Daniel Nettheim Hunts Down Dafoe and Sam Neill

Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill have signed on to star in Daniel Nettheim’s The Hunter, based on the novel by Julia Leigh. It will present a return to film for Nettheim, whose last feature was the 2000 film, Angst. In between features, the helmer has more recently worked on television series’ directing episodes of The Secret Life of Us, Rush and Headland.

Produced by Porchlight Film’s Vincent Sheehan (Little Fish) and his most recent credit being executive producer on Animal Kingdom, scripted by Alice Addison and Wain Fimeri, The Hunter is set in Tasmania in the 1920’s and tells the story of about a hunter in pursuit of the last Tasmanian tiger who stumbles across the family of a man missing in the wilderness. The project has a budget of AU$6.7 million being financed by Screen Australia and Screen New South Wales with Madman as the Australian distributor. Here’s a book review of the book published in the Y2K.

Leigh’s flawed but exciting debut describes the deadly search for the fabled, and perhaps extinct, Tasmanian tiger, aka the thylacine. A mysterious man who is identified to the reader only as M assumes the identity of “Martin David, naturalist” and arrives at the filthy, disheveled house of depressed Lucy Armstrong, whose husband, Jarrah, a naturalist and bioethics expert, recently disappeared on the plateau. Lucy’s home becomes the base for M’s treks into the wilderness, ostensibly to study the habits of Tasmanian devils. In fact, and in secret, M works for a biotech company. His mission: to secure genetic material from what may be the world’s last remaining thylacine, reportedly sighted on the plateau. M must hide his true occupation from Lucy and her lonely children, Sass and Bike, as well as from the National Parks researchers and the suspicious local townspeople. Sydney-based Leigh shifts ably between M’s laconic narration and third-person storytelling. With the exception of a superfluous (and clumsily handled) romantic subplot, the novel’s events are compelling, drawing the reader deep into M’s inner jungle. Leigh is most effective when writing in M’s voice, exploring his relationship to the wilderness, his tracking expertise and his ability “to think like a true and worthy predator.” Fans of Peter Matthiessen will find Leigh darker and sometimes less ambitious, but effective in similar ways, as M’s obsession with the hunt drives this moody work by a gifted new author to its chilling conclusion. (Oct.) – Publisher’s Weekly