Australia doesn’t really do sequels. Firstly, our filmmakers generally don’t lean towards extended, multi-film narratives, and secondly, not enough local films rattle the box office with such force that a follow-up film becomes a foregone conclusion. But despite the fact that the sequel concept isn’t one at the forefront of most filmmakers’ mind, the team behind the 2011 hit, Red Dog, didn’t take long to spring into action. “We started having those conversations pretty much as soon as the film popped,” Red Dog’s alarmingly prolific director, Kriv Stenders – who has just locked off his next film, Australia Day – tells FilmInk without a hint of exhaustion.

And pop Red Dog did. To the tune of $21 million, in fact, which is an utterly extraordinary haul for an Aussie film. The film was famously based on the true life tale of the eponymous hound, who helped create the community of Dampier in Western Australia, and is even acknowledged with a statue this outpost of the mining industry. A popular sightseeing spot with tourists (thousands of whom pass through the area each year), the statue caught the eye of visiting British author, Louis De Bernieres, who had been in the region speaking at a literary event in nearby Karratha. The scribe behind such popular books as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Birds Without Wings was instantly intrigued by this story of a dog that literally changed the world around him. Two years later, the author came back to Western Australia and collected stories from the locals and compiled them into his 2002 book, Red Dog.

That book, of course, became a film, and the rest, as they say, is history. So beloved, and so successful, was Red Dog that the talk of a sequel seemed almost natural, even in a cinematic landscape where such things are so utterly rare. Importantly, the film’s core creative team – Kriv Stenders; producer, Nelson Woss; and screenwriter, Daniel Taplitz – were all involved in those initial discussions, and were all committed when it came to making the film happen. The ideas came thick and fast, hurled around like a manky old tennis ball in a dog park. There was, of course, one enormous hurdle that the Red Dog creative team had to jump: the loveable pooch dies at the end of the first film, making a standard, narrative follow-on film impossible.

This occasionally pushed the trio into unusual storytelling ground. “Our most ambitious idea was to do something like Citizen Kane,” Stenders reveals. “Instead of a newspaper magnate, it was going to be an iron ore magnate, and the dog was the Rosebud of the story. It was going to be Lang Hancock meets There Will Be Blood, with the dog as the central character,” the director laughs. “It was a cool idea, and we loved it, but the whole Lang Hancock thing was a little sensitive. We just thought, ‘Let’s park that one!’ We came up with a lot of ideas, and talked a lot about the tropes of the genre, and the things that we’d set up in the first film. But there’s an almost alchemical thing that goes on, so after those initial discussions, we just decided to take our time with it. We didn’t want to do something quickly that was purely cynical, so we just waited.”

It was screenwriter, Daniel Taplitz, who finally brought in the idea of doing a prequel. “I just thought, ‘That’s it…that’s the idea. That’s the film that we should make,’” Stenders explains. “By that time too, Roadshow wanted the film to happen, and the planets just aligned. Films are a bit like conception: they either happen or they don’t.” With Taplitz’ prequel idea in place – his story would follow Red Dog as a pup in Karratha – the writer headed off to the cattle station where the story would take place.

“Daniel just immerses himself in research,” Stenders says. The writer soaked up the atmosphere, talked to the locals, and studied the history, resulting in a script that reverberated with both truth and myth, not unlike the first film. “He found all these great stories, and they ended up in the film. That’s what was great about the process: merging history with fiction. Then we tried to figure out how to recreate some of the gags from the first film, but in a new way. But what I loved about Dan’s pitch was that it was a stand-alone film. You don’t need to have seen Red Dog, but if you have, it’s even better. I felt like I was making a new film. The only constant was the dog, and the Red Dog brand. I approached it like a new film.”

The resulting Red Dog: True Blue is indeed a new film. A “far gentler” film, says Stenders, it’s set in the slightly more innocent but no less turbulent era of the mid to late sixties (Red Dog unfurled in the wild and woolly seventies), and is a more distinctly family-friendly piece than its predecessor. That doesn’t mean, however, that Red Dog: True Blue isn’t without weight. “That era signalled the death of the agricultural industry and the birth of the mining industry, and also the indigenous movement in Australia,” says Stenders. “It was a very, very volatile time. It was very rich in that way. We were making a different type of film and telling a very different story.”

