Jacki Weaver Last Cab to Darwin

Cast: Jacki Weaver, Emma Hamilton, Mark Coles Smith
Director: Jeremy Sims
Genre: Drama

Synopsis: Rex, a Broken Hill cab driver, has spent his life avoiding getting close to people. Even his best friend and occasional lover Polly, who lives across the road, is kept at distance. One day, he discovers he is dying. He doesn't want to be forced to rely on anyone, least of all Polly, so he decides to leave his home and drive alone the 3000kms across the continent to Darwin, where the recently passed euthanasia laws lead him to believe he can be in control of his own death. But on this epic journey he meets people who force him to re-evaluate his life. He begins to realise that a life not shared is a life not lived. Sadly it seems wisdom has come too late, until Polly finally gives Rex the courage to act. Against all the odds, in one final heroic act of pure will, he drives his cab back through time and distance to Broken Hill, where he will share what he has left of his life with the one he loves.

Last Cab to Darwin
Release Date: August 6th, 2015

 

Director's Notes – Jeremy Sims On -Last Cab To Darwin'

Making the Film

'This film has been a long time in the making. I know everyone says this but this one truly has…Reg Cribb and I drove to Broken Hill and then on to Darwin researching the story back in 2001, so that's 13 years. Although we told a version of the story on stage a few times – firstly at the Sydney Opera House and secondly on a long national tour – there was always a belief that the story of Rex would find its natural home on the big screen.

To that end, we began work on the screenplay more than eight years ago. My first film was an adaptation of another Reg Cribb stage play that I had developed, Last Train to Freo, which was a low-budget, real-time, one-location exercise in learning how to make a film. My second came along while we were working on Last Cab, so it got pushed back a few more years.

The great thing is that by the time we came to make this movie I was more than ready to tackle the material; ready to trust the story's allegorical, faux naturalistic style and confident that I could get the performances I needed in the time we had and the difficult locations we were going to shoot in. In the end I'm glad I didn't get to make it five years ago!

Reg and I spent many, many drafts refining the story, finding the tone, over many years".

Themes

'There are strong themes in the film. The strongest – and this is true of more than half of all films in one way or another – is the issue of Belonging. This central spine brings so many interesting and provocative related issues to the table that the layering of meaning, drama and especially humour, becomes impossible to avoid.

Does Rex belong to his past, or his future? He doesn't know, but is sure it must be one or the other. Of course the aim in life is to feel like we belong to the -now', to the moment.

Finally, for me, there came the question of belonging to one another – which is what we call love. Reciprocated love is such a holy grail – such a pure definition of -belonging'. Perhaps this belonging, which puts the human will centre stage is the most satisfying of all; and the hardest to manifest. Last Cab to Darwin explores -mateship', it explores loneliness, family, and more specifically it explores euthanasia as a way of controlling how we leave this place once we are sure we no longer belong here. It's not a film about Euthanasia any more than it's a film about how the scars of youth control us".

The Cast

'I was really lucky to get the cast I wanted to work with. Michael Caton is a screen actor with a forty-year pedigree. He is a national treasure in Australia, and it was an honour to direct him as Rex. His performance is a nuanced marvel to me, and I know we couldn't have made the film without him. Ningali Lawford-Wolf and Jacki Weaver brought charisma and honesty to the whole thing, and both their roles were written with them in mind.

I hope the world sees Mark Coles Smith and Emma Hamilton and takes them off into the kinds of careers they deserve. I was just so grateful when they turned up switched on, ready to play and respectful of the actor they had to work with in every scene. Caton is so simple and natural that if you are not prepared to just be there and react you are going to look silly".

The Style

'We chose to shoot in the grand tradition of 70s character studies. The palette, the density, the framing, the generally static camera were all aimed at recreating that effortlessly entertaining style I love from the period. Hal Ashby, Michael Cimino, Coppola, Malick, Lumet, these were the stylistic influences.

Ed Kuepper has provide the kind of soundtrack that might elevate a film by any one of those guys (all guys I'm afraid!). I wanted guitars, but not American guitars – no Paris, Texas stuff, as much as I love that film. Ed is a legend from the punk era – some argue without The Saints there is no punk era – and I've been a fan of his solo work for two decades. When he dropped off the first two demos I knew I'd made a good decision to follow that instinct.

