‘Walkabout’: the movie Alex Garland calls “virtuoso filmmaking”
Even if you don’t know Alex Garland’s name by now, you definitely know his movies. The English screenwriter and filmmaker made his name penning innovative scripts for films such as Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later before making his directorial debut in 2014 with Ex Machina. He went on to write and direct 2018’s Annihilation and recently unveiled his rural psychological horror Men starring Jessie Buckley.
Back in 2022, before the release of Men, Garland sat down with Rotten Tomatoes to discuss some of his favourite films. His selection is reflective of the eclecticism that has defined his output in recent years. From “extraordinarily powerful” Soviet war films like Come and See to “profound” Palme d’Or winners like Parasite, the director certainly has diverse taste.
One of the films on his list was Robert Egger’s haunting 2019 period thriller The Lighthouse, starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe. “There are some amazing people working today, and I think [Robert Eggers] is one of them,” the director said of Eggers. “I thought The Lighthouse was fantastic. It was incredibly funny and strange but, most of all, incredibly original.”
Far Out recently sat down with Mark Korven, who composed the scores for both The Lighthouse and Eggers’ first film, The Witch. Discussing what working with the director taught him about his craft, Korven said: “Rob is real big on acoustic music, and he really awakened that in me. It led to the creation of the Apprehension Engine, which is an instrument designed to produce horrifying sounds acoustically.”
Garland went on to talk about his love of Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 epic Walkabout, which tells the story of a geologist who takes his two children into the Australian outback to murder them. When he fails, he shoots himself, and the two city kids are forced to wander the wilderness in the hope of rescue. Their fortunes change when they meet an Aborigine boy – played by David Gulpilil – who teaches them how to survive.
“It’s virtuoso filmmaking,” Garland said of the Australian new wave classic. “It has one of the strangest, unannounced or unanticipated scenes in any kind of film I’ve ever seen. It can be really shocking, but it’s also really touching and very sort of oddly charming”. A film about the beauty of being alive, Walkabout remains one of Roeg’s most transcendent works.
Watch the trailer below.
