A STUDY GUIDE BY PAUL MITCHELL

http://www.metromagazine.com.au

ISBN-13-978-1-74295-089-1 http://www.theeducationshop.com.au

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introductionThe Hunter is a psychological drama set in the contemporary Tasmanian wilderness about a mercenary’s search for the last living Tasmanian tiger (or ‘thylacine’).

Based on Julia Leigh’s 1999 novel of the same name, the !lm tracks the emotional and physical journey of Martin (Academy Award®-nominated Willem Dafoe – Spiderman, Platoon), sent from Europe to Tasmania by a mysterious biotech company.

In addition to the exhausting task of trying to !nd a single and possibly extinct animal in the wilderness, Martin must battle small town prejudice, negotiate the struggle between loggers and conservationists, wrestle with another man’s jealousy, and deal with his employer’s sinister demands.

A single mother, Lucy (Frances O’Connor – Blessed, Mansfield Park), and her two children, Bike (Finn Woodlock) and Sass (Morgana Davies), also befriend him, adding a layer of complexity to an already dif!cult mission. In a race against time and in mortal danger, Martin, a man who has lived an amoral and emotionally detached life, must decide who and what is worth saving.

Also starring Sam Neill (The Dish, The Piano) as Jack Mindy, The Hunter is an Australian production made by the team that created the AFI-award-winning Animal Kingdom. Although the novel upon which The Hunter is based appeared in 1999, the !lm’s central themes of wilderness protection, cloning, gene technology and species extinction have never been more signi!cant. The Hunter is a !lm that stimulates debate, while educating and entertaining its audiences.

curriculum relevance

Year 10 English, especially for themes such as Literature and Context, Texts in Context, and Responding to Literature.

Year 11 and 12 students of Media, Film Studies, National Politics, Australian and International Politics, and Society and Culture.

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synopsisMartin is a mercenary sent from Europe to the Tasmanian wilderness on a mission to hunt down the last Tasmanian tiger for an anonymous biotech company. Local guide Jack Mindy provides him with a base camp, one that has been approved by the biotech company: a run-down forest cabin that is home to two children, Sass and Bike, and, it emerges, their depressed mother Lucy.

Lucy’s husband Jarrah, a zoologist, has been missing in the wilderness for months. This intrigues and concerns Martin, adding to his reasons for keeping his mission to !nd the tiger a secret from Lucy’s family and the local townspeople. But his suspicions are raised when his traps and equipment are sabotaged and he is followed during his solitary journeys into the unforgiving terrain.

Martin is drawn into a dramatic search for the tiger and at the same time his empathy for the family deepens. He !nds himself making an unexpected emotional connection to them, and the wilderness around him. This pushes him to dramatically confront the reality of his work and his personal morality.

Martin’s struggle and his eventual actions force the audience to consider whether some mysteries are better left unsolved, what our responsibilities and obligations are to endangered species, and what should be the driving motivations (money? love? family?) for our work and personal lives.

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from book to filmNovels have for decades provided rich pickings for directors and screenwriters looking for powerful stories to take to !lm. Some of the most critically acclaimed and popular !lms in history have been adapted from novels: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (!ve Academy Awards®, including Best Actor and Film), The Godfather (three Academy Awards®, including Best Adapted Screenplay) and To Kill a Mockingbird (three Academy Awards®) were all adapted from novels, written by Ken Kesey, Mario Puzo and Harper Lee respectively. And, of course, the Harry Potter series, the highest-grossing !lm series in history, was adapted from the best-selling books by J.K. Rowling.

With so much of the plot, character and setting work already done for them, it’s no wonder !lmmakers are always on the look out for novels – and short !ction (Jindabyne, Short Cuts and Brokeback Mountain were all adapted from short stories) that can make the transition from book to screen.

