When Hollywood came calling
Peter Jackson’s first Hobbit movie transformed life on the farm for Suzie Denize. Her remarkable story is featured in a new book by Heather Kidd about clever Kiwi businesswomen living in some of the country’s most beautiful and remote landscapes.
Suzie Denize, Hairy Feet Tours
If anyone had asked a school-age Suzie Denize what she envisaged in her future, it’s highly unlikely she would have replied “film-set tour owner/operator”. Just as she would have no doubt shaken her head at any suggestion that an entire film crew, including world-famous actors and an Oscar-winning director, would one day be tramping over the 121ha she calls home, filming scenes for what would become a billion-dollar box office hit. But that’s exactly what’s happened. The upshot of filming part of Sir Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey on a farm situated 14km west of Piopio, in the King Country, has resulted in Suzie’s own unexpected journey.
These days, more often than not seven days a week, you’ll find Suzie taking fans of The Hobbit movies to see some of the real-life locations that appear in the film.
Suzie might not have a thespian background, but she’s a natural performer. And she knows her subject matter – as well as the levels of people’s expectations. In the four years Hairy Feet Tours has been operating, she’s seen it all: those who are struck speechless by the grandeur of the scenery, the ones who are moved to tears, the committed fan who turns up dressed in movie character regalia, the reluctant participant who is tagging along because this tour is on their mate’s bucket list.
Suzie’s roots are embedded deep within King Country soil, having been born and brought up in the Rangitoto district just out of Te Kuiti. She married local plumber, Warrick Denize, and by the time their two sons, Peter and Matthew, arrived they were living on the original 40ha block that forms one-third of their current property, which adjoins the Denize family farm.
Warrick still had his plumbing business, which meant a lot of the work around the farm fell to Suzie.
Life might have continued, pleasantly predictable, with the farm, plumbing
business, Playcentre and family all ticking along. But then, one day in late 2010, there was a knock on their door… and waiting on the other side was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Limestone is a not uncommon feature of the land around Piopio.
Some properties have caves and rock-like outcrops, but none can lay claim to the magnificence of what is to be found on the Denizes’ piece of land – limestone cliffs that soar 90m above the bush line, sheer walls of weathered stone looming over the countryside. The cliffs are a natural phenomenon, but with a mythical quality. Rugged and sinister, they look fortress-like; in other words, a near perfect example of what Peter Jackson was seeking as the location for Trollshaws Forest.
Peter’s location scout, Jared Connon, came knocking on the Denizes’ door because he’d heard about the cliffs while searching for likely locations in the Waitomo area. While it wasn’t the first time the family had been approached – the cliffs having featured previously in several TV commercials – this enquiry was on a different scale altogether.
There is a nice symmetry about what happened next. Suzie and Warrick had already been discussing how they might open their farm to the public, more for the scenery than the emerging farm tourism market. Over the years Suzie had taken a lot of people onto the farm, including horse trekkers, school parties and Scouts. Her fatherin-law had been involved in the Department of Conservation’s summer programme and he’d guided hikers and family groups across the land.
The Denizes’ vision was to formalise their tour arrangements. Their boys were teenagers, almost off their hands, and it seemed time to turn words into actions. What they hadn’t counted on was a call from Tinseltown.
“We were like, “Wow! This is a coincidence!” and we thought we’ll just go with it. Having said that, we were very aware that an expression of interest from a location scout didn’t automatically mean they’d go ahead and film scenes on our land, and even if they did it wouldn’t necessarily mean it would end up appearing in the movie.
“Every step of the way we kept telling ourselves that we wouldn’t get too excited because the film industry is notorious for ringing up and saying, ‘Sorry, we can’t come,’ and that’d be it.”
But back they came. “We’d already made the decision to open up the farm to the public, but this added potential to what we wanted to do. Because the farm had previously been used for the making of a few TV commercials, I guess we thought that filming a movie here would be along similar lines. It was that but on steroids!”
Not long after the location scout’s visit, the big guns arrived – Peter Jackson and his associates flying in by helicopter. According to Suzie, they’d looked at limestone outcrops around the region, but it was the sheer size, the drama of the cliffs on the Denize property that appealed.
The valley floor, too, was completely different to the terrain used in the filming of The Lord of the Rings, which was another plus. In the movie, the hobbits are undertaking a journey using a route different to the one they’d travelled in the previous trilogy. In short, the Denizes’ place was perfect.