Steve Arnold did a sterling job getting the pictures to look like they do. Over seven weeks, and thousands of kilometres with a tiny crew, what he achieved with one small truck and a couple of cameras was extraordinary. He is the one that insisted on production values that frankly I didn't think we could achieve with the money and time we had.

Lastly the world of the Australian outback has to be acknowledged. With a nod to Roeg's Walkabout and Kotcheff's Wake in Fright, we knew we needed to actually do the drive to evoke the drive. Thank God my producers Greg Duffy and Lisa Duff agreed. It was a trip we will never forget."
Jeremy Sims - December 2014

About the Production

From Where -Last Cab To Darwin' Hails

Jeremy Sims recalls that Reg Cribb read an article in the newspaper and said 'I think there's a story in this".

The article referenced Max Bell, a terminally ill cab driver who drove 3,000 km from his home in Broken Hill to Darwin in the 1990s hoping to take advantage of the Northern Territory's voluntary euthanasia laws.

Jeremy Sims and Reg Cribb spent two weeks in the Broken Hill Barrier Daily Library researching in 2001. Reg Cribb met Max Bell's nurse and realised it was a complicated story.

Jeremy Sims says: 'We realised very early on that the story we wanted to tell was not the biography of Max Bell. What interested us was the premise and the storytelling possibilities that come from a cab driver from Broken Hill driving to Darwin. Max Bell didn't have many friends. He was a very difficult, cantankerous old bugger who apparently, as we discovered while we were making the film, used to drive around abusing people out of the window of his cab if they were too slow crossing the road. He had no family and no-one to tell his story to at all. Max didn't meet anyone on his journey to Darwin, he just drove there.

Reg Cribb and I wanted to tell an allegorical story using the beginnings of Max's story. While elements of his story inspired this story, what we wanted to create was another story where the characters are very different, as are the people he meets on his journey – so we created all the other things that happen and we imagined what might happen if someone in this situation took this trip.

Jeremy Sims says the character of Rex Macrae is original, but was also inspired by some elements of Bob Dent's story - the first Australian to die from a legal, voluntary lethal injection in the Northern Territory in 1996.

While Jeremy Sims managed to get some money from Australia Council Theatre to develop a play, he says 'always in the back of our minds was the thought that the story's natural home was as a film".

Reg Cribb adds: 'When Jeremy Sims and I hit the road to take the actual journey that Max took from Broken Hill to Darwin, it was always going to be a film, we could see that".

Jeremy Sims says: 'Although we told a version of the story on stage a few times – firstly at the Sydney Opera House and secondly on a long national tour – there was always a belief that the story of Rex would find its natural home on the big screen".

Reg Cribb and Jeremy Sims started on the screenplay more than eight years ago (Reg Cribb wrote the stage play; Jeremy Sims produced and directed).

Principal photography began on Last Cab to Darwin in Broken Hill on May 5, 2014. After shooting for just over two weeks in Broken Hill, the production headed to South Australia to shoot in Marree, William Creek, Oodnadatta and Marla before heading to Alice Springs, Barrow Creek, Tennant Creek, Daly Waters and Katherine. The seven-week shoot concluded in Darwin in late June.

Key Characters In Last Cab To Darwin

Rex Macrae (played by Michael Caton)
Rex is a cab driver who, when told he doesn't have long to live, sets out on an epic journey from Broken Hill to Darwin in a bid to die on his own terms. Along the way he discovers that before you can end your life you have to live it, and to live it you have to share it.

Jeremy Sims says: 'When it came time to make the movie, really, I realised that for me, the interesting story was that of a lonely man who opens up to a full life and it's the idea that perhaps it's never too late to discover all the complexities of life and love. And so with the Polly character, the idea of Rex being in love with her and the idea of him having to get back to her and the idea of him not having the courage to tell her that he loves her, became central to it.

Everyone you meet, if you get to spend more than an hour with them, you might not think they're very interesting people but if you do spend time with them, you will discover that everybody is complicated…everybody, without exception. That's kind of what we like about Rex – I think Rex would like to think he's not complicated. The least complicated human being on the planet is what he would like to be, but of course that's an incredibly complicated thing to want to be.

