Mia Wasikowska named Star of the Year by Australian International Movie Convention

Australian actress Mia Wasikowska is currently in France filming . Source: AFP

 

 

James Wigney, The Daily Telegraph, reports

Rising Aussie star Mia Wasikowska got a bonus birthday present today with news she has been named as the Star of the Year by the Australian International Movie Convention.

The Canberra-born actor, who turns 24 today, was honoured by the convention, which opened on the Gold Coast last night, for an already stellar career that includes the HBO hit In Treatment and whose movies including Alice In Wonderland, Stoker and Lawless, have made more than $1 billion at the box office.

Wasikowska will next be seen in Tracks, director John Curran's adaptation of Robyn Davidson's memoir of her epic journey on foot across the Australian desert in 1977 accompanied by four camels and a dog.

Tracks screened in competition at this year's Venice Film Festival, had a gala screening at the Toronto Film Festival, and opened the Adelaide Film Festival last week.

The movie was Wasikowska's first Australian feature film since the 2007 monster croc movie Rogue. Since then she has acted opposite Johnny Depp, Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman, appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair and drawn praise from the likes of Glenn Close and Meryl Streep.

"It's a real honour to have this award," she said. "The film was very special for me - it gave me the chance to be able to work in Australia again for the first time in a long time and to reconnect with the Australian industry."

Wasikowska is currently in France filming the title role in the coming film adaptation of the literary classic Madame Bovary.

Mia Wasikowska stars in film of Robyn Davidson's book 'Tracks', about camel journey across Australia

Mia Wasikowska in new film Tracks, based on Robyn Davidson's 3200-kilometre trek across Australia. Picture: Supplied

 

The Daily Telegraph reports

Robyn Davidson's 3200-kilometre foot journey across Australia accompanied by four camels and a black dog has never really ended.

Her 1977 trek catapulted Davidson into an unexpected media storm, from which came a book deal a few years later and a career as a writer and traveler. More than 30 years on, her book recounting the journey, Tracks, has been turned into a film starring Australian actor Mia Wasikowska and directed by John Curran.

"I think even writing the book all those years ago changed the journey," Davidson, now 62, said in an interview before the world premiere of the Tracks in competition at the Venice Film Festival. While writing it in "this horrible, pokey flat in London" two years after the fact, Davidson said she experienced an incredible feat of memory.

"I swear I remembered every single campsite over a period of nine months. As soon as the book was finished, it was gone. It was as if the book ate the memory," she said. "I wonder now if the film is going to copy the book in some sort of way, so people, and even I, remember it in some weird confused way."

The book, which was translated in to 18 languages and has been part of the Australian school curriculum, had been optioned many times for films that were never made.

Davidson said she is "delighted" other filmmakers didn't get to make their versions of the film and that it went to Curran, an American who has lived in Australia, saying his film "is the good one." Her only condition was that she wanted Wasikowska, a fellow Aussie, to play her.

The two women met on a trip to the desert so Davidson could show the young actress a few things about camels.

"I thought, 'Oh, she is she is so tiny and frail. How is she going to muster the sort of earthiness?'" Davidson recalled.

"The next time I saw her was at a shoot at Ayers Rock, and she was transformed. She was wearing my clothes, she had hairy legs. She was a little toughie. It was amazing."

Tiny and frail is exactly how many viewed Davidson when she showed up in Alice Springs in 1975 to prepare for the trek eastward to the Indian Ocean. She spent more some two years scraping together money and learning to train the camels that would accompany her. Eventually she sought sponsorship from National Geographic, which set a condition that a photographer would capture images at intervals.

Along the way, Davidson had to face down charging feral camel bulls, track down her own camels when they went missing, suffered the loss of her faithful dog, and eventually faced a growing media circus as word of her feat spread.

She also was befriended by Aborigines, including one elder, Mr. Eddy, who accompanied her through sacred lands, and was taken in for brief respites by the few white settlers living in the outback.

Davidson also developed an enduring friendship with National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan, played in the film by Adam Driver, despite her initial resentment at his periodic intrusions.

She still is at a loss to explain why she undertook the journey.

"I suppose the most I can say is I had a kind of instinctive understanding I needed to do something very demanding of my life in order to make an individual of myself, in order to pull all these rather unprepossessing bits together, and forge a person."

Davidson went on to become a prolific writer and lived two years with nomads in India, which she said, was "the most extreme and difficult" thing she has ever done. "That made this look like a cakewalk," she said.

The bonds she forged with those she met on her on her trans-Australian journey, including the camels, remained strong. Mr Eddy, she said, made her an honorary wife.

And the camels retained their loyalty years after. She visited them once in western Australia. After playing and cuddling them for an hour, she turned to walk back 16 kilometres to the homestead.

