Richard Franklin

Richard Franklin was a British-born director who spent much of his working life in Australia, arriving there in the late 1960s and quietly becoming one of the more distinctive genre filmmakers the country produced during the New Wave years. Born in Marylebone, London, on 15 January 1936, Franklin studied film at the University of Southern California — where he crossed paths with Alfred Hitchcock, an encounter that shaped almost everything he'd go on to make. That Hitchcock influence wasn't incidental. It ran through his work like a structural fault line.

The film that put Franklin on the international map was Roadgames (1981), a genuinely clever thriller shot largely from inside a truck cab, with Stacy Keach playing a long-haul driver who becomes convinced he's tailing a serial killer across the Australian outback. It's a film that doesn't get discussed enough — it predates a lot of the cat-and-mouse thriller conventions that became standard by the mid-1980s, and Jamie Lee Curtis turns up in a role that plays knowingly on her post-Halloween status. Franklin followed it with Psycho II (1983), which is either the most audacious sequel assignment a director can take or a career trap, depending on how you look at it. Honestly, he handled it better than most would have. The film didn't embarrass the original, which for a follow-up to Hitchcock is close to a minor miracle. Working with Anthony Perkins again, Franklin managed something that felt less like exploitation and more like a genuine attempt to revisit a character — Norman Bates, here shown released from institutional care and trying to hold himself together — with some psychological seriousness.

Franklin's recurring preoccupation was suspense built from domestic or everyday spaces rather than spectacle. He wasn't interested in action for its own sake. What's striking is how often his films locate their tension in ordinary settings — the highway, the motel, the family home — and trust the audience to feel the wrongness before anything overtly violent happens. He worked frequently within genre frameworks that could have been purely commercial but consistently pushed toward something more psychologically grounded. His collaborations with producers and studios were often transatlantic, moving between Australian productions and American studio work, which gave his filmography an unusual range without a clean geographical identity.

Brilliant Lies (1996) represents a later-career turn that shows how far Franklin had moved from pure genre mechanics. Based on David Williamson's stage play, the film centers on a sexual harassment claim in a workplace setting — a woman accusing her former boss, competing versions of the same events, and a family structure that keeps complicating who you're supposed to believe. It's a chamber piece, really, and Franklin directs it with a restraint that suits the material. The performances from Gia Carides and Anthony LaPaglia carry most of the weight, and Franklin largely gets out of the way and lets the dialogue do the work (which, given how strong Williamson's writing is, turns out to be the right call). Hard to say if it found the audience it deserved on release — it's the kind of film that tends to be rediscovered rather than immediately celebrated.

Franklin continued working in television through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, directing episodes across various Australian productions. His career arc — from Hitchcock-influenced genre pictures to socially engaged drama — doesn't fit a single tidy narrative, which is probably why he's never quite received the sustained critical reassessment his best work warrants. The body of work is there. Someone will catch up to it.