Awake To Possibility

After Three Decades on Our Screens David Wenham’s Star Keeps Rising – but Even He Didn’t See Himself Remaking His Favourite Aussie Film,
 

- Michael Adams

‘I’m trying to now approach my work so I can get a sense of the… freedom I had when I was younger.’

David Wenham

David Wenham knows what scares you about the new version of Wake In Fright because it scared him too. “I was dead set against it,” he says of being overseas and hearing that the 1971 Australian masterpiece was to be remade. “I just thought, ‘That’s ridiculous.’ I mean, why would you?”

As things would have it, shortly after the actor arrived back home in Sydney the revamped script landed on his desk. “I could easily just have dispensed with the idea but out of curiosity I read it,” the 52-year-old actor says. “It was really, really good. I went 180 degrees on the idea.”

Wenham didn’t make the decision lightly – he rates the original version as his favourite Australian film of all time “without a doubt”. But he feels that the new version will allow a strong tale – based on Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel of the same name – to find a new audience. “Why not give the opportunity to other generations to look at this story from a new perspective?” he says.

Wake In Fright relates the harrowing odyssey of a young teacher who’s stranded in an outback hellhole, where he’s gradually stripped of his sanity by a toxic version of Australian masculinity, his descent facilitated by the town’s malevolent cop Jock Crawford.