By Erin Free
With landmark seventies films like The Devil’s Playground and The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith, Fred Schepisi staked his claim as one of the pioneers of the Australian filmmaking renaissance. Like colleagues such as Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong, and Bruce Beresford, Schepisi also found great artistic success in Hollywood, with films such as Roxanne and Six Degrees Of Separation. In 2008, reports surfaced that Schepisi would finally return to Australia to make his first local film since 1988’s Evil Angels. The touted project was The Last Man, an adaptation of Graham Brammer’s book, Uncertain Fate, which tracked five Australian Special Forces soldiers in the final days of the Vietnam War. After years of conflict with funding bodies, The Film Finance Corporation approved key support for the war flick, and Schepisi lined up big names like Guy Pearce, David Wenham, Simon Baker, Martin Henderson, Vince Colosimo, Aden Young, and Sam Worthington to star.
The film never eventuated, however, and Schepisi went on to make The Eye Of The Storm, with Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis, in Australia instead, and then teamed Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche for Words And Pictures. When FilmInk chatted with the director on the 2008 DVD release of the aforementioned The Devil’s Playground and The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith, Schepisi was visibly excited about The Last Man. “We’ve got all the good Australian guys,” the director said. “I’ve had a lot of actors who have said yes, and we’ve started negotiations. Who ends up in it will depend on availability and the suitability of negotiations. The story is very much engaged with the characters, and its scope comes out of what they live through. I want to use very special filmmaking techniques to heighten that. I’d like to give the audience a genuine feeling of what it was like to be there in the jungles of Vietnam. And then there is another section of the film which takes place twelve years later when the leader of this particular patrol has committed suicide, and it’s the first time that all the guys get together with their partners, wives, and girlfriends. That’s quite a settlement of the lingering emotions of the conflict.”
