Turtle Beach (film)
| Turtle Beach | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Stephen Wallace |
| Produced by |
Matt Carroll Greg Coote Graham Burke |
| Screenplay by | Ann Turner |
| Based on |
Turtle Beach by Blanche d'Alpuget |
| Starring | |
| Music by | Chris Neal |
| Cinematography | Russell Boyd |
| Edited by | Louise Innes Lee Smith |
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Production
company |
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| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
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Release date
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Running time
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90 minutes |
| Country | Australia |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $778,535 |
Turtle Beach (a.k.a. The Killing Beach) is a 1992 Australian film directed by Stephen Wallace and starring Greta Scacchi and Joan Chen. The screenplay was written by Ann Turner, based on the novel of the same name by Blanche d'Alpuget. It caused controversy in Malaysia where the Government took exception to scenes of Malays executing refugees.
Judith, an Australian photojournalist (Greta Scacchi), leaves her family to cover the story of Vietnamese boat people in a Malaysian refugee camp. There she befriends Minou, a Vietnamese streetwalker (Joan Chen), who has married a diplomat and together they try to bring awareness to the terrible conditions suffered by the people there.
Ann Turner was working for Roadshow when she was hired to adapt the novel, which she loved. However she says the project soon became compromised:
When I first saw the film I thought it looked like the writer was on drugs or completely insane, because you could see there were two films working within the one film... There were a lot of different voices in terms of the finance-raising, there was American money, and the producers - many, plural - really had very different views of what the film should be. Greta Scacchi really liked the book and liked the script and fought for it. But during the process of developing the script, they brought in an American writer and it really changed. I was off directing Police Rescue at the time. Then the cast, when they were in Thailand, said they'd signed on the script that I'd written and wanted to change it back to that. There was something about the American script that was more like King Rat than Turtle Beach. So then I was flown out to Thailand to rewrite the rewrite and the film ended up actually being a combination of both.
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Wikipedia