Wake in Fright


DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT – TED KOTCHEFF
MAKING WAKE IN FRIGHT: THE NOVEL
THE FILM
FILMING IN AUSTRALIA
SHOOTING IN BROKEN HILL
POST-PRODUCTION AND RELEASE
RECOVERY AND RESTORATION
WAKE IN FRIGHT ON AUSTRALIANSCREEN
WAKE IN FRIGHT ON DVD AND BLU-RAY

FILMING IN AUSTRALIA

Kotcheff, his family and then wife, actor Sylvia Kay arrived in Australia before Christmas 1969. First assistant director Howard Rubie, an experienced newsreel cameraman and director, was charged with helping Kotcheff “soak up Australian culture.”

Rubie says this translated in trying to find locations, characters and situations that lined up with the seedy, rollicking, drunken, heavily masculine culture depicted in the book and then in Jones screenplay: “We went to an RSL club, some wharfies’ pubs, the kind whose clientele clock off work at 6:00am and are heavily into the drinking by 9:00am…we did a lot of drinking.” Kotcheff was taken to an illegal casino in Sydney’s nightclub heartland in the east of the city for research.

In a crucial scene in the film Grant (Gary Bond) loses all his money in the unique Australian made game of chance called Two-Up – where a “spinner” throws two pennies into the air and chancers lay money whether they land heads or tails. Kotcheff was eager to see the real thing but it did not come without a little risk: “We went to the Double Bay Bridge Club,” says Rubie. “You walked up a flight of stairs off the street, and there at the top of them you would find two doors with “Double Bay Bridge Club” branded on them and a Big Heavy [doorman] in between the them. Unless you knew which door to enter the heavy would get suspicious and throw you out...probably down the stairs.” Rubie says fortunately they selected the right door!

Casting continued. Kotcheff saw just about every young female actor in Australia for Janette. None of them had the dispassionate insolent air that he wanted. Executive producer Howard Barnes suggested Ted’s wife, Sylvia Kay, a distinguished West End actor who happened to have a facility with accents. Kotcheff was not keen on the nepotism but in the end he relented. Editor Tony Buckley felt that the whole crew was behind the decision: “Sylvia was dead right. There was a sullen-ness and sultriness about her that wasn’t offensive. There was something under the skin that you wanted to delve into.”

The film, budgeted at just over AU$700,000, commenced filming in Sydney in January 1970. Though the entire film was set in the outback, in and around the fictional Bundanyabba, the company had to shoot most of the interiors in Sydney and the rest, mostly exteriors, on location in Broken Hill, the actual ‘prototype’ for the novel’s setting.
Locations in Sydney included streets in Bondi Junction to ‘cover’ for the back alley behind the Yabba’s Two-Up School; the Yabba’s Bad Penny Bar where Grant befriends Tim (Al Thomas) was the Old Crystal Hotel in what is now Sydney’s Chinatown and the gigantic pub in down town Yabba, where Grant meets the local cop, Jock Crawford
(Chips Rafferty) was the main bar of the Sheraton Grandstand of the old Sydney Cricket Ground. The interior of Tim Hynes house was an actual private home in Killara, a suburb north of Sydney.

Amongst production designer Dennis Gentle’s most impressive work was the Two-Up school and ‘restaurant’ constructed at an old warehouse in Paddington and Doc Tydon’s hut, the interior of which was built to scale at AJAX studios in Bondi Junction. Other locations include hospital interiors in Randwick, Sydney, a hotel lobby in a real motel
on Sydney’s lower north side, Kirribilli and Cochran’s Hotel, Pyrmont.

Kotcheff asked production designer Dennis Gentle to provide the unit with red dust, even on the Broken Hill location:“We got those old fashioned fly sprayers and we put the dust in them and before every take the prop man would spray the dust into the air,” says Kotcheff. “Everything little thing had a layer of dust on it.”

Photo: Jack Crawford (Chips Rafferty) watches John Grant quell his thirst (foreground) in Wake in Fright

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