Gallipoli (1981 Film) - Production

Production

Peter Weir had wanted to make a film about the Gallipoli campaign since visiting Gallipoli in 1976 and discovering an empty Eno bottle on the beach. The wrote an outline of the script and gave it to David Williamson to turn into a screenplay. The script went through many variations - the South Australian Film Corporation did not like an early draft and said they did not want to fund the film, which then had a proposed budget of A$4.5 million, as it was. In May 1979 Weir asked Patricia Lovell to produce. The script then began to focus on the story of two runners. Lovell managed to raise $850,000, which was not enough to make the movie.

Then in May 1980 Rupert Murdoch and Robert Stigwood announced they were forming a film company, Associated R and R Films. Lovell approached them with the script, and they agreed to fund it provided the budget did not exceed $3 million. Lovell later said the final budget was $2.8 million - really $2.4 million with the rest consisting of fees. This was the highest budget of an Australian film to date. Rupert Murdoch's father, Keith Murdoch, was a journalist during the First World War. He visited Gallipoli briefly in September 1915 and became an influential agitator against the conduct of the campaign by the British.

Peter Weir cast Mel Gibson in the role of the cynical Frank Dunne, and newcomer Mark Lee was recruited to play the idealistic Archy Hamilton after participating in a photo session for the director. Gibson explained the director's reasons for casting the two leads:

"I'd auditioned for an earlier film and he told me right up front, ‘I'm not going to cast you for this part. You're not old enough. But thanks for coming in, I just wanted to meet you.’ He told me he wanted me for Gallipoli a couple of years later because I wasn't the archetypal Australian. He had Mark Lee, the angelic-looking, ideal Australian kid, and he wanted something of a modern sensibility. He thought the audience needed someone to relate to of their own time."

Gibson described the film as "Not really a war movie. That's just the backdrop. It's really the story of two young men."

The original music was provided by Australian composer Brian May (who had also scored Mad Max). However the most striking feature of the soundtrack was the use of excerpts from Oxygène by French electronic music pioneer Jean Michel Jarre during running scenes. Quiet or sombre moments at Gallipoli, and the closing credits, feature the Adagio in G minor. The use of the adagio (Major Barton is heard playing it before the final attack) is a historical oddity. A fragment of the composition purportedly discovered in 1958 by composer Thomaso Albinoni's biographer, Remo Giazotto, in the ruins of a Dresden museum after it was destroyed during World War II, was in fact an entirely new work by Giazotto. Whether a musical hoax or not, the music would not have been known at the time of the battle.

Gallipoli was filmed primarily in South Australia. The cattle station scenes were shot in Beltana, the salt lake at Lake Torrens, the station at Adelaide Railway Station, and the coastline near Port Lincoln was transformed into the Gallipoli Peninsula. The pyramid and bazaar scenes were filmed on location in Egypt.

David Williamson makes a cameo as an Australian soldier playing a game of Australian rules in Egypt.

The farewell ball scene was not in the original script but was an idea of Weir's during shooting. It cost an extra $60,000 to make.