IN SEARCH OF A HAPPY ENDING
Interview for SPADA Conference newsletter.
October 2003

Blame it on her West Coast roots, but Gaylene Preston prefers to call what others deem a filmmaker’s “passion” simple bloody-mindedness.

‘Passion’ doesn’t come close to describing the steely, year-in-year-out, determination required by Preston and Robin Laing (her business partner) in getting Perfect Strangers - her first DRAMATIC feature film in a decade - off the ground.

She is understandably pleased to have finally got this feature completed *– especially one that she wrote, directed and co-produced. And she’s keen to get cracking on her next feature – but more on that later.

Perfect Strangers, starring our own Sam Neill, Joel Tobeck, and Australian actress Rachael Blake, is what has been variously described as ‘a macabre fairy tale’, ‘a chilling romance’ and ‘a spooky love story’.

“It explores the dangerous deception of desire - how far do you fall,” she asks, “when you fall in love?”

“Perfect Strangers was an idea I had while driving to Hawkes Bay in 1982,” she tells me over coffee and cake at her Wellington home.
“I was thinking about power in relationships and how stories often follow a very regularized formula. And I asked the question - what if you took a predator and a victim and they fell in love - how would that affect the relationship? Would the victim become the predator? Would the predator become the victim? Who would get who?”

Preston was also interested at the time in subverting what she perceived as a national obsession with man alone stories. The man with a gun in the wilderness which internationally Preston asserts, later segued into a macho interpretation of supposedly proactive females on the big screen.

“I went to the AFM in Los Angeles in 1990 and every poster had gone from guys with guns, to guys with girls with guns – and the girls always had big tits and long legs – so this was meant to be proactive females on screen…I wanted to explore something a bit more modern and less same old same old.”

Preston wrote nothing down at the time, but let the idea gestate as she got on with other work. She and Laing had released her first feature MR WRONG (aka DARK OF THE NIGHT) in 1985 and followed this up with RUBY AND RATA (1990) and BREAD & ROSES (1993) but then with what she considers (tongue in cheek) was a lousy career move,she decided to make a documentary about seven old ladies talking about the war - the widely acclaimed feature length documentary WAR STORIES Our Mothers Never Told Us (1995)

“I’d just established myself in the world of drama making and here’s this documentary that I just have to do!” she mock-laments. After that she was, she says, cast as a documentary maker – “there’s a perception out there that if you can make a decent documentary for some reason you can’t be any good at anything else.”

The nature of the international film market also counted against her. “We make so few films and we make them so slowly that the international market moves on. It’s a fast turnover industry out there. The film industry – you’re hot, you’re not, you’re in, you’re out… “If you’re pre-selling a film, and no-one can actually remember your last one because it was a while ago… well forget it! Literally.”

Between 1993 and 1998 she and Robin LAING put huge effort into developing a film of the Jean Betts play Ophelia Thinks Harder.

“But we weren’t able to get it up,” Gaylene says. “Even with a lot of real interest in it internationally, we weren’t able to get the financing to work. We had to walk away. That was psychologically and financially quite debilitating. I emerged from it by giving Annie Goldson a hand with Punitive Damage, I sort of worked my way out of not-quite nervous breakdown territory.”

Gaylene said she knew that the next dramatic feature project she worked on had to succeed. “I thought, I have to actually achieve it onto the screen. I have to. I can’t not.”

So in 1998 she stopped telling the story to people in kitchens at parties and sat down and completed writing what became a 15-page treatment of her predator-victim idea. She claims that the story “unfolded almost complete from the very beginning”.

“Plan A was to optimise the project, make it look great, go for marquee name cast,” she said. “Plan D was to shoot it on my weekends with drama students on my D.V.-cam round at Red Rocks [on Wellington’s south coast]. “Either way, it was going to become a film,” she says.

She showed her 15-page outline to Sam Neill because she’d always considered him ideal for one of the key roles. She fully expected him to say no. He said yes.

“And of course then I realised in a way that the plan had just got harder again”

She originally conceived the film as an improvisational piece, one where the characterisations would be developed in rehearsal. Sam Neill had other thoughts.

“I wrote the film from the outline because I wanted to improvise it. Sam agreed but he always agreed to it while asking for a little bit more… and a little bit more! So I grew the 15 pages to 30 pages and I kept building it, and it became a 91-page dialogue script which I had become quite attached to by the time we were shooting though it did change a bit during that process. It’s great though to be developing from such an early stage with one of the leads cast. Sam was very helpful.”

The story centers around three characters, and is set on a mythical island. Filming took place with Alun Bollinger behind the lens on the West Coast, and Gaylene has described the location as very much like a fourth character.

“Its “treacherous beauty” powerfully reflects and underscores the action and the protagonists’ shifting moods,” she says.

“We shot in all weathers including one of the worst storm to hit the place in ten years,” Gaylene recalls.

