Trivia / Turkey Shoot

• Banned in China: The film was banned in Scandinavia for years.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget: A$2.5 million, Box office: A$321,000.
• Creator Backlash: Olivia Hussey wished not to appear nude, so they got a body double. In her autobiography, she said...
  "Ironically when I saw the finished film and what the body double looked like, I wished I'd done the damned nudity. I had a much better body than she did."
• Creator Breakdown: Olivia Hussey was a little panicked during the shoot, worried that Australia's infamous wildlife would be everywhere. As a result, she was very nervous on location.
• Enforced Method Acting: Rumor has it that real bullets were fired at the actors in some scenes, though they may have just been BB's (still capable of causing injury though).
• Method Acting: For the scene where Paul is made to hold up weights, Steve Railsback, who is a method actor, insisted on using real weights. This had the side effect of making it difficult to get his lines out.
• No Budget: According to Brian Trenchard-Smith, half the film's budget never arrived due to the Australian government changing its previous position on tax rebates for investors. Steve Railsback claimed that the investors invariably gambled half of the production budget away at the horse races. This led Trenchard-Smith to add more nudity and explicit gore into the film to compensate for the lack of the large-scale setpieces he had planned.
• Sleeper Hit: The film flopped in both the US and its native Australia. However, when it was released in the UK, it broke Box Office records! Its UK success may have been helped by the fact that the villain had the same surname as the then-current and rather divisive Prime Minister...
• Wag the Director: Lynda Stoner was apparently very demanding on the set. Due to her strong animal beliefs (she is a long term campaigner of numerous animal right causes), she refused to cut open an actual dead fish in one scene, forcing the special effects department to jerry-rig together a fake one as fast as possible for the scene. Additionally, she also refused to do a nude scene,^note At the time she was something of a sex symbol in Australia; but after a long discussion with director Brian Trenchard-Smith, she compromised to partially appearing nude (backside shot).
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original script was a Period Piece set in America during the The Great Depression. The Australian government refused the production a tax credit unless the film was set in Australia, so it was re-written.
  • Several planned set-pieces had to be cut or scaled down due to the film losing nearly half its intended budget before filming started. Among these:
    • An action sequence involving a helicopter.
    • A more expansive camp set with hundreds of prisoners and guards.
    • An elaborate opening sequence depicting the dystopian outside world and the backstories of the three protagonists. All-in-all, the first fifteen pages of the script were cut.
  • There was originally an additional hunter, to be played by famed Aussie chat-show host Graham Kennedy. When the budget was cut, Kennedy fell out of the production's budget range, and his character was combined with Thatcher. Other sources indicate that Kennedy flatly refused to take part after reading the script.

---