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magazine is from the fourth issue september 1993 the photograph and cover shot are by simon young this was possibly the first time a mainstream new zealand magazine sold in supermarkets had an out gay man on the cover the intro read the piano wasn t the only new zealand film to make a big splash at cannes this year desperate remedies directed by peter wells and stuart main was in the prestigious un certain regard section and sold spectacularly well around the world including the all important us market but the film commission wasn t so enthusiastic at one point deciding that the film shouldn t be made stephanie johnson talks to wells about his sensuous fairy tale breaking the rules in the last decade peter wells and stuart main have made a number of remarkable short dramas and documentaries including jewel s darl based on a short story by anne kennedy and a death in the family which won awards here and in the us and canada their first feature is the startling sensuous and liberating desperate remedies wells is also a successful writer of fiction his short story collection dangerous desires picked up the reed fiction award and rave reviews at home and will soon be published in the us with potentially lucrative sales to the large gay market there main loathes being interviewed so while his shadowy presence lurked about their lovely ponsonby villa i talked to wells in his study from which you can see the glinting harbour and the puffing chimneys of the chelsea sugar works sj what are the logistics of co directing pw people always ask about the co directing it s not as strictly demarcated as one of us directing the camera crew and one of us directing the actors the film can break up in different ways like in this film i worked more with lisa chappell who plays anne cooper and cliff curtis as fraser what a find he was wonderful such a decadent face had he done much work before a bit he just appeared out of the blue watching him last night at the premiere i think he s the first maori actor we ve seen on film who isn t self conscious the common wisdom is that co directing can t be done because stuart and i have been it for quite a long time it crept up on people before they could make a judgment in some of the films we ve made together i ve directed stuart s been first assistant director and editor in other films i ve been writer and set director and he s been director i suppose you and stuart had the odd disagreement yes we would ve i suppose with this film stuart was much more remorseless than i was in terms of style but you were remorseless about the actors keeping to the text he laughs with the partnership people are always fascinated by the technical processes of it i think it s allowed both of us to investigate all sorts of areas which individually would have been very difficult to have brought off like creating a kind of queer cinema because we ve been able to do it together there s been support and a kind of push pull relationship i think if we d been doing it individually almost inevitably we would ve gone overseas as it is we ve created our own sort of island and now there s garth maxwell and all sorts of other people and so it gets bigger and bigger that s been the most creative aspect of the partnership who yells out action stuart does normally but we talk a great deal before we begin the project we do quite a lot of rehearsal an unusual amount for film with desperate remedies as with death in the family we did our rehearsals with a video camera there so we were planning our shots at the same time it s only in rehearsal that you start to discover what you re doing desperate remedies is such a vision it has such a look that i wondered how you d arrived at a vision like that together it was worked out really with stuart me michael kane and glenis foster who are the set and costume designers we d sit down in this room and we d talk forever the basic starting point was we didn t have a big budget so we could be as extreme as possible how much did it cost 2 1 million in terms of international budgets it s tiny do you think the costs of it were kept down because it was shot indoors if you d actually gone down to the wharfs you would have had to dress them and park a sailing ship there we d decided we didn t want that kind of film there were jokes in that scene that i think only new zealanders or possibly people from colonial countries would appreciate from both sides of the fence like natives no problem on a placard new zealanders will have different readings of the film to others people have said to me it doesn t have any point of view of history and others say it s revisionist i see the film as an escape from history although it has a point of view on history when i was doing research i read about a family who lived in new plymouth at the time of the land wars they were such desperate times then when people had to withdraw into a stockade and their houses were burnt down and they lost absolutely everything they had to stay in the stockade and try to eat whatever was in the cupboards and then when that disappeared and they were all sleeping in a room it was all sort of desperate and it really appealed to me as a philosophical territory desperate remedies is not as desperate as that but we wanted the feeling of a stockaded town where everyone s pushed in and so people are going to do all sorts of things even though it s all sort of exaggerated and mad and wild i would call the film a queer take on mills and boon stuart and i as little poofters growing up loved all that sort of mills and boonie historical romance kind of thing a lot of the pleasure came from the fact we were able to take historical romance the great heterosexual genre and change it around so that what is always meant to be the great ending is subverted the language in the film is striking archaic in a way like those who light the fuse may live to be blinded by it i enjoyed writing that dialogue i worked with debra daley on the second draft she was the script editor we had a great deal of fun with that duelling dialogue you don t really know what anyone is thinking but they re duelling back and forth all the time the high flown nature of the film is so refreshing in new zealand we still seem to believe that you don t blow your own trumpet you make films about what you know about your own life s experience it s a death of the imagination it was a very easy screenplay to write even though it took five years but the five years were really spent in the politicking the film commission asked you not to talk to anyone at cannes about how they d first knocked you back what was the story there if something like this comes along which is out of the context of all the films that have been made up to that time of course it s high risk i m so pleased we ve got a film commission and it s absolutely essential that we do but the voting situation on it is a strange one whereby there are always producers and directors on it in a way whatever project comes it has to be fitted within the profile of their own projects if your project comes up at the same time as one of theirs we went through a terrible stage when they d spent something like 70 000 developing the script we were going for production money and they said no we ve decided this film can go no further it s not on it won t work so we just had to say you re wrong it s going to be made i talked last night to