Julia Leigh’s novel The Hunter was published in 1999 to broad critical acclaim. It has been translated into nine languages and was internationally shortlisted for numerous prizes. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Leigh was named a Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year and “one of 21 writers for the 21st century” by The Observer (UK). Interestingly, Leigh has recently made the transition from novel to !lm, writing and directing the feature Sleeping Beauty. She told Trespass magazine that she wasn’t daunted by the jump from literature to !lm:

“For me, both !lms and literature come from the same place... the !lmmaker and the novelist both have something to explore, they both work with the "ow of time, they create a full and detailed world, they both build characters [and] a feature !lm and a novel are both complex projects.”

The Hunter’s director Daniel Nettheim was attracted to Leigh’s book because of the story’s intimacy and the fact that it was set against the large scale of the Tasmanian wilderness. He says the book is “a highly focused narrative with a strong emotional core, exploring the themes of isolation, loneliness, grief, survival and compassion. It is a story about the fragility and vulnerability that occurs when we open ourselves up to the experience of human emotions”.

Producer Vincent Sheehan said he was compelled to make the !lm because the book “was a really striking piece of literature that also had a very cinematic world; a powerful journey of a central character. While being distinctly Australian, its themes had strong international appeal.”

A novelist writes a book alone, whereas a !lm script often has many people involved in the writing process. Nettheim wrote an initial treatment for The Hunter then worked with Melbourne-based writer Wain Fimeri on early drafts. Sydney-based Alice Addison then took over as the principle writer, developing the script’s central elements.

The cast was encouraged to read the book to further enhance their understanding of the !lm’s world. Willem Dafoe (Martin), however, said, “I didn’t read the book for the longest time because I had my hands full with reading the scripts and seeing what was coming off [it], without having an allegiance to another source. And then once I felt the script was really well developed I asked Daniel, ‘Do you think I should read the book?’ and he said ‘Yeah, go ahead’. It’s faithful in a certain way, but it’s really a different story…”

Actress Frances O’Connor (Lucy), who has starred in other book adaptations (Mansfield Park, Madame Bovary, Three Dollars), said reading the novel helped “ . . . "esh things out. There are a lot of differences between the novel and the adaptation, but I am glad I read it. There was some nice detail about my character that wasn’t necessarily in the !nal draft of the script.”

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A Personal ConnectionDaniel Nettheim said The Hunter was intended as a contemporary take on the traditional ‘adventure in the wilderness’ genre. His aim was to show the landscape’s “beauty and poetry” in a way that didn’t need to be explained.

“The !gure of the tiger in this story is not mythologized,” he said, “nor is its presence purely symbolic. It serves primarily as an elusive goal for the main character, one which often seems unattainable, perhaps impossible, but which is a catalyst for Martin’s much deeper journey into himself.”

Nettheim felt a strong connection with The Hunter when he read the novel. He has spent a lot of time in the bush – walking, camping, climbing, exploring – and made many family trips to Tasmania in his childhood.

“I have always been deeply drawn to the sense of isolation and calm that the bush can offer, the deep sense of escape into another world and the opportunities for meditation and re"ection that this world invites.”

He set out in The Hunter to use the landscape to strong dramatic effect. He said the wilderness can appear familiar and appealing to some people, yet for many it seems “wild, exotic and inhospitable”. He added that the !lm’s main character Martin was comfortable with isolated natural terrain, but, “paradoxically, while he is highly respectful of the bush, his business within it is essentially destructive.”

The Hunter, therefore, explores what Nettheim calls the “uneasy relationship that has always existed between man and nature.”

The Trail of the TigerThe Tasmanian tiger (or ‘thylacine’) was declared extinct in 1986 and the last known animal died in Hobart Zoo on 7 September, 1936. Since then, however, the incidence of reported sightings has continued. According to the Tasmanian Government’s Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment (DPIPWE), most sightings occur at night in the north of the State. The DPIPWE said most sightings had been “clear cases of mis-identi!cation”, but a study of sightings between 1934 and 1980 concluded that 320 sightings (just under half) could be considered “good sightings”. All of these, however, have remained inconclusive.

