Close encounters of the film-making kind
Christchurch writer and director Nic Gorman tells Charlie Gates about the seals, sea lions and dolphins he encountered while making his debut feature film.
They were vomiting on dolphins. The sea was rough, jostling the small fishing boat in the waters of Akaroa Harbour.
The film crew had strapped their cinematographer, John Chrisstoffels, to the boat so he could get a steady shot. Many of the crew succumbed to seasickness, scrambling to the edge of the boat and vomiting into the water. This was the first few days of shooting on Canterbury film Human Traces ,a psychological thriller which will premiere at the New Zealand International Film Festival in Christchurch’s Isaac Theatre Royal on August 4.
Christchurch writer and director Nic Gorman remembers the seasick crew members were paid a visit by the local population.
‘‘We had three crazy days on the boat. It was rougher than we expected. The boat was moving so much and it was quite insane. It was a pretty crucial story point. We had to get it done, but it was very stressful.
‘‘Lots of people were seasick. I was OK. Some people got really sick and were vomiting off the boat.
‘‘It was one of those things that was kind of magical. We were followed by Hector’s dolphins. They were swimming around us the whole time. There were moments where people were vomiting into the water and then the dolphins would jump out. It was horrible, but so beautiful seeing a dolphin at the same time. It was like this spiritual vomit.’’
The film was shot over seven days on Canterbury’s Banks Peninsula and 18 days on the Otago coastline in late 2015. Long Point, two hours south of Dunedin, and Haylocks Bay on the Banks Peninsula stood in for a subAntarctic island where the arrival of a mysterious young stranger disrupts the world of a couple monitoring the local ecosystem.
In Otago, the crew continued to have close encounters with wildlife. There were yellow-eyed penguins, oyster catchers, sea lions and seals. And even a mummified creature that could not be identified but became a set mascot.
Human Traces is the debut feature from Gorman, 39, who grew up in St Martins and joined Christchurch improv troupe Court Jesters as soon as he left high school. He enjoyed acting, but was always drawn to writing.
‘‘Doing improv is a great school. It is really useful for storytelling. You get that instant feedback from an audience. You can’t sit in a room and mull over it. You try something and see if it connects.
‘‘I was really lucky that I had those years between 18 and 25 when I was doing a regular show every Friday night. It was really useful schooling on writing and storytelling.’’
He was exposed to arthouse movies at an early age. He watched Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas while half asleep at the age of seven and later in life would sneak downstairs to watch the second season of Twin Peaks and endlessly rewatch films like David Lynch’s Wild at Heart recorded from television on his VCR.
Later still, he would raid the cult section of Alice in Videoland or watch offbeat classics like
Reefer Madness or Slacker in the Mid City cinema, just off Cathedral Square.
‘‘Movies were my formative experience.’’
He made his first film to get into fine arts school at the University of Canterbury. He didn’t know how to edit and so shot the whole film in sequence, editing in-camera and using his flatmates as cast members.
He also studied film as part of his American Studies honours degree.
He moved to Wellington in 2004 to complete a Masters in Creative Writing. He wrote a novel and had a couple of short stories published. A friend made one of his short stories, The Unicorn, into a short film with funding from the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC).
He adapted his own short story into a script and that was his introduction to screenwriting.
After his Masters, he worked on and off as a teacher and wrote a short zombie film called Here be
Monsters that won best short film at the NZ Film Awards in 2013.
About this time he started tinkering with an idea about a low-budget feature film set on the subAntarctic Islands, the isolated islands to the south of New Zealand.
‘‘I have always been fascinated by them. I read a lot about their human history. There was a settlement in the Auckland Islands that lasted a few years. It was so harsh to live down there. People died.
‘‘The settlement was abandoned and left there. They left the animals. There were feral pigs and sheep roaming the island.
‘‘That story was the thing for me that gave me a visual entry. This notion of the island as a character that was physically tormenting the humans that were there and fighting back. The humans are trying to extract themselves from this place and remove all the human traces, but can we ever totally remove our footprint? That was the starting place for the story.’’
He started writing the script in 2014 when he was living in the US for a year. He wrote the first draft in the library of Harvard University, where his wife was studying law.
He watched early Roman Polanski films Knife in the Water,
Cul-de-Sac and Repulsion for their psychological tension, 2011 US thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene for tone, Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction classic
Stalker for location and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia for structure.
