Daniel Nettheim’s IFFR closer The Hunter is a character study of an outsider, rather than a film about hunting, the film’s lead actor Willem Dafoe tells Geoffrey Macnab
“It’s not a film about hunting,” actor Willem Dafoe tells the Daily Tiger of his role in
The Hunter (IFFR’s closing film.) He plays Martin, a mercenary loner, hired by a biotechnological company to travel to Tasmania in search of a Tasmanian tiger. This is a breed presumed to be extinct, but the company suspects that there may be one last animal left in the wilds. If Martin could track it down and get hold of its DNA, the company stands to make a fortune.
The Hunter (an adaptation of the debut novel by Julia Leigh) began its long journey toward production several years ago as a project in IFFR’s CineMart. Its director, Daniel Nettheim, has a long relationship with Rotterdam. Several of his shorts screened here, as did his 2000 feature, the black comedy
Angst.
“It was the material and I liked the way how he approached me. It was a passion project for him. It was ten years in the making,” Dafoe (the big-name US star of such movies as
Platoon,
Wild At Heart and forthcoming fantasy blockbuster
John Carter) says of why he took a role in a modestly budgeted Australian film. “The role is very much an outsider – I like that role. I am the gringo in an Australian movie!”
The movie was shot on location in Tasmania. “Not only is it a very particular and a very beautiful place, a very exotic place, but part of if deals with this mythology that is very central to Australia, that of the Tasmanian tiger.”
We follow Martin as he turns up in a tiny Tasmanian community, trying to pass himself off as a scientist. He is staying at the beautiful but remote home of Lucy (Frances O’Connor), a traumatised woman whose husband has gone missing is mysterious circumstances.
When we first see him, Martin is an aloof and inscrutable figure. He is highly professional but doesn’t connect with other people. His idea of relaxation is to lie in a hot bath listening to opera music and shutting out the world. Martin is another of Dafoe’s many screen loners (akin to the characters he has played in films like
Light Sleeper and
To Live And Die In LA). He talks of how he is drawn to “marginal people, people with a different way of thinking.”
The Hunter has action movie elements but is more of an eco-parable than a conventional thriller.
Martin, Dafoe suggests, is “really at the heart of the movie. It is not about hunting. It’s not about Tasmanian tigers. It’s about the emotional journey of this character. It’s a character portrait.”
More about The Hunter here.