Greg Mclean Is A Caring, Sympathetic Director

Wolf Creek director Greg McClean’s follow-up frightfest Rogue is hitting the cinemas today.

The old-school-ish “nature peril” flick, features over-sized crocodiles gobbling up Northern Territory tourists while a cast of all-good Aussies give their best Mick Dundee impressions, so it should be another winner for the filmmaker.

(Incidentally, the NT’s tourism commission must be delighted with all this great publicity McClean’s giving them; first psychotic rapists/murderers and now killer crocs! Sure beats Daryl Somers standing in front of Uluru and chuckling, “You’ll never, never know if you never, never go”!)

This junket story has the usual “oh the laughs we had” fluff that comes with a movie premiere, but we couldn’t help but feel a lovely bit of schadenfreude at McClean’s obvious delight in putting US import and star Michael Vartan through his paces:

“Michael had just come out from America and was scared of spiders, snakes – all animals really – so it was a new experience for him,” [Radha] Mitchell, 33, explains.

McLean adds: “I realised very quickly he would be great for the character.

“He is from LA, he’s never been to Australia and had no idea what the Outback was. When we arrived in the Northern Territory, that’s when he realised it was real. It was a huge shock for him, I mean here he was on a boat with real crocodiles and Radha Mitchell driving and she couldn’t drive a boat. It was very different to anything he has ever done in America.”

That’s the spirit, Greg!

Hopefully they also took Vartan to some only-accessible-by-road-train pub and made him shotgun a few Fosters, before telling him that “all Australians” eat kangaroo balls while threatening him with a sugarcane machete.