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona was the touchstone for the sense of isolation and psycho sexual themes.
His final script was about three people on a remote sub-Antarctic island, with each of the three parts told entirely from one of their perspectives. The characters are tasked with removing all nonnative animals and plants from the fictional island, called Perseverance Island, that were left behind by an historic settlement.
The stories overlap at times, telling some scenes from three different perspectives. But, unlike the Akira Kurosawa classic
Rashomon, which retells the same event from various different perspectives, the narrative for
Human Traces is broader in scope. ‘‘The idea was they are all three separate stories, but each could stand on its own.
‘‘There are things in them that appear in all of them, but mostly they all have their own little story arcs.’’
The development of the script was funded over two or three years by about $60,000 in NZFC grants. The film was given an NZFC grant of $850,000 in 2014/15 for production of the film. Wellington company Random Film also invested a small amount in the production.
The first production task was to find a place on mainland New Zealand that could pass for the sub-Antarctic islands.
Producer Nadia Maxwell said they spoke to photographers and Department of Conservation workers who had visited the islands about what parts of New Zealand could act as a double.
‘‘They all said: The Caitlins, the Caitlins, the Caitlins.’’
Gorman spent about a year searching for the perfect location. ‘‘Every part of the coastline, from the Banks Peninsula to Invercargill and along to Fiordland, we covered in some way on our location hunt. We were trying to find something that looked like another world and didn’t have farms behind it.’’
He eventually found a small bach surrounded by cliffs on the Otago coastline.
‘‘It was an old fishing hut and it looked like it was part of the land. The walls were painted with tar because it got buffeted by winds.’’
They would feel those winds while shooting at the location for 18 days.
‘‘We got sunshine, wind and hailstorms. It was kind of cool.
‘‘We wanted it to feel weatherbattered and hit by wind and rain. On the second-to-last-day of the shoot we got the worst weather, but it was the most productive day.’’
They were also exposed to the local wildlife. Sea lions, seals, yellow eyed penguins and oyster catchers would visit the set. They often couldn’t film in certain spots because oyster catchers or penguins were nesting on the beach.
‘‘We didn’t shy away from embracing nature, but it is pretty unpredictable, especially when you are dealing with large sea mammals,’’ he said.
‘‘We were constantly having to work around sea lions and yelloweyed penguins. When a penguin came along, we had to stop filming, drop to the ground and wait for it to pass.
‘‘We had a sea lion wrangler. If one came along during the shoot, he would jump down on the ground and bark at them and the sea lion would bark back at them. The dude was more alpha than the sea lion so he would back off.’’
A sea lion also pulled down their make-up tent during production.
‘‘They are a bit like puppies. That was a crazy day. It was a nightmare at the time.’’
But the wildlife was an essential part of the movie’s theme.
‘‘The film is about the notion of balance and eco systems and how small changes can have bigger effects on people. That is the nice thing about being down there and having the nature so close to you.
‘‘We were very conscious of nature and being very respectful. We were borrowing the land from the animals, rather than the other way around.
‘‘It was beautiful and kind of ugly as well. It was very hard. We saw so many dead animals. Dead sheep and cats and seals. There was this mummified thing that we could not identify what it was. It had a really gnarly jaw and big teeth. It was the set mascot. I really wanted to get it in a shot, but it was just too weird.’’
Once shooting wrapped, Gorman spent about 10 months working with editor Richard Shaw at Park Road Post in Wellington to complete the film. Scarlet Johanson movie Ghost in the Shell was being edited in the same facility. One day, Shaw spotted film star Juliette Binoche in the corridor. And then they had a final cut. ‘‘It was a great feeling and a terrifying feeling.
‘‘You will never touch it again. You are always terrified you will see something that has slipped through. Even though you have seen the film 200 times.’’
Gorman hopes his next project will be a science fiction film called
The Lost. He has been working on the script with $25,000 in development funding from the NZFC.
Maxwell said the script was ‘‘speculative realism, set in the near future’’ and was similar to films like Never Let Me Go or Children of Men.
She plans to pitch the script to investors at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
Gorman said many of the skills he used for film directing were developed on The Court Theatre stage in Christchurch as an improviser.
‘‘You have to be able to trust your gut as to what is working as a director. Improv helps with that . You have to be really open as an improviser and be prepared to go in directions that you didn’t plan. You can’t really hold onto things. That is really important for a director.’’
‘‘You have to be open to new magic.’’