Kiwi actress has love affair with Otago
Back on the big screen in Kiwi actress Emily Barclay talks to about returning to Otago and working with Rachel Weisz.
It’s the most magical part of the world. Every time I go there I think to myself, ‘I wonder why I don’t spend more time there’?’’
It’s not Los Angeles, Sydney or Plymouth, Emily Barclay is enthusing about, although she has lived in all those places, but rather the Edinburgh of the south – Dunedin.
It’s nice to hear my hometown getting such wraps from the Kiwi actress, just as it is to see parts of it dressed up on the big screen, albeit standing in for Australia, in The Light Between Oceans.
Out next month, Derek Cianfrance’s ( My Blue Valentine) film is an adaptation of ML Stedman’s 1920s-set novel about a lighthouse keeper and his wife who rescue and adopt an infant girl at sea, only to discover that the child’s mother is still searching for her.
Starring Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander and Rachel Weisz, it was filmed at Central Otago’s St Bathans, Marlborough’s Cape Campbell and in various spots in and around Dunedin’s harbour basin.
‘‘It was so amazing. Getting up every morning and going to work with that backdrop doesn’t get any better than that,’’ says Barclay, who plays the sister of Weisz’s character in the movie.
Originally scheduled to spend her Dunedin days in a hotel, the now 31-year-old actress, who first burst onto the scene in 2004’s In My Father’s Den, was floored when Weisz invited her to take the spare room of the countryside cottage she was staying in.
‘‘That was a bit of a dream come true,’’ Barclay says of working with the Oscar-winning actress.
‘‘She is one of the most incredible actors working right now and she is a dream of a human being as well.
‘‘Watching her work was pretty extraordinary. The ability she has to just flick over into this kind of place. I’ve no idea how she does it – she’s a genius.’’
Based in Sydney of late, the England-born, New Zealand-raised Barclay admits it was actually the chance to come back across the Tasman and work with Cianfrance that attracted her to the role.
She had heard he liked to work in a slightly different way to many directors, something she encountered right from the audition stage.
‘‘We all auditioned with a scene or two from the film, but it seemed like he mostly cast from his instincts of what you were like. He was less interested in the scenes and more in talking and hearing about you and your life and who you are.
‘‘That’s always quite a relief to me because auditions are so strange and difficult. You go in and you have to prepare this thing and give this little performance which is nothing like what you actually have to do when you are doing the job. It’s nice to be able to have a conversation with someone and for it to feel a little bit more human than ‘go on, show me what you’ve got’.’’
Cianfrance’s unique approach to film-making continued during the shoot, which Barclay admits was ‘‘incredible, but terrifying’’.
‘‘You have to give yourself over completely to the process. Most of what we did was improvised. You have a script, but it’s very much a rough guide to what should be happening in the story at that point.
‘‘If you’re not meant to have met someone in the story, he’ll try to not have you meet as actors before you do that scene together.
‘‘He’ll set up a scene and you don’t start form the moment you say the line that is scripted – you start from 10 minutes earlier, when you walk into the building and ask to find the person you need to speak to. It was like being in another world – it really was.’’
Anxious to impress, Barclay admits she did an embarrassing amount of work in preparation for the role, naturally including reading the book.
Also helping her get into character was costume designer Erin Benach.
‘‘She had sourced the most incredible things, there were hundreds of things to try on and I certainly wasn’t a huge character in the film. These clothes were almost antiques, so delicate and beautiful and fragile and you do feel different when wearing them.’’
Likewise set dressing and production design helped set the 1920s mood, although Cianfrance took it a step further than most, Barclay says.
‘‘Derek likes to able to shoot 360, so he will set up a room or a house or an area so that he doesn’t have to reset it. So it’s not like half of the room looks like the 1920s, it’s every single detail in the entire room. That’s pretty amazing, you feel pretty immersed.’’
When asked whether she’s noticed many differences between Kiwi film production now and back in the early 2000s in Roxburgh on Father’s Den, she demures.
‘‘I was so young and it was really one of my first experiences on a film set. There were also a lot of American crew on this film. Having said that, a film set is a film set is a film set wherever you are and I don’t think it fundamentally changes very much.
‘‘Of course, they were incredibly different experience, although I think there was similar magic on both films. Being involved in two films that people believed in very much has been very exciting.’’
For someone who we associate with critically acclaimed film performances (although she actually started out as a 14-year-old on Shortland Street), it seems strange that Oceans marks her first movie role in five years.
After her success as a troubled tomboy in Father’s Den and a showstopping, sexy turn in Suburban Mayhem (which also earned her the somewhat dubious attention of noughties lads mags like FHM), she became more famous for protesting against cruelty to pigs outside John Key’s electorate office in Kumeu.
Then she dropped off our radar and into the Sydney theatre scene (performing stage classics by the likes of Chekhov, Wilde and Shakespeare), before recently garnering terrific notices and a Logie nomination for her role as Sarah Hayes in the Aussie paranormal drama Glitch
A second season of that, now backed by Netflix, will shoot early next year, while Barclay has also recently completed the fourth season of dramedy Please Like Me.
However, her most immediate concern is seeing Oceans on the big screen.
‘‘Yes, I haven’t seen the film yet,’’ she confesses. ‘‘I shot so much, sometimes we had seven hours of rushes at the end of the day, but I think I’m probably in the film for only two seconds.’’
Still, even if that is the case, which I assure her it isn’t, Barclay says the opportunity to come home was more than worth it.
‘‘I love working in New Zealand. The crews are incredible and the locations are always absolutely stunning.’’
(M) opens in New Zealand cinemas on November 3.