The film follows young teen, Michael (Levi Miller), who is shipped off to the remote WA farm of his grandfather (Bryan Brown) when his father dies and his mother suffers a nervous breakdown. There, he learns about Aboriginal customs and land rights through indigenous farm-hand, Taylor Pete (Calen Tassone); romance through his comely tutor, Betty (Hanna Mangan Lawrence); and the rigours of male competitiveness through macho helicopter pilot, Stemple (Thomas Cocquerel). But mainly, Michael learns about the joys of companionship that a canine like Red Dog (originally called Blue) can bring.

The film walks something of a tonal tightrope, mixing the dynamics of a family film with more weighty concerns, from a young boy’s burgeoning sexuality to issues of cultural re-appropriation and the scars of The Vietnam War. They’re all knitted together seamlessly, but Stenders is quick to divert any credit away from himself. “Daniel just wrote such a beautiful script,” the director says. “It was like sheet music. There were notes on a page, and I knew how to play them. I could hear them…I could see and hear the film coming off the page. When you have a script that gives you that much, it just makes your engagement with the material that much more fluid. There’s a dialogue that happens between the director and the words on the page, and that’s very exciting. If I was ever lost about how to do a scene, I’d just go back to Dan’s script. It was all there. The script is like sheet music, and I’m just the pianist. Dan’s the composer, and I’m playing the music that he’s written.”

Making a sequel puts a filmmaker in an interesting place: there’s possibly a built-in audience for their film (a true rarity for an Australian film), but that audience also comes with hopes and expectations that wouldn’t be there in the case of an original movie. “It’s still a film,” Stenders asserts. “It’s still got to work. You still have to work hard to make the best film possible. The audience doesn’t owe you anything…you owe them everything. You can’t take the audience for granted. You’ve got to deliver. In a weird kind of way, it cancels everything out. The film is still a film. It’s great that people love the first one, but that’s no guarantee. You still have to make a good film. That’s all you can do: do your best, and hope for the best.”

Red Dog: True Blue is a more than worthy – but wholly different follow-up – to Red Dog, and as Stenders tells it, the film fits right into the movies that built up his love of cinema in the first place. When he and Red Dog’s producer (and principal driving force in terms of getting the film up and running), Nelson Woss, first met (at Cafe Zoetrope in San Francisco, no less), they discovered that they had a shared love of Australian films like Storm Boy, Blue Fin, and Walkabout.

“With Red Dog, we were able to tap back into that canon,” Stenders says. “What I’m most proud of is that Red Dog is a continuation of that great Australian cinema that has been made over the past decades. What we’re doing is hopefully continuing that tradition. Hopefully, we’re continuing the audience’s love and appreciation for their own stories. Australians love to see themselves on the screen, and Australian kids love to see themselves on the screen. American films are great, but what’s great is being able to tap back into the magic that those films that I’ve mentioned had. Red Dog isn’t an anomaly or a stand-out: it’s building on the foundations of those original films. Films like Babe, Paper Planes, Oddball, and Kenny have all built on those foundations too, with love, and we’re continuing with that.”

The film’s backers, Roadshow, obviously have a lot of faith in Red Dog: True Blue, with the power players not only programming the film to open on Boxing Day (one of the biggest release days of the year), but also putting all of their considerable weight behind it in terms of advertising and promotion. “We’re still a small ship in a harbour with some very big ships,” Stenders sighs of putting the film out there at such a busy time. “Roadshow have been absolutely fantastic in terms of promoting the film, but we’re dealing with these big American things…they’re not just films, they’re franchises. They’re industrial complexes, and there are all the ancillaries that go with that. The amount of money that’s spent on them is astronomical. That’s very intimidating and very scary. It’s a scary world, and you never know what’s going to happen. But hopefully, the audience will enjoy Red Dog: True Blue, and hopefully, I’ll get to make more films. All I know is that I can put my hand firmly on my heart and say that we’ve made the best film that we possibly could.”