Question: What were the true events that inspired you to write Wolf Creek?
Greg McLean: I wrote the original story five, six years ago and it was pretty much a standard horror thriller set in the Outback. Then over the years I heard about a couple of true cases that happened in Australia, one of them being the Ivan Milat case which is about a serial killer who would pick up hitchhikers on lonely highways and take them out into the woods and do horrific things to them. That case was influential in many ways because is had all of these elements that were so terrifying and scarier than anything I could possibly come up with. So that case influenced the Mick Taylor character a lot in terms of what he did, what his background was, mode of operation.
Then more recently there was the Bradley Murdoch case taking place right now, again, a very similar character who lived in West Australia patrolling these lonely highways looking for victims who pulled over this car with two British backpackers in it and shot the guy and tried to abduct the woman, Joanne Lees. They just had all of these similarities and had all of these incredibly bad intentions. When people would meet him he’d be the nicest guy in the world because he had to be nice enough to get them to come with him in the first place.
So that was the key quality that I took from those true cases. There’s other details too that are a blend of those cases. I also tried to blend clichés and icons from Australia - the Steve Irwin or Mick Dundee character, all of these big broad Australian characters recognizable in the States.