Kiwi film’s location has own story to tell
Back in September 2015, a mate of mine crushed a vertebrae in his lower back. He had been booked to start work that week as the location manager on a new lowbudget New Zealand-made feature film to be called One Thousand Ropes. He called me into replace him.
And that’s how I came to spend the last month or so of 2015 fighting off the Wellington spring weather and getting to know the residents of the community of council-owned houses that once stood between Taranaki and Hopper streets.
Ian Athfield had the morefamous Arlington Apartments tower block over the road on his CV. But of whoever designed the low-rise village, there is no official mention.
Seems to me that someone is being too modest. The architects’ solutions to the challenges of middensity, low-cost family housing were deceptively creative and generous.
The brief was to provide affordable inner-city housing for working families and singles.
I’d never stopped to admire the subtlety of those buildings before working there. But soon I began to notice that every house caught its own patch of sunlight, every morning and every night.
That no front door opened opposite another.
That no two houses within sight of each other were ever quite identical.
There was a measure of dignity in those houses, I’m not sure many people ever noticed. Privacy and dignity sure weren’t the words most people I know ever used to describe the place. Not in the last few years anyway. Location managing is a funny sort of job with a lot of intangible rewards.
The film crew generally believe you exist to protect them from whatever the location has to offer. While the owners of the location are under the impression that you are there to protect their property from the damage that a film crew can cause. I guess both are true.
By 2015, the village was a looseknit community of people recovering from one affliction or another, alongside recent immigrants, refugees and the elderly.
Working on One Thousand Ropes, it was pretty obvious that the residents were more worried about the crew than we were of them.
In between the relocations in rush hour, the guarding of the parking spaces and the hundreds of calls to the Wellington City Council – who were fantastic – and all that other fun stuff location managers do, I got to watch as director Tusi Tamasese (The Orator), cinematographer Leon Narbey, producer Catherine Fitzgerald and a Wellington crew worked for six weeks to do justice to that unrepeatable location. Whether we have is for you to decide.
But for me, One Thousand Ropes will always be a portrait of a place I came to like very much.
A collection of houses designed and built to house one set of dreams, that came to shelter a community that 1980’s economics dreamed into existence.
There’s a new set of modular houses being built now. With a kaupapa remarkably similar to the original 1960’s plan for this site.
The designs looks pretty good. I hope that for a few generations at least, they are allowed to do the job they were designed for. But even if they’re not, I’m sure that pretty soon this new village will have its own stories to tell.