The only downside was the secrecy. The contracts produced by the studio forbade anyone from talking about what was happening – before, during and after filming. For the adults, it was a difficult enough situation; the sudden influx of vehicles and people into Piopio and the surrounding area was bound to attract attention. But it was much harder for Peter and Matthew, who were soon being pestered by their schoolmates as to what was going on out on the farm.
“Every step of the way we kept telling ourselves that we wouldn’t get too excited.”
“In the end I had to ring the school and say, ‘Please don’t ask them anything about anything.’ I probably sounded mental, but it was a very tricky situation. Of course we wanted to be able to say The Hobbit movie is being filmed here, but that word held a an awful lot of power.
“There was an awful lot of twitching on our part, we were like politicians. We couldn’t say yes and we couldn’t say no, we stuttered and stammered. It was a tough year and a half. You don’t want people turning up to photograph sets or be sneaking around while the actors are doing their thing. A huge part of the movie is the surprise element. We all knew what Gandalf looked like, and Bilbo, but no one had seen the 13 dwarves or Thorin Oakenshield.”
Before filming could begin, preparation of the various sites was undertaken, tracks wide and solid enough to accommodate large and heavy vehicles were built, as were the flat areas on which they could park. A group of 20 personnel worked solidly for six weeks prior to filming.
“They used locals where possible, and all the way they asked, they didn’t just presume. Who would be best to use? Do you know such and such? They tapped into local knowledge, they didn’t just bulldoze ahead.
“Five hundred people [which is more than the entire population of Piopio – 396, according to the 2013 census] is a lot to have on a farm where there’s no cellphone or internet coverage, no fibre optics, and barely a radio signal unless you’re on top of the cliffs. It all had to be thought out beforehand, and it was a real eye-opener as to how something massive can actually work.”
Filming took place during late spring 2011 and into summer 2012 and the Denizes had a ringside seat for the making of a big-budget blockbuster.
The red carpet world premiere took place in Wellington in late November 2012, and a couple of weeks later, hundreds of kilometres away in a Hamilton cinema, Suzie and Warrick and their extended family settled into their seats to watch a screening of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.
“We went to Hamilton to see the movie because we wanted to view it on a big screen. We all sat there, never saying a word. And goodness me, we had the most screen time of any New Zealand location used in the entire film. It was like, ‘Oh my God! There we are again!’”
Watching the movie helped Suzie and Warrick make up their minds as to the direction their tour business would take, and its structure. Yes, it would be about hobbits, about people seeing the sights that they’d viewed in the film, but it would also be about the farm. The Denizes regard themselves as a genuine King Country farming family and that’s how they wanted to portray themselves: dressed in their farm gear, working dogs at heel, sheep and cattle in the paddocks.
With the movie released, they were finally free to talk about their experiences – something that didn’t come easily to them after spending a year and a half sworn to secrecy – and to develop their tour ideas.
“We had to be very careful with other people’s intellectual property, which is where the studio was excellent. Even they don’t own the title of the movie, it’s owned by Middle Earth Enterprises, who bought it from Tolkien, and it’s amazing how many of the words they copyrighted.
“The studio, and particularly the original location scout, Jared Connon, put us in touch with the right people who were great at helping us steer clear of trouble, which we could so easily have blundered into: taglines, websites, brochures, you can’t use certain terms, especially if it’s for commercial gain.”
While the limestone cliffs might have the wow factor, the most important question the Denizes needed an answer to was this: was Hairy Feet a viable long-term venture? Movies are like fashion: some are timeless, never out of vogue, while many others are out-ofdate soon after their release date. Would the enthusiasm for all things Hobbit remain?
“It was a tricky one,” admits Suzie. “Our first thought was that we’d jump in and if the worst comes to the worst and nobody wanted to know anything about a hobbit, all we’d have done is line a shed and built a few roads.
“But our gut feeling was that it’d be all right. The movie is a classic, just like The Lord of the Rings and The Sound of Music. The Sound of Music was first screened more than 50 years ago and I understand that even half a century later there are still four full-time tour operators showing people places that appeared in the movie.
“Also, our tour is not just a film location, it’s not necessary to be a fan of hobbits or the movies to get
something out of our tours.”
As with any start-up, the biggest issue was having enough money to turn what was farmland into a bona fide tourist attraction.