"They fell in line behind me, following me all the way," she said.

Aussie outback to be the real star of Tracks, The Rover and Wolf Creek 2

John Jarratt in Wolf Creek 2. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied

 

Vicky Roach, The Daily Telegraph, reports

Forget the quirky comedies and gritty urban dramas - Australia's leading filmmakers are heading back to the bush.

The Outback is the star of four high profile films scheduled to hit our cinemas next year, including Tracks and Wolf Creek 2.

Although targeted at very different demographics, the extraordinary true story of author Robyn Davidson's 2,700km camel trek from Alice Springs to the ocean and the bloodthirsty sequel to Greg Mclean's 2005 horror hit have both been selected to make their world premieres at the Venice Film Festival later this month.

A Sundance Film Festival launch is a strong possibility for The Rover, director David Michod's hotly-anticipated follow-up to Animal Kingdom, the internationally-acclaimed film about a Melbourne crime family that bagged Jacki Weaver an Oscar nomination.

Starring Robert Pattinson and Guy Pearce, the apocalyptic thriller was shot on location in South Australia about the same time as Tracks and Wolf Creek 2, competing for locations and crew.

And while Mad Max 4: Fury Road was eventually forced to relocate to Namibia, due to the uncharacteristic greening of Broken Hill, George Miller's groundbreaking franchise rewrote the rule book on creative, genre-bending uses of our iconic interior.

Scale is one factor contributing to the current Outback revival, which continues with Jocelyn Moorhouse's The Dressmaker, a gothic tale of love, hate and haute couture starring Kate Winslet and Judy Davis. Filming is scheduled to begin early next year in the Wimmera or Mallee regions of Victoria.

"You have to have something distinctive to go up against the big blockbusters,'' observes Oscar-winning producer Emile Sherman (The King's Speech), who is working with director John Curran on Tracks.

"And people, particularly the 30-plus audience who are getting a bit sick of endless franchises about superheroes, are looking for other journeys they can go on in the cinema that will take them to places they have never experienced."

The distinctive, naturally photogenic landscapes of Australia's jaw-dropping interior offer a very real alternative to Hollywood's spectacular, CGI-generated backdrops.

"You look at those big, glossy Hollywood movies, which I love incidentally, but it doesn't matter where they are filmed,'' says associate professor Jane Mills, of the Journalism and Media Research Centre at UNSW.

"We have all had that experience of going to any city in the world and there is another McDonalds or another Subway. Cities are a bit samey. The Outback is special. It gives you a sense of veracity; the sense that you are really there."

Supporting Mills' theory is Tracks' decision to shoot on film using an anamorphic, wide-screen format (a technique embraced by movie studios in the 1950s to compete with the popularity of television.)

"It feels like big cinema,'' says Sherman.

"And then there are the camels, which are such a key part of the film. There is this small girl (Mia Wasikowska) and these enormous camels with incredible, bellowing growls. It's a very visceral experience."

Michod and producer Liz Watts also chose to go against the current digital orthodoxy, again shooting The Rover on film.

The wide open spaces of the Australian Outback also give filmmakers plenty of creative elbow room.

Australia filmmakers have been mining the distinctive landscape for its imaginary possibilities since the 1950s, when John Heyer and Charles Chauvel set an extraordinarily high benchmark with The Back of Beyond and Jedda respectively.

Since then, whitefella directors have periodically returned to the bush for inspiration in films as diverse as Walkabout, Wake in Fright, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Priscilla: Queen of the Desert.

"It's certainly an Australian dreaming in a sense," says Sherman, acknowledging that the undomesticated landscape allows filmmakers more opportunity to take creative risks.

For someone like Michod, who is under intense pressure to deliver on his hotly-anticipated follow-up to Animal Kingdom, the Outback must have seemed like a chance to keep Hollywood at arm's length.

Marree, a one-pub town 650km north of Adelaide, is about as far from LA as a filmmaker can get.

"I was always concerned that if I made my second film in America, the freedom to make the film I wanted to make might not be the same as if I made the film here," he says.

Producer Al Clark (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) sees Michod's choice of location as significant.

"It's interesting that David, who I would assume would have been offered a lot of prospective films, ended up writing his own and writing something that was set in the antithesis of (Animal Kingdom's) confined space, which was an endless space.''

Mills says the effect of Baz Luhrmann's Australia on the current wave of Outback films should not be underestimated, either.

"His film drew upon so much history of Australian cinema and I think began to show a way of reconciliation between black and white, that both black and white Australians can feel a sense of belonging,'' she says.

