Out of the Trenches
A Queensland production over a decade in the making, Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan (Kriv Stenders, 2019) is a bold yet intimate Anzac war drama that sidesteps politics in favour of saluting Aussie brotherhood and bravery in times of conflict. I speak to Stenders about his experience of working with scribe Stuart Beattie – who previously penned Collateral (Michael Mann, 2004) and Tomorrow, When the War Began (Beattie, 2010) – to do big-screen justice to this curiously overlooked Australian chapter of the Vietnam War.
Oliver Pfeiffer: The Battle of Long Tan is a lesser-known Australian contribution to the Vietnam War. Why was it important, for you, to revisit this particular Anzac story?
Kriv Stenders: Firstly, it’s quite a remarkable story in terms of the actual statistics: 100 men going into a rubber plantation and coming across a North Vietnamese army force of over 20001 […] It [saw] the most artillery ever fired in Australian battle, and the fact that the Australians were, I guess, ‘victorious’ in the battle is pretty unprecedented.
But, more to the point, it’s really a forgotten story – and it’s more about these men, the majority of whom were boys [aged] nineteen and twenty who hadn’t seen combat before. So it’s a story about these men who