The setting up of Hairy Feet and the film location and farm tour took almost a year of hard work.
Keen to stock Hobbit merchandise in the on-site shop, Suzie scoured the internet looking for saleable items. A lot of Lord of the Rings memorabilia is now only available from collectors, but some of the books are generic and she was able to buy them new. Some of the stock is out of the ordinary, handmade by fans, which Suzie is able to order. Items that are small, flat, light and durable – something of a tall order – remain a priority as they’re what work best for tourists.
However, these are all sidelines to the main event – the Hairy Feet tour. For it to work, Suzie, with back-up from Warrick, had to become a walking, talking guide, which was, she says, an interesting experience.
The tours are 90 minutes and run twice daily. Tour groups are kept purposefully small, no more than 15 to a group, although it was akin to baptism by fire when a group of 150 dedicated Lord of the Rings fans turned up in December 2013.
As yet, tours are conducted in English only. Suzie’s been able to rope in a couple of friends to do translations in Japanese on occasion, but as the majority of visitors are from Englishspeaking countries or where English is widely spoken, any potential language barrier has not been a problem to date.
“Up front I say to people that I only speak English and it’s up to them if they pay the money to come on tour. I did have a deaf man come one day and I wrote him notes. He was very appreciative of my efforts.
“Every person who comes here is different. I like people, I like joy, and I especially enjoy the challenge of the ones who come in dragging their feet because one of their family has made them go on this blimmin’ hobbit tour. I can spot them straightaway and I take their attitude as a challenge. More often than not, by the time they’ve done the tour they’ve had a lot of fun, they’re talking about reading the book and buying the DVD.”
Suzie’s had people turn up and start talking in Elvish, the hobbit language created by Tolkien. When a Gandalfattired person arrived on a bicycle, she immediately asked him if he was
Dutch. He was. Some come sporting pointy ears, some people are moved to tears, others are speechless. For most, it’s an emotional experience.
“A lot of fans are shocked to see that the cliffs are real. Their expectation is that they were digitally enhanced for the movie. Or they expect that the bush won’t be real. But it is. Sure, we have the props – the wooden railings, the massive boulders – but it’s the natural environment that seems to really stir the emotions. I like seeing the surprise in their eyes, hearing them gasp. It’s lovely getting to share that side of it.”
On a personal level, Suzie has been on her own unexpected journey during the course of the last seven years. She’s learned a lot about herself.
“Although I always thought I could work hard, I now know that I can. I didn’t know I could cut a whole path by hand with a spade, but I did. And I had very manly muscles for a number of months afterwards as proof!
There are ongoing challenges with technology, internet coverage is slow and costly, mobile phones don’t work at all. But the biggest challenges – keeping a secret for a very long time, setting up and running a business, taking groups of complete strangers, the majority of them disciples of J.R.R. Tolkien, on guided tours of a movie location set deep within a King Country valley – are all things Suzie has accomplished, and continues to do so in a charming and down-to-earth Kiwi way.
Some sported pointy ears; others were moved to tears.
Desiree Whitaker, artisan whisky distiller
How does the daughter of South Canterbury teetotal dairy farmers grow up to become the owner of an artisan whisky distillery? The answer is, of course, not straightforward, and neither was the path Desiree Whitaker trod to get to where she is now, the founder and joint owner of a boutique distillery. Sited in one of the most spectacular valleys in New Zealand, it is directly opposite one of this country’s best-loved winter playgrounds, Cardrona Alpine Resort. Owning and operating a distillery was not seriously on Desiree’s radar until six years ago. Her original plan upon leaving school was to study law. Halfway through her second year at the University of Otago she was surprised to discover that it wasn’t for her. Needing some time to figure out in which direction she wanted to head, she
