The making of Wake in Fright: 'I wanted people to watch the film and be sweating'

From actors downing 30 pints of beer a day to the quandary of filming a kangaroo shooting scene while vegan, veteran director Ted Kotcheff goes back behind the scenes of the Australian thriller

There are many, perhaps countless, reasons to return to the director Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 masterpiece Wake in Fright, truly one of the greatest motion pictures ever made in Australia. Some 45 years later it refuses to shrink into irrelevance, as if the film were some colossal plant still thriving in the desert.

Themes around drinking, gambling, suicidal ideation, homosexuality and the us-and-them divide between city and country (a particularly topical subject in the wake of Donald Trump’s election) imbue Wake in Fright with an urgency we must now assume will never go away.