Funnier than Texas
What’s it like launching a Kiwi comedy in the US? We asked Jackie van Beek and Madeleine Sami to diary taking their movie, The Breaker Upperers, to Austin.
What’s it like launching a Kiwi comedy in the US? We asked Jackie van Beek and Madeleine Sami to diary taking their movie, The Breaker Upperers, to Austin.
How does New Zealand comedy travel? Well, if it’s movie The Breaker Upperers, it goes economy via San Francisco to Austin, Texas. There, at the state capital’s SXSW Film Festival, the film tickles many sets of Texan ribs, and between screenings, including the film’s world premiere, creators Jackie van Beek and Madeleine Sami scoff the famous local barbecue variety.
Part of an array of music, comedy and technology conferences in Austin, the film festival has in recent years become an important launch pad for big-screen comedies – especially female-led ones such as Bridesmaids and Trainwreck.
For van Beek, Sami and their backers, it’s a chance to create a buzz for the film and introduce themselves to an audience that won’t know them from their careers spent making New Zealand television a funnier place.
Some in Austin may recognise them from their roles in What We Do In the Shadows, the hit 2014 vampire spoof by Taika Waititi (an executive producer on The Breaker Upperers) and Jemaine Clement (who has a cameo role as “Tinder date”).
Van Beek has directed a raft of short films and a feature drama, The Inland
Road, and Sami directed the second season of Funny Girls. The decision to co-helm the film as well as write and star in it was partly inspired by the Waititi-Clement directing double act behind Shadows. Why not just do it ourselves, they thought?
In front of the camera, they play friends Mel and Jen, a cynical pair who operate a small business breaking up couples, which is hired by those who want to outsource the painful process of calling it quits on a relationship. It was van Beek’s idea. She took it to Sami.
“As women in our late thirties and early forties, we’ve been on this Earth long enough to have experienced the highs and lows of falling in and out of love a number of times, having our hearts broken and maybe even breaking a few hearts ourselves,” says van Beek. “So in creating these characters, we’ve been able to draw from personal experience.”
Ideas, scripts and workshops followed. In came producers and backers including Waititi and Piki Films partner Carthew Neal, arts patron-turned-film financier Sir James Wallace, as well as Ainsley Gardiner, whose Miss Conception Films was set up to “make films by women for women with strong female protagonists”.
The movie was shot last year. It stars James Rolleston in his first film since a 2016 car accident. Sami and van Beek had written the role with him in mind. It was especially heartening for Gardiner, who produced Boy, Rolleston’s debut, to see him back. “I felt grateful that I was able to be one of the people helping him to come back to acting after a really tough year.”
But the movie is the van Beek and Sami show and one they’ve taken on the road. The Listener asked the pair – and Gardiner – to keep a diary of their Texas excursion. Their pages arrived carrying some stains of what was once a delicious marinade …