10 great Australian debut features

When Peter Weir released his debut feature, the darkly funny horror The Cars That Ate Paris in 1974, the young director had already benefited from a rapidly expanding Australian film landscape. In 1971, he directed a section of the portmanteau film 3 to Go, the first fiction film of the Commonwealth Film Unit, the government-funded company that later became Screen Australia. The same year, his morbid 52-minute class satire Homesdale was funded by the Australian Film Institute’s nascent Experimental Film and Television Fund and sold to network television. 

Australia ushered in sweeping social reforms in the 1970s, many of which directly impacted the lives and futures of young people – free university education, government-funded childcare and the abolition of national service. When combined with the arts funding bodies established on a federal and state level during the same period, it’s easy to see how so many young directors like Weir could make a significant mark on Australian cinema during the decade.

The Cars That Ate Paris is screening at BFI Southbank this April and will be available on limited edition Blu-ray in May. Before Weir’s Hollywood emigration, and before his celebrated entries to the Australian New Wave canon, including Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), The Last Wave (1977) and Gallipoli (1981), his debut film straddled the line between in-your-face Ozploitation – note the spike-covered Beetle on many of its posters – and fierce satire on the contemporary obsession with progress. 

To celebrate the film’s return, this list puts it bumper to bumper with nine other road-ready debuts that have come out of Australia in the half century since.

Director: Peter Weir

The tiny outback town of Paris has a secret: the car accidents that happen on its outskirts are planned and orchestrated to sustain the tiny town with scrap metal and fresh meat for the doctor’s experiments, under the watchful eye of The Mayor (John Meillon). Peter Weir’s later films would lack the garish Ozploitation sensibilities – namely a vulgar, antisocial smashing-together of comedy and violence in the outback – but The Cars That Ate Paris is still a Weir film through and through, with a remote setting, a protagonist paralysed by guilt and pain, and a dangerous man trying to leave his dubious mark on the world.

It’s remarkable how well The Cars That Ate Paris plays as a western – an uprooted stranger is stuck in a remote, arid and ramshackle town, witnessing both a despotic leader’s twisted idea of progress and the violence tolerated at this unusual frontier.

Director: George Miller

This dust-and-sweat-caked road romp was George Miller’s first foray into feature filmmaking, and his four subsequent films set in Mad Max’s oil-deprived apocalyptic wasteland form the spine of the Australian doctor-turned-director’s career. Set in the near-future, the world of the first Mad Max still somewhat resembles our own, with police officer Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) struggling to uphold law and order as ecocide tears society apart and cackling, sadistic motorbike gangs terrorise the highways. 

Max becomes ‘mad’ when his wife and child are killed by the nefarious gang leader Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne). He makes a sudden heel-turn into vigilantism that speaks to the defiant, provocative spirit of Ozploitation action. The world’s gone to pot, and the only way to escape the rotten binary of villainy and victimhood is to embody raw, folkloric badassery. Mad Max’s unique depiction of a world on the edge of a dangerous precipice still permeates modern Australian genre film.

Director: Gillian Armstrong

Before her sensitive adaptation of Little Women (1994), starring Winona Ryder, Gillian Armstrong directed another literary adaptation about a stubborn young woman whose writerly ambitions are curtailed by the limited paths available to 19th-century women. My Brilliant Career is based on the novel by Miles Franklin, a difficult coming-of-age story where Sybylla (Judy Davis) leaves rural farmwork for her wealthy relative’s petty, constrictive world of marriage and manners – which she finds is just as much of a dampener on her creative spirit as her meagre, harsh family farm. 

My Brilliant Career pairs an attractive romance plot – where Sybylla is both pursued and scorned by the devilishly handsome Harry Beecham (Sam Neill) – with Donald McAlpine’s stunning, serene cinematography of New South Wales’s landscapes, imbuing the historical drama with a sense of the sublime. The film is rich with the bitter sadness of an artist afraid she’ll never be able to express how she relates to the world.

Director: Russell Mulcahy

Russell Mulcahy’s run of stylish cult classics and curios include Highlander (1986), Ricochet (1991) and The Shadow (1994), but his debut is his most exciting and visually astonishing work. With a simple high-concept hook – a feral boar creature-feature in the Australian outback – and a perfunctory script about an American (Gregory Harrison) searching rural Australia for the truth about the death of his reporter girlfriend, Razorback concentrates on a maximalist, blinding and at points surreal visual design – an evolution of the music video style Mulcahy established with artists like Elton John and Duran Duran. 

Razorback is a bold, sensory escalation of Ozploitation motifs of paranoid hunters and outsiders becoming prey to Australia’s wildness. The sharp, impactful editing, lush production design and vibrant, immaculate lighting elevate the grisly and outlandish material into a dizzying treat. Mulcahy would return to wild monsters much later in his career with MTV’s Teen Wolf (2011), directing 40 episodes and a 2023 reunion film.

Director: Rob Sitch

A contender for Australia’s best film comedy, The Castle takes place in a sparsely populated suburb right beside Melbourne airport, where the eccentric, lovable Kerrigan family are thrown into chaos when developers attempt to expand the airport and turf them out of their home. Patriarch Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton) resists with all his might – after all, a man’s home is his castle. 

