COME TO NZ
Elijah Wood’s Kiwi connection continues
‘It just really felt like this tense, funny, weird dark piece that appeals to a lot of my tastes.’
ELIJAH WOOD
After the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, actor Elijah Wood’s career could have gone anywhere. But instead of chasing another big budget blockbuster franchise, he decided to go another route – smaller films.
‘‘Directly following [the Rings] films, I was definitely interested in working on things that were very different,’’ he says.
The now 39-year-old actor with those bright blue eyes, who started his Hollywood career with an appearance in a Paula Abdul music video when he was 8, has since built a career appearing and producing unique independent films. It’s not that the actor avoids big studio projects or franchises. He recently voiced a character in the animated series Star Wars Resistance and costarred with Vin Diesel in The Last Witch Hunter.
Wood, who spent 16 months in New Zealand filming the Lord of the Rings trilogy, simply wants more time to do different projects instead of being trapped in just one.
‘‘It has less to do with being a part of another giant spectacle, or studio film,’’ he says, and more to do with working on projects ‘‘that would take less time, frankly’’.
One of those things is Come to Daddy, a new dark, comedic thriller which opened in New Zealand cinemas on Thursday.
‘‘It just really felt like this tense, funny, weird dark piece that appeals to a lot of my tastes,’’ he says. And ‘‘the character was really different than anyone I’d really played before’’.
In Come to Daddy, Wood stars as Norval Greenwood, a pretentious musician who goes to a remote, seaside home to visit the estranged father he hasn’t seen in 30 years. The family reunion, however, takes some dark and funny twists and turns the audience will not see coming.
The film is by New Zealander Ant Timpson, who Wood had worked with as a producer on the wildly bizarre 2016 film The Greasy Strangler. That movie was one of several produced by SpectreVision, a company Wood started in 2010 with film-makers Daniel Noah and Josh Waller.
A producer of more than a dozen films himself, Timpson makes his directorial debut with Come to Daddy. He developed the story and worked on the script with Toby Harvard, who wrote Strangler.
The 53-year-old film producer produced genre favourites such as Turbo Kid and Housebound. But the death of his father led him to decide it was time to direct.
‘‘It was literally the rude awakening of my own mortality running towards me like a runaway train, alongside the death of my dad, who was such a supporter of my interest in film,’’ he says.
Timpson developed the idea for Come to Daddy after spending days in his home with his father’s body inside a coffin. He then teamed up with Harvard to develop the script.
As a result, he says, Come to Daddy serves as a tribute to his dad, and the type of films the two of them loved to watch.
‘‘We shared a real interest of gallows humour, and 70s film, those great character actors,’’ he says. ‘‘It was a tribute to him, [and] it was a tribute to the genre films I grew up with.’’
Timpson noted it was a joy to work with Wood. ‘‘And I’m so happy [Come to Daddy] came out as good as it has, because it would be a sh...y tribute to my father otherwise,’’ he adds with a laugh.
Come to Daddy (R16) is in cinemas now.