Swinging Safari
Short description
Swinging Safari is set in an Australian coastal town in 1975, where a dead 200-tonne blue whale washes ashore and turns the place into a sudden attraction. Behind the closed doors of the neighbourhood, the parents of three families throw themselves into the sexual revolution, while fourteen-year-old Jeff watches the adults around him behave badly and struggles with his own feelings for Melly, the shy girl next door. The film is a comedy drama about growing up while the grown-ups misbehave.
Stephan Elliott wrote and directed the film, which follows his earlier work including The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Eye of the Beholder, Easy Virtue, A Few Best Men and Rio, I Love You. The cast is led by Guy Pearce and Kylie Minogue as Keith and Kaye Hall, alongside Radha Mitchell, Julian McMahon, Asher Keddie and Jack Thompson. Al Clark and Jamie Hilton produced it for See Pictures and Wildheart Films, and it runs 97 minutes.
On IMDb the film holds a critics' rating of 6.3 out of 10 from 28 reviews, while on TMDB it has an audience rating of 5.3 out of 10 from 68 votes, a gap that suggests reviewers responded more warmly than general viewers did. It was released in January 2018.
What's left behind the scenes
- Initially, the plot featured five families, but then Guy Pearce noticed that so many people would only confuse the audience, and in the final version of the plot, only three families remained.
- Initially, the film was going to be titled "Flaming Kids," but the sponsors objected, deciding that potential viewers would mistakenly think it was a horror film based on the title. Director and screenwriter Stefan Elliott stood his ground, and work on the film was almost finished when a fire occurred in the 24-story "Grenfell Tower" in London, resulting in the deaths of many children. It was then that Elliott gave the go-ahead to change the title, and it was changed, although in some countries the film was still released under the title "Flaming Kids."
- The scene with the whale carcass bears a striking resemblance to a real event that occurred in 1970, when police in Oregon, on the Pacific coast of the United States, had to remove a whale corpse from the road, and they came up with no better solution than to simply blow up the carcass, after which everyone and everything in the area was showered with pieces of already decaying whale meat.
- The film is largely autobiographical for director Stefan Elliott and tells the story of his growing up and making often dangerous "films" with friends and neighbors. The character of Melly, played by Darcy Wilson, is based on Lizzie Gardiner, Elliott's longtime friend and costume designer. The bedroom scene had to be filmed intermittently because it evoked certain memories in Elliott. After filming, he told interviewers that he couldn't even sleep after shooting that scene. He also stated that Beck (played by Chelsea Glow) was not based on his sister, but on the sister of one of his neighbors. According to Elliott, his own sister at that time was a perfectly ordinary and even boring person. Some of his memories and "secrets" were never reflected in the film so as not to upset close friends and family.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
