HBO’s new quirky true-crime documentary “Last Stop Larrimah: Murder Down Under” is about the circumstances around a man who vanished – and was possibly murdered – in an Australian town of just 11 people.
“It was really hard [getting locals to talk],” said director/filmmaker Thomas Tancred, who is based in LA but whose parents are Australian.
Premiering Oct. 8 (9 p.m.) and executive-produced by the Duplass Brothers, “Last Stop Larrimah: Murder Down Under” is set in a remote Australian outback town, where there’s no cellphone service or police station — but there is a local crocodile, a bar and just under a dozen eccentric residents including Fran Hodgetts, known for her prickly attitude and her pies.
The documentary dives into the town’s history, the sharp-tongued residents’ various squabbles and the missing persons cold case of Paddy Moriarty, 70, who vanished in December 2017 along with his dog, prompting a police investigation.
“Early on, I showed [footage] I had to an Australian person. And he was like, ‘How did you get these people to talk to you?’ I know this from experience, my dad was an old Australian guy who didn’t share much,” Tancred told The Post. “Once I got there, I think it just took them looking me in the eye. Once they got to know me, they were welcoming.”
“It got to the point where I could walk around town, knock on anyone’s door [and] they would be like, ‘Thomas, come in, have a cup of tea!’”
“I knew I didn’t want it to be a generic true crime [documentary], where it’s just spooky the whole time,” he said. “The thing I’m thankful for is that these residents are colorful people, and they’ve got lots of great stories, and they love to sit down and they call it ‘spin a yarn.’”
Interviews with residents — and footage of Moriarty — show that depending on who you talk to, he was an affable rascal or a menace who might have even been an arsonist.
The documentary also covers numerous conspiracy theories about what happened to him — such as a theory that whoever killed him fed him to the crocodile, which is why no body has ever turned up.
“The hardest thing was finding the tone. How do I infuse that comedy next to a scene where there’s something dramatic and sad going on? That balance was something I was trying to nail,” Tancred said.
“There were tons [of theories] that we tracked down [and some of them didn’t make the film,” he said. “One that was interesting to me was that, a couple miles into the bush, there are these sinkholes. So people told me like, ‘There’s a great chance he’s in there. Those things go on forever.’”
Filming in that region wasn’t a walk in the park, he said.
“It is brutal. Early on in the process, I planned to shoot with a certain camera, and our director of photography was like, ‘You can’t shoot with that camera. I shot up there recently, and the body melted on the camera,’” Tancred said. “For the first time in my life, I had heat stroke. And the elements are crazy.”
“Everybody there told me that whatever happened to Paddy and whoever did it … if you drive south, there’s nothing for a long time. There’s no gas stations, so there’s no security cameras. If you pull somebody into the woods there, there are so many animals that could eat their flesh, and feral pigs to eat [their] bones,” he continued. “And there’s a snake there that bites you and five minutes go by, and you’re dead.”
“I think that’s what keeps a lot of people from living in that part of the world,” he said. “It is tough.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
