FILM · 1982 · AUSTRALIA
Heatwave
19 archived facts 5 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (19)
- #001
Heatwave was made and released roughly seven years after the disappearance and presumed death of Juanita Joan Nielsen (22 April 1937 – presumed 4 July 1975).
- #002
Director Phillip Noyce made Heatwave after being fired from directing Attack Force Z (1981).
- #003
Heatwave was inspired by the real-life disappearance of Juanita Nielsen and her campaign against high-rise development in Kings Cross, Sydney.
- #004
Judy Davis received top/ first billing, and Richard Moir received second billing.
- #005
Actress Judy Davis began work on Heatwave with only a one-week break between projects, following her previous film Hoodwink (1981).
- #006
Heatwave was director Phillip Noyce's first film after Newsfront (1978), which won many AFI (Australian Film Institute) awards.
- #007
Filmmaker Phillip Noyce once said of the four-year gap between Heatwave and his previous film Newsfront (1978): "But for one reason or another, they [the screenplays] didn't develop satisfactorily. And then there was a financial crisis in the film industry."
- #008
Some of the production crew who worked on Heatwave had also worked on director Phillip Noyce's previous film Newsfront (1978). These included actors Bill Hunter, Chris Haywood, Robyn Moase, Bill Lyle and Don Crosby, editor John Scott and cinematographer Vincent Monton. A large number of technical crew worked on both films.
- #009
Heatwave was one of two Australian films inspired by the 1981–1982 campaigns against Kings Cross, high-rise construction in Sydney and the real-life disappearance of Juanita Nielsen. The other was The Killing of Angel Street (1981). The Sydney productions overlapped, and both films were reportedly once being shot on the same street in Sydney.
- #010
Director Phillip Noyce once described Heatwave as "...like a Hollywood gangster film except that it's set in Sydney in the 1980s... with a more complex and larger cast of characters than Newsfront (1978)."
- #011
This was the third film in which actress Judy Davis appeared on Australian screens in the year of its March 1982 release. Davis was first seen in Winter of Our Dreams (1981), released in July/August 1981, and then in Hoodwink (1981), released in November 1981.
- #012
Lead actor Richard Moir once said of Heatwave: "The film has mystery, violence, romance; in fact it has all the elements you need to make it interesting."
- #013
After the film's cinema release, director Phillip Noyce said of its story: "It has a lot of parallels with Newsfront (1978). The main character is a man struggling to keep his integrity while everyone around him wants to compromise."
- #014
Director Phillip Noyce said of the production shoot for Heatwave: "We had to shoot it very fast with our limited budget of about 1 million dollars, and there was no studio to save you if you went over. So it was made on the smell of an oily rag - just like the films being shot here today... as in the case of Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)."
- #015
In an interview with 'Urban Cinefile', director Phillip Noyce said of Heatwave: "I have no doubt that I would shoot the film differently... I would tell the story differently today. Maybe that's because I'm more conservative. Instead of implying the connections between the conspirators, I could have made them more definite. "Heatwave" belongs to a different period in Australian cinema, a time when we took a lot of risks. I think that comes with youth - the youth of the director and the youth of that second new wave. It was a period when there was a love affair between audiences and Australian cinema; that's something you see quite often these days."
- #016
Australian actress Judy Davis returned to Kings Cross, Sydney to play Kate Dean in Heatwave. The "Cross" was the main setting of Davis's previous film, Winter of Our Dreams (1981).
- #017
Actress Tui Bow, who played Annie, appeared in four silent films in 1925–26 and made her sound debut playing a stenographer in The Thin Man (1934).
- #018
During filming in King's Cross, Richard Moir was shooting a running scene and knocked over a female spectator in her early twenties several times; the woman never thought anything of it until one of her friends saw her in the film.
- #019
Heatwave is one of at least eight major Australian feature films that showed Sydney's King's Cross red-light district at its peak in the early 1980s. The titles are: Heatwave (1982), Dead Easy (1982), Winter of Our Dreams (1981), The City's Edge (1983), Going Down (1982), The Dark Room (1982), Goodbye Paradise (1982) and The Killing of Angel Street (1981).
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