Goodbye to Kiwi film pioneer
It was a life as colourful and irreverent as his best-known film, Goodbye Pork Pie. Pioneering film-maker Geoff Murphy originally wanted to be a fighter pilot. He was short-listed for a place, but the Air Force decided he lacked leadership skills. He drifted through school, university, engineering and teaching, looking for something to be exceptional at – to the point that, when he wrote his 2015 memoir, he worried he was simply cataloguing his failures.
But at university, he discovered jazz and actor-to-be Bruno Lawrence. At Wellington’s Studio Jazz Club, he discovered marijuana and actor Ian Mune. Somewhere between the two, he discovered his passion.
And when it came to making movies, he found a new mantra:
‘‘There was no such thing as can’t.’’
At a time when the government-run film unit controlled everything from funding to equipment, Murphy pioneered the art of making do. There was no money, no film schools and no cheap digital cameras. His first major film project, The Magic Hammer, was based on an operetta he wrote for his Newtown School pupils, before he also dropped out of teaching. Then-wife Pat made costumes from thrift shop clothes; the set – refashioned from dumped television backdrops – was ferried to the site on the Morris Minor roofrack. They built a tracking dolly and camera crane and smuggled a tape recorder in from Sydney, after being refused an import licence.
‘‘In 1970, getting a feature film up and running seemed impossible,’’ Murphy recalled. ‘‘As time went on, people ignored the impossible and began to plan their features.’’
When Lawrence bought a 1949 Leyland Tiger bus and founded Bruno Lawrence’s Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition (Blerta), Murphy and family joined him. It was a touring extravaganza – a crazy confection of music, mixed media and mixed drugs. The drugs were strictly off-set – he didn’t want to mess with the work.
When Murphy left Blerta in 1972, he had five kids, no house and no job. He joined forces with equally-broke film enthusiasts Alun Bollinger, Martyn Sanderson and others to buy a 1-acre block with two derelict houses in Waimarama, Hawke’s Bay. They set up a film-maker’s commune, alternating gardening and pig killing with building Ma¯ ori village sets and shooting movies.
While they started at the bottom of the heap – struggling to feed the kids – the commune proved a fount of creativity. Within a decade they were all celebrated in their fields – Sanderson and Lawrence had both been actor of the year, Bollinger was in demand as a cinematographer and Murphy was the country’s top film director. ‘‘We all just rose together,’’ Murphy recalled.
When Goodbye Pork Pie opened in 1981, it broke box office records and sold to more than 20 countries. It took Murphy by surprise – he thought he was making movies for a ‘‘lout intellectual’’ minority. Even in later years he rated it a ‘‘very good’’, but not great, film.
Its success, followed by Utu and The Quiet Earth, earned him a Hollywood callup. But even the madness of Blerta and a hippy commune did not prepare him for the madness that was Hollywood. He lasted a decade, directing action blockbusters, including Young Guns 2, Under Siege 2 and Freejack, and action scenes as a respected second-unit director.
He worked with top talent such as Mickey Rourke and Helen Mirren, and paid off his yawning New Zealand tax debt. But in the end the anti-authoritarian wasn’t cut out for a world that seemed to be less about directing skills and more about your ability to mollify neurotic studio bosses.
Murphy was no saint, and his personal life was complicated. His 22-year marriage to Pat dissolved after a long affair with Diane Kearns. In the interim he ditched both to pursue fellow film-maker Merata Mita. Their son Heperi’s first memory of his dad was of him blowing up a house in Ponsonby for his film Never Say Die.
He remembered Murphy as a grizzled old director puffing on a cigarette, but archive reels showed ‘‘a bunch of mischief-makers picking up a camera and having a bit of fun while under the influence of some sort of mind-altering substance’’. He also recalled a man who stood up for the little people – including a cast of elderly Mexican women being barked at by an over-zealous director.
Murphy rated Utu as his best work, but when it first opened in 1983, it was panned by critics. When a remastered version was released in 2013, however, it received rapturous critical acclaim. It typified the late-life adulation Murphy received, which culminated in a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2013 Moa NZ Film awards. Murphy was also named as one of New Zealand’s 20 greatest living artists by the Arts Foundation, and was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the 2014 New Year Honours.
It didn’t stop him being blunt and antiestablishment to the end, decrying the ongoing lack of funding for New Zealand stories: ‘‘All the support goes to Peter Jackson to make American f...ing pictures,’’ he lamented in 2015.
He was cynical of the sudden rush to praise: ‘‘I thought they were never going to notice,’’ he joked.
Murphy was a true pioneer at a time when, as he put it, ‘‘qualifications mattered far less than spirit, initiative, inventiveness and results’’. ‘‘If you wanted to make films, you had to be tenacious, persevering, devious and lucky’’. And Murphy was all of those things. – By Nikki Macdonald
‘‘In 1970, getting a feature film up and running seemed impossible. As time went on, people ignored the impossible and began to plan their features.’’