This story is something that only someone like Michael Caton could tell for us. The moment his name came up, we went -Oh, yes, he's the one'. And we did the reading of the script at the Dungog Film Festival with 200 people in a hallway crying their eyes out and we all just went -I think he can do this'. He is an emotion vessel – that's why he can be so funny and so moving. He has this innate ability to channel an idea and it's really pure. It comes in and goes out and if anything, he's better at it on the screen than he is in real life, even, which is weird but that's often the case with great actors. He understood the character immediately.
It is a chance for Michael Caton to really show people what a subtle and skilled screen actor he is, and he's just exceeded all our expectations. His performance is subtle and detailed and layered and moving and complex - and funny, and charming.

One of the saddest things for me in this whole film is that I had to cut the film down to under two hours because I could easily have had ten minutes of Michael Caton just driving, and thinking about his predicament and if I do get to do a Director's Cut, it'll be mostly Michael Caton driving that will be added to it. It's all written on his face".

Michael Caton says: 'Rex has never been out of Broken Hill. He is very defensive about his life, he's never really talked about things and has a girlfriend that he hides, although all his friends know, and he finds he is terminally ill. And he heads off to Darwin in search of euthanasia and what he finds is a whole other world. He starts to see things through different eyes.

Last Cab to Darwin is sort of like an odyssey. My character takes a journey and he has this idea of what's going to be at end of it, but in taking part in the odyssey he's transformed. The character at the end of the movie is so different to the character that starts the movie. That's the journey, the emotional journey, the cab is the vehicle but the real journey is internally".

Polly (played by Ningali Lawford-Wolf in a role which Cribb and Sims wrote specifically for her)
Polly is an Aboriginal woman who is Rex's neighbour and occasional lover.

Jeremy Sims says: 'Pretty much the only characters Aboriginal people play in Australian films are good-hearted victims. But both Reg and I have met quite a few elder black women, particularly, who have opted out of all of the pressures and stresses of complicated Aboriginal family stuff and said -You know what? I'm going to get my shit together, I'm gonna get my world in order and then I might think about bringing some of you mob back in again. So that's what we were interested in creating - a woman who says -All that humbugging, all that family stuff that is my heritage, I want out of it'.

On one hand, she was brought up in a white household, she was one of the first children of the stolen generation so that's where she learned those skills, probably in a religious institution she learned to be organised so she could run administration at Broken Hill Council.

What we loved about her was this idea that when we first met her, Rex says -Oh, are your cousins, your family coming out'? and she says -No, it's fucking chaos when they come' but we know in her voice that, of course, she wants to be connected to her family, just as Rex does but neither of them can, for their own stubborn reasons and we thought that we would like to create a pair of characters that are both stubborn in their own way and they are both cutting off those that love them because it's too complicated and they don't want to have to face it.

We loved the idea that one was white and one was black but they were really identical and that's what they find attractive about each other.

Reg and I wanted to create a white and a black character that were equal, neither of whom was a victim. If anything, Rex is less together than Polly is, but they both have a great yearning to connect".

Reg Cribb says: 'Ningali Lawford-Wolf was always in my mind for Polly. I worked with her on Bran Nue Dae and I also adapted a Chekhov play in Perth which she was in. She's just the right kind of energy for that character of Polly so whenever I committed pen to paper, I always had Ningali's rhythm in mind. Just outspoken, no bullshit, brash, in-your-face but with a huge heart".

Doctor Nicole Farmer
Doctor Farmer (played by Jacki Weaver) is a Northern Territory doctor who ministers to Rex.

Jacki Weaver says: 'The character I play is Doctor Nicole Farmer – she's a middle class doctor with a strong sense of social justice, who has settled in Darwin and she is a passionate advocate for euthanasia. She's seen a lot of her patients suffer, she's a very compassionate woman, she's single-minded, well, she is quite obsessive about the subject. She happens to be living in Darwin when the law is passed in Darwin, which was, albeit quite briefly, to legalise euthanasia and she wants to take advantage of this and help some people to end their suffering voluntarily. She encounters the character of Rex who is terminally ill and is intent on using the euthanasia laws. I think she has an awakening when she sees the human side of what's going on with Rex".

