Daniel Nettheim's THE HUNTER had enough intrigue and suspense to bring Willem Dafoe down to the remote wilderness of Tasmania to shoot this thriller about a supposedly extinct animal.

Not, it's not the whirling dervish of the Warner Bros. cartoon, but a real, exotic creature thought to have died out in 1936, the Tasmania Tiger. But enough "sightings" convinced a shady bio-tech firm to send in a mercenary played by Dafoe, to track and bring back this almost mytholgical animal whose DNA is thought to possess healing properties.

Listen to Willem describe how the isolation and distance of this lone operative was too enticing to pass up, and how the landscape of the island state made a breathtakingly perfect setting for the mystery. Hear how adversaries on opposite sides of the ecological divide came together to work in harmony on the film, and how he was the first to look up Tasmanian Tiger on the Internet.

Watch director Daniel Nettheim explain the difference between the devil and the tiger, and how Tasmanians have embraced the striped creature as a symbol of their uniqueness.