Domestic strife

English director Mike Newell has made a great many films, and he made Hugh Grant a star in 1994’s Four Weddings and a Funeral. His latest is a screen version (reviewed last week) of best-selling novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, set on the Channel Islands during its occupation by the Nazis during World War II. It’s not Newell’s first 1940s foray: he came to New Zealand in 1981 to make Bad Blood, about West Coast mass murderer Stanley Graham, who killed seven people in 1941.

What did you think of Guernsey as a book? Well, I was immensely charmed by it, and at the same time “charm” is such a weasel word. I felt that it was turning up untold war stories.

I was born in 1942, so I remember what it was like at home and I remember it being cold and gritty and there never being enough coal. Everything was rationed, but your mother made everything seem normal. This is a story like that: it’s a story of huge events told through domesticity and through tiny, sapping difficulties.

Seeing German troops in a British village is like something out of science fiction.

It was weird and kind of shocking. They made German the official language of the island. They made them drive on the other side of road, which is always a pressure point for the English. There were policemen saluting German officers and it felt very odd to think that even this tiny bit of your own country had gone that far.

Your memories of making Bad Blood?

It was a liberation. I had made two movies for the Americans and been very unhappy and wrong-footed by the American way of doing things. Suddenly, I had this little story about

Stanley Graham going crazy in the boondocks. It felt like I was in a world that I could understand and control and make quirky.

I loved the way that New Zealand actors would consider it shameful if you had to get a stuntman in to do their stuff. They brought this tremendous authenticity to it.

– Russell Baillie