Jeremy Sims says: 'All the roles that Jacki played in the play are not in the film and when we were doing the play and Sean Taylor was playing the doctor, and Stevie Rogers before him, we used to always joke that Jacki should play the doctor. She used to do his lines backstage. Basically I got in touch with her and said -Look, we're making a film, we want to rewrite the doctor role completely and make her a woman and we want to make her journey complicated. Are you interested? Jacki said -I am, of course I am.'

She just loves the story and she wanted to be involved and do anything she could to help us get it made. It's not a big role, it's a supporting role and the more we cut the film together the more appreciative I was of her bravery, playing that role as strongly as she did. It would have been very easy for her to say -Oh, why don't we make her lovely, and why don't we do this or I don't really want to say that or she wouldn't really do that – but she didn't do any of those things. She said -Yeah'. It's a very thankless role in many ways but she did it for our purposes – for Rex's journey and for Julie's journey. Jacki understood that perfectly, from the beginning".

Tilly
Tilly (played by Mark Coles Smith) is a young Aboriginal man from Oodnadatta whose life has gone off the rails. Tilly is befriended by Rex when they meet at William Creek and joins him on the journey to Darwin.

Jeremy Sims says: 'Tilly is a young man with a brain as sharp as a tack, who's wasting his life through the circumstances that he's born into. We wanted to very clearly paint that picture of lost potential. This is the one guy, you know how every town has a young kid who is like the prince, that everyone has expectations of and in Oodnadatta, it's Tilly. He's the kid every family knows and says -Oh, Tilly, he could do anything, that boy, could be Prime Minister of Australia, play for Essendon'".

There's a reason Tilly says in the film -I met Michael Long'. Michael Long was an Aboriginal man from the desert who played football at a very high level and then took all of that influence he gained as a famous sportsman and immediately turned it into bettering the lives of Aboriginal people. He's now a politician. People say -oh what's the point, they play football and they don't do anything else with their lives.' But it's a way into a white world that then, if they're smart about it, gives them influence to do better things.

Reg Cribb and I wanted Tilly to be an example but the fact is that the tug of alcohol and family and isolation and the amount of courage it would take for a black guy from a community to succeed – and the temptation to give up on that ambition to make it in the -white world' is very real and is far stronger than we give it credit for. We wanted to dramatise that it's not easy. And it's much harder for Tilly than it is for someone brought up in South Perth or Toorak or Rose Bay who attends a private college and gets drafted and the path is really easy.

Mark Coles Smith and I talked about that from the very beginning and he got free rein to play with the character because he has heaps of that internal wariness, sadness at the world. Most of the characters he gets asked to play just exude that. Tilly has the trickster on top of that – that trickster character – there is one in every Aboriginal community. They're given that power. They choose one of the young kids, say -he's a trickster' and then they give him the power – they say -Oh, tell us a joke'".

Mark Coles Smith says: 'So, I play Tilly Johnson, who's a young Arabana man living out in South Australia, in Oodnadatta, not far from Cooper Pedy. I've got a lot of love for Tilly, he's a beautiful young man but he's a bit lost and I think one of his major issues is self-esteem, which is something I think a lot of young people can relate to, at least I can. So I was able to find an inroad into the character that way. Tilly masks that with charm and charisma and this sort of heightened gregarious nature so he's really very playful and very childish, but I think behind all of that he's got a bit of suffering and he's trying to find courage, really. I think that's what his journey is about. And he meets Rex and takes the trip all the way to Darwin with him".

Julie
Julie (played by Australian-born UK-based actress Emma Hamilton) is a feisty English backpacker on the run from her nursing career who Rex and Tilly meet at the Daly Waters Hotel, where she works as a barmaid. She clearly fancies Tilly, and is drawn to Rex after assisting him when he collapses in the pub. Julie joins them for the rest of their journey.

Michael Caton says: 'It's Julie that starts to see that there is really something happening between Rex and Polly. And she tries to coax that out of Rex, which she does eventually. She really gets him to acknowledge his feelings for Polly, but it's like getting blood out of a stone. Polly's a huge part of Rex's life, but he's never really faced up to that fact".

