NZ Herald October 2001
Summertime Blues
After making a splash at international festivals, Christine Jeffs' debut feature Rain is about to catch local audiences in an emotional downpour, writes Russell Baillie.
Christine Jeffs is describing a single sequence in her movie Rain. As she speaks about how the camera moves from room to room and character to character she weaves her hands with tai-chi-like grace in front of her eyes.
She's actually talking about how Neil Finn's music (see story, F5) helps change the mood of a scene at a mid-point in film through its series of cuts. But as her hands dance you can see a little hint of the film-maker within - the director who has made her debut feature having already established herself as a film editor and an in-demand, prize-winning shooter of commercials.
Rain is a first movie of a first novel - that of London-resident New Zealand writer Kirsty Gunn, first published in 1994.
Jeffs' movie expands and embellishes the slim, evocative volume about a teenage girl's recollections of an early-70s summer spent holidaying at the bach just as her family pulls itself apart.
The result is a powerful film that has already had a warm reception. It was accepted into the Directors Fortnight at this years Cannes Film Festival, has also shown at the Montreal, Toronto, Edinburgh, Melbourne and local film festivals, and distributors in North America and France have bought the work for cinematic release.
But here, on the eve of its commercial release, Rain is likely to be talked about for the combined effect of its depiction of the period and its sheer emotional clout.
When I mention to Jeffs that two women of my acquaintance, both of whom grew up in the 70s, separately saw it at festival screenings and found it utterly poignant for its echoes of their own childhoods and families, she replies that's been a widespread reaction - and not just in New Zealand.
"It's interesting you say that, because people have had very personal responses to it universally. And when I've done question-and-answer sessions at Melbourne and at Toronto just a couple of weeks ago, a lot of people crowded afterwards to actually talk to me about their personal response quite in depth and a lot of them had been very emotionally moved.
"They've been strongly engaged by the movie and in a lot of cases quite shell-shocked in what it brought out in them."
Jeffs is talking in the offices of her company The Girl (so named because advertising agencies were always saying "we should get, y'know, the girl"). The space is an open-plan wonder of interior design situated in Auckland's screen-production precinct behind Victoria Park Market.
Upstairs it's all polished floors and iMacs, downstairs a vintage Land Rover sits in the garage next to a small boardroom. The advertising work has obviously proved lucrative.
Jeffs has wanted to make Rain into a film since the mid-90s. She had done a short film, Stroke, which she says was designed more as an exercise in showing her craft as a film editor than the result of a burning ambition to be a director and so the scripts- and the advertising work - kept rolling in.
"But I never found something I could put myself into. When I read the book I felt very strongly connected with it. I think part of it was the kind of poetic and metaphorical nature of the landscape in the writing and the emotions and things kind of resonated quite strongly with me. So I hung on to the book for a while and it just stuck with me."
She took the story to producer Robin Scholes, who procured the film rights. Jeffs' initial creative hurdle was the screenplay: "The first thing was the actual story and the translation of the smallish novel - it had a substantive enough emotional resonance because it had kind of big themes there, but it was, in the plot sense, small on the page and the characters needed fleshing out.
"One thing I learned about Rain is that it's not necessarily about what is on the page. You can pick up a lot from the tone of the book or there are a lot of clues there. I personally responded to the clues as much as anything else, and things that personally resonated with me, and then you can develop those things and extend from them. A lot of books that are adapted are very much about plot, but this one I had a different connection with."
As well as modifying some of the adult characters, Jeffs changed the location - from what is ostensibly Taupo in the book to a sheltered, tidal east coast beach.
With the script finished, funding came through from the New Zealand Film Commission in late 1999 and it was a rush to cast the film. The main adult roles of Dad/Ed (Alistair Browing), Mum/Kate (Sarah Peirse) and interloper Cady (Marton Csokas) were cast through the usual auditions, with Peirse returning from London for the role.
The harder mission was to find youngsters to play Janey and her little bother Jim.
Jeffs found 14-year-old Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki in Wellington and at the last minute cast the scene-stealing Aaron Murphy, of Puhoi, as Jim.
Jeffs says she made sure Fulford-Wierzbicki and her family were fully aware of the content of the script and what it meant for her character.
"One of the key things I spoke to her about early on was the depth of emotion that was going to be required from the character and we talked about how she was going to access different parts of herself to show that. For her - and for me - there were lots of scary things she had to do in the film."
And for Murphy, Rain was a different sort of learning curve - he had to learn to swim.
"He was very nervous of the water, he doesn't swim at all which was great for the character of the little boy in the film so he had to learn. Even from the safety point of view we had to give him lessons just to give him confidence around the water, and you can sort of see that through the character - he isn't a very physical kind of child and there is a kind of fragility about him." The film was shot on the Mahurangi Peninsula at the end of summer last year.
Yes, smiles Jeff, it was different making a low-budget feature rather than a just-so visually stylish commercial set against the advertising industry's culture of excess.
"I always thought when I had the chance to make a film that I would have a chance to spend time on the visual side, but the mere fact of working with the budget that we had and what the time frame was, it was rip shit and bust.
"The camera was on the shoulder and we were literally running all day and screaming and yelling and carrying on. It was complete chaos just to get it done. Getting it done was the main thing - it wasn't so much about art - so it's amazing that people respond to its beauty, because somehow that seeped through."
Despite its 1970s setting, Jeff says she was careful of not overdoing the period feel.
"We specifically steered away from the brighter colours - the oranges of the 70s and the big flares and that kind of stuff so it was more real. Not every 70s family experience is of that fashion, so it's not about fashion - it's more about a sense of that place and a sense of that time.
"It evokes the period of my childhood and I would like to call it timeless - it's slightly a vague term, but it had to be of that era. It wasn't a today story but it had to be relevant if, for example, kids watched it today."
Throughout it all Jeffs has some extra support in partner John Toon, also the film's cinematographer and associate producer. He shot with mostly hand-held cameras. "I feel very comfortable with the camera on the shoulder and three people in a tiny real space - on the usual 35mm film, but mainly on grainy 16mm stock for both budgetary and stylistic reasons," Jeffs says.
"One of the great things is that we have a coded language. We each have individual missions in terms of our roles as cinematographer and director. We find a way to compromise where necessary for the greater good, but I think that happens in all director-cinematographer relations - so long as you've got a good one."
Now Jeffs is on the hunt for another big story to tell in between those small-screen commercials. She is in good company locally - even big-league Kiwi directors such as Lee Tamahori and Vincent Ward continue to shoot advertisements between films.
She's got an agent in Los Angeles and has been sent scripts of American films but nothing she's liked so far. She's also got a pile of books that are getting dog-eared in the search for further inspiration.