‘I’m going to refuse to die’
Yes, he’s got Hollywood A-lister celebrity friends – but Sam Neill is just as at home mixing with donkeys and swans, and, he tells Alison Mau, got through quarantine with chocolate and medicinal cannabis. Photos by Kate Roberge.
Sam Neill, freshly-minted New Zealand Arts Icon, is on his final day of quarantine in an Auckland hotel. He’s been a long time away – 10 months, mostly in the UK filming the latest Jurassic installment – and he’s rather excited to be back.
He admits this (with a touch of glee) for good reason. When he finally drives up to his farm in Central Otago, it will be something of a new start.
“I’ve built myself a little house in my absence, and the last time I saw that it was just a framework. I’ve (also) acquired a dog, who’s now fully grown, and I’ve never met my dog.
“So a lot of things have happened, and I’m going to walk back into my world, but it’s also a brand new world.”
He’s named the pup Chuff, and she is a bull terrier pointer cross, he explains, bred by his daughter. Chuff was supposed to be a purebred bull terrier but mum escaped and hooked up with an unintended suitor; “she was caught in the act!” He’s also made good use of technology, using FaceTime to direct the placement of furniture in his new home.
Much has changed since Neill left for Morocco in February, pre-Covid. He tried “helter skelter” to get back to New Zealand for lockdown but got stuck in Sydney, before flying to the UK to film Jurassic World: Dominion. The highly-anticipated film is the sixth in the franchise, and reunites him as paleontologist Alan Grant with original cast members Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern, as well as more recent recruits, Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard.
The months-long shoot at Pinewood studios in Buckinghamshire was unusual enough. With the pandemic raging outside, the cast were secluded in their own tight “bubble” at The Langley, a country hotel nearby. Neill interrupts his story to talk a bit about the hotel itself, “a rather grand house at one time, it was built by the third Duke of Marlborough before he inherited Blenheim Palace, so it has this beautiful Palladian front on it, and as an amatuer enthusiast for architecture I found the building rather pleasing. So we were very lucky.”
It’s no surprise to find Neill is pleased by architecture; he is one of life’s true enthusiasts – pleased by many things, which makes him delightful company in spite of the shortcomings of a quarantine Zoom call.
Behind the scenes at The Langley was pretty acceptable, too, he laughs.
“All we saw were each other. I had a few days in London before I left, but other than that I saw nothing of the UK other than the hotel and the park.
“There were old mates and new mates, and we looked after each other and had a lot of fun. I’d get
Jeff in (in the evening) and he’d play the piano, and I’d sing. Backgammon was a big pastime, but more than anything, we had 170 acres of parkland around us.
“There were donkeys over there, there were horses, there were a couple of swans I got to know quite well.”
Once again, no surprise about the swans. Neill’s social media posts, to his almost half a million followers, are often selfies taken with his own chickens, pigs, or ducks, most of them named for his Hollywood friends. The posts have become online legend, and there are plenty who’ll say he’s helped keep them sane during this long, infernally difficult year.
“I used to stick my hand up and voice my opinion on this or that (on social media), but I stopped doing that four or five years ago. I thought, it’s just people shouting at each other and you never change anyone’s mind. One less shouty voice is probably a good thing.”
Since, he’s made a great fist of bringing joy instead, and in lockdown, dove into what he’s dubbed “Cinema Quarantino”, a series of selffilmed shorts with his (famous) mates around the world.
‘‘I was just reading poetry and doing silly things to entertain myself as much as anything. So much has happened this year it’s hard to remember how frightening people found that first lockdown,’’ he says.
‘‘Everyone was alone and alarmed and very frightened, and no one knew the science of it at that
‘‘So a lot of things have happened, and I’m going to walk back into my world, but it’s also a brand new world.’’
point. It was a scary, dark time, so I thought, if I can cheer myself up with something silly, maybe someone else will have a little cheer as well.’’
I tell Neill I was cheered to read that rather than making cameo appearances in the new film, he, Goldblum and Dern would be ‘‘running and screaming’’.
‘‘We all made it clear that we were not interested in doing cameos at all, but simultaneously it was made clear to us that they didn’t want us for cameos.
‘‘This may be the end of the franchise, I’m not sure ... but it’ll certainly be the last for us. And they wanted to finish the franchise.. with what they call the ‘legacy’ cast (laughs) and the Jurassic World cast, which is Chris and Bryce and so on. So there are several strands of stories going through it, but we are all in the mix together.’’
The big-budget lushness of the production – Neill estimates the total crew at around 800 film industry workers – also helped keep the boredom of lockdown at bay.
‘‘The great thing about going to work was that almost every day, there would be a different set. I think they had something like 129 different sets; it was a really major production so it wasn’t just the same thing happening every day.
‘‘You would go in and say, ‘wow! Did somebody build this for us?’ It was extraordinary.’’
