Walkabout

Looking better than ever thanks to an excellent 4k scan and restoration, Walkabout is a film which no serious cinephile would want to have missing from their collection. It's supported here by a full suite of extras, most of which are themselves impressive and far easier to get lost in than most of their ilk. Don't start unless you have a few hours to spare.

First up is the commentary by Luc Roeg and David Thompson, which goes into depth about the experience of making the film as well as looking at its literary origins, the production process and aspects of its reception. Luc, who starred, was very young at the time so can't always lead on the provision of facts, but what he does remember is far richer in its way, focused on the human aspects of the process and the physical and psychological challenges involved, as well as on the grand adventure of making a film with his father, with his older brother also involved. He offers the sort of insights one wouldn't normally get, both here and in the separate interview included on the disc. In the commentary, the two also touch on some of the other great Australian classics of the period, such as Picnic At Hanging Rock and Wake In Fright.

An interview with producer Si Livinoff provides more in-depth background on how the film came to be, and there's also an interesting contribution from Jenny Agutter, these two together also serving as a pleasant reminder that for all that we often look back on cinema's past with horror today, there were men working then who took the responsibility to protect young female stars seriously. The interview with Danny Boyle doesn't add much beyond establishing that he's a fan, and for some reason it's recorded at a lower volume, so you will have to adjust your set. There are also minor sound issues in the Q&A and in the archive introduction by Nicolas Roeg, which are more unfortunate on account of his tendency to mumble, but it's still interesting to hear (when one can) what he had to say.

If there's one major omission here, it's the voice of David Gulpilil, who dies last year. It's a shame that nothing has emerged to give us his perspective, since he was the outsider on the set and even the lines he speaks have never been translated into English. Agutter recalls meeting him some years later, however, and suggests that in the meantime his perspective had changed so much that some aspects of the experience had vanished from his memory. This disc represents an important effort to preserve those memories which remain and accord this classic its proper place in the cinematic archive.