New Territory
Territory director Greg McLean takes DQ inside Netflix’s Australian drama about the battle for control of the world’s largest cattle station, where he spent its special effects budget and how he was inspired by Top Gun: Maverick.
When it comes to television shows that rely on special effects, Territory isn’t one of them. Blending elements of Succession, Yellowstone and even Game of Thrones, the Australian series is set on the world’s largest cattle station as a generational clash for its ownership threatens to tear the Lawson family apart, leaving rival cattle barons, desert gangsters, Indigenous elders and billionaire miners all eyeing up the prize.
Yet there was one very specific issue that meant director Greg McLean and his VFX team had a lot of work to do in post-production before the launch of the Netflix series in October.
“There’s not that many effects in the show, but the biggest visual effect was taking out the reflection of the sunglasses,” McLean tells DQ. “We had all these characters wearing sunglasses because we thought it looked really cool, but then we had 560 visual effects shots to take out the crew standing in the [reflection] of the sunglasses. If there’s a season two, there’s definitely gonna be a mandate from Netflix saying no more sunglasses on characters.”
The filmmaker is best known for his work on series such as Scrublands, Jack Irish, The Gloaming and Wolf Creek – a series sequel to the pair of horror films set in the Australian outback featuring serial killer Mick Taylor (John Jarratt). A third film, Wolf Creek: Legacy, is in the works with McLean producing.
However, Territory marks his biggest ever small-screen commitment, helming all six episodes of the drama. “It’s also probably the biggest production I’ve done in terms of just scale of the show,” he notes. “It was great. It didn’t feel too overwhelming. There are certainly times where you go, ‘Well, what the hell are we doing here? We’ve got 3,000 cattle and three choppers and 10 cameras. It just feels like it’s Apocalypse Now.’ But you come out of it and go, ‘OK, that was that. We got the material, did we not?’ And then you go again the next day.”
Produced by Easy Tiger (Colin from Accounts, Scrublands, Four Years Later), the drama is a portrait of a family at odds over the future of Marianne Station, and those taking on this once great dynasty in a battle for land and legacy. The ensemble cast includes Anna Torv (The Newsreader), Michael Dorman (Patriot), Robert Taylor (The Newsreader), Sam Corlett (Vikings: Valhalla), Sara Wiseman (High Country), Jay Ryan (Scrublands), Hamilton Morris (Sweet Country), Clarence Ryan (Mystery Road Origin) and Tyler Spencer (The New Boy).
McLean had been working on Scrublands S1 with Easy Tiger’s Ian Collie and Rob Gibson when he overheard them at lunch one day talking about a new drama set in the Top End, the northernmost part of Australia’s Northern Territory (NT). He had previously made a film there, the 2006 feature Rogue, and is fascinated by that part of the world, so much so that he “pestered” the producers to find out what the project was.
“They weren’t really thinking of me for it, but I said, ‘No, what is this show? I’m really interested. What is it?’,” he remembers. “They eventually told me and I said, ‘My God, that sounds amazing. A big drama series in the Top End sounds wild.’” He was then given the chance to pitch his vision for the series, and when they really liked it, he was given the chance to present his ideas to Netflix, who also liked what they heard. “It was a process of pitching up the chain until finally they said, ‘This is the guy to do it.’”
Comparisons to other series on TV may not always be helpful, but the director says “an Aussie Yellowstone” is not a bad way to describe Territory, which originated with a desire to make a drama set in the Top End after executive producer Ben Davies (Bondi Rescue) previously made a reality series called Outback Ringer, about men and women working with cattle in the NT.
“He came back from that experience and said to Rob, who’s more of a drama producer, ‘What if we did a big Succession-type story? There’s all these competing families in the NT, what if we did a Succession-type story with a Game of Thrones quality, because you’ve got the mining companies, Indigenous characters, the station owners all competing for control of the land.’
“I was the one saying, ‘Well, Yellowstone is this great show.’ It wasn’t really a reference point but if you’re going to do a show about a powerful family with a powerful patriarch in a cattle station, you’re going to have a reference to Yellowstone. It’s not a bad thing. I’m just watching season five now. I love that show; it’s one of my favourite shows. It’s such a clever, interesting series, so to be compared to that is an honour, actually.”
Through the story, it is Torv’s Emily Lawson who serves as the anchor for viewers, who, through her perspective, get to delve into the lives and motivations of numerous other people vying for control of Marianne Station. But the story ultimately comes back to the question of how a woman survives in a very “hyper-masculine, macho environment, one that is geared to keep women out of power,” McLean says.
“It’s her story, but through her lens. We then go into all of the other complex family dynamics. It’s ultimately like all really cool stories, a family story. I’m not saying this is Shakespeare because it’s a soapie, but there’s a degree to which Shakespeare was pretty soapy too.”
McLean joined the project, written by Davies’ co-creator Timothy Lee, Kodie Bedford, Steven McGregor and Michaeley O’Brien, with all six scripts in place and a Bible document that would serve as his guide to the world of the show. Some of the scripts, however, came in at 70 to 80 pages long, so the director sought to cut them down by 25% in order to be able to complete production within the planned 62-day schedule.
“We did do a fair bit of restructure at that point,” he says. “There were a few conceptual things that I added, but in no way can I lay claim to the scripts because my job was to come in and say, ‘Here’s how I think the show should look and feel. Here’s the ambition for the vision for it. This is what we should be going for.’ The story was pretty set and those guys did an enormous amount of work for some years before I joined. We had a great writing team, as well, who delivered six pretty damn good scripts.”
He then set out to make a series that was as “big and operatic” as the scale of the storytelling and the vast landscape of the Top End, telling a “very Australian story but in a very epic way,” akin to a Hollywood blockbuster.
