Rabbit Proof Fence Writing

I’ve learned that film making opportunities can come at the most unconventional of times, and that film directors like Phillip Noyce should never ignore them. For example, when Noyce was woken at three in the morning by Christine Olsen, he decided that he wouldn’t hear the script for her new movie idea until morning. Once he saw the script, he loved it. Once filming Rabbit-Proof Fence, Phillip casted people native to the area he was filming in. The man chosen for Moodoo, or the Tracker, was the same aborigine actor that played the bush boy in the movie Walkabout. Molly, Gracie, and Daisy, age twelve nine and eight, are the three protagonists of the film, were chosen from their hometowns in Northern Australia. Noyce wanted the audience who saw the girls to feel as if they could be their own children, which brings me to my next topic.
The film inspired emotions in its audience, making the three girls beloved everywhere. Emotion is one of the many things directors use to influence opinion and understanding. The emotions Noyce used were sadness, joy, fear, and hatred. People were sad that the girls were ripped from their homes because “the papers said so,” and this also created a feeling of hatred. They also experienced these feelings when Gracie was kidnapped. The audience was happy when the two made their way back to their home in Jigalong. The film also inspired fear, fear that when the three were exposed the raw elements of the Australian Outback, they would’ve died. And finally, those watching the movie deeply hated A.O. Neville, or “Mr. Devil”, as the girls at the Moore River Aborigine camp would call him. Neville is the main antagonist of the story, along with most of the supervisors at the camp. He believed that by total immersion in Australian culture, he could eventually “breed out” the Aborigines. Political understandings are also affected by these types of movies. People become inspired to support or stop whatever the movie was based on, and they may write letters to the president or a state representative to try and do something about it, such as get a law passed or raise even more national awareness than a movie could generate.