How Nicole’s showing the way
THEY’RE YOUR STORIES NICOLE HOEY (54), FROM AUCKLAND, IS THE MANAGING DIRECTOR OF CINCO CINE FILM PRODUCTIONS
Igrew up in Kaikohe and my tribal affiliations are Nga¯ti Kahu and Te Aupo¯uri. I went to school up there until I was 12 and then came down to Auckland for boarding school.
My mother was a teacher and she taught preschoolers, I think I got a love for being very imaginative from my mother because she was constantly creating resources for her classrooms. The weekend before school started, we all had to be in her classroom making it look beautiful for the kids. She would create plays and we were always creating stories. Now that’s what I’ve spent my career doing!
I’ve worked my way up from the bottom in the television industry. There weren’t television schools when I was coming out of high school, so people teaching you on the job were your education. You had to hit the ground running and be a fast learner.
I started in television commercials where we would shoot two to three commercials a week. Working in advertising proved to be a fantastic training ground for moving into making television programmes because you had to learn from a very young age how to pitch your ideas. It does feel like I sort of fell into making TV shows.
I set up Cinco Cine Film Productions in the ‘80s, and a month and a half after I set it up, the stock market crashed and then I found out I was pregnant − I definitely was a rarity as a woman in business.
At that time, there were no women who completely owned and ran their own production company. I was a working mum who went back to work shortly after the birth of my son Tom and many of our women have done the same.
I’m very pro pushing women up into positions in the workforce. We have our babies here with us at the studios and they love it. I have a fantastic staff and I’m so proud of them. I try and get as many different shows – we’re even working on a feature film − and I try to give everyone as many different opportunities as possible, just the way I was trained. All of our trainees are bilingual too.
It was my son who has been the inspiration behind making our te reo programmes.
He was about six years old and in Kura Kaupapa [Maori language immersion school] and we were watching What Now one day. I was still making TV commercials at that time. While we were watching, he turned to me and said in te reo, ‘Hey Mum, why don’t you make us a show in te reo Maori just like What Now, because did you know Mum, a lot of Pakeha kids can’t speak Maori and we could win some prizes.’ And I actually thought, why not! Why not serve the audience that is my son and all of the kids in Kura Kaupapa? And that was the genesis of Pukana.
Pukana was my big baby and 18 years later, it’s still showing. My little baby is now Takaro Tribe, an animated bilingual and te reo children’s show which I work on with the amazing Campbell Farquhar.
I’ve had the original drawings for this show for about eight or nine years now, and it’s been even longer in the making. Many of my friends would ask me about Maori pronunciation, so we thought why not name the characters after the Maori vowels – A, E, I, O U – and it’s much easier if you sing it!
All of our shows are for the whole of Aotearoa. We want to share our beautiful language with everybody. All kids love te reo Maori, it doesn’t matter where you’re from, they love waiata and kapa haka, so we make that a feature in the show.
Our Kohanga Reos are populated with more than just Maori children, which is fantastic, so we want the show to represent that. In 15 years time, I’d love kids to say they grew up with this show and they remember it from their childhood. I want it to become part of every New Zealand child’s identity and be the fabric of their childhood and part of who they are.
I didn’t grow up with te reo, my language skills are not as good as I’d like them to be. I grew up in a monolingual world. Surprisingly, when I had my son Tom, I thought to myself ‘Right, you’re going to learn te reo!’
I didn’t have the opportunity to grow up bilingually and he has that. I know a lot of people say why learn te reo? But the reality is it’s about embedding more than one language in a child’s brain function.
Te reo is one of the biggest selling points our country has and I want our nation to be so proud of it.”