Jeremy Sims says: 'Rex and Julie love each other as soon as they see each other. And she looks after him and they hang out together and in his head, it's bittersweet. When he cries he's thinking -Well, if I'd had a daughter, if I'd lived my life differently, I'd have a daughter like you.'

And Julie is the catalyst for Rex to realise his feelings for Polly.

He's very, very lucky to have met her and she's lucky to have met him. You know, you meet kindred spirits in life and that's what Rex and Julie are and they serve a purpose for one another. She's going to keep meeting people like that and she's going to keep caring because that's the sort of person she is and someone like that should be a nurse".

The Themes Of Last Cab To Darwin

Jeremy Sims on the story in the film: 'When Reg Cribb and I finally started working on the screenplay we knew what we wanted the story to be. The story of a white, isolated old man from an old-fashioned country town, who thinks he knows everything there is to know about the world in his 70th year and doesn't have anything to learn – all his opinions are set in stone. And then someone says -You're dying' and he discovers the only way he can get out of his thing of dying without having to ask anyone for their help, which is what he's scared of, more than anything else in the world, is to drive to Darwin. At that point, the world starts to go -Well, actually, you are having a relationship with the aboriginal woman next door and you've never asked her about her family and she's never asked you about yours. And then he goes on the road and meets a whole lot of people and to me and Reg that was fascinating".

Jacki Weaver on the themes in the film: 'I think Last Cab to Darwin is a hugely themed film. Like all good films, you're laughing one minute, crying the next – it's like real life, it's hilarious one minute and tragic the next. It has a universal appeal – the characters could be anywhere, except that they are quite intrinsically Australian characters but they're still everyman. It's, as I said, very funny in parts, it's a film about love and life and death and love again and it's love in many forms. It's not just between two people but between many – it's about mateship and friendship and romantic love and platonic love – it's a pretty hugely themed film.

It's about love, it's about man's humanity, it's about life and death, as Zorba the Greek would say, -the whole catastrophe'".

Michael Caton on what the film is about: 'I think it's about humanity, it's about love, life, death and more love, but mostly love. And discovery – an insular man sort of discovering a whole other world".

Jeremy Sims on mateship: 'The mateship thing is actually not specific to country towns or urban areas. I think it's part of the advertising culture, it's part of Australian culture, it's a really strong massive double-edged sword in Australian cultural life and something that Reg and I feel very strongly about. And it was one of the first things we wanted to explore when we started working on the story, which is that the idea of mateship as being one of the assets of the Australian, and particularly male, psyche, is codswallop.

The downsides to mateship – denial and ostracism and a failure to acknowledge your emotions - a lot of it lacks courage. At its best, sure, if you've been shot through the arm and you're on the battlefield and someone comes to rescue you, great – that digger mateship thing is fantastic, of course. But sticking up for a friend who is a racist pig, for instance? And not telling the police that he beat up his wife? That's not useful at all, in a culture. So, Reg and I have always been bemused by this glorification of mateship culture in Australia.

We really enjoyed writing those three boys (Col, Simmo and Dougie). In the film those boys need to realise that being a mate is not enough. Being a friend is different. So when Rex says -Boys, I'm dying' and Simmo, so perfectly delivered by John Howard – Reg and I still watch that and say -How did he get that so right?' – and he goes -Oh, Rex, you're not fuckin' dying, you're sitting here with your mates having a beer.' It's useless in those situations to be matey about it. You need someone to say -How does it feel? Are you scared? Can I do anything for you?'

The flipside of mateship is that I play in a footy team every Sunday. There's no women, we all get down there, a bunch of blokes from all walks of life, most of us don't see each other anywhere else but when we play footy. When one of the boys was sick, the whole club got together and paid his mortgage for three months. Another guy fell off his motorbike last year and we all had a whip-round and we sent him five grand for his family to get through Christmas so mateship has its place and it's really powerful and strong but it's not a substitute.

Rex's friends Simmo, Col and Dougie just don't want to get involved. They hear on the radio that Rex is sick and they go -that's complicated, I don't want to be involved in that. Can you please just come in here and drink beer with us because I don't want to have to examine my life.'

And that's what Reg Cribb and I wanted to explore and we're really happy with how that's come out of the film".

