Turtle Beach

Turtle Beach (1992)

Reporter Judith Wilkes leaves her husband and two sons in Sydney and goes to Malaysia to cover the story of the Vietnamese boat people. She becomes romantically involved with Kanan, and strikes up a friendship with Lady Minou Hobday, who keeps a regular vigil at "Turtle Beach" where the refugees try to secretly land, in the hope that one day her own children will arrive. Accompanying Minou one night, Judith witnesses a brutal massacre by the Malaysians, which spurs her on to expose the horrors of the internment camps at Bidong.

Date of release
1992-03-19
TMDB
5.3 / 10 (15)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Thriller, Drama
Director
Stephen Wallace

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Box office: A$359.4K
  • Based on: Turtle Beach
  • Filmed in: Sydney and Thailand

Turtle Beach, also known as The Killing Beach, is a 1992 Australian film directed by Stephen Wallace and starring Greta Scacchi and Joan Chen. The screenplay was written by Ann Turner, based on the 1981 novel of the same name by Blanche d'Alpuget. It caused controversy in Malaysia, where the government took exception to scenes of Malays executing refugees.

Production

Ann Turner was working for Roadshow when she was hired to adapt the novel, which she loved. However she says the project soon became compromised:

When I first saw the film I thought it looked like the writer was on drugs or completely insane, because you could see there were two films working within the one film... There were a lot of different voices in terms of the finance-raising, there was American money, and the producers—many, plural—really had very different views of what the film should be. Greta Scacchi really liked the book and liked the script and fought for it.

The film was financed in part by the people who had invested in Blood Oath, directed by Stephen Wallace. They were enthusiastic about that film and hired Wallace to direct. Wallace:

I loved the book and I really wanted to make the film. I think in the end the script really wasn't good enough and I had a terrible run-in with the producer on it. It was just a nightmare. I wanted to make a film about Asia again, because I thought Asia was misunderstood in Australia and I thought the more light we can shed on Asians, the better... But unfortunately in the film, it all went haywire ...

The Australian Film Finance Corporation invested $5,248,857 in the film.

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

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