Also informing the contemporary, whitefella perspective is a growing canon of work directed by internationally-acclaimed indigenous filmmakers, many of whom are right at home in the country's dramatic interior.

From The Sapphires and Bran Nue Dae to Beneath Clouds, Mystery Road and Samson and Delilah, indigenous filmmakers have been slowly remapping the Australian cinematic landscape from an alternative, Aboriginal point of view.

Challenging the accepted co-ordinates still further are films such as Ten Canoes, which Rolf De Heer co-directed with Peter Djigirr, and the upcoming Charlie's Country, on which he is collaborating with David Gulpilil.

Historically, white filmmakers have portrayed Australia's interior as a harsh and dangerous place in which they are extremely uneasy.

"It's a very particular view of the Outback that comes up a lot because it's the white settlers' experience of this foreign place where they weren't at home'' says Karen Pearlman, Head of Screen Studies at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School.

Wolf Creek 2, The Rover, and Mad Max 4 would seem to follow in this tradition - perhaps revisiting our troubled colonial past in the wake of the intervention and Parliament's 2008 apology to the stolen generations.

Tracks, however, appears to stand apart in this cinematic landscape, traditionally inhabited by men.

"Not only is she an explorer as opposed to an antagonist in the landscape, but (the protagonist) is a woman. That's really important in differentiating (Tracks) from the other films - seeing a woman take leadership and move fearlessly, with benign intent, into this landscape," says Pearlman.

A film adaptation of Davidson's autobiographical novel has been in the works since 1987, when Julia Roberts was to play the lead role. Why is it finally about to hit the big screen now?

"When we take on films at See-Saw, our question is always: 'what makes them relevant today.'

"That drive Robyn had to escape the chatter of urban life, and the 20s political conversations she was having, and to get out there alone and see what comes of her away from everything, that fantasy seems to me to be even more relevant today as we are bombarded by so much technology and social media,'' says Sherman.

The experience of the younger cast members on Wolf Creek 2, many of whom were more intimidated by the lack of internet access they experienced on location in the Flinders Ranges than they were of Mick Taylor, underscores Sherman's point.

Author's journey across desert to leave tracks on big screen

The epic journey of Robyn Davidson, who walked the Australian desert with four camels and a dog, is to be recreated in a film. Photo: Edwina Pickles

Linda Morris, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports

After 35 years and a failed attempt by actress Julia Roberts to bring it to the big screen, the story of solo adventuress Robyn Davidson and her nine-month trek across Australia's central desert is to be made into a film.

The ethereal Mia Wasikowska will play the intrepid Davidson, while Adam Driver, of the HBO series Girls, will take on the role of Rick Smolan, the brash former National Geographic photographer who documented Davidson's trek, in a $12 million production that will begin filming on October 8 in South Australia and the Northern Territory.

In 1977 Davidson, with four camels and her dog, Diggity, set out to cross Australia's heartland for no better reason than she had wanted to find herself. She was mystified when her personal odyssey became the stuff of international headlines. Incorrectly reported as missing, she was pursued by paparazzi and had to shoot her beloved Diggity when the dog took poison bait.

Tracks is being produced by Emile Sherman and Iain Canning of See-Saw Films, whose credits include The King's Speech, Shame, and Oranges and Sunshine. It is being co-produced by Julie Ryan, maker of Red Dog and Ten Canoes. The film is to be directed by John Curran, from The Painted Veil and Praise, who also wrote the screenplay with Marion Nelson.

Davidson's journey was one of the great Australian stories that begged to be adapted for the big screen, Sherman says.

''Robyn, played by Mia Wasikowska, undertakes such an epic journey, doing what I suspect many of us wish we had the courage to do: to cast off the shackles of our lives, going as far away as possible from the noise of civilisation, and to find out how we would manage truly alone.

''At the same time, it's her unique relationship with her camel companions and her dog, Diggity, that gives the story such warmth and intimacy.

''And of course there is her more complicated relationship with the charismatic National Geographic photographer … whose ongoing intrusions she's forced to accommodate.''

The character of Davidson first drew Roberts, then Helen Hunt to the role. Disney bought the film rights in 1994. Tracks, Davidson's account of her solo venture, was an international bestseller and has been re-released by Bloomsbury for the start of the film's production.

Davidson, who is based in Melbourne and has struggled with public representations of herself as a romantic figure of the desert, is pleased with the casting of Wasikowska. The film will not exactly mirror her journey, but memory is a contentious thing.

''You have all these triggers in the book that allow other people to imagine and, indeed, allow me to imagine the trip, which is probably different from actually how it was,'' she says. ''People will think the film will be a representation of what happened and, of course, it's much further removeIt's a funny, strange, slippery thing - memory - and you have to make your identity up in the middle of it all.''