Reg Cribb on redemption, and love: 'There's a few themes running through the film but a strong one to me is redemption, of oneself, coming to peace with who you are, working out what's really important in your life.

When Rex leaves his friends and lover behind, not knowing really if they were his friends, because he doesn't know that, they learn and he learns through his journey what they really mean to each other. So really it's about redemption. And it's about love.

I worked with a guy on Bran Nue Dae who helped with script editing called Guillermo Arriaga, who was the scriptwriter on Babel, 21 Grams and Amores Perros and he said you should be able to bring every scene back to one word. For instance, this scene is about love – if it's not about love, then it's not working".

Jeremy Sims – -Everyone got someone': ''Everyone got someone'. Tilly says that at the crisis point into the third act. It's the major argument of the film, that everybody has someone. -You gotta have someone to cover the dirt back over', Tilly says to Rex. And Tilly's betting that Rex's -someone' is Polly and the boys back in Broken Hill. And sure enough, it is. As an audience, we know it's Polly and the boys. We know that if Rex had the courage to just sit there and say, -Help me, I'm dying', that they would. Human beings are hard-wired to care for one another".

Reg Cribb on mateship: 'I think men everywhere, not just Australia, will recognise that idea that it's just too hard, too much to talk about, to face something as huge as your own mortality. Michael Caton reflects all that through his face. They (his mates Simmo, Col & Dougie) are initially not there for him but in the end they prove themselves to be there for him so everyone learns".

Jeremy Sims on euthanasia: 'I should say that I don't have any interest in making an overtly issue-based film – this is not a film about euthanasia. But the film does explores euthanasia as a way of controlling how we leave this place once we are sure we no longer belong here.

I will say this about euthanasia. It is really complicated. Stop thinking you know what you think about this and then read some stuff and then think about it again, because you'll find that your opinion, depending on what you've read and your circumstances, will change…massively. Till this film happened, I thought I knew what I thought, but I didn't.

Everyone I've met thinks they know what they think about euthanasia. When you say -what do you think about euthanasia?' very rarely will someone say -I don't know, I need to find out more about it and I imagine the circumstances will colour that'…no-one says that. People say -It's outrageous that we don't have the right to end our lives when we need to. It's outrageous – how dare they?' Or they go -It's a sin against God'. So everyone has their position and it's pretty solid. Everyone who has known or loved someone through a terminal illness or a terrible accident or injury has a very strong view on euthanasia and it's not always what they started with.

All I would say about euthanasia is that word encompasses about thirty different positions – everything from the argument that every human being should have the right to commit suicide whenever they like, to the view that someone who can no longer speak, see, feel or move or is in insufferable pain, should have the right to be euthanised. Then as you move up from there to anyone who is terminally ill who has control of their mental faculties still can choose to kill themselves or be killed, that's where a lot of people, probably me included, sit. That spectrum is massive". Reg Cribb on euthanasia: 'I don't think I'm qualified to say how I really feel about it till I'm in a situation of having to make a choice like that myself. I can speculate and we've all seen loved ones struggling but I don't think I'm really qualified yet to understand the heart of the debate.

As Rex says, -Jeez, it's hard. It's hard to kill yourself. That's because he learns to love life again. There's a great line in Game of Thrones when the dwarf character says -Living has all kinds of possibilities.' I agree 100% with that. I think Rex, in his journey, sees that. It's not about whether he's dying or not, it's about getting out of his comfort zone and seeing the world".

Jeremy Sims on the death of -Old Australia': 'Reg's and my principal interest in the beginning was the idea of the dying of Old Australia. The death of the sort of Banjo Paterson/Henry Lawson mythology of laconic men and cold beers and mustering and the stoicism and dry sense of humour and -she'll be right, mate' and all that stuff.

When it came time to make the movie, really, I realised that for me, the interesting story was that of a lonely man who opens up to a full life and it's the idea that perhaps it's never too late to discover all the complexities of life and love". Reg Cribb on categorising (or not) Last Cab to Darwin: 'Stylistically I'm always drawn to films, and the great films for me and what we attempted to do with this, are the ones that are not categorised as straight drama or straight comedy. I think we've fallen down in Australia sometimes by going -this is a comedy, so it's fully gagged, full of set-ups and all very obvious'. The comedy for me comes out of the identification of the relationship we see unfolding on the screen and the care we have for the characters and the more you laugh with them, the more you will cry with them. That's how I feel about great dramas. They're always full of comedy. Comedy and laughter and tears sit really closely together for me – they come out of the same place. I couldn't be prouder of the whole thing. It's a good story and you want the good stories to be told".