“By the end of the day, only two small lights were operational, and our hero boat ‘Dauntless’ was offshore unable to take shelter, swamped and very nearly sunk by six-metre high seas.

“Finally as the crew squelched and shivered their way home, we discovered slips on the road, trees torn out of the ground by their roots and a community further up the Coast evacuated from their homes. And all this on day one!”

From then on, Gaylene says it was eerie how every day for almost nine weeks, the Gods delivered the film crew perfectly scripted weather.

Filming Perfect Strangers was, for Preston, a pleasure.

“Going down the Coast, which is where I come from, shooting this film that came out of my head, essentially with a bunch of old friends was just a wonderful experience,” she says. “I felt very supported.

“It is a fantastic privilege making your own film,” she adds. “It’s just the best fun you can have.

“There were people involved in our shoot who had worked on Mr Wrong. Others had worked on Bread and Roses, Ruby and Rata … and I saw the real wealth, and true value of staying at home and making your own films. Unusually I haven’t left New Zealand to make films. I have been fortunate, and privileged to have stayed here and done my own work my own way. I was going to say at my own speed, but unfortunately that’s not true because it can be such a long time between movies.”

The key reason is lack of opportunities for serious development finance not to mention a local funding structure that, in her opinion, barely works.

“If you look at the current funding situation, Theres probably around NZD30million of community money earmarked for film production which is committed to projects that remain unmade and the money sits in the bank. That has pretty well been the situation give or take three or four million since the beginning of 2000. THE Film Fund has agreed to fund around nine projects, which over the last year or more have not proceeded because the criteria are so difficult. They have committed their money but there has been no filmmaking outcome. These projects must be promising or the funding would not be committed, so I’m just wondering when do we get to the point that we admit that the structure just isn’t working?”

“It is fiercely difficult for everyone,” she says.

Which brings us to the the buzz surrounding Perfect Strangers, and expectations that Preston will soon be embarking immediately on her next feature.

“I have several projects I’d like to make but I know it will be the same hard road [as always].

“It would be nice to wake up in a place where the money is available to at least get cracking with a reasonable vision and not have to think, OK, I’ve got to come up with an idea that I can shoot at Red Rocks with a bunch of drama students or risk never getting it made.”

“The telling of New Zealand stories is a very tough issue, very tough issue indeed. If you want to tell a New Zealand story - and this applies to Roger Donaldson, Jane Campion, Vincent Ward Geoff Murphy - whether you have an international reputation or whether you don’t, it’s immaterial - the telling of New Zealand stories is incredibly difficult because we have very limited access to our own investment community. Merging public and private money is virtually outlawed here. This puts local filmmakers in an untenable position and in my view the proposed PEGS scheme highlights that problem.

“I don’t think as a society we have truly valued what telling our own stories on the big screen is worth. “It’s great that New Zealand is now ‘Middle Earth.’ But we mustn’t be too naïve about that. There are plenty of people around the world who would see Lord of the Rings as being shot in Middle Earth not in New Zealand. Whereas a New Zealand film like Whale Rider or Perfect Strangers goes out there and it’s of us, about us, in us. Never mind the foreign movies. Whether Last Samurai is shot here or in Japan is really of no interest to the audience but a New Zealand film goes out there and brands the Nation The local stories impress offshore in all kinds of ways that are of unquantifiable value to the country. But, in the end, they’re made at a real human cost.”

Gaylene believes that there is a strange kiwi attitude held by some.

“There’s an unconscious attitude that filmmakers are somehow getting away with something. Your reward is that you get to make your film, That’s the reward, so to expect any pecuniary return as well is damn near criminal.

“It is an amateurist attitude. It’s at the heart of the New Zealand perception of the arts. If you’re having fun, you shouldn’t be paid for it! That runs very deep in the New Zealand psyche.

“So we have a culture, and the resulting Government infrastructure, that unfortunately undervalues the creative contribution. One or two or three films a year just isn’t good enough. We are very lucky that the ones we make do so well.”

Quite what Gaylene does next is unclear. She has been offered an Australian film to make, and she has a couple of her own projects developed.

“What I really want to do is make another feature film which is my own work,” she says. “I’m not as young as I used to be. I figure I’ve got another 10 years. I’ve got a vague impression that with practice you get better and I’ve had a bit of practice and I don’t want to spend the next 10 years trying to make my next feature. But If I have to, I suppose that’s what I’ll do.

I will continue to campaign strongly for us to be able to make many, many more New Zealand films at least at the budget level of Perfect Strangers.

She acknowledges now a sense of loss that the project is over.

“I’m sort of in mourning because I’ve been going to the island – Perfect Strangers is set on a mythological island – for the last four years every day I’d go and spend time on the island, and discover more about it and its inhabitants. The island has been a place where things happen… and now the film is finished, I can’t go to the island any more. It has become a solid state and I have to wait to visit with an audience now – join a tour party as it were.