Ted Kotcheff

A cultural interpreter

Born 7 April 1931 in Toronto, Canada, William Theodore (Ted) Kotcheff grew up immersed in the Bulgarian-Macedonian diaspora. He learned to speak his parents’ native Bulgarian before English. As a literature graduate turned production stagehand, Ted Kotcheff developed his own storytelling language from an early age. His formative years in Toronto paved the way for him becoming a filmmaker who could interpret the experience of cultural dislocation with astounding nuance.

Kotcheff's legacy spans a remarkable body of work across cinema, television drama and theatre including iconic Hollywood feature films like The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), First Blood (1982) and Weekend at Bernie’s (1989). In Australia, he is revered for directing Wake in Fright (1971), a seminal film of the Australian New Wave that remains a cornerstone of the nation's cinematic history.

Watch a US trailer for Wake in Fright (AKA Outback)

That's not us

When Jamaican screenwriter Evan Jones adapted Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel Wake in Fright, he suggested a Canadian director (Kotcheff) to the Norwegian producer who had been hired by an American fridge manufacturing company, Westinghouse.

'I loved Jones' script,' said Kotcheff, 'and I read the book and I understood it all immediately, what it was about. At the time people were telling me, "Kotcheff, how did you have the temerity to go and make a film about a culture that you know nothing about?", but I felt I knew these people.' Kotcheff was arrested by the cultural similarities. 'Australia is Canada. Its people [are] trapped in empty spaces.'

The film was only retrospectively canonised in Australia, even while it earned critical acclaim abroad, including a nomination for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971. While the Cannes screening reportedly left Martin Scorsese 'speechless', Australian audiences at the time were less than impressed.

Despite its later reappraisal as an Australian cult classic, Wake in Fright suffered an ambivalent if not hostile reception at the time. At an early screening of the film, one member of the audience stood up in the theatre and shouted ‘That’s not us!’ to which Australian actor Jack Thompson purportedly rebuked: ‘Sit down, mate. It is us.’

In these excerpts from interviews with the NFSA, Kotcheff reflects on aspects of the making of Wake in Fright and its legacy.

The Moby Dick of Kangaroos

In the early 1970s, Australians were ill-prepared for the violent horrors that kangaroos might inflict on screen when Kotcheff uncovered an unlikely and belligerent star in Nelson, the 'Moby Dick of kangaroos'.

The kangaroo hunt sequence in Wake in Fright , which devolves into a fistfight between man and roo, has since been burned into the collective consciousness of Australian cinema. Nelson had an unnerving presence, and the chaos of his theatrics mirrored a country reckoning with its own violent histories. Kotcheff explains how fortunate the casting turned out to be:

Down Dante’s Inferno

As the schoolteacher protagonist in Wake in Fright (played by Gary Bond) descends into moral and cognitive disarray, he is offered a beer by almost every male in the Yabba, the town where he finds himself trapped. Kotcheff's vision of life in the Yabba was a truly sinister hallucination that laid bare the psychic constitution of Australian cultural identity and is alarmingly resonant five decades later.

The only scene Kotcheff planned that was ultimately not used showed the conditions endured by the men of the Yabba who worked down the mines. 'I went down the mines in Broken Hill; it was Dante’s Inferno down there.'

The lost film

Restored by the NFSA in 2009, Wake in Fright was almost lost forever before it was rescued by Tony Buckley, the film's Australian editor, in 2002.

Kotcheff celebrates the story of the film’s restoration, reception and unholy resurrection:

Under Kotcheff’s direction, Wake in Fright was realised with clear-eyed intensity. It's a story where social pressures, libidinal excess and a noxious masculinity ultimately swallow its unsuspecting visitor.

Ted Kotcheff woke us up with an almighty fright, and for that we bid him a peaceful rest.

Main image: Dawn Lake, Chips Rafferty and Gary Bond in a scene from Wake in Fright (1971)