With film productions closing the world over for Covid-19, he’s grateful Jurassic’s strict safety protocols allowed the movie to be finished; it was not without its scares, however. Two actors returned positive tests for Covid which were then found to be false, but the set closed for two weeks nevertheless. Neill estimates he was tested more than 50 times.
‘‘Obviously, in a brutal sense, you can replace almost everyone on a crew if they have to go into isolation. But there’s only one Jeff Goldblum, there is no other. He’s someone you cannot replicate, even if you wanted to.’’
Two weeks of managed isolation here at home must be a right pain, after all that excitement?
‘‘You don’t really want to be on your own for 14 days, and I was dreading it. But ... all the staff here – there’s armed services, there’s police, there are nurses, caterers [and] security, there are the people who deliver clean towels. Everyone is just so caring, I’ve been overwhelmed a couple of times at how touched I am by how much people care.
‘‘There must be a fair amount of stress that goes with the job, and they do it with such good grace. The nurses come every day and they take your temperature, and just have a little chat to see if you’re OK.
‘‘That’s such an important question these days – are you OK, are you doing alright? It’s over and above the question of ‘do you have any symptoms?’ I’m so touched by that.’’
Neill admits he passed the time in isolation in a very human way – by procrastinating.
‘‘It’s so weird isn’t it? Because I’ve written out a little list of things I need to do, and I get to the end of the day and it’s 11 o’clock and I need to go to bed, and I haven’t ticked off the list.
‘‘I deplore the fact that people are on their phones all the time, but I am on my phone a lot at the moment and I’m FaceTiming a lot. To be able to talk face to face with old friends, people I haven’t talked to in ages... it’s been a real lifesaver.’’
He’s also renewed his acquaintance with an old flame – Whittaker’s chocolate – which he nibbles surreptitiously during our interview. And, he doesn’t mind admitting, in a ‘‘very stressful year’’ he has tried something new, too – CBD – aka medicinal cannabis, the legal form of the product which has either little or no mind-altering THC.
‘‘It’s very good for anxiety, it’s very good for pain relief, and at my age you’ve always got a back ache or something! (laughs)
‘‘The first thing I did when I got off the plane was to call my doctor. I said, ‘I understand you can get CBD for medical purposes, and I really need it for medical purposes, could you write me a script?’ Thankfully they did, and I can tell you, for things like 14 days’ quarantine on your own, it’s very helpful.’’ Despite giving it a push as a student in the 1970s, Neill says he no longer likes ‘‘being stoned’’. But he did eventually agree to step into this country’s debate on the legalisation of cannabis referendum, after a conversation with Helen Clark. ‘‘I thought New Zealand would just be more sensible, and just go, ‘oh for goodness sake, 80 per cent of us have tried marijuana at some point, what’s the big deal?’’’
He says Clark reminded him some of the places with the lowest employment in New Zealand also have, ‘‘not accidentally’’, the highest expertise and growing rates of cannabis.
‘‘Why not just legalise it and give these people proper jobs, as they have in California?
‘‘P (meth) is a bloody scourge wherever it is, and to classify marijuana in the same league is absolutely absurd.’’ He was disappointed by the results of the referendum. ‘‘I hope people change their minds.’’
Neill worries also, about how the arts will survive the pandemic.
‘‘I think I’m right in saying the government has been quite good about supporting the arts and artists here, which they were not in Australia. I don’t know what it is about Right-wing governments, but... [there’s] no question that Covid has been good for the enemies of the arts across the planet.
‘‘I cannot overstress how important the arts are. I grew up in a New Zealand where... one was led to believe it was just farmers and All Blacks, and nothing much else mattered. The older I grew, the more I realised I was lucky to live in a country which was particularly gifted with wonderful visual artists, great poets and fantastic writers.’’
He yarns about the 1960s and 70s, a time when, if you wanted to hang with artists, you had to hunt them out for yourself. He discovered them mostly gathered at the [now gone] Kiwi Tavern in Auckland, and recalls it in the early 70s, populated by ‘‘all the painters.. and all the poets and all the anti-Vietnam protestors’’.
This week, after decades as unofficial Kiwi treasure, Neill, 72, officially became one of the most valued artists in New Zealand history.
He is only the second actor to be named an Arts Icon by the Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi, a group limited to 20 living New Zealanders (the other actor was Don Selwyn, who appeared alongside him in Sleeping Dogs, Neill’s first ever film.)
He recalls making an appearance at the awards once before; at the inaugural ceremony in 2003 he accepted the medal for his close mate Ralph Hotere, who was too ill after a stroke to attend. Now he has the honour himself, and is properly chuffed. One catch though – he knows the Icon medal must be handed back when he dies.
‘‘I’m going to refuse to die because I don’t want to give the medal back. It’s going to keep me alive for decades!’’