There have been a number of searches for this now iconic animal, but none of them have been able to show any evidence of the tiger’s existence. The Hunter’s production designer Stephen Jones Evans spoke to a number of believers who claimed sightings as late as the early ‘7Os.

“There’s been no strong photographic evidence since the last one died in captivity in 1936, but it doesn’t dull their belief. So to me it’s akin to a kind of religion . . . it’s a faith.”

Nettheim said in The Hunter the Tasmanian tiger represents the themes that also exist between characters in the story. “The tiger certainly represents hope, but it’s a double-edged sword because the tiger represents our failings as a colonising nation. It asks the question, can we redeem ourselves as a race?”

Even today the circumstances surrounding the tiger’s extinction remain a contentious issue for some and it is seen as a tragedy.

“It’s very easy to romanticise because there’s such limited understanding of it, becoming even more mythic, so it becomes a perfect creature to chase,” said producer Sheehan. For his part, Willem Dafoe says the tiger represents a kind of nostalgia.

“Because so much of Tasmania is wilderness . . . it’s easy to imagine that something could exist for many, many years without coming into human contact. So there’s a little part of me that hopes that Tasmanian tigers still exist.”

making the hunter

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Filming and RealismNettheim said he and his team worked hard to produce a “visually rich !lm”, using the landscape to show characters’ changing emotional states.

“In collaboration with cinematographer Bob Humphreys, we chose to shoot in the widescreen format to best capture the majesty of the landscape. During our preparation, we referred back to many examples of classic widescreen !lmmaking, including New Hollywood !lms of the 1970s, and many of the great Westerns.”

As you would expect from its title, The Hunter involves a signi!cant amount of that age-old practice, and Nettheim said that during !lming he learnt a great deal about hunting.

“Although the hunting sequences . . . may appear as cruel or brutal to some,” he said, “hunting is one of the oldest pursuits known to mankind, and carries with it a long tradition of wisdom and skill. I hope we have been able to capture some of its inherent beauty.”

He said he was surprised by how intricate was the process of laying traps and snares, adding that hunting could be both philosophical and artistic.

“Willem was determined to capture this aspect of his character as accurately as possible, and we employed a talented and charismatic ‘survival expert’ to help us . . . This infused Martin’s character with a great amount of authentic detail, from the way he used his tools to the way he moved through the bush.”

A State of DebateFrom protests over the proposed damming of the Franklin River in the 1980s to current battles about how extensive logging should be, preservation of the Tasmanian wilderness is an ongoing topic of debate and controversy. Current Greens’ leader Bob Brown, of course, hails from Tasmania, and forest conservation has been central to his and his parties’ policies. Writers such as Tasmania’s Richard Flanagan and Anna Krien (Into the Woods) have weighed into the debate, as have politicians, musicians, loggers, locals and international visitors.

The team behind The Hunter realized they were making a !lm that could not avoid grappling with this history and present. The !lm’s story has as a backdrop the relationship between loggers and ‘greenies’ or activists, and the character Jack Mindy !nds himself in the middle of this struggle.

“Jack is someone who understands you have to save wilderness and big trees, but at the same time people need jobs and there would be no life in these little communities if it wasn’t for forestry and this is something that’s red raw here,” said Sam Neill who plays Jack. “And you have to come here to . . . experience how real and emotionally charged that is . . . you could not tell this story anywhere else.”

Sheehan said it was a “sensitive issue but also such a signi!cant part of the culture that you could not avoid it.” He said the !lmmaking team didn’t want to sanitise the issue and were at pains to ensure the story didn’t take sides. “The loggers on site and at the pub were real, the protestors were too,” he said, adding that a special moment for him during !lming was when protestors and loggers shared tables at lunch.