The Castle was the debut film of prolific TV writer and performer Rob Sitch, who would later direct the moon-landing comedy The Dish (2000). The script was co-written by a troupe of Australian comedians who Sitch collaborated with throughout the 1990s. Shot on a small budget, The Castle makes up for its visual plainness with a faultless comic ensemble, each character lovingly lampooning the pride and principles of the Australian working-class. Endlessly quotable even to a non-Australian audience, The Castle was an instant hit and a quickly canonised Australian debut.

Director: Rowan Woods

Gordon Graham’s play The Boys was based on the 1986 rape and murder of Anita Cobby. In 1998 it was adapted by first-time director Rowan Woods and screenwriter Stephen Sewell into a grim and claustrophobic film that replaces the story’s original theatrical confines with a raw, naturalistic visual style, bringing us into the heart of the unchecked violence brewing in a troubled Australian family. 

Brett Sprague (David Wenham) is a parolee who’s resentful of the lives his mother (Lynette Curran) and two brothers (John Polson and Anthony Hayes) lived while he was behind bars. He reasserts his alpha status by terrorising the women around him, with his girlfriend Michelle (Toni Collette) and his brothers’ girlfriends (Jeanette Cronin and Anna Lise Phillips) subject to his dangerous misogyny. Unfurling with insidious momentum, The Boys shows the origin point for a violent, highly publicised Australian crime in the poverty and abuse of domestic spaces.

Director: Andrew Dominik

Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007; Blonde, 2022) hasn’t directed another film in Australia since this debut, an unorthodox biopic about notorious repeat offender Mark ‘Chopper’ Read, inspired by Read’s larger-than-life autobiographical writings and anecdotes about his life inside and outside of prison. 

Chopper was Eric Bana’s breakout dramatic role. After appearing in sketch shows and comedy films (including a standout turn in The Castle), he immersed himself in Read’s idiosyncrasies – blokeish, colloquial language and sudden sadistic outbursts – and the resulting performance caught Hollywood’s eye and led to an explosive decade of leading roles. There’s comic verve to his performance too, as he gleefully winds up fellow inmates and gangsters and lays on a thick polite-schtick in the most grimy, tense altercations. A clear influence on Nicolas Winding Refn’s equally provocative Bronson (2008), Chopper stitches together episodes from Read’s life to paint a gripping, absurd and ironic portrait of a twisted and uniquely Australian success story.

Director: Warwick Thornton

While New Wave films such as Walkabout (1971) and The Last Wave (1977) confront Australia’s colonial legacy and anti-Aboriginal racism, they are films written and directed by white artists and foregrounding white characters who discover the complex experience of present-day Aboriginal Australians. Warwick Thornton’s debut Samson and Delilah is firmly rooted in the perspective of its eponymous teenage duo, played by first-time Aboriginal actors Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson, who escape their remote community in a stolen truck to the city of Alice Springs and discover the tragic price of their independence: rough sleeping, shoplifting, sniffing petrol and physical abuse. 

The two actors say practically nothing throughout the film, but they easily express the characters’ agitation, desperation and loneliness through physicality and behaviour. Thornton’s camera captures the quiet tragedy as they retreat deeper into themselves instead of being each other’s lifeline through their extended suffering. It’s a hard watch, but a bold vision of survival.

Director: David Michôd

The fact that David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom is the third dark, violent, true-crime-inspired drama on this list is an indication of how Australian cinema evolved across the first decade of the new century. These new voices are not just expressing a grim counterpoint to the demeaning stereotypes about the country pervading popular culture, but they attempt to reckon with the ugly, homegrown nature of Australian violence in the modern era. 

Animal Kingdom is the most ambitious and cinematic of the three. It’s set in the Melbourne underworld, where a young man (James Frecheville) is brought into the fold of his wider criminal family, with volatile gangster uncles (Ben Mendelsohn, Sullivan Stapleton) and an overbearing grandmother (Jacki Weaver). Meanwhile, a detective (Guy Pearce) is trying to bust them all. Michôd’s debut is a confident, suspenseful crime film, and the novice director was blessed with career-best performances from Jacki Weaver and Ben Mendelsohn.

Director: Jennifer Kent

Films like Jennifer Kent’s debut – buzzy, stylised, indie horror expressing clear psychological and social themes – became commonplace in the decade that followed its 2014 release, but this scratchy, numbing psychological horror stands head-and-shoulders above its many imitators. It’s an invasive, paranoid look at the damaged, grief-stricken bonds between a mother, her child and a terrifying demon from a picture-book. After the death of her husband, Amelia (Essie Davis) struggles to cope with the erratic behaviour of her son Samuel (Noah Wiseman), but the arrival of a creepy children’s book about a top-hat-wearing, long-fingered, grinning monster triggers a haunting that threatens to consume the unstable mother. 

Kent references the strangeness of German expressionism, early cinema special effects and European cautionary tales, deliberately avoiding any obvious ‘Australian’ images or themes. Perhaps this explains why the film was a much bigger hit overseas than it was at home.

Finding Your Way: The Films of Peter Weir plays at BFI Southbank from 30 March to 30 April.

The Cars That Ate Paris + The Plumber are out on BFI Blu-ray in a new 4k restoration on 25 May.