did what countless young Kiwis do: she bought herself a one-way ticket to London. She quickly discovered that without a qualification you end up pulling pints. The Front Page pub is in an upmarket area of Chelsea, on Old Church Street, which has rock star Eric Clapton as one of its near neighbours. The pub’s clientele was affluent and, at the time Desiree worked there, it was renowned for selling the most bottles of Bollinger Champagne per year of any bar in the UK. “It was a really good learning curve,” she says. “Mum and Dad hadn’t ever drunk much alcohol, Mum not at all and Dad might have a glass of wine with friends or at a business dinner. I hadn’t really been exposed to alcohol except as a student – when we certainly weren’t drinking Bollinger and single malts! I had to learn about what I was serving and I remember being attracted to the malts. It’s odd, but initially it was about the shapes of the bottles and the differentcoloured liquids inside them.” Fast forward several years and Desiree was back in New Zealand with a dream to open her own distillery. In 2013 she made a decision to move to Wanaka, a place which is special to her family, to find a site on which to build a distillery – a bold move on every level. “I was quite naïve,” Desiree recalls. “I didn’t think it would take much time; all we needed was solid ground and water. Being from Canterbury I didn’t think it was going to be much of a problem, when actually finding those two things together was very difficult.” With the help of businessman and driving force behind the development of the Cardrona Valley, John Lee, she eventually found the right spot and with the help of her parents – who offered to match her dollar for dollar and also provide a guarantee – she began to build. “I’m very lucky, I’ve got wonderful parents. I’ll never forget someone visiting the distillery and remarking to me that the definition of unconditional love has to be my teetotal parents investing in a whisky distillery.” With so much going on, it’s perhaps surprising that in the midst of bringing her distillery dream to life Desiree fell in love – with Ash Whitaker. “‘It was love at first sight. You read about it, of course, but when it happens to you it’s pretty amazing. Ash is an incredible man, very special. He’d moved
I couldn’t believe it. It was crazy. We sold out within 15 minutes of being on air.”
up from Gore and had a contracting business in Wanaka.” Within a month of meeting, the couple got engaged and a short time later Desiree discovered she was pregnant. Desiree and Ash were married on top of Mount Roy, above Lake Wanaka, on New Year’s Day 2015 and their son Ritchie was born seven months later on 28 July. Daughter Reid’s arrival was celebrated 22 months later. In Ash, Desiree had found not only her soulmate but someone who shared her vision for what the distillery could become. Although his business was booming, the couple decided it was not in their best interests to be involved in separate, time-consuming businesses, so he put his company on the market. Within three weeks he had a buyer, and he invested the proceeds from the sale in the distillery. Cardrona Distillery was commissioned in October 2015, with the very first spirit flowing from the stills on Desiree’s birthday, October 23. The first cask of Cardrona whisky was laid 13 days later. The actual whisky-making process is short – just five days – however it’s a long-term project to get it on the shelves. Desiree says that in New Zealand you can call it whisky after three years, but her take on such a short maturation time is that it would still taste pretty raw. “We’re here to make lovely drinks – whisky, vodka, gin and liqueurs – and we’re waiting 10 years for our whisky. There’ll be a big party here on Guy Fawkes Day 2025.” Having a considerable wait for the whisky doesn’t mean the distillery is idle. Anything but. “We make an orange peel liqueur, it’s the same family as Cointreau but a wee bit different. We use Gisborne orange peel, so fresh oranges from Gisborne get sent to Wellington where they are squeezed and we get the peel. We macerate that on our spirit for about three weeks so it’s lightly sweetened, but it’s not as sweet as Cointreau, and a bit stronger too at 44.8 per cent. “This year we’ve also made a Central Otago cherry liqueur. A local Cardrona family has an orchard in Cromwell, which is where we sourced the cherries, and they’re squeezed on-site at our distillery. It’s going to be delicious.”
Monique Neeson, boutique blanket maker
Monique Neeson is a former hairdresser who these days calls a farm down the gloriously named Forgotten World Highway home.
It was love that persuaded her to swap her old city lifestyle in New Plymouth for the green hills of King Country heartland 10 years ago.
But she recalls her first visit to now-husband Tim’s farm almost put her off.
“The first time I drove down to the farm I said to Tim: ‘Who the hell lives this far out of town? I’m never driving this stupid gravel road ever again. You can come and visit me!’”
A decade living on the farm has seen Monique become largely immune to feelings of isolation. She thinks nothing of having to drive for an hour to take the children to kindergarten, doing a grocery shop in Taumarunui, or making the two-and-a-half-hour trip to New Plymouth.
Her nearest neighbour might be
6km away, but that doesn’t mean she misses out on a social life. She and a few other young mums in the district have formed a coffee group and they get together once a fortnight at each other’s houses.
“It’s amazing, here we all are living in the middle of nowhere yet literally doing what the mums in the city are doing. It’s great to get together, we have a coffee and let the kids go crazy.”
