For his feature film debut he took an award winning novel about one man on the hunt for the Tasmanian tiger and turned it into a work that attracted an international star, national media attention and a huge opportunity for Tasmania. Togatus spoke with Daniel Nettheim, the Director of the new film, The Hunter, which stars the man best known for his role as the Green Goblin, Willem Dafoe.

Q: Willem Dafoe has generated a lot of media attention for the movie, was it difficult to get him onboard in the first place?

A: It was actually surprisingly easy. We didn’t send the script out until we were pretty confident with it – and it did take eight years to write the script – but it was remarkably straightforward. We sent the script to his manager who liked it and passed it on to him and we got a call saying Willem was interested. No, “intrigued” was the word. I immediately booked a flight to New York to try and convert that into a meeting. At the end of the meeting he said, “great, I would like to work with you guys.” 

Q: At what point did you decide that he was the one you wanted for the main character?

A: From very early on in writing the script we were interested in Willem. We were kind of fortunate that the main character was an outsider. The world was our oyster in terms of our casting opportunities so we wrote a list of our favourite actors, and then we had to go “right, who is approachable among these people”. I found out that Willem was actually a pretty approachable person. He’d done another film in Australia called Daybreakers. I knew people who had worked on it and they all spoke highly of Willem and what a great collaborator he was. I thought in this world of ego driven stars he sounds like a person that would be great to go on this journey with.

Q: You also have a strong Australian cast, was it harder in a way to convince them as mainlanders to come down here?

A: To tell the truth everyone was really enthusiastic about coming down to Tassie. Sam Neill was here for longest apart from Willem. Also Francis and the kids were pretty much booked for the duration of the seven-week shoot. But a bunch of other really great actors from Melbourne and Sydney who we love – Sullivan Stapleton, Callan Mulvey, Dan Wylie, Dan Spielmen, Jamie Timony – they came for a day or two at time. They all commented on what a great atmosphere there was around the shoot and how beautiful it was to come down to Tasmania to do a day or two of work, go back home and come back later to rejoin the crew. None of them could wait to come back.   

Q: What was it like working with Willem? I’ve heard him use the word collaboration about this film.

A: It really was. The script didn’t really indicate a whole lot of backstory or history or personal details, so it was really a role for an actor to take ownership of and invent a lot of the details. That is kind of how I pitched it to Willem in the first place and fortunately for me that is how he really likes to work, as opposed to being delivered a fully fleshed out character with all the details and not being able to participate in the realisation of that character.

The interesting thing about working with Willem is that he is really particular about doing things himself. He didn’t want a stunt double. There is one stunt double for one shot where he falls off a cliff, but for everything else he said, “you can’t double me with someone else, it’s got to be me.” When we are doing these really wide helicopter shots, that little person in the frame is always Willem. He would put on this heavy pack and walk for hundreds of metres away from the assistants, who would be hiding from trees so we couldn’t see them from the chopper. There is a shot near the beginning of the film where he is heading into the wilderness. It’s beautiful, the chopper comes up and around and you see him on this really amazing backdrop. We had to have a few goes at it. I would radio, “just keep walking in that direction,” and he would radio back, “sorry what direction? I can’t even see you, where are you?”. What I didn’t realise was the button grass he was walking on is really difficult to walk on. That stuff is just so marshy and so boggy. The film doesn’t show that- it looks like it should be easy and I had no idea. So we kept calling out “keep going, stop acting, we are going to appear at any moment.”

Another time you see him as a silhouette on the top of the mountain and he starts climbing down the rocks. I hadn’t been up there and I was down the bottom with the radio saying, “can you ask Willem to move a bit faster, he seems to be taking his time climbing down those rocks.” And the assistant would say, “I told him and he says he is trying. He says it’s a bit hard.” And I’m thinking it doesn’t look too hard. A bit later we went up there to film a shot looking down, and what I didn’t realise there were forty foot chasms between the rocks that would have killed him if he’d fallen. I had to apologise and go, “hey, sorry for bossing you round like that, I had no idea.” I guess my point is, and this is one of the comments Willem made after seeing the film, is that we’ve captured the way the environment looks, but we actually haven’t captured the physical reality of what it’s like moving through those locations.

Q: Had you been to Tas before you got involved with this film?

A: Yeah, quite a bit. My cousins have always lived in Tasmania, so from a young age we were coming down for Christmas holidays in Launceston. So I knew about the beauty of the place from quite early on.

Q: I’ve heard the nature is like an extra character in the film. Was that intentional?

A: Absolutely. The landscape plays such an important dramatic role. We were really careful in picking our locations in as much as they always had to serve the story in a specific way. Each of the landscape choices reflects a certain part of the narrative, but also an emotional state. Often Willem wasn’t playing opposite any other human actors in the scene and there was a lot of stuff of him alone in the wilderness. What he is reacting to and responding to is the environment itself, just like he would be with any other actor.