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Willem Dafoe (Martin)Academy Award®-nominated Willem Dafoe has performed in more than 60 !lms, in Hollywood (Spiderman, The English Patient, Finding#Nemo, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, Clear And Present Danger,# Mississippi Burning), independent US cinema (Basquiat, The Boondock Saints, American Psycho) and internationally (Far Away So Close, Paris Je T’aime, Tom & Viv).

Frances O’Connor (Lucy)

Australian actress Frances O’Connor has captured worldwide attention through her versatility across !lm, television and theatre. She recently starred in the Australian independent !lm Blessed, winning the Australian Film Industry Award for Best Actress. She made her !lm debut in Love and Other Catastrophes and starred in Three Dollars, Mans!eld Park and AI: Arti!cial Intelligence.

Sam Neill (Jack)

Sam Neill, perhaps best known for his starring role as paleontologist Dr Alan Grant in Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III, has appeared in more than 60 !lms. His high-pro!le appearances have included roles in Reilly, Ace of Spies, Omen III: The Final Con"ict, The Hunt for Red October and The Piano. Most recently he played Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in the television series The Tudors.

Morgana Davies (Sass) Morgana made her screen debut at seven years of age in the feature !lm The Tree, which closed the Cannes Film Festival in 2010. She received rave reviews across Europe and Australia for her portrayal of Simone, and was nominated for Best Actress and Best Young Actor in the 2010 AFI awards.

Finn Woodlock (Bike)Seven-year-old Finn Woodlock is a newcomer to the big screen, but has already worked on several student !lms, including supporting roles in Out Here in Suburbia, The Father and Flight. He has also taken classes in singing, acting and dancing at the Children’s Performing Company of Australia.

selected cast biographies

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activity one – before watching the filmAs a result of marketing, reviews and word-of-mouth (whether personal or online), we come to films with a set of expectations and things we know (or think we know) about the film’s subject/story. The following questions explore how these expectations affect our film viewing experiences:

What are your expectations before you watch this film? Given the title and marketing, do you expect an action movie, drama or a mystery? Why or why not?

Without doing any research, discuss what you know about the Tasmanian tiger.

How do you think the film might deal with the tiger?

What films have you seen that were based on fiction books? What were your responses to those films, especially if you had read the book before seeing the film?

Have you seen films that any of the main actors (Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill, Frances O’Connor) have starred in or had supporting roles in? How does that affect your expectations before viewing The Hunter?

Imagine one of the stories you have written at school over the past few years (or at home) will be made into a film. What are the aspects you want to control and what are you prepared to leave to the filmmaker? How do you think this plays out in real life?

activity two – what we see, what we readFilmmakers and novelists/fiction writers often use different methods and tools to get key messages and information across to their audiences. This activity looks at one scene in The Hunter and asks students to think critically about the difference between it and the same scene in the novel.

Starting at the point when Martin !nally gets the generator going, watch the scene in which Lucy wakes up from her state of depression and then goes back to bed. Now read page 18 to the middle of page 19 in the novel, which also describes Lucy rising from her long slumber and returning to bed.

There are many differences between these scenes. What are they and why might they matter?

How would you describe these scenes in both the novel and !lm? i.e. pivotal, of limited importance, emotionally powerful, distracting from the main story? Why?

Which scene do you prefer and why?

In the !lm, Martin gets the generator going. For what might this be a metaphor?

In the novel, our attention is drawn to a poster of a unicorn behind Lucy. Why might the author have chosen to do this?

Before this scene in the movie, no popular music has appeared on the soundtrack. What is the effect of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘I’m on Fire’ playing on the turntable?

How do you feel about Martin after watching the !lm scene and how do you feel about him after reading the scene in the novel? How do these scenes affect character development and how do they advance the plot?

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activity three – the tasmanian tigerThe mystique surrounding the extinct Tasmanian tiger plays a central role in The Hunter’s premise. Here are some exercises that ask viewers to look carefully at how the tiger functions in the film’s narrative.

