David Michod recently had some things to say about his upcoming post-Apocalyptic film, The Rover. The Australian director gave some details about the setting, the characters, and their motivations. One detail that’s unique about this post-apocalyptic world is that it didn’t come to be because of World War III, or some bomb going off, or a wide-spread disease, or zombies; instead it was caused by economic collapse.

Michod’s words and the accompanying clip featuring stars Robert Pattinson and Guy Pearce come from Twitchfilm.

The Australian Outback of The Rover is a world ten years after a great Western economic collapse. It’s a near future of social and economic decay. Services, utilities, law and order have fallen into dangerous disrepair. And yet people from all corners of the world have come to this place to work the mines that feed the new world alignment, that feed the great powerhouses of this, the Asian century.

The world of the movie, as such, mirrors the American and Australian gold rushes of the 19th century. People are drawn to the land’s mines and with them come the leeches, the refuse, the hustlers and criminals who hope to exploit the mines’ margins.

This isn’t a complete collapse of society – it’s an inversion of present-day global power dynamics. This is Australia as resource-rich Third World country.  This is the violence and unrest of contemporary Sierra Leone or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

And at the centre of this world are two men – one, a murderously embittered Australian man, a former soldier who has lost his farm and his family; the other, a simple and naive American boy, too young to remember a time when things were anything other than what they are.