed there. I had a strong love for nature and the outdoors and that was only enhanced. I learned that very famous Hollywood actors are approachable and can be very nice people [laughing] and great company over seven weeks. I also learned in the release of the film that human beings have an incredible diversity of tastes, but if you make a good film there’s always a good audience for it.
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