Petaia returns to second home
Filming One Thousand Ropes allowed one Samoan actor an opportunity to revisit his old haunts, he tells James Croot.
Anew Kiwi film sees the welcome return of an old face to our screens. The star of 1979 film Sons for the Return Home, Uelese Petaia went on to be one of the faces of 1980s youth current affairs show Viewfinder and had a role in TV band drama Heroes. After that, he simply disappeared, that is – until now.
One Thousand Ropes shows what the world has been missing for the past 30 years. Petaia delivers a terrific performance as Maea, a former boxer, trying to escape his violent past, while working two jobs (as a baker and a pregnancy masseuse) and almost literally wrestling with demons.
Speaking from his native Samoa, where he has lived for the past three decades, the avuncular Petaia admits his reintroduction to film-making didn’t quite happen in the usual way.
‘‘Tusi [Tamasese, the film’s writer-director] was told that I was still alive and then he sent someone [actually Tamasese’s brother] to try and do an audition. It was the day before I was due to go to Australia on a business trip. They asked me in the afternoon and an hour later we had filmed one.’’
He says he still had no idea what he was actually signed up for, until a phone call later came saying that they were sending him the script.
And it only took a glance for Petaia to confirm his interest.
‘‘I thought, ‘thank goodness they found me’. I’m very strong on anti-violence and I felt the character was important enough for me to be involved and ensure that our people get to find out about how bad domestic violence is in making families break apart. I was also trying to bring out that you can redeem yourself and come back and make things better.’’
For his own part, Tamasese says he was not only convinced Petaia was the right man to play Maea, his audition even gave him food for thought on how to make the character better.
‘‘In the script, the main character was quite brutal and physically intimidating. Uelese was this guy who almost looks like Santa Claus and he delivered something that’s had this almost gentle feel to it. I thought, ‘this is more powerful than what I’ve written. Someone who doesn’t look intimidating, but still brings out violence – I’ll try this one’.’’
Petaia says bringing the character to life was both easy and hard.
‘‘I knew the kind of person he [Maea] was. I’d seen a lot of that in my own personal life with my uncles and extended family – people who ruled with their fists. But, at the same time, working out why they do that and how it affects them – that was the hard part. Also, the juxtaposition of being so violent with his hands and being able to calmly massage these women.’’
However, having spent a lot of time following his midwife grandmother around Samoa as a child, pregnancy massage was a familiar concept to him. he says.
‘‘She would travel all around. I used to sit mesmerised at her calmness and how she used her hands to make them feel comfortable.’’
He needed more help with kneading dough. ‘‘We spent a lot of time with Wellington bakers getting to know their ways.’’
The capital used to be home to Petaia, before he went back to Samoa in 1985 to look after his elderly parents. He lived in Newtown for two years in the early 1980s, after finishing Sons for the Return Home.
He chuckles at the serendipity of returning to a familiar place after all these years. ‘‘When I asked ‘where are we filming these apartments?’ Tusi said they were called the Arlington Apartments. I laughed, because that’s where I used to live. It felt like coming home.’’
Had much changed? ‘‘Not much,’’ he says, ‘‘except there is much more variety of people living there. I noticed a lot more other ethnic groups – not just Pacific Islanders.’’
Petaia says naturally he noticed more change in the film-making process.
‘‘You don’t have to sit around any more until everything is processed a couple of days later to see whether things turned out – you can go and watch the video of it soon after the take.
‘‘I enjoy stage productions because you get that immediate reaction, so its great to be able to replicate that now on a film set. It is a lot more oiled machinery than in the past.’’
Not that he’s ever given much of a chance in Samoa to forget his Sons role as Sione.
‘‘People are always coming up to me as if they know me really well. I think, ‘how the hell do I know this person? I’ve never met them before’, and then they go ‘I really enjoyed that film you were in’.’’
Petaia thinks that film has also had a lasting impact on Samoa.
‘‘You still see and hear a lot of the problems that Sons For the Return Home was trying to bring out. But being the first time Samoa had been cast in such a major production, it generated such a lot of interest in there, and later on, when we came to do other smaller productions for both TV and film, people had become more astute and understanding of the demands of making something.’’
With both his parents now having died and his family all grown up, Petaia says Ropes has come just at the right time for him. So does that mean we may see more of him? Does he have plans to challenge Dwayne Johnson as Samoa’s No 1 acting son?
Petaia’s instant guffaw is backed by a loud rooster crow. ‘‘Dwayne does what he does and he does it well. Maybe if we get to see him if he comes to visit again we could hand him a couple of storylines he might be interested in.’’
In the meantime, he’s been busy doing promotional work for Ropes, which included a visit to the Berlin Film Festival in February and organising last week’s Samoan premiere in Apia.
Proud of the film and his director, Petaia hopes it’s a film that will resonate with and haunt audiences.
‘‘I hope men leave the cinema thinking to be ambassadors of nonviolence in villages and families and I hope women go away empowered knowing they can stand up to violence. They don’t have to take it.’’ ❚ One Thousand Ropes (M) is now screening in select cinemas.