A life telling stories
Keith Hawke has travelled the world shooting documentaries but projects closer home command his attention these days. Adrienne Matthews reports.
Keith Hawke’s office in his wife’s ballet studio in Nelson’s Vanguard St is surprisingly empty. The worn sofa and chunky wooden table give no hint to his years of adventures as one of NZ’s pioneering documentary film cameramen.
It doesn’t take long however to discover that he has an extraordinarily rich world of experiences stored on film, in the books he has written for his family, and his sharp, clear as a bell memory.
Just like a painter makes marks on paper, Hawke has drawn an indelible body of work through the camera lens, both as a photographer and a director.
As he says of film making in the introduction of his book, Plough Chains and Bees Arses, ‘‘It has taken me on a lifetime journey around the world and into the reality of corruption, the attraction of rogues and the wild roller coaster thrill of making films in foreign countries’’.
When a teenager in Canterbury, surrounded by his father’s glasshouses filled with tomatoes, Hawke imagined he would be a plant scientist or at least end up, in his own words, ‘‘growing things’’.
A failure to master physics at Lincoln University, however, put paid to that and he cast around for something else.
‘‘I drew stock and decided that my interests were simple’’, he says. ‘‘Travel and still photography were right up there and I figured that becoming a TV cameraman would be an ideal career’’.
There were no jobs available at CHTV3 in Canterbury back then and all the work was being done by private companies. Fortuitously a partner in one of those, Pierre Lods of ‘‘Orly Productions’’, handed him a camera and said that if he could go and find a story and produce something good enough for CHTV3 to accept, the company would take him on.
For several days he feverishly studied every bit of TV film work he could find then made up stories and pretended to film them. Having never even held a movie camera before, he familiarised himself with every inch of the 16mm Bolex.
Finally he loaded 100 feet of film and set out to locate a story. It must have been quite something to see him chasing around the city after fire trucks in the hope of finding a dramatic enough blaze to build a story on.
Eventually his efforts paid off and a film was duly handed in. It went straight onto TV news and his career was underway.
It was a heady time in the 1960s when TV was taking the country by storm and local news content took pride of place. In 1965 Hawke was asked by the NZ Broadcasting Corporation to set up a camera department in Dunedin for DNTV2. This required some sweet talking as he was due to undertake his compulsory military service.
After a year’s delay the requirement caught up with him and he had to temporarily move to Burnham Military Camp for training.
In 1967, Hawke began a tour of duty as a military correspondent for the Ministry of Defence in the Vietnam War.
Based in Singapore, he covered the New Zealanders’ activities and, sometimes, the Australians. Initially tempted to work for the much better paid US networks, his interest quickly waned when he realised that too many of those reporters and cameramen didn’t always return from a day’s combat assignment.
His tour of duty eventually over, Hawke boarded a ship for Australia. Rest and recuperation possible. It is so important to become invisible. All messages between the crew were carried out by hand signals’’.
Hawke was fortunate to meet three of NZ’s most eminent women writers – Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Ngaio Marsh and Janet Frame thanks to being asked to produce a documentary on the trio for NZBC.
‘‘I remember Ngaio had a fabulous car’’, he laughs. ‘‘It was a black Jaguar and she let me drive it up the Port Hills.
‘‘Everyone said that Janet was a recluse and I would have to pussyfoot around her. She was actually a lovely lady and a pleasure to work with’’.
Later on, he worked on an adventure series that included jet boating and climbing with Sir Ed Hillary. ‘‘My lasting impression is of him flying through the air’’, he says, laughing again. On one shoot Sir Ed rowed him and a crew out to a needle rock off the Northland Coast where they clambered ashore and climbed the near vertical rock face,
In 1975 came one of Keith’s greatest adventures – the NZ Himalayan Expedition to Mt Jannu in Nepal. Sir Ed’s wife Louise and daughter Belinda had recently died in a plane crash in Kathmandu but Sir Ed walked into the basecamp with the team regardless.
‘‘He was a good guy’’, says Hawke, ‘‘someone you could see on any farm in NZ. A Kiwi bloke with a good heart’’.
The Jannu expedition was a test of endurance in the extreme. In addition to the climbers (Graeme
‘‘I drew stock and decided that my interests were simple.’’
Dingle was one) and camera crew, 17 Sherpas and 70porters made up the team for the 17-day exercise. Not only did vast amount of heavy camera equipment have to be carted to very high altitudes, the conditions were often horrendous.
Temperatures were freezing, there was altitude sickness, leeches and diarrhoea to contend with, constant damp and dangerous, almost impossible climbs. ‘‘We had to get up vertical rock faces. I had done some climbing but wasn’t prepared for the extreme conditions,’’ he says. ‘‘High altitude cameraman Waka Attewell had a dual responsibility as he was also charged with keeping me alive on the mountain’’.
