TORONTO—In Tracks, Mia Wasikowska plays Robyn Davidson, an Australian adventurer who, as a young woman in 1977, crossed almost 2,700 kilometres of the outback on foot. She trekked from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean, accompanied by four camels and her dog.

Director John Curran’s film, based on Davidson’s 1980 book about her experiences, is enough to send a shiver of anticipation up some spines. Or a shiver of dread. Not everyone finds the prospect of watching an actor lead some camels across a desert for an entire feature-length movie all that thrilling.

The difference, it seems, is in the why. To some people, an onerous journey like this—undertaken by a young woman, alone, against all odds—makes perfect sense. To others, it seems incomprehensible. During an interview with the Georgia Straight at the Toronto International Film Festival last fall, Wasikowska said she had “no trouble whatsoever understanding Davidson’s desire to do what she did”.

“She is a profoundly antisocial person, and I can certainly relate to the fact that part of the attraction is getting away from the city and getting away from the white noise, that distracting hum, and taking your life back to basic survival, that kind of environment,” she said.

Raised in Canberra by photographer parents, Wasikowska was weaned on art-house films, which may explain her roles in some of the other features she premiered at TIFF: namely, as a bratty junior vampire in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, and opposite Jesse Eisenberg in Richard Ayoade’s The Double, due to hit screens this month.

Later in the year, we’ll also see Wasikowska in David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars. She said she’d be attracted to working in the future with directors like Jane Campion, Werner Herzog, and Canada’s Sarah Polley. Even her big break, as Alice in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, was more about working with Burton, she claims, than hitting big-time Hollywood. Some see her as the anti–Jennifer Lawrence, avoiding the trap of franchise moviemaking in favour of more original, challenging roles. (Although she’s contractually obligated to Burton’s Alice sequel, she said she “hasn’t even read the script”.)

Wasikowska is in every frame of Tracks, which follows Davidson’s travails through sandstorms, sunburns, and snakes, with the only occasional reprieve from her solitude coming in the shape of National Geographic photographer Rick Smolan. He’s played by Adam Driver as the lovable foil to a very determined and possibly unstable female—just like Driver’s role in HBO’s Girls.

As in the ’70s, Wasikowska says, there are still plenty of people who “don’t get it”, and they often included prospective financiers for the film adaptation of the story, several versions of which have been on the docket since at least the mid ’80s, when Julia Roberts was once attached to star.

“A lot of the feedback the filmmakers got from potential funders was ‘Oh, she’s too bitchy,’ and ‘Why is she even doing this?’ They had a hard time understanding why and wanted to know why, which is sort of exactly the same as during Robyn’s journey,” Wasikowska said.

The actor added that she can relate to Davidson’s desire to avoid providing an explanation for her choices, and she likened her experiences in the indie-film world to the compromises Davidson accepted to make her dream a reality—including NatGeo’s sponsorship and Smolan’s presence. “It seems to me like a perfectly desirable thing to want to take yourself away from people demanding things like an answer to these questions and just to do something for the sake of doing it,” she said.