By Dov Kornits

38 years after he completed his masterpiece Wake In Fright, director Ted Kotcheff finally returned to Australia for the first time to present the restored classic at The Sydney Film Festival. He proudly confesses that his busy schedule could only allow for one trip in the first half of 2009, and instead of going to The Palais for the Cannes Classics presentation of the film, he instead chose to return to the scene of the crime. “There are two things about a film,” the surprisingly animated and enthusiastic 78-year-old starts. “There’s the film itself, and then there’s the whole experience of making it. I had the greatest time here. I really loved the Australian crew. They were young, enthusiastic, and unspoiled. Prop men helped the electricians move the lights; electricians helped the prop men move the furniture. You’d never find that in America or in England, where there are strict union lines. The crew here worked together, and they wanted to make the best film possible. There was this tremendous energy, and I adored them. I remember it with great fondness.”

A scene from Wake In Fright.

The Canadian-born Kotcheff should know a thing or two about international film crews, having worked all around the globe on films as diverse as North Dallas Forty, First Blood and Weekend At Bernie’s. “I love the gypsy quality about directing,” he says. “I made a film in Israel [Billy Two Hats], I made a film in France [Who Is Killing The Great Chefs Of Europe?], and I made a film in Thailand [Uncommon Valor]. I love making films around the world. It’s the joy of being a director. That appealed to me about taking on Wake In Fright. I made this film called The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz about a Jewish boy growing up in Montreal. Someone says to him, ‘Kravitz, why do you always run around like you’ve got a red hot poker up your ass?’ I’m always interested in characters that don’t know themselves, and in the process of the film discover the truth about themselves. That was the other quality about Wake In Fright that was so entrancing for me. There was this teacher who has no idea how he’s going to behave at extremis, and he finds that he is no different from all these people that he’s had total contempt for.”

Ted Kotcheff

It may seem strange today that Kotcheff got the gig of telling a distinctly Australian story, but this was 1970, before Australia’s New Wave, and around the same time that Brit Nicolas Roeg was shooting another Australian classic in Walkabout. “I made a film in London called Two Gentleman Sharing,” says Kotcheff by way of explaining how he became involved. “It was about the race situation in London in the sixties, and the script was written by a Jamaican named Evan Jones, who did a lot of Joseph Losey’s films. As a result of working together, we’d developed this friendship, and he said, ‘I’ve got this job adapting a book, and it’s written by an Australian called Kenneth Cook. It’s fabulous.’ He said that I’d love it, and that it was right up my alley.”

A scene from Wake In Fright.

Wake In Fright quickly opened and closed without much fanfare in the US and, more disturbingly, Australia. In the US, it was re-cut and retitled Outback, and in Australia the powers that be thought that it wasn’t an image that they wanted to promote of the country. What’s worse, a print of Wake In Fright has been impossible to find for more than thirty years. It must be an amazing feeling for a director to have their film rediscovered after so many years in the wilderness. “Two things are amazing,” says Kotcheff. “Firstly, that the film is being re-released in Australia, but secondly that it was declared a Cannes Classic. In 1971, it was invited into the competition at Cannes. At the screening, there was a voice behind me that kept saying, ‘Wow, that’s great! What a sequence!’ When it came to the climax, he was going, ‘He’s gone all the way!’ When the lights went up, I realised that it was a lad about 23-years old. I went outside and asked the PR guys who it was. They said, ‘Oh, that’s a young American director who’s only done one film…his name’s Martin Scorsese.’ 38 years later, and who happens to be in charge of the classics department that chose Wake In Fright as a Cannes Classic? Martin Scorsese. He remembered my film after 38 years. I felt so great about that.”

A scene from Wake In Fright.

A 2009 screening at Cannes and the Australian re-release would not have been possible if, as has been widely documented, the negatives of the film hadn’t been discovered in Pittsburgh USA, only weeks away from heading to the garbage dump. “I consider the film to be one of my finest achievements,” Kotcheff says. “Had those negatives been discovered two weeks later, they would have been burned. That would have been like a knife into my heart. I love that film,” gushes Kotcheff. “When you make a film, you’re always aiming for a hundred. Out of all the films that I’ve made, Wake In Fright comes closest to achieving almost the full hundred that I aimed for.”

This article appeared in FilmInk Magazine in 2009. Wake In Fright is available on various streaming and digital services. The Royal Hotel is in cinemas now.

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