Gallipoli (1981)
Synopsis
Gallipoli is an Australian war film produced by Patricia Lovell and Robert Stigwood,
directed by Peter Weir, and starring Mel Gibson and Mark Lee, who play two young
men from Western Australia who enlist in the Army during the First World War
and participate in the failed British effort to capture Gallipoli from the Ottoman
Tu rk s.
Background
On 2 October 1976, on a visit to the Dardanelles in northwest Turkey, Australian
film director Peter Weir (The Last Wave) took a two- hour walk on the beaches of
Gallipoli and deci ded that he had to make a film about the disastrous WWI British-
ANZAC campaign against Ottoman Turkey that occurred there 61 years earlier.
Weir subsequently wrote an outline and engaged playwright- screenwriter David
Williamson to turn it into a screenplay. Weir and Williamson used C.E.W. Bean’s
12- volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 (Australian War
Memorial, 1921–43) as one of their primary sources. They also used diary excerpts
and letters from soldiers who fought at Gallipoli, collected in Bill Gammage’s book
The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (Australian National UP, 1974;
Gammage also served as the proj ect’s military advisor). Williamson crafted many
script revisions before he narrowed the focus to two runners who become “mates”
and comrades- in- arms. He also deci ded to focus the combat portion of the film on
a single calamitous engagement during the Gallipoli campaign: the so- called Battle
of the Nek (7 August 1915), when the 8th and 10th Regiments of the Australian
3rd Light Horse Brigade launched a series of failed bayonet attacks on Ottoman
trenches that resulted in appalling losses: 238 dead and 134 wounded out of a
force of 600 (a 62 percent casualty rate), while the Ottoman Turks suffered only
8 dead. Peter Weir initially secured an exclusive production deal with the South
Australian Film Corporation (SAFC) but the deal was amended over “creative
differences” and the SAFC ended up providing only partial funding. After rais-
ing 850,000 AUD between May 1979 and May 1980, Weir’s producer, Patricia
Lovell, approached media mogul Rupert Murdoch and producer Robert Stig-
wood, who had just formed a new film com pany (Associated R&R Films). They
agreed to provide the rest of the funding on the proviso that the bud get come in
under 3 million AUD— the highest bud get of an Australian film at that time.
Rupert Murdoch’s father, Keith Murdoch (1885–1952), a WWI journalist who