Roger Donaldson: It's lost in the deep dark past… So much has happened since then it's hard to honestly go back and remember how things happened quite the way they did. Things like the difference between the book and the movie - it's over 30 years since I read the book, you know, so I don't really remember what the differences were. I do remember some key things, why it came along in the first place.

As I understand it, it as Bob Harvey who suggested adapting the novel?
Bob Harvey was the person who suggested Smith's Dream would make a good movie. The book Man Alone was also talked about.

So what was your connection with Bob