What they do on ghost hunts
Actor Maaka Pohatu has been channelling the spirit of Winston Peters while dealing with paranormal occurrences around Wellington.
Pohatu, who plays the diplomatic Sergeant Ruawai Maaka, is obsessed and a little bit frightened of the spirit world in the new television series
Wellington Paranormal. So his bosses encouraged him to look to our (temporary) leader.
‘‘Initially, when I was thinking of building Sergeant Maaka [as a character], I was inspired by Willie Apiata, mainly because I wanted to grow a heavy moustache. But producer Paul [Yates] said no, and so did Jemaine [Clement, the director],’’ Pohatu says.
‘‘Instead, while we were on set, Jemaine would be like, ‘that’s great Maaka, just [a bit] more Winston Peters, the diplomat’. I had no idea [what I was doing] – I just kind of squinted a bit.’’
The televised Police Ten 7-style mockumentary is a spinoff to Clement and Taika Waititi’s 2014 horror comedy
What We Do In The Shadows.
The series follows the film’s two oblivious cops, officers O’leary (Karen O’leary) and Minogue (Mike Minogue). It’s set at the Wellington police station where Sgt Maaka has a secret office he uses to investigate the paranormal.
I was with the trio as they investigated a possible paranormal occurrence outside a rundown shed, up a peculiar street, in Aro Valley.
Of course, this is all an act, just without scripts or much of a plot. Despite this, the three actors manage to draw bellows of laughter from the crew, using anything and everything around them to make the whole thing even funnier.
They stop and ponder over a ‘‘ghost door’’ connecting them to the ‘‘other side’’ (it’s a possum trap), the green demon slime slathered on the trees (it’s moss) and the paranormal sign etched into the derelict shed (it’s graffiti).
They tread through muddy pathways, bushes, and trees with a pretend taser gun, before coming across what looks to be a dog collar. The three conclude it is likely to be a belt buckle for a really tiny ghost.
Acting and playing off each others’ quirky senses of humour comes naturally to the trio as they exchange jokes. That deadpan humour was what got the TV show across the line.
Clement says Minogue and O’leary – an early-childhood educator who hadn’t done any professional acting before she appeared in the 2014 film, caught the eye of everyone involved early in the auditioning process.
‘‘They made us laugh more than anyone else did, and one of us said to the other, ‘these guys should have their own TV show’, kinda joking,’’ Clement recalls.
‘‘And then I started thinking about the idea more, and when Paul saw a cut of the movie, he mentioned the police officers being funny and said it could be its own show.’’
Three years later, it finally started to come together – which was quite a shock for O’leary. ‘‘Certainly, I thought that was the height of my acting career, it had plateaued and reached the end of its life,’’ O’leary says.
‘‘It was very excitingwhen we got called that day and they said, ‘hey, guess what? Some joker thinks that you were quite funny and maybe they will make a TV show [because of it]’.’’
‘‘I always think that everything I do is going to get turned into a TV show,’’ Minogue adds. ‘‘I start with, ‘this is gonna be the big one’, but it never is – except for this one.’’
Big enough to call on the help of Hollywood director Sir Peter Jackson. He loaned corn crops to the crew, used in The Lovely Bones, because of course, it wouldn’t be a paranormal show without crop circles.
Throughout November, various areas around Wellington were blocked off to allow for filming. Still, it didn’t stop the verbal abuse being hurled at the pretend police. ‘‘My first day in public was on Cuba St and people were yelling ‘pigs’,’’ Pohatu recalls.
The cast also had old favourites like ‘‘f... the police’’, and the occasional ‘‘oink oink’’, hurled in their direction.
The paranormal cops are playing it cool, despite the hype surrounding the series.
‘‘On the end of each script, they had an estimate of how many laughs they would get per script and it was one to two,’’ Minogue says. Is he serious? Who can tell.
‘‘Generally, there are standards that have to be met when you get funding, and that was one to two laughs per episode. So you’re looking at six to 12 laughs across the series.’’
‘‘Those are pretty high goals so, we’re happy with that,’’ O’leary adds.