“By that, I mean let’s not shy away from leaning into how emotional [it is] and where it’s romantic, being very romantic and where it’s action, going really action,” he says. “I put together a 12-track playlist and showed a bunch of films to people and said, ‘This is the visual language you should be going for.’”
At that time, Top Gun: Maverick had also just come out, and the Tom Cruise blockbuster proved to be another reference point for Territory. “I really love the cinematography. I love the feel of that movie, and even though that it was a total throwback to old-fashioned Hollywood, it was executed in such a beautiful way,” McLean says. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we present our action, which is basically cattle mustering and all the action of a cattle station, as if these guys were fighter pilots.’ Let’s make them look really cool and let’s present that lifestyle as being something that’s very exciting and very thrilling, and try to capture the energy and excitement of these cattle musters. That was a big reference point for me and for all of the team.”
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But perhaps the biggest challenge facing the director was creating the feeling of an intimate family drama against the backdrop of a working cattle ranch that covers an area the size of Belgium.
“The cattle station we were filming on is 348,000 hectares, so it’s vast. When we first got there, we had to fly on a chopper and spend an hour flying around to see the borders of it,” McLean says. “In the first episode, we have a scene when we conveniently have the ex-head of the station explaining in an induction video to the newbies how a station works, and he says, ‘This is the biggest stage of the world. It’s as big as Belgium.’ It actually is as big as Belgium, so it’s kind of amazing.”
In fact, Tipperary Station, which doubles for Marianne Station in the series, isn’t actually the biggest in Australia. That title, and the prize of being the world’s largest working cattle station belongs to Anna Creek Station, which covers almost 16,000 square kilometres.
“It’s actually so vast; it’s monstrously huge. But the challenge was how we slipped it in without it feeling like very bad exposition,” McLean says. “We actually had some natural exposition in the show but we also were able to utilise incredible drone photography, because once you get up really high, you actually get a sense of the scale of what it’s like to move that amount of cattle around – and we were moving real cattle around.”
The cast and crew of Territory had the “full run” of Tipperary Station, which meant the cattle were brought in as extras. “We just had to feed and water them. We had all their vehicles, we had all their choppers. They just said, ‘Come and make the show on the station.’
“That way of life up there, on stations in the NT – which is very different to the rest of Australia – I feel like they were very keen to bring people into that world because it’s a little bit of a dying world. Hopefully, they get a lot of people ringing up and saying, ‘Can we come and work there and be a ringer for a year?’”
Thanks to his work on the Wolf Creek franchise, McLean is used to filming outdoors in various outback environments, where preparation – and flexibility – is always key to a successful day’s shooting. When it came to shooting Territory, he was particularly keen to capture a sense of the Top End’s “fairly untamed land,” where it can take several hours to reach the boundary of an estate.
“We wanted to portray the landscape there as being incredibly beautiful, incredibly primal, but also fairly untamed, in the sense that it’s the resource that everyone’s fighting over up there, whether you’re a miner, an indigenous character who tries to protect the land and preserve it because of your own tradition, or whether you’re a farmer who wants to farm and use it for your own means,” he says. “The land is the value in that part of the world.”
Taking over Tipperary Station also meant the actors could immerse themselves in their characters and their surroundings for the entire shoot, although they had to do so in rising temperatures at the end of the dry season, which would reach 40 degrees on occasion.
“We were all basically living in this one place, pretending to be station workers for the day and then coming back and all eating together and sleeping in the same areas,” the director says. “The whole crew, including the cast, just embraced it and it became the lifestyle we’re all into.
“They got to really ride horses every day, so they got to do all the mustering and be trained. They could all ride anyway, but to do that kind of stuff is very fun for an actor. So to actually get on horseback, do the real mustering and fly the choppers everywhere, they had a lot of fun.”
But as difficult as it was living and working at a base 200 miles from anywhere, “it was inspiring for people because we were in a heritage-listed sacred site shooting this amazing show,” he adds. “Any kind of difficulty we had was offset by the fact we had the privilege of being in this beautiful location that was so pristine. You’d just find yourself staying in this spot, looking at a 65,000-year-old cave painting done by the ancestors of the guy who led us to shoot there. So it was challenging, but it was a real privilege.”
Territory is now the latest Australian drama to land on the world stage, and McLean admits his home country is enjoying a moment in the sun.
“I feel like, internationally, Australia is still a fairly exotic place for many people, particularly the outback – and particularly the tropical outback,” he says. “The Northern Territory is very different to just the regular outback because it’s tropical, it has crocodiles, it has buffalo, it’s a very weird place. So I feel like that part of Australia would be very exotic to international audiences.”
He adds that, in a streaming environment, where viewers can tune into series from around the world, creatives should be able to tell their own stories, “in our own tone with our own language and lens of reference, and people internationally, if it’s a good story and compelling and emotional, will watch it,” he says.
“This show being embraced around the world is proving that idea about maintaining your own language, maintaining your own voice, not trying to do America. You’ve just got to do your own thing, and I feel like we’ve just made a show, while obviously has some lineage to existing genres – it’s obviously a western, it’s obviously a neo-western, it’s got a crime element – it’s very much its own voice. I’m very happy that people are enjoying the Australian-ness of it and going into a world that I think is very unique and interesting.”
tagged in: Anna Torv, Australia, Ben Davies, Easy Tiger, Greg McLean, Jack Irish, Michael Dorman, Netflix, Outback Ringer, Robert Taylor, Sam Corlett, Sara Wiseman, Scrublands, Succession, Territory, The Gloaming, Wolf Creek