According to film legend, there came a point during the shooting of Apocalypse Now at which director Francis Ford Coppola discarded the script in favour of a copy of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The parallels between book and film are of course deliberate and profound.
One gets the impression that something similar occurred during the creative gestation of Van Diemen's Land. This period drama about colonial Tasmanian folk antihero Alexander Pearce shares a similarly symbiotic relationship with Dante's Inferno.
'We access the story through Pearce's confessions,' says director Jonathan auf der Heide. 'It's as if he is drawing us into his own personal hell and giving us a guided tour. You follow him down through the spirals of hell until you meet Satan himself.'
The film's 'cheeky' allusions to the Inferno have a historical basis. The mouth of Macquarie Harbour was nicknamed 'Hell's Gates' by the Sarah Island convicts, a wry acknowledgement of the harshness of life on this penal colony.
But if life in the colony was hard, it was nothing compared to the unforgiving wilderness beyond. History records the cannibalistic measures Pearce and his fellow escapees adopted in order to survive after fleeing the colony. In auf der Heide's film, desperation takes the form of spiritual and moral corruption as a result of the cruel landscape.
'The further these guys go on the journey, the more they are taken over by the harshness of this place', he says. 'The landscape in the film represents the darkness of man, the brutality, and how they need to become like it if they are to be the last man standing.'
The old adage applies here, that the location is an important character (in this case, the title character) in the film. Like others before him (notably Peter Weir in Picnic at Hanging Rock) auf der Heide milks Australia's natural wilderness landscapes for all their ominous potency.
'First is the image of going down the Gordon River with these towering walls of trees, and how insignificant a man is compared to that. We used lots of wide shots to make the characters seem insignificant compared with the landscape. If you're going to take part in the battle between man and nature, you're going to lose.
'I'd done a tour down the Gordon River, and I saw what these guys were up against,' he adds. 'They came from a cultivated homeland of England, Ireland and Scotland, to this untamed,