Hello again Pork Pie
Writer-director Matt Murphy and producer Tom Hern tell second-bite at the Kiwi cinematic classic Pork Pie came about.
Matt Murphy had decided by the age of 11 that he intended to be a film director. It may have taken him another 45 years to make his first full-length feature, but the result is certainly true to that childhood resolve.
Seven weeks off school when he was 15 to lug lighting equipment around the set of his father Geoff’s movie, Goodbye Pork Pie, merely confirmed young Murphy’s plans, and left him with a diminishing appetite for formal education. A half-hearted, if more popular (‘‘once the film came out and was popular, I did go from having maybe two friends at high school to five’’) bash at sixth form quickly faded into a long and varied career in film production.
But not until 2012, after mostly spending his time making expensive car commercials, did the idea to reimagine Geoff Murphy’s 1981 classic occur – and only then when his friend Alan Harris, who would executive produce the new version, suggested it.
Murphy went away and ploughed through four drafts of a potential script before he completed one he liked.
On the way, he showed the first, rather hokey version to his father, who had crafted a reputation, not just as a Kiwi cinematic pioneer, but the industry’s most forthright and belligerent elder statesman.
Publicly, Geoff Murphy’s first comment on the idea of a remake was this: ‘‘I find the concept confusing because I can’t see how to remake it.’’
Privately, says his son, he was ‘‘very kind in being restrained about the feedback’’, gave sound advice, his blessing, and the rights to remake his classic for the modern day.
It’s only proper Murphy had his father’s approval for a film whose crew includes a third Murphy generation.
The original didn’t just make young Matt more popular at school – the way he recalls it, it made the entire tribe a whole lot more palatable to New Zealand.
Matt Murphy was 6 when his father and a group of acting mates, including Bruno Lawrence and Goodbye Pork Pie’s charismatic lead, Tony Barry, embarked on Blerta, a Ken Kesey-like travelling circus of which he recalls ‘‘going into these small towns and
Steve Kilgallon
Publicly, Geoff Murphy’s first comment on the idea of a remake was this: ‘I find the concept confusing because I can’t see how to remake it.’ Privately, says his son, he was ‘‘very kind . . . blokes looking sideways at us’’.
After that, his father, the late actor Martyn Sanderson, and Goodbye Pork Pie cinematographer Alun Bollinger, established a commune in the Hawke’s Bay village of Waimarama.
Goodbye Pork Pie – based on an anecdote Geoff Murphy had heard about a couple of jokers selling off the spare tyre and jack of their rental car for gas – was conceived in those commune years and its success proved that this strange crowd knew what they were doing.
But the idea of a remake had stalled by the middle of 2015, says Murphy, until the recruitment of a young producer, Tom Hern, who could barely remember even seeing the original.
Hern, then 30, arrived with the aim of having the film fully financed and shooting within a calendar year. They fell short, but only just.
Making Pork Pie was, says Hern, a particularly complex funding arrangement: more than 20 backers, from the obvious – the New Zealand Film Commission and New Zealand On Air – to those who had supported Hern’s last project, The Dark Horse ,to rich individuals making their first foray into film financing because they loved the original, and who may have had fairly strong ideas about how it should all look.
‘‘You always want to make people think things were their idea,’’ smiles Hern. ‘‘How do you do it? It really comes down to the pitch,’’ he says. For the locals, it was about engaging their love of the original; for those less