Thoughts on Film Writers and Boats

By Danny Mulheron.

I agreed with John Barnett and Stephen O’Meagher’s comments about the Film Commission, but it is purely an emotional response. I have exciting daydreams about making Film Commission staff have to make do on the outside world without the eclectic blanket protecting them. I would love to see many of them beg on the streets, homeless, their film careers in tatters.

I attended the Big Screen Symposium a year or two ago, nice for about half a day before you recognise the smell of Flop Sweat.

There were many seminars where funding was discussed. How do we get money? Why don’t they give me funding? Not one on how to improve performance. How to create density in scripts? Nothing. Neil Gaiman, who could have been asked, ended up answering fan questions about Dr Who apocrypha. Everyone there seemed to know everything already; they just hadn’t been recognised yet. 

A young optimistic filmmaker, Stella Reid, asked me what I wanted to get out of the Big Screen Symposium? “What I wanted,” I replied, “was to get out of the Big Screen Symposium.”

Despite the thrill of bitterness, I resist as much as possible the love of whining about funding bodies. It is basically wanking, a short term pleasure that I would prefer someone else to do for me.

And so it is with great reluctance that I defend the Film Commission.

The narrow definition of “hit” as being purely box office is a very short-term one. I agree that some of the financial flops of the Commish were avoidable, and were very likely box ticking legislative exercises, regulatory ass coverage, committee-led creativity defining what kind of movies must be made. Or worse, the result of harassment and bullying by various small wigs who make big waves. But within that there were some good movies and those people who worked on them don’t deserve the derision I usually dump on them. Muru was a good movie, Savage, The Convert. No one but the most poisoned academic could resent Red, White and Brass.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople lessened its risk because it was based on a hit, Barry Crump’s Wild Pork & Watercress. The film was a commercial hit, partly because it was also based on commercials, iconic Toyota and Flake ads from our childhood. Taika’s magpie nest of memory drives straight into the spinal cord of New Zealand’s addiction to television.

Perhaps rather than blaming the Commission, maybe we should look at ourselves a bit more, maybe we didn’t get funding because the scripts were not good enough. Is it conceivable that White Privilege or Woke Officialdom are easy scapegoats when maybe just bad writing is to blame.

Who are our great film writers anyway? Can you name one that is not also a director? Graeme Tetley, remember him, was one of our most prolific and successful, not a director, purely a writer. Michael Heath wrote some blinders. Briar Grace Smith has written a few, but even she has been tempted down the director tunnel. Perhaps she recognises that the only real beneficiaries of the Film Commission are directors who want a show reel.

How many actors who have appeared for nothing in shorts or low budget movies, believing mushy promises of future work only to force themselves to smile and clap when foreign actors get all the speaking roles they were promised. “Hey, isn’t New Zealand doing well?”

I want to eat out again one day.

The real supporters of New Zealand film and telly are the writers, the actors and the crews. The very people who do the subsidising are the ones who need subsidising the most. Upfront investment in films depends on patronage not immediate profit. A hit rate of 2 percent isn’t great, but it is not for the want of trying. There is always going to be a percentage of flops. The All Blacks don’t win without having trained and played for years. You can’t say the games players lost didn’t do them any good.

The only advice I could give the Film Commission is to spend money on the writers, as it would spend less money, make less expensive public mistakes and be more productive. Everyone wants to rush into production because that is where the chunky money is, hardly a cash register ringing endorsement of the thing that matters most, the screenplay.

Good writers are as rare as world class heavyweight boxers. Not everyone can do it just because they’ve got Final Draft 12 or an AI script writer. Those who can do it, will, with or without you. Maybe keep an eye out for them.

I was asked by a playwright once to write a reference to Creative New Zealand. I asked them what it was for?

“To write a play.”

“Bullshit,” I replied. “Tell me why you need the money?”

“For a boat, actually.”

“What do you want me to say?”

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