These days, however, Monique’s life is less about coffee mornings and more about business – the burgeoning business of ShearWarmth, which was started by her and her mother-in-law, Lyn, in 2009.
“We’d got a poor price for wool that year and it got us thinking about what we could do to make things better for ourselves,” says Monique.
Creating ShearWarmth was, she says, the start of a beautiful thing. The idea seemed simple enough: produce a good, old-fashioned woollen blanket made exclusively in New Zealand, with all parts of the process traceable.
Obtaining the wool was the easy part. For softness, lambs’ wool makes up 70 per cent of each blanket. The remaining 30 per cent is made up of hoggets’ wool, which gives the blankets strength. The family farm produces 100 per cent of the wool for the blankets.
The wool gets scoured at Whakatu in Hawke’s Bay, spun at Woolyarns in Levin and woven by Inter-weave in Auckland. The all-important finishing touch, the silk edging, is done by skilled seamstress Jenny Allen in Taumarunui. After this the blankets come back to the farm where Monique fills out a “birth certificate” for each one before posting it to the purchaser, who could be anywhere in the world. So far, blankets have been supplied to the United States, Germany, France, England and, of course, New Zealand. It’s the natural uncoloured blanket, named Tokirima after the farm, which remains ShearWarmth’s most popular product. According to Monique, no two Tokirima blankets are the same, their final, very individual colouring determined by such seasonal vagaries as weather and pasture growth.
“It’s always exciting to get the Tokirima blankets back and to find out how different they look compared to other years,” she says.
Next to Tokirima, the Merlot/Gravel tartan is proving extremely popular, and Monique has high hopes for the black-and-white check design.
ShearWarmth could have been a simple country business had it not been for a call from TV heartland show, Country Calendar, last year.
Filming for the show took place over a number of months and
Monique was only weeks away from giving birth to daughter Zadee (she and Tim also have four-year-old
Heath and three-year-old Effie) before it wrapped.
Neither Monique nor Lyn had any inkling how big an impact the show would have on their business. “I was so naive about it. I said to Lyn that we mustn’t get too excited and that if the programme helps us to sell 20 blankets that’d be awesome.”
As the show was airing in July 2016, Lyn suggested to Monique that she check the website. What she saw stunned her. “There were pages and pages from PayPal. I couldn’t believe it. It was crazy. We completely sold out within 15 minutes of being on air and suddenly everyone was talking about us.
“It was very much a matter of ‘Oh my God! What do we do now?’”
First up was the job of bagging up all the blankets and sending them off. For three nights Tim and his brother Jethro, a geotechnical engineer based in Christchurch, sat at the table preparing the blankets for postage while Monique wrote up all the birth certificates.
Shortly afterwards the pair were asked to enter the 2016 Enterprising Rural Women Awards. It involved preparing a powerpoint presentation, which took Monique seven hours, followed by a Skype interview.
“I found it really nerve-wracking,” says Monique, who had to do the interview on her own while Lyn was at hospital with her ill husband. “I don’t know why but I’d assumed that with the awards being a rural women’s thing I’d be talking to a panel of women. But it was mainly men and I have to admit that blew me away to begin with.
“Afterwards I rang Lyn and told her that I stuffed it up completely! I thought I’d done terribly, I had such a bad feeling about the whole thing. I was convinced I’d blown it and that our chance was gone.”
She needn’t have worried though: they made it to the finals and ShearWarmth won the Emerging Business of 2016.
It was a massive boost for Monique and Lyn but they feel they still have so much to accomplish.
Finding a way to create a bigger blanket without having to send it to China to be made is at the top of Monique’s wish list; a close second is a desire to make a smaller blanket – one that can fit an incubator. It’s a project that’s dear to Monique’s heart and she is currently in talks with the Neonatal Trust about it.
She’s also had requests about whether or not it’s possible for ShearWarmth to create a black bush singlet, that age-old staple garment much loved by rural Kiwi blokes.
When her children see her seated at the dining room table filling out birth certificates, they know she’s doing “blanket work”.
“I love it when someone phones me to say that their grandchildren or great-grandchildren have received the blanket,” she says. “We’ve got repeat customers, people who order another blanket because their friend has had another baby type of thing. I love that side of it. It’s so cool to get the feedback or to hear the stories about who the blanket’s for.” Monique’s New Zealand-made blankets come with their own “birth certificate” tracing the production process. The blankets come in checked colourways and the popular natural “Tokirima”.