the people who said this film won t work and they said oh we didn t understand the way you were going to make the film was it the style of the film that confused them i think so in a way we also had to educate a lot of the actors stuart and i grew up in a time when on television there were a lot of old films on a sunday afternoon so you grew up almost unconsciously learning a history of cinema these days the films are on at such terrible times nobody watches them so everybody loses that history so we sat down with the core cast the six main actors and we watched those fast talking films of the 30s and 40s something that s been lost is the speed at which people talked the way they cut in on each other when they watched them they suddenly clicked into the type of performance we wanted from them in a way it was quite liberating for them to actually be bravura and to be able to walk right up to a camera there are lot of close ups they re all such beautiful people that s part of the language of the melodrama genre all the main characters are incredible looking and all the extras are character faces everyone who isn t part of the main drama is a kind of character face that you can read at a glance i kept thinking it was like a fairy tale too the opium smoking caterpillars reminded me of alice in wonderland he laughs i think it s a fairy tale in both senses of the word because you d rehearsed the actors such a lot how many takes did you do on average for each scene it varied not many with jennifer ward lealand who plays dorothea she has an almost faultless technical ability it was interesting working with jennifer and say with cliff because they were so different in their approaches and they challenged each other cliff is such a method sort of actor he would charge all over the sets working himself up into a complete lather before a take had anne and dorothea escaped so they could be lovers here without the eye of england on them they had no relation to england really calling her dorothea brooke was a totally conscious thing she s the heroine of george eliot s middlemarch in a way we wanted to take a certain kind of victorian independent woman of sensibility and place her in a quagmirey colonial situation the house that she lived in was extraordinary with all the reflected surfaces and the feeling that at any minute it was all going to shatter they were the first scenes we did the drawing room scenes it was wonderful for the crew and cast because the first rushes we got back looked so staggering we were all on a complete high i ve never seen a new zealand film as sumptuous as this i remember after seeing it feeling relieved as if a barrier had been broken and we were at long last allowed to make films that don t have all the way through them this is a community announcement making such a theatrical film is a good thing because i think new zealand actors on the whole have had to be very throttled in their kind of emotional range more throttled than new zealanders actually are is that possible now the other thing i wanted to talk about is the music it really stands out it s one of the aspects of the film you remember peter scholes composed the score he did a wonderful job music is another part of the language of that genre we used the auckland philharmonia 70 pieces right down to a wonderful russian violinist writers who want to write films have got to deal with the fact that film makers have often got such literal minds it s such a struggle that in the end many good writers think i can t be bothered i ll go and write a book for me as a writer i really like the fact that i m involved in the film world i notice for some writers that they see it as some form of prostitution i think it s a good combination to have financially it makes your life so much more possible because writing for film brings in a lot more money there are also craft considerations with whatever you re doing when i go back to writing fiction i find it very pleasing because it seems so limitless have you started another screenplay yet i ve got two i m slowly working on the ideas are just forming i had a lovely conversation with shonagh koea about the rituals of writing you know how it s such an important thing to have a routine and a rhythm i really underestimated how easy it would be to go from doing a film back to fiction i just thought oh we ve finished i ve had a holiday now so i can sit down and work i ve got back into that way of thinking that it s a lucky thing even though at times it feels like hell posted by stephen stratford at 2 44 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest friday january 11 2019 waikato times letter of the week 89 from the edition of thursday 10 january as always spelling punctuation grammar and logic are exactly as printed in the waikato times new measures for drones the impending danger to society was evident from the moment that private drones became a marketable commodity but politicians world wide have done nothing to manage their use how must they act to recover this situation could they make some unpopular decisions like grounding all private drones until compulsory countermeasures such as onboard transponders like aircraft iff enabled them to be identified instantly or insisting that drone manufacturers provided authorities with the means to countermand the instructions sent to drones by their operators unfortunately we already need measures to curb the activities of fools who cause danger with fireworks alcohol drugs motor vehicles bikes and scooters while they are curbing these antics they could have a serious campaign against the low lifes that litter our streets with fast food and drink containers political success would be more achievable if they concentrated on things that they can fix rather than melodramatic panic over climate change which has been cycling on for millions of years could it be that stone age mankind would have averted this if they had built cycle tracks do not hold your breath the polling agencies that politicians rely on continue to provide services that do not reflect reality or societal needs hugh webb hamilton posted by stephen stratford at 3 42 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest monday december 31 2018 hamilton press club 2 sadly i was unable to attend the mid year meet of the hamilton press club when land wars historian vincent o malley was speaker press club meets are usually decorous and respectful but apparently that one got a bit raucous when perma polite don brash asked a disobliging question herald journalist kirsty johnston was there and tweeted since deleted but the internet doesn t work like that the only account of that event i have seen so expectations were high for the end of year meet with green mp golriz ghahraman as speaker disappointingly don wasn t there but there were a bunch of writer friends a bunch of journalists mostly harmless political operatives such as simon bridges sean plunket matthew hooton and richie hardcore and one i do know hamilton west mp tim mcindoe whom i sat next to at lunch he was admirably frank about certain things but you know chatham house rules at a front table sat kirsty johnston lizzie marvelly and noelle mccarthy at the table behind them sat sean plunket star of 2017 s end of year meet my report is here i thought his best line then was after 32 years in journalism you could probably use my ego as tiles on a space shuttle he also asked that there be no live...