Trailer
Plot summary
A news bulletin announces that Prime Minister Volkner has cut short urgent oil talks in the Middle East and returned home over the country's worst union dispute since 1951. With street brawls and rationed petrol, a general strike approaches, and Volkner promises emergency legislation. Smith's marriage to Gloria has ended after her affair with Bullen, so he drives out of the city with no plans, heading for the isolated Coromandel Peninsula. There he finds an island he likes and wins the Māori owner's approval to settle there. The son of the island's owner hands him a dog and persuades him to swap his car for a dinghy. On the island, Smith finds a military radio that still works and hears Volkner declare martial law.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sleeping Dogs (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sleeping Dogs, starring Sam Neill, Ian Mune and Warren Oates, was the first feature-length 35 mm color film produced entirely in New Zealand.
- Roger Donaldson wanted Jack Nicholson as the American commander but could offer at most $5,000. Nicholson's agent steered him to Warren Oates, an outdoorsman keen to see New Zealand; the production posted him the script, travel brochures and the promise of a South Island holiday after ten days of shooting.
- The escape from the police van was filmed on Auckland's Queen Street at a crowded Friday lunchtime with no permits, no police permission and no extras. A passer-by tackled Sam Neill's stunt double, taking him for a real prisoner making a break, and the stuntman had to point out the camera crew to be let go.
- In his first motel scene Warren Oates is holding a page of the script, afraid of forgetting his lines, and plays it as though the paper were directions to the motel. Sam Neill says Oates had written into his contract that he be supplied with cannabis during the shoot, and local crew members brought him Coromandel-grown supply.
- Importing automatic firearms into New Zealand was illegal, so the effects team carved and painted wooden machine guns. Plumbing tube served as barrels, packed with explosive charges fired by a wire that ran down the actor's arm to a crew member with a switch; Warren Oates was bewildered when Geoff Murphy handed him one and told him to just shake it.
- Budget limits and import restrictions left Geoff Murphy's effects crew improvising with old Ministry of Works explosives and detonators meant for dam and tunnel construction. Sam Neill wrote that the production half blew the motel up with its amateur explosive effects.
- The invented riot scenes, police with batons and shields driving back protestors, were closely echoed in real life four years later by the anti-apartheid clashes during the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand.
