The Silver Screen Oasis

RedRiver wrote:In fact, he took that picture of Donald Meek for your avatar.

Today, the sadistic serial killer at the heart of Wolf Creek is preparing to bump off an elderly couple in a derelict farm house about 90 minutes' drive north of Adelaide, although it feels a lot more isolated than that. But first, his director has to frame the mayhem perfectly.

''Let's just open the door again,'' Greg McLean (Director) says from his seat at the far end of the hallway. Suddenly, the place is flooded with harsh light, as a wave of heat from the desert pours in.
Backpackers Rutger and Katarina (Phillipe Klaus and Shannon Ashlyn) stray into dangerous territory.

McLean surveys the scene on his monitor, then glances at the screen of his laptop, on which the final scene of John Ford's legendary 1956 western, The Searchers, is playing. If you are going to quote from a classic, it pays to get it right.

In the set-up of his own shot, McLean is looking to echo the moment in which John Wayne is framed in the doorway of a house into which he is not invited, with the desert at his back and then at his front. He is aiming, he later tells me, for ''a direct inversion of that idea of the lone hero wandering out into the west. This film is a western in lots of ways.''