Supernatural beings take time out in NZ
Jack van Beynen provides a behind-thescenes look at a Disney movie filmed in New Zealand and about to hit the big screen.
A PAPARAZZI was haunting the set of A Wrinkle in Time. He’d been spotted in the hills above Lake Pukaki trying to get a shot of star Mindy Kaling in her intricate costume.
It made filming difficult. Production sent a couple of people up into the hills to harass him, while down on the lake shore Kaling was shrouded in a black polar fleece blanket between takes.
She was shooting a scene with young co-star Levi Miller. Miller lay on a giant blue bean bag, and Kaling had to rush over, lay a sweatshirt on him, caress his brow.
When this scene goes to screens in the next few days, Kaling and Miller will be alone on the lake shore, but here, on the second-last day of filming, they were surrounded by scores of people. The crew, who were mostly Kiwi, wore a kind of uniform: black jackets, shorts, hiking boots, lots of pouches. In her baby-blue ski jacket, producer Catherine Hand stood out a little.
Hand read Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle as a girl more than 50 years ago, and was so struck by it she wrote a letter to Walt Disney asking him to make it into a film. She lost her nerve and binned the letter, but for her whole working life she’s tried to bring it to screens.
A Wrinkle in Time tells the story of a headstrong 13-year-old’s cosmic journey to find her missing father, a scientist who has found a way to teleport through space. She takes a classmate and her 5-year-old brother, a child prodigy, along with her, and the trio is guided by three wise supernatural beings, Mrs Which, Mrs Who and Mrs Whatsit.
When it was published in 1962, the book was notable for featuring a female protagonist in a sci-fi story, and for the way it mixed quantum physics with L’Engle’s Christian faith.
Storm Reid, 13, and Deric McCabe, 8, play protagonist Meg Murray and her brilliant brother Charles Wallace. When we – three reporters, two publicity people – arrived, they were with their onset tutors.
We had to wait 15 minutes for McCabe to finish a science experiment, but the kids had only just sat down when a runner came to say they were needed on set. Off they were whisked.
Similarly, Reese Witherspoon wearing a ginger wig and a bodylength suit bag – to protect her delicate outfit – had only just started telling us about how she loved the book of Wrinkle as a child, and how her own children had read and loved it, when she was called to set.
The scene they were shooting involved all three children and all three of the Mrs’s. Winfrey’s character, Mrs Which, had transformed into some kind of giant creature, and was explaining the nature of the darkness the protagonists face. On set she was represented by an 8 metre-tall pole with two tennis balls impaled on a crossbar to represent the character’s eyes, and let the other actors know where to look.
Winfrey herself was on set, sitting shaded in a little tent and reading her lines into a microphone from where they boomed out over the tussock and calm blue lake. By now the sun had come out, banishing the sandflies and causing the crew to strip off their pouches and black jackets.
We watched them do many, many takes, addressing their lines to the giant pole/tennis ball creature.
Quite abruptly, we were told it was our time to talk to Winfrey. This was perhaps the mostanticipated interview of the day, and there had been uncertainty about whether she’d have time to talk to us. We were escorted to the little tent where she’d been sitting to read her lines.
We found her – Oprah Winfrey, ‘‘the queen of all media’’ – enthroned on a folding stool. She did not talk to us so much as hold forth. Her interview ended up being the day’s longest, but it was the one where we asked the fewest questions. Not that she was boring! She could spend an hour telling you about what she had for breakfast and still be magnetic. But to interrupt her, to derail her soliloquies, would have been like swearing in church.
The topic she spent most of her time expounding on was New Zealand’s natural beauty. She’d been staying on a nearby farm and waking up to views of Aoraki, and it had left quite an impression.
‘‘This morning we were all out going, ‘Hallelujah,’ because did you see that sunrise? Cray-cray!’’ she said.
‘‘The sky was on fire. So you have this flaming orange golden red sky. It literally made me weep. You can’t not feel the sense of reverence and awe here.’’
It turned out the New Zealand scenery was the main reason she was doing the movie at all.
‘‘This is how this all actually really truly happened,’’ she told us.
‘‘Ava (director Ava DuVernay) was coming here, I was here last year, in Auckland, and I didn’t get a chance to come to the South Island, and that was my big regret, that I didn’t make it to the South Island. So when Ava said they were doing their scouts here, I said, ‘OMG, I want to go,’ and, ‘When you’re there, I’m going to come over and watch you film,’ is what I said.’’
DuVernay asked Winfrey if, seeing as she’d be on set anyway, she’d mind reading for a role. Winfrey read the script and went: ‘‘Oh, celestial being. Okay, I’ll do that.’’
‘‘That’s how it happened. It was New Zealand first, it was first about New Zealand, then it was about the role, then it just works out to be the most perfect role I’ve ever done. Who doesn’t want to play a supernova born of the stars – who is wise and has been her for several millennia – who doesn’t want to do that?’’
DuVernay had put in a 12-hour shift, but as the crew packed up she came to talk to us.
By her own admission, DuVernay was an unlikely choice to direct Wrinkle. Her previous dramatic film, the Oscarnominated Selma, was about the