SUSAN POLK talks to Robin Scholes, producer of "Once Were Warriors".
RARELY DOES a film come along that not only permeates a culture but actively changes it. Once Were Warriors, a tough drama of domestic violence in modern Maori culture, has not only pulled in millions of dollars in its home country, it has given hundreds of Maori families the initiative to step forward and address the actual violence and poverty in which they live.
Once Were Warriors is now the second-highest grossing film in New Zealand history, and is running neck-in-neck with the leader, Jurassic Park, for first place. This, according to producer Robin Scholes, is due to the fact that Warriors has come to the right place at the right time. So timely is the film that it has gone well beyond cult status and entered the very culture itself, becoming a reference point for many who have long kept silent about their domestic troubles. The film is a ruthless expose of domestic violence which shatters the lives of a Maori woman and her children, and it pulls no punches - literally - in its portrayal of the grim conditions many Maori women endure in New Zealand today.
"It's become a means by which people can express their problems," Scholes said. "It's become a part of the language - I've been told that there are people going to refuges and saying `I've got a Warriors problem,' and everyone knows what they mean."
The book is based on Alan Duff's novel of the same name and Scholes said she fell in love with the idea of making it into a film immediately after it was published in 1990. Her production company, Communicado, snapped up the rights and began workshopping the idea with director Lee Tamahori and writer Riwia Brown. With backing from the New Zealand Film Commission, New Zealand on Air and Avalon NFU Studios, Communicado began to piece the cast together, scouring the islands for Maori actors they felt would suit the roles in Warriors.
Their fears of finding enough Maori actors to audition for the demanding roles were put to rest by casting director Don Selwyn, who scoured the islands for talent, turning up more hopefuls than any of the production team could have hoped for.
"Don is a Maori himself, and he has been very very active in training young people and he went on sort of a mission. He went up and down the country; he encouraged young people to come in and audition. He used radio ads and local ads, so all the regions were covered. He brought in all these people and had them read - we had literally hundreds and hundreds of faces to choose from, which was quite extraordinary because we had all these choices, rather than agonising over how to find these people," Scholes said.
Selling the film was another challenge, as the content is not the sort to make industry executives fall over themselves to get the rights to distribute to a public which, generally speaking, tends to prefer more light-hearted fare, complete with happy endings. "Ultimately it comes down to ways in which you can obliquely avoid the violent side of things," Scholes said.
"What we had to do was to get excited about it and say: 'It's a love story - a real love story. It doesn't show their lives in a negative light, it's really going to be made to give Maori families something to look forward to, to give them hope,'" she said. " And of course we did put a lot of hope into the film, but no matter what we said, people thought `it's about domestic violence; no one wants to see a film about domestic violence!' "
And Warriors is rife with explosive violence, though not of the usual Hollywood shoot-em-up style. Scholes' claim that it is actually a love story is not far from the truth, as much of the film revolves around the relationship between Beth and Jake, who love each other passionately but whose incendiary conflicts tear apart the lives of the entire family. Jake's character is volatile; he alternates between romantic generosity and sudden fits of rage at the drop of a hat, and it is was this dark twist that was the heart of the story, as well as Communicado's biggest problem; after all, who would want to throw millions of dollars at a project which depicts a family living below the poverty line and torn apart by violence?
In order to overcome this hurdle, Communicado brought the head of police from a Maori community when they made their pitch to the Film Commission. "He stood up there and said that if we don't do stories like this, issues like this will keep on being swept under the carpet, will never come to light. I think what he did made a real impression because he, as a Maori and as someone who is dealing with these situations every day, could say it's not necessarily negative - it can if fact be positive. He could say `it's only one aspect of our life; there are other parts of our culture which are pure and which we actually value'."
Although this is the first feature film Communicado has completed, the company has been making television programs and commercials since 1986, and is currently the biggest independent production house in New Zealand. This may be why the film has such a finely-tuned visual edge to it, and why Scholes and Tamahori had no trouble seeing the film from start to finish without losing that same visual intensity that permeates Warriors. The desolate urban landscape, the fierce, tattooed youth gangs, and the sudden bursts of violence all have a realistic, spontaneous feel to them that probably could not have been achieved with a less experienced production team.
Still, the film never releases its hold of Beth's hope and her pride in her own heritage. Scholes agrees that the film could easily have been much bleaker in its vision, but she said that the element of hope is not a fictional one. "We had to show that there is a solution - we felt that was absolutely essential," she said. Unlike urban-angst films like Boyz in the Hood and Romper Stomper, Scholes' film portrays the characters in a much more well-rounded light. The result is that the viewer is far more sympathetic and understanding of the characters' circumstances, even in the case of Jake.
"With all the characters in a film like this, it's really important to make them lovable, whereas with the characters in films like Boyz in the Hood, there's very little that you can love about them because they care for each other in ways that we can't understand. We can understand the ways that the family in Warriors care for one another. Jake's a wonderful character because he teeters between being wonderful and charismatic and sort of horrific. And we all know people like that to various degrees - you know, you'd love him if he could just change that nasty bit so you could love him 100%."
Scholes sees Warriors as primarily a woman's film but acknowledges it carries a message to victims of domestic violence that transcends the barriers of age, culture, and gender. Although Once Were Warriors begins its international expansion here in Australia, the story's universal message will appeal to audiences around the world.
Once Were Warriors - at the Kino and the Longford cinemas.