"Walkabout" is director Nicolas Roeg's 1971 British feature set in Australia, adapting the novel by author James Vance Marshall, available in an unedited director's cut through the Criterion Collection.
The story starts with a high school girl (Jenny Agutter), her younger brother (Luc Roeg) and their father, a geologist, going for a drive into the Australian outback, where they stop for a family picnic. Suddenly, without warning or reason, the father begins shooting at them and when they run behind rocks for cover, he sets the car on fire and kills himself.
The girl conceals what has happened from her brother as they spend a night sleeping on rocks, climbing high into the mountains for a vantage point to see the ocean. As they begin their trek towards the sea, they grow weak from exposure, until an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) appears and saves their lives by taking them through the frontier.
The film was produced from a minimal 14-page screenplay by English playwright Edward Bond, with Roeg, a British filmmaker, bringing an outsider's interpretation to the Australian setting."
We didn’t really plan anything, " said Roeg. "We just came across things by chance…filming whatever we found."
"The adventure I had been a part of was woven into the fabric of the film, " said Agutter.
"We would walk for half a day up a mountain to capture the grandeur of the place, or sleep in a dry riverbed to rise early and catch that particular morning light. Each location distilled the essence of a scene, like the illustrations in a wonderful children’s book.
"My memories of making 'Walkabout' are linked with the journey of 'the girl', who like myself was at that perplexing age between adolescence and adulthood."
Sneak Peek "Walkabout"...
