Backroads

Backroads (1977)

Two strangers – one white, one black – steal a car in western NSW and head for the coast. Jack is abrasive, cunning and disparaging about Aborigines. Gary doesn’t really care – he just wants to escape. En route, they pick up Gary’s Uncle Joe, a French hitchhiker and a young woman who’s running away. Their petty crimes escalate as they go, heading towards disaster.

Date of release
1977-06-27
TMDB
6.3 / 10 (9)
Runtime
1h 1m
Genres
Action, Drama
Director
Phillip Noyce

Casting

Interesting facts

Backroads is a 1977 Australian film directed by Phillip Noyce. Two strangers – one white (Jack), one Aboriginal (Gary) – steal a car in western New South Wales and drive around the coast. The original characters came from a story by Adelaide writer John Emery, with whom Noyce had worked on a short film. Australian reviews of the film were mixed, and it opened commercially in only one cinema.

Production

John Emery had written one of Noyce's short films at film school, Caravan Park, and pitched him another story, The First Day of Spring, about a young aboriginal. They developed the script together. Gary Foley agreed to act provided that he would be responsible for the film's indigenous content.

The film was mostly shot on location near Bourke and Brewarrina in western New South Wales and was funded in part by a $25,000 grant from the Creative Development Branch of the Australian Film Commission. Shooting finished in April 1977 when the finance ran out. Noyce applied to the Australian Film Commission for money to finish the film, however he decided instead to launch Backroads at the Sydney Film Festival in 1977.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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