By Dov Kornits
“He did turn up on the first day and go, ‘Um, where’s my trailer,’” smiles actor, Temuera Morrison, when FilmInk asks if his Mahana director, Lee Tamahori, was any different after having worked in Hollywood for many years. “And then he was just down on the ground, like ‘Oh, here it is.’ That was wonderful.” After finding fame together on 1994’s epochal New Zealand drama, Once Were Warriors – a searing account of the urban Maori experience anchored by Temuera’s Raging Bull-style performance as Jake The Mus, a brutal, unforgiving patriarch – the duo are back in their native New Zealand for Mahana. It’s Tamahori’s first film in his homeland since Once Were Warriors (the disappointing 1999 sequel, What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted, was directed by Ian Mune), which he followed up with a fistful of studio and indie movies in Hollywood, including Mulholland Falls, The Edge, Along Came A Spider, Die Another Day, xXx 2: The Next Level, Next, and The Devil’s Double.
Based on the classic NZ novel by Witi Ihimaera, Mahana follows the teenaged Simeon (an impressive performance from newcomer, Akuhata Keefe), who is on the verge of becoming a man, with all the attendant baggage that comes with this in his tight-knit rural community. Always looking forward instead of back, Simeon constantly bristles under the over-stern tutelage of his grandfather, who is the feared (and sometimes hated) patriarch of the Manahan clan. “It’s a tricky thing putting Temuera in this movie because of the previous film that we had done,” Tamahori tells FilmInk after the screening of Mahana at The Sydney Film Festival. “Because he’s such a larger than life character, I didn’t want people looking at him and drawing the same comparisons with this character from 20 years ago in Once Were Warriors. I think that we succeeded in laying that ghost to rest, because you start to take him as you should, at face value as this different character. There are echoes of the old character, but it’s not the same guy.”
You haven’t made a film since The Devil’s Double in 2011… “Well actually, I have made one. There’s another one that I’ve been making in Europe. I’ve been making it for three years, and it’s still not finished. I’ve got a producer that’s out of control and won’t pay the bills to finish it. Mahana comes along on the coattails of that.”
Did Mahana take a long time to put together? “There was a deal done between the Mahana producer and the Emperor producer, which is the film that I’m making in Europe. They both wanted to go in 2013, and the Emperor producer is the one that tossed the coin, and we started working on that in 2013, with a view that we’d be coming back and making Mahana in 2014. But the project fell by the wayside and got into terrible difficulties, so we moved on to Mahana in 2015, which is a year later than we wanted to. So I came back, finished that, and then went back to Europe and still haven’t finished Emperor. It’s quite a complicated mess. But Mahana was a dream. We just came in and shot it. It was very efficient and effective…the way a film should be! We shot it, and finished it in less than a year. The other one was like Terry Gilliam’s Lost In La Mancha!”
It’s easy to compare Mahana to Once Were Warriors… “That was always going to happen because Temuera is in the lead role. He was a very, very aggressive father figure in Once Were Warriors, and now he’s got a few more years under his belt, but he’s playing another patriarchal father figure. Both stories also take place in a very particular time period. The culture is sort of fractured more now. In the middle part of the 20th century after WW2, the Maori culture was emerging from the shadows of a de-populated people who were only on the land and in rural environments. Maori never came to the cities in New Zealand until after the 1950s, and that’s when our story is set. It really frames the milieu of this story and this period. It’s about a young man gaining an education through a European part in our education, and learning that there is a much greater and more different world out there than the one he’s known. And yet both of them have huge relevance. So he’s finding himself in many ways. Like all young people, he has to stand up and seize the time. That’s what it’s about. The two of them go at each other, because Temuera’s character is old school and status quo, and Akuhata’s character represents the coming of the new. It leads to all sorts of major conflicts.”
How did you find Akuhata Keefe? “Well, strangely enough, I was looking for a smaller guy. Akuhata is a big guy. I wanted a smaller guy because Temuera is not tall. I didn’t want to have a teenage male towering over him, because it would reduce his stature. That gave me a mindset where I was looking for a smaller, wiry character. But Akuhata came in, and I just threw all that out the window because he was the right guy for the job. In fact, it turned out to be a better choice in the end because it meant that when they face off physically, as they do in the film, you tend to believe that the young guy could whip the old guy if it comes to it. It never does, of course, but you need to understand that it might happen. With a smaller, wiry guy, you’re not going to believe that quite so readily.”
Was it different looking for young actors today, as compared to when you were casting Once Were Warriors? “When we made Once Were Warriors, there were very few Maori actors. There were a handful of professional Maori actors, and now there are a lot. And so, on this film, we had the advantage of being able to work with a lot of people that I’ve never worked with before…people with high quality expertise. But as with Once Were Warriors, when you have to start going below the age of 15, you’re pulling kids out of high school and you’re creating them from scratch. That hasn’t changed. But there is a wealth of talent out there now…it’s vast. Kids are more confident now. They’ve all got phones and they’re doing selfies. Everyone wants to be in front of a camera now. You can’t stop them. You’ve got to push them out of the way. It’s much easier to deal with people. I can go to any high school in the country and pull someone out of the class and they’re not intimidated by it. No one is shy. When we were casting Once Were Warriors, there was a lot of shyness, because they didn’t trust the medium…in some cases, they’d never seen a camera before. There were no real video cameras or phones back then.”
It’s a fascinating depiction of the male Maori experience… “Witi Ihimaera, who wrote the story, has written this story before. He has written many books, and many of them feature himself as this young man. Akuhata is actually channeling the writer, Witi Ihimaera, because he came from a poor rural farming family, exactly like this character, so he is that character really. Witi was from that new generation of smart, educated young Maori, who were going to go through university and carve a new career for themselves in the modern world of the 1960s and ’70s. That’s what Akuhata represents in the film. The film is set on the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand, and that doesn’t mean anything to anybody other than to those who know. But it is a little bit like the American South, but for New Zealand. It’s very Maori, and it’s very old school. The men don’t say very much. They’re very taciturn…they’re like Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine, and they don’t say very much. They’re like characters from American westerns. Temuera’s character says very little, but what he says carries a huge amount of weight. My dad was like that, and my grandfather was like that. Luckily I don’t think I am. I talk my head off now.”
How did your working experiences overseas inform this film? “It didn’t inform it at all, actually. I just approached this as I would any New Zealand film. All my films overseas have been fairly large budget studio pieces, but back here in New Zealand, and Australia, it’s independent film. That’s what we make. The large companies come in and make their films here. Australia is a backlot for American film and so is New Zealand. But when we make our own films, we deal with our own culture. It was still very much like it was when I did Once Were Warriors. It was pretty much the same way that I have always made these type of films: tight budget, not much time, and a cast of relatively unknown actors. You don’t get cursed with the problems that you do with large scale A-list Hollywood actors, which can be quite problematic. It can be great in some ways, but terrible in others.”
Has the film resonated with New Zealand audiences? “I knew that it would be a hard sell because it’s a period piece, and it’s seen a little bit through rose coloured spectacles. It’s not a romantic piece, and it’s got a really nasty sting in its tail, but it is a loving look at a period of time that actually existed that I remember very well. It’s before things turned really bad…and things did turn very bad. Once Maori moved to the cities, it was all over. It was high density ghetto urbanisation, which is where Once Were Warriors came from. You could arguably say that this film was a precursor to what was about to come. Once you factor in no work, alcohol, drugs, large families, poor self-esteem, and violence, the rest is history. Those are all the precursors.”
Mahana is in cinemas now. Click through for our review of the film.