Reg Cribb on the Central Australian Outback as a character in the film: 'From the first research trip it was clear that the outback was a major character in this story. It was a major character in the play because that was really about the death of -Old Australia' as played out by the outback. The great thing about the film is that we found a much more personalised story rather to make it too broad in its scope, we brought it back to Rex's story. The film had a big beautiful visual canvas but the personal narrative of it really is Rex's story.

In the film, the visual vista of Australia still reflects Rex's inner state as he goes along, but it becomes much more of an obstacle for him and you feel that much more in the film. The elements he encounters along the road, they really stand in the way of him achieving his objectives, but also feeding into his understanding of who he is".

Filming Last Cab To Darwin In The Bush

In May 2014, a crew of 34 people set off to film Last Cab to Darwin, shooting in sequence a 3,000 kilometre journey that took them from Broken Hill to South Australia to shoot in Marree, William Creek, Oodnadatta and Marla before heading to Alice Springs, Barrow Creek, Tennant Creek, Daly Waters and Katherine and concluding in Darwin in June.

Director, co-writer and producer Jeremy Sims says the Australian outback was always going to be a major character in the film.

'You do get a great sense of the outback from the film, whether it's Tilly and Rex stretching their legs at the Devil's Marbles or Rex getting a drink of water at Lake Eyre. That said, we purposefully went out of our way not to do helicopter shots", says Sims.

Michael Caton says: 'Our idea was to show the harshness initially, of the Australian outback, but in actual fact we had rain and the green comes up overnight so the land was looking beautiful. It wasn't quite the harsh brown land, although there are places where just the nothingness – you know the everlasting sameness of the never-ending plain – well you really get that there, it is just amazing country. Steve Arnold, our Director of Photography, has done us proud, in terms of how he's captured that. The landscape becomes another character".

Producer Greg Duffy says the crew was embraced in each town they shot in but reserves special mention for Oodnadatta.

'Basically most of the people of Oodnadatta are in the film and they gave us their whole town for three days. Lisa Duff (Producer) and I were even asked to come and speak at the local school.

Jeremy Sims was thrilled to be able to shoot in the Oodnadatta Pub.

'No-one has ever filmed the Oodnadatta Pub full of aboriginal people socialising. They might drive past there and as the Manager of the Oodnadatta Pub, who's a white guy, said, -All the white people in their cars, heading out for an outback experience, they take one look at the Oodnadatta Pub and they drive straight past. They never, no-one ever stops in here yet the only place in this whole area that you'll get a proper outback experience is if you come in here for a beer. He said -I've been here for five years and they're the most wonderful people; they're lovely people, it can get a bot rowdy but no-one's gonna get hurt.

So we shot the interior of the Oodnadatta Pub and you see it, in all its glory, and everybody in that pub stayed there for 12 hours and they shot over and over and over again and from every angle; no-one left, they did exactly the same thing, on cue, mute, full sound, the whole thing", says Sims.

Greg Duffy says one of the challenges they had to address before setting off on the shoot was the cost of traffic control for a road movie covering 3,000 kilometres.

'We calculated that the traffic control we'd need as the shoot basically drove from Broken Hill to Darwin was going to cost us $48,000 and that's money we didn't have in the budget. So we worked out that only way we could do it was if four of us did a course in traffic control and the lollipop training over a weekend.

So Duffy, plus writer Reg Cribb, Producer Lisa Duff and Production Assistant Emma Marshall attended a three-day training course in Broken Hill as well as doing an online course in traffic control.

'We ran a very, very tight ship with our traffic control. We had to control traffic all around Broken Hill, which you can imagine – mining trucks and some heavy vehicles and they're all on a deadline so they don't like to be stopped – we'd say -we're just making a film down the road, could you possibly just wait for 10 minutes while we do this take?' We had a few who were disgruntled but there were no road rage incidents.

