To mark the death of writer and film-maker Peter Wells on
Monday, the 103rd in this occasional series of reprints from
Quote Unquote the 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.
