The Man Who Inspired Adam Driver's Adventurer (2024)

The new movie Tracks out this weekend has a peculiar high-concept premise: Beautiful, mysterious woman walks across Australian outback with a bunch of camels, has unlikely romance with an American photographer assigned to document her journey.

Also peculiar: It's a true story. Well, mostly true.

The woman, played by Mia Wasikowska, is based on Robyn Davidson, who trekked across Australia in 1977, and became a folk hero to some and a source of bafflement to others. The man is inspired by Rick Smolan (known for his Day in the Life and other coffee-table books) who was shooting the journey for National Geographic. Rick is played by the lanky and intense Adam Driver, he of Girls and future Star Wars villainy.

The real Rick Smolan lives in New York City and has produced a coffee-table book called Inside Tracks with photos both from the original trek and the movie set. Smolan sat down with me last week for some Vegemite and a pint of Foster's (actually, iced tea and burritos).

ESQUIRE.COM: I hear camels are kind of mean. They're spitters, right?

RICK SMOLAN: Actually Robyn's were affectionate. They adored her. They were like 2,000-pound dogs. I've never seen anything like it. But they didn't like me.

ESQ: Do you think they were jealous?

RS: Apparently they just choose one person to bond with. They kind of saw her as leader of their pack.

ESQ: But they didn't spit on you.

RS: No. And I never got kicked. They have articulated joints so the can actually kick in any direction.

ESQ: That's the way they get you?

RS: That or they sit on you. Camels have necks that are so strong that 15 grown men can sit on a camel's neck. So they come and knock you over with this incredibly powerful neck, and they'll sit on you and suffocate you.

ESQ: How much time did you spend on the set of the movie?

RS: About a week. But I was only allowed on the set to shoot while they set up the scenes. I didn't get to watch the filming. John Curran, who is a terrific director, apologized and said, "Actors get spooked easily, like thoroughbred horses."

ESQ: Or like wild camels.

RS: Exactly. John said, "I am happy for you to be here during rehearsals, but when we are actually shooting it's just too unsettling for them to think that the person they're playing is watching."

ESQ: When you did see the movie, how'd you like the movie version of yourself?

RS: When I first saw the movie, it was just me and three other people at a screening. The lights go down, the movie starts, and about five minutes into the movie, I'm having trouble breathing and experiencing this terrible sense of dread. I felt like I drank 15 cups of coffee at the same time.

ESQ: What was going on in your head?

RS: I suddenly realized that every time I left Robyn on the trip, I got the sense she was going to die. There were wild camels and snakes. She could have run out of water. Or if she ran into some nutcase out there, I mean this is the outback, there are no cops. And I was really smitten with her at the time. So while watching the movie that first time, all these emotions came flooding over me. I couldn't enjoy the movie. Plus, I thought my character was awful.

ESQ: But you like it better now?

RS: I saw the movie the next time at the Toronto International Film Festival with people. The audience was crying and laughing and holding their breath. And Adam was the comedic relief.

ESQ: You had a small part in the movie, right? You played a park ranger?

RS: Yes, my Alfred Hitchco*ck moment. The weirdest part was when I went into the makeup trailer to have sunburn painted on my face. I sat down at this barbershop chair and all around the mirror were enlarged snapshots of me. From high school, college, my driver's license. I was like, where did you get these? I wasn't angry but I was stunned. We're in the middle of the desert and my life is scotch-taped to this mirror. And the makeup woman said, "Oh, our prop team found these on your niece's Facebook page. Adam wanted to look at them when he's getting made up in the morning. He wanted to see your facial expressions and how you hold your mouth."

ESQ: It was odd to see Adam Driver smile. He's not a big smiler in . Did you ever get confused with him on the set?

Girls


RS: Not really. But at one point, I was sitting in the makeup chair, Mia was in the next chair, and Adam was standing waiting his turn. And Mia said, "Rick." I turned to her, and she said, "No, sorry the other Rick." She meant Adam. Mia tells me, "There are so many moving parts on this shoot, so between the dogs, camels, the wind blowing, we just decided it'd be easier if we used our stage names on the set."

ESQ: How was it when you shot Robyn?

RS: One challenge is that she didn't wear clothes a lot during the trip. The only direction I ever gave her was just "Please put on some clothes for an hour. National Geographic is not going to use naked pictures of you."

ESQ: That could be a good cable reality show. I bet an Australian production company is working on getting five beautiful women to walk across the desert with camels with no clothes.

RS: Well, I'll tell you, they tried making this movie for 30 years. They had so many actresses attached to it: Julia Roberts, Helen Hunt, Nicole Kidman. Every time I got a call from Hollywood it was "Oh yeah we're definitely making it." The one with Julia Roberts had this plot where the photographer shows up in Australia on a fashion shoot, and the theme of the fashion shoot is the outback, so the models are going to pose with camels as their backdrop. They hire this camel company to bring them camels and the animal wrangler is Robyn, and the photographer is so struck with her beauty compared to these artificial, fake-looking models that he... you know. It was such horsesh*t.

ESQ: How true to life was the love scene?

RS: Well, in real life, it did come about in the middle of a fight.

ESQ: Really? In the middle of a fight? I have never had that happen.

RS: It was pretty much what happened in the movie. She was exhausted and she exploded, and says, "I walk 20 miles and load all this stuff on and off my camels, and you just stand there taking pictures like a f*cking idiot." There was also a bottle of whiskey involved in this conversation. And then things went from her being furious to the complete opposite. She's one of these people who does whatever she wants to do, says whatever she thinks. It can be unsettling and unnerving.

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To pledge to Smolan's Kickstarter campaign for his smartphone-enabled coffee-table book about Robyn's journey across the Outback, click here.