Why ‘Crocodile Dundee’ gave Steven Soderbergh nightmares: “I was stressed”
If you open the dictionary to the word ‘productive’, you’ll see a picture of Steven Soderbergh, as this god of indie cinema is one of the most prolific filmmakers of the modern age, churning out movies at a sometimes alarming rate.
He released a total of nine films between 2010 and 2019, which is already impressive, but that doesn’t take into account that he was technically retired between 2013 and 2016, marking him a movie-making machine who shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
One of his earliest efforts is the line-blurring, suitably surreal semi-biopic Kafka, starring Jeremy Irons as the legendary writer Franz Kafka, blending elements of his real life with some of the more outlandish aspects of his work. It wasn’t a major hit by any stretch, but it remains a cult favourite among devoted fans of the director’s output.
Perhaps Soderbergh would have drawn more money if he’d cast somebody else in the main role, about which he revealed to The Playlist that, while he was making Kafka, he’d had a dream about casting the lead role. For whatever reason, his subconscious convinced him that he’d settled on Crocodile Dundee’s Paul Hogan in the project, which turned out to be a literal nightmare.
“I’d forgotten about that dream until I’d dove back in [re-editing Kafka] and remembered,” he recalled, “I had a beard at the time, and I woke up in the course of one night, I had a big white patch in my beard. I was stressed.”
If, for some reason, you need it explained to you why this would have been a bad idea, Hogan was an Australian comedian who, after appearing as the eponymous character in the aforementioned sleeper hit, found himself thrust into the global limelight. Despite winning a Golden Globe for his work, he wasn’t much of an actor, but he was very good at playing a gruff Aussie, and that was about it. Now, he is something of a cautionary tale, as his initially success simply could not be sustained by the slew of bollocks that came immediately after it.
As we’ve established, Hogan would not have done a better job as Kafka, especially when compared to Jeremy Irons; however, for a bit of fun, let’s consider whether or not the movie would have been more financially viable had Soderbergh’s dream become reality.
It’s hard to understate just how big a deal Crocodile Dundee was at the time, which made Hogan synonymous with his native land, as Australian culture became a worldwide fascination. That was in 1986, though, and in the five years prior to Kafka’s release, his star had dimmed significantly, with his 1990 movie Almost an Angel an out-and-out flop. Six years later, he would turn up in Flipper in 1996, but he was very much third on the bill behind Elijah Wood and the dolphin.
Shockingly, we must come to the conclusion that Soderbergh was correct not to cast Hogan in his sophomore effort. As it is, he found the film “frustrating” enough, so the last thing he needed was an eccentric Aussie running around the set trying to show people his big knife.