Determined as ever to do a good job, Keith pushed fear aside and counts the expedition as one of his most memorable.
Work on the series ‘‘The Spirit of Asia’’ followed. It was an opportunity to explore Asian countries that were not so well known. First stop was Burma, where the crew lived for a time with a travelling circus.
‘‘To have an elephant gently brush past you in the back of the tent in pitch darkness required a great deal of faith that I wasn’t going to be crushed by those enormous feet,’’ he says.
His favourite job however was a multi-million dollar film documentary for giant manufacturer Caterpillar.
‘‘By 1982, Louise and I were based in Hong Kong and I had set up Hawke Films to produce documentaries for corporate customers,’’ he explains.
‘‘I put together an outrageous proposal where Caterpillar equipment would be filmed in multiple environments around the globe and the Caterpillar board loved it,’’ he says. ‘‘We went from the oldest working Cat in Queenstown to tea farms in Kenya, the coal mines in Kentucky and to apple orchards in Japan. We went once around the world and three times across the USA. It was a hell of an adventure.’’
The result was the most significant corporate film for a US company for many years.
Hawke and Louise spent 12 years based in Hong Kong. Louise was a founding member of the Hong Kong Ballet and danced as Prima Ballerina while Hawke worked on any projects that excited him. Monumental was his five years’ documentation of the demolition and rebuilding of the famous Hong Kong Bank headquarters.
One of the most expensive buildings ever built, the massive project was complicated and demanding. Different sections of the structure were produced in different parts of the world and coordination was challenging.
‘‘We spent a total of 200 days filming,’’ says Hawke. ‘‘Nothing could be left out and by the end of it I was extremely knowledgeable about engineering and design.’’
When the job was finished the chairman sent a copy of the film to every major TV station in the world. Hawke was very happy in Asia. ‘‘I’m the most Asian westerner you’ll find,’’ he chortles.
‘‘I love bargaining and understand how saving face in those cultures is so important.’’ It was time however for Louise to have her wish.
‘‘Working in Asia was hard for white women’’, he says. ‘‘Her dream was to come back to NZ and set up a ballet school’’.
Although he could keep working from wherever he was, it was vital to Hawke that Louise could have ‘‘her time’’.
Nelson is a far cry from the hustle and bustle of the big Asian cities he was so familiar with but Keith has continued to work. One of the challenges for him has been the massive change in technology in the film industry through the years. Long gone are the familiar rolls of 16 and 35mm film and heavy camera gear.
‘‘Now my daughter, Maya Hawke, a documentary film maker and editor in the USA, edits feature documentaries on her Mac’’, he says.
Meanwhile his son, Nick Hawke, is filming documentaries in places like Nicaragua, Thailand, Bali and the UK using equipment that is far lighter than he ever had access to. ‘‘Technology though is only a tool to tell a story’’, he explains. ‘‘I’ve never had one more piece of equipment than what I’ve needed’’.
Hawke is not optimistic about documentary film making in NZ these days.
‘‘Asia is so much more technologically advanced and TV here has become so dumbed down, political and commercially driven’’, he says. ‘‘My early career was so involved with serious investigative programmes and documentaries. What I see now is beautifully shot but lacking any original script approaches. The cost of buying a reality TV show from overseas is a fraction of the cost of making a good documentary here so the art of serious film making is not being learnt by young people coming into the industry.’’
Currently Hawke is working with his business partner in China on a coproduction feature film and as well as being busy with a substantial job sheet of fascinating projects.
‘‘I am fascinated by anything and everything.’’
In addition to producing work for NZ companies he is currently undertaking a ‘‘Women of Influence’’ series, targeted at girls who are leaving school and young mothers who want to get back into the workforce. Conversations with rural people whose lives have been affected by depression and suicide is another project on the go as is ‘‘In Good Hands – Angiography’’, a documentary where nurses tell their story.
He has also produced a history of Pic’s Peanut Butter, a series of stories from the elders in Bhutanese families and a documentary on the making and performance of the opera ‘‘Hohepa’’ by Jenny and Craig McLeod.
Between interviews for this story, he was several times in the Hauraki Gulf and the Marlborough Sounds, shooting for a documentary on marine protection areas.
First priority, however, is wife Louise.
At the end of each year she writes and produces a ballet performed by a combination of her students and visiting members of the Royal NZ Ballet. The latest performance was a work celebrating the great composer Tchaikovsky and Hawke’s job was to help build the set, manage all the lighting and lay down the multiple soundtracks required, along with producing a documentary of the highlights.
There is clearly to be no rest for this irrepressible cameraman and film maker. The technical equipment may have changed dramatically from the 1960s but there is no replacement for the documentary maker’s intrinsic skill in telling stories.
‘‘I have an insatiable curiosity,’’ says Hawke. ‘‘I am fascinated by anything and everything. I love to spend time with people and then meld into the woodwork as the story emerges.’’