Of course, once we got out onto the Stuart Highway, or particularly the Oodnadatta Track, we had a bunch of scenes where we had a cattle truck and we had a stunt where the cattle truck breaks the windscreen of the cab so we had a series of things where we had to basically shut down large sections of the Oodnadatta Track, which is all gravel, and stop these huge trucks and great long road trains from going about their business because we were shooting our film, with a little cab, down the way.

And at one point we had me, Reg, Lisa and Emma on two-way radios, which only have a range of about 5 kilometres. So we were 5 kilometres apart, 20 kilometres up the Oodnadatta Track, and relaying messages up and down the track on traffic movements while the crew shot the truck stunt with the cab. We were standing there in the 40° heat, all by ourselves, eating flies and trying to stay in contact. The glamour of filmmaking", says Duffy.

Writer Reg Cribb adds: 'As traffic controllers, we were necessary but we were also annoying sometimes when we were in shot so when they'd yell 'action' we'd have to leap into the nearest gully with goannas and flies and lie face down wearing these orange safety vests. We approached it with good humour. And I am now a Certified Road Traffic Controller.

Duffy says that Cribb was not only a Certified Road Traffic Controller, but appeared as a cyclist in the middle of the Oodnadatta Track and Mound Springs; was Tilly's double in the second cab; played a footballer in some scenes in Darwin and was Michael Caton's driver on the shoot.

'So we got the most we possibly could out of our writer", says Duffy.

Soundtrack For Last Cab To Darwin

The original soundtrack for Last Cab to Darwin was composed and performed by Australian guitarist, vocalist and songwriter Ed Kuepper.

Director Jeremy Sims says: 'One of the great things about being a director of a film (one of the few things, everything else is really hard work…) is that you do get to employ your heroes, or at least try. I've been a fan of Ed Kuepper for twenty years, I think his music is quintessentially Australian. He is a guitar player but at no point does it become Southern American, or twangy or slide guitar-y. There's something about it and I've always loved it. Me and my old mate Brian Vriends have been listening to Ed Kuepper and going to see him live since we were 23 so when the film was coming around I played a lot of Ed Kuepper music while I was writing and it always seemed to fit.

I loved working with Cezary Skubiszewski on Beneath Hill 60 and it was a dream come true to walk into a room and see the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra playing the cues for my film, but Last Cab to Darwin never felt to me like that kind of film.

I certainly didn't want an orchestral score but I didn't want anything angular or esoteric either. I wanted something that would be the voice of Rex and so I wanted one instrument, because it was going to be so first-person, so subjective, we're with Rex for the whole movie so I really wanted to have someone basically be Rex and all things pointed to getting a well-known musician to do it.

And then I went, 'well, why don't I get Ed Kuepper?' I rang him up and it turns out he's always wanted to do a soundtrack for a movie, he loves movies and he's really pissed off that no-one's asked before. In fact lots of people have asked him before but the films never got up. So he was in from the word -go'.

We got him to read the script a few times and then we flew him down to the studios in Sydney and got him to record some music for the film before we shot. So we got 70 minutes of music that the boys at (sound design studio) Nylon divvied up into 19 tracks and put on CDs.

We gave everyone in the crew a copy and we nearly all agreed on our favourite songs and all of those are in the film, a lot of them embellished with some strings but otherwise the music has absolutely evolved organically with the film and that's the most pleasing thing about it. Hopefully Ed likes it."

Ed Kuepper also wrote and performed an original song for the film that plays over the credits, called -It's Never Too Late'.

34 People in the -Last Cab to Darwin' crew
2 Cabs used in the film
14 Spare tyres which blew
3 Windscreens smashed during the shoot
3,500 Kms travelled by crew from Broken Hill to Darwin
1 Trailers which blew during the shoot
0 Injuries on the shoot (unless you count the day Emma Hamilton kicked Michael Caton in the head, trod on his foot with her Doc Martens and drew blood & kicked a football into his pinched-nerve neck
2 Crew vehicles bogged during the shoot
Countless Flies eaten by cast & crew during shoot (Jeremy Sims holds record for number of flies consumed in a day (6)
0 Feral cats harmed during the making of this film

Last Cab to Darwin
Release Date: August 6th, 2015