Watch the video of the last Tasmanian tiger in captivity. What emotions does it stir in you? How does the !lmmaker use our value judgments about species extinction to engage us with the !lm’s story?

How do you feel about the tiger being hunted in the !lm?

In what way does the tiger function as a character in the movie?

In an interesting parallel, the tiger is itself a hunter, like Martin. Research some facts on the tiger’s hunting ability and compare and contrast them with Martin’s skills. Who is the better hunter?

Did you !nd yourself believing that the Tasmanian tiger exists, is no longer extinct? Why or why not?

What was your reaction to the tiger’s death in the !lm? Were you glad it had been saved from having its genes used destructively, or disappointed that the creature would never get the chance to thrive on earth again? Perhaps you had other thoughts . . .

If the tiger in the !lm could speak, what would it say when Martin is taking aim with his ri"e?

activity four – the wilderness debate

Discuss what you know of the debate about the preservation and/or use of Tasmania’s wilderness, especially the forests.

How does The Hunter deal with the above issue? Is it a main theme or just background?

The !lmmakers say that in creating The Hunter’s story they didn’t take sides in the forestry/conservation debate. Do you agree? Why or why not?

Write a letter/email to Sam Neill’s character Jack as if he were your grandfather. What do you want to say to him about the debate surrounding the use of Tasmania’s rainforests?

What role does the wilderness play in the !lm? Is it just a backdrop for the story or does it function like a character? Why or why not?

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activity five – who has the right to genes?The biotech company in The Hunter wants to capture the Tasmanian tiger and clone its venom for biological warfare. These questions relate to the ethics of cloning and gene use.

In a !ctional aspect of the !lm and book, the Tasmanian tiger is said to have venom that can stun its prey. The !lm’s biotech company wants to clone and sell that venom for use in biological warfare. Discuss what this would mean for humanity.

Scienti!c advances in genetic technology mean that if a Tasmanian tiger were found there could be an attempt to clone it and bring it back into the wild. What are the potential social and environmental impacts attached to this?

Which extinct animals would you clone back to life if you could? What would be the possible effects on humanity (and other animals) of your decision?

activity six – characters in close up

Which character do you relate to most in the !lm and why?

What do you think of Sass and Bike’s mother leaving them to roam the house while she is ill in bed?

What changes occur in Martin through the course of the !lm? Is he the same person at the end? Why or why not?

Bike follows Martin into the wilderness. Why doesn’t Sass?

In the book it’s clear that Martin would have killed either a conservationist or a logger if either got in the way of his mission. Is that your impression of Martin from the !lm?

What motivates Jack Mindy? Is he what you’d call a divided character? If so, what divides him?

Imagine you are the Tasmanian tiger – and you can write! Draft a note to each of the main characters about what you think of them.

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helpful linksThe last Tasmanian tiger in captivity

Information about the Tasmanian tiger from the Tasmanian Government’s Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment (DPIPWE)

Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan writes on preserving Tasmania’s rainforests

Information about Anna Krien’s book, Into the Woods

Scholarly article on biotechnology and warfare

Interview with author/screenwriter Julia Leigh

Forest Industries Association of Tasmania

Article on species extinction

suggestions for further activities

After viewing the !lm and reading the book, get into groups and consider how you might create at least two of the !lm’s scenes differently, how your ‘production team’ would approach the task of adaptation.

Write a 500-word news article for a Tasmanian publication as if The Hunter !lm were an actual event. You will have to think carefully about what to include and what is not newsworthy.

Write a 500-word review of The Hunter, taking into account the fact that it is an adaptation from a novel.

Write a diary entry as Bike or Sass after Martin arrives at their house.

Using video recording, images from the web or your own drawings, create either a visual essay or short !lm that accurately sums up your feelings about the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger.

This study guide was produced by ATOM. (© ATOM 2011) ISBN-13-978-1-74295-089-1 editor@atom.org.au

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