Q: How did you cope with the elements? There has been talk of leeches and bad weather.

A: Most people on film shoots have great outdoor gear. There is nothing worse than being cold and wet on set when you are there for ten hours trying to film. We were prepared for extremes and quick variations in temperatures and conditions. So that was fine, but the trick is what you are getting on screen. I knew that the weather could change really rapidly, like four seasons in one hour. We realised we had to work with that because we were never going to be able to fight it. So we had a pretty adaptable schedule. We always had a plan for what scenes we were going to shoot during the day, but we had the flexibility to change them around if the weather changed. For example, there were scenes I wanted to shoot in snow. On Mount Wellington, we were lucky enough to get the first snowfall in six weeks on the one day we were shooting up there. I knew we had all these scenes that had to be shot in snow so we quickly changed around the schedule and shot the snow scenes.

Q: Do you believe that the Tasmanian tiger is still out there?

A: I’d love to believe it. I think that science tells us it is not possible, but there seems to be so much belief on the island and from the people we spoke to. When you look at that vast world heritage area with no roads and very limited access, if it wanted to hide it’s got plenty of places. The only thing that I really want to see is a photo of it. There are a couple of sightings a year and some of those make it into the press, but it’s a bit funny that no one’s managed to pull out their iPhones and get a shot.

Q: What made you chose this specific story as your first feature film?

A: I read the novel about ten years ago and I was really attracted to the strong emotional journey of the main character. Also, the cinematic potential of the landscape that was described so beautifully in the book that it made me want to come back down here and have a look at those places.

Q: So you read the book when it first came out?

A: Yeah, both Vincent Sheehan and I were at the book launch and we read the book at the same time and a couple of months later we met up and talked about doing it as a film together.

Q: So you know the writer of the book?

A: Yeah Julia and I had been co-editors at Honi Soit, the Sydney University newspaper back in the very late eighties. At the time we were writing a lot of film reviews. We both had an interest in film back then. I ended up going off to film school and Julia finished her law studies and became a novelist. We did always have this shared passion for cinema. So I think that history helped us get the rights to this story.

Q: How was adapting the book to the movie?

A: The adaptation wasn’t obvious, because the book is a beautiful work of literature and it’s also very internal. A lot of the book takes place inside the character’s head and you can’t really show that on the screen. We kind of made a disciplined decision not to use voice over narration or not to use flashbacks to fill in this character’s backstory. We wanted to tell the story purely in the present tense as it unravels. So we had to fill in a lot of the narrative ellipsis and big holes in the plot – that is the luxury of the novelist, but as a filmmaker you can’t get away with leaving out that information.

Q: What was your favourite part of making the film?

A: Probably being in Tasmania. Being on location, away from home, it really contributes to the adventure. As a crew we were living the adventure of the main character in that we were outsiders, we were away from home, we were battling weather and seeing beautiful landscapes. Shooting in Tasmania was really the highlight.

Any fun moments?

Well we had great catering. In Deloraine, where we stayed for five weeks, there was this pizza restaurant called Red and the staff realised very early that if they stayed open past eight o’clock they would have thirty or forty people in. There were five other restaurants in town that didn’t quite cotton on. As a result, this restaurant became our home away from home. We’d go up there every night. Sometimes it would only be five people, sometimes it would be thirty, but we became really good friends with the guys in the restaurant and they ended up hosting screenings for us, staying open as late as they could. It was great and they also had a really good wine list, so a lot of Tassie Pinot was drunk.

Q: Have you always wanted to direct a film?

A: I was one of those kids who were making super eight films when they were in high school. Ever since I was about twelve-years-old and I saw Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock I had been enamoured of the possibilities of doing that. After school I ventured in photography and art school, but did eventually come back to film school. I’d always had an interest in working in that medium. Eventually I landed in directing.

Q: You’ve also done a lot of television?

A: Since coming out of film school I’ve done a lot of stuff, particularly series television on some great shows. I love doing that. That is my career. The film is almost like a luxury. If you get to make a film every five to ten years in this country then you’re privileged. I’d like to keep balancing the two.

Q: How is being a film director in Australia?

A: It’s probably easier than some places and harder than others. We don’t have the population like the US or the UK to generate a lot of local product. That being said, I think we have a healthy industry for our size. There is great government support, which a lot of places don’t have. I think the trick to getting a film made in this country is having a good project.

Q: What is next for you?

A: I haven’t decided what my next film project will be; I’m reading a few scripts and hoping to get back into good TV soon.

By Bec Chirichiello