For someone who still gets excited by fax machines, Google Earth does something almost sexual for me, so I’m going to take advantage of its wonders and map the different places the cabin has been; in reality, in the mind’s eye, and in the film.
The idea of the cabin has in fact travelled a fair bit, moving as the story developed. As I mentioned in the last post the initial inspiration for the story was a desolate place, rich with the sense that the land was an overpowering force – a core to the story that I wanted to keep intact.
The area around Iluka has that peculiar buzz and hum to it that you come across all over Australia – the sense that it knows something you don’t know and can never possibly know, and this is the kind of haunting I wanted to get at. It goes right to the heart of what this story is about – the tenuous relationship non-indigenous Australians have with such an inhospitable landscape.
This is the spot:
Closer in you can see the roof of the original cabin. I’m next to it with a massive pin in my head.
It was isolated and it was filled with foreboding. But as I was working my way through a couple of kilos of prawns and a bottle of wine on the beach it was pretty clear that it wasn’t quite desolate enough.
Right from the start I wanted to steer away from the generic depiction of the Australian bush as a vast, wide, arid landscape. There’s a hostility about that kind of country that is horrific, but it lacks the kind of menace I was looking for. Land like that will kill you by leaving you alone and washing its hands of you. I needed a place that would kill you by suffocating you.
I kept looking back in my mind to the kind of mulchy deciduous forest I’d known as a child in England, and the cloying menace of that kind of landscape. It was the sort of place that had its own language, rather than an echoing silence – the sort of place that would drive you mad with whispers, not echoes.
It’s been really refreshing listening to comments from reviewers and interviewers who really understand this in the narrative – who really get it. Probably the two biggest writing influences in my work are Dennis Potter and Harold Pinter, and it’s been just wonderful to hear from people who can read that in the work and understand where the story’s narrative is coming from. It’s just great that so many people are picking up on that and immersing themselves in it.
Like many people of my generation the stories we listened to or watched were saturated with that eerie threat of the unreal. Even Doctor Who. There seems to be something in the English and North European psyche that’s haunted by ‘what’s in the forest’ – trolls, devious creatures posing as angels, trees that tangle you up by the hair and then swallow you whole.
That fear crept into the work of the playwrights and screenwriters and they managed to bring the same threat into the domesticated indoors.
As Nat was an Englishman I wanted to recreate that, but at the same time tap into the truth of the matter in the land here for everyone who engages with it. The land walks to its own tune.
The first place that came to mind for me was the area around the Barrington Tops or near Khancoban at the foot of the Snowy Mountains.
And here it is:
It’s a place of verticals, not horizontals. It’s a place that surrounds you, that has secrets.
And so when I started plotting the mechanics of the story world this is the place I kept in mind – the colours, the kind of trees, the copses and quarries, rough hills and forbidding grey skies, cold, wet and muddy.
What’s been truly wonderful about the development of this project is how everyone who has come on board has had the same vision – has seen it exactly how I saw it.
This was where taking the time at the start with those creative relationships really paid off. It allowed me to keep writing without doubting for an instant that Kriv, Kristian, John or Rob had a different picture in their heads. The picture that Kriv created out of this is just frighteningly identical to the image I had in my head all along, and I think it’s rare for that to genuinely come about, and is testament to spending time at the start of a project talking things through, learning from each other and getting inside each other’s heads.
So when the time came for actually locating the shoot I had no doubt whatsoever that Kriv and Kristian would nail the perfect spot down.
And the last place I expected that to be was South Australia. And furthermore about half an hour outside Adelaide.
But I remember receiving the call from Kriv after he and Kristian had been taken out to the first of what we all presumed would be a long and arduous hunt for exactly the right location, and him telling me it was exactly the right location.
…And so the cabin transformed itself from the little settlers hut outside Iluka, to a place in my head, and then the week before shooting began I went up to the hills outside Adelaide to find this:
And there are little more humbling things than to see the reality of that from a potentially daft idea inspired by bourbon, wine and a bag of prawns eighteen months earlier…
