Long shrouded in secrecy and frequently targeted by protests, the Pine Gap space research facility in central Australia is about to be thrust back into the spotlight in a way that will hopefully catch the attention of conspiracy theorists everywhere. The futuristic looking collection of white domes in the desert that makes up Pine Gap, formally known as The Joint Defence Space Research Facility, is situated about 20 kilometres from Alice Springs and is as alien to the landscape as it is arcane.
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Its reputation for secrecy has caught the imagination of Australian filmmaker Justin Dix, whose company, Wicked of Oz, has carved out a niche for itself as a special effects studio.
His new movie, Crawlspace, which will have its Australian premiere at the Canberra International Film Festival on November 3, is set in an underground facility at Pine Gap which has been put into emergency lockdown after being attacked by an unidentified group.
A claustrophobic thriller that mixes intense action and psychological drama, it opens with a group of special forces soldiers dropping into tunnels and airshafts. They land just above a research centre where mind-control experiments have been taken to incredible extremes.
The story focuses in on a character named Eve, played by Amber Clayton. She is an escaped prisoner who has broken free of her confines but not managed to get out of the facility and is weaving her way through a series of tunnels.
Dix says he wanted to do a "genre film" but not be constrained by the conventions of that kind of writing.
"I wanted to make a film that I love and I love genre films and Australia does not make these films much any more," he says.
"We used to but we don't do them much now. Australian films tend to be made for cultural reasons now.
"When I was writing the script I didn't want to make it a pure zombie movie or a creatures movie or a virus movie.
"I wanted an 'everything movie'."
Crawlspace includes plenty of sci-fi fare, from psychic experiments to the quest to create new super soldiers.
Dix says it felt like the right time to put an Australian flavour into the genre that has been so well explored by the US market.
"When you look at genre stories there are a lot of conspiracies going on and they are usually set in Area 51 and I thought there's no reason we cannot have one in Australia," Dix says.
"There has been this facility in the middle of Australia for about 35 years and it seemed like a practical place for a conspiracy film."
It certainly presents as rich territory, with Pine Gap the centre of attention for online groups interested in the supernatural. And there's the added interest of the recent revelations in a tell-all book from a former employee at Pine Gap, David Rosenberg.
An American-born electrical engineer turned technical spy, Rosenberg was not only one of the longest serving and most experienced officers to have come out of the Pine Gap, he was also a 23-year veteran of the US's most secretive intelligence organisation, the National Security Agency.
After 18 years at Pine Gap, he went public last year to do television and newspaper publicity for a book his colleagues warned would never be allowed to be published.
Rosenberg told Fairfax last year that Inside Pine Gap: the spy who came in from the desert discusses the role of the Pine Gap space research facility from 1990 to 2008 and details his life and work spanning four Australian prime ministers, three American presidents, numerous wars – in the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia – as well as the end of the Cold War and the 2001 terrorist attacks in the US.
Through it all, Rosenberg was sitting in a large dark room in the centre of Australia, watching and listening.
"We weren't publicised, our role wasn't well known, and some of the stuff we did at our facility and also what happens at other facilities was quite remarkable," he says.
In the book, he takes the reader into his first day inside Pine Gap's "secure building", past the entrance where a pair of Australian and US flags – once taken aboard a shuttle when it launched one of the base's spy satellites – are displayed, and into the open-plan and top-secret operations floor.
"The entire operations floor was dimly lit as the analysts needed low light to help them see details on their computer monitors," he says.
"I saw signs above the various work areas indicating the type of activities being performed by these highly specialised operators."
Rosenberg said he wanted to dispel the myths and misconceptions about Pine Gap, but there was much that he could not reveal.
The book took six months to write, but one year to negotiate its publication.
With this kind of rich material spilling out of the top-secret base, it was fertile ground for an imagination like Dix's.
The subject matter has allowed him to bring not only storytelling to the fore but his technical know-how.
Dix has worked with some of the most famous directors in the business such as George Lucas and Roger Donaldson, re-creating iconic robots R2D2 and C3PO for the Star Wars episodes two and three and 1960s Trinidad for the British production of The Bank Job.
Dix and his team at Wicked of Oz have won awards for their prosthetic makeup effects, props, miniatures, animatronic characters and set pieces for feature films, television and exhibitions. With Crawlspace, he has taken the reins as writer, director, and producer.
"This has been about taking everything I have done on other people's films and bringing them together for mine," Dix says.
"This is my first feature film as a writer and director. I was able to storyboard every scene before we started shooting, which gave us a big leg up.
"I was really very particular about how I wanted it all to look."
Dix and his team shot the movie at the Docklands studios in Melbourne.
"We built 16 sets and and it was an epic production actually and we did it over a very condensed 24 days," he says. "They were normally 10-hour days."
The film has been well received overseas, where it has been picked up for a film festival in Spain and for US Screenfest in Los Angeles.
Crawlspace will be shown at the National Film and Sound Archive's Arc Cinema on Saturday, November 3, at 2.15pm as part of the Canberra International Film Festival.
