Mia Wasikowska On The Sounds Of Camels And The Lure Of Travel

By NPR Staff

Published September 22, 2014 at 3:24 PM CDT

Mia Wasikowska plays Robyn Davidson, a woman whose real-life journey across the Australian desert is depicted in <em>Tracks</em>. — Mia Wasikowska plays Robyn Davidson, a woman whose real-life journey across the Australian desert is depicted in *Tracks*.

Mia Wasikowska wants you to know that camels get kind of a bad rap.

Talking with Melissa Block on Monday's All Things Considered, she hearkens back to her time with them while shooting her new film, Tracks. Based on a true story, Tracksfollows a young woman who decides to set out on her own across the Australian desert, and takes a dog and a few camels along. After being treated to some great camel growling that perhaps is its own kind of music (... "humpcore"?), Wasikowska says that it's not as mean as it sounds. "I think that growl has given them so much bad press," she says. "It's funny — they growl kind of all the time, but it's just, like, kind of their chatting. But people find it very off-putting."

Wasikowska says that the camels were actually pretty easy to deal with: "They kind of just do what they're told. They follow you, they, you know, go wherever you go. So we had, like, no camel trouble on this movie."

There was more to the trip than the camels, though, and she also talks about the purposes of the journey for the original woman, Robyn Davidson, and about why it's so hard for some people to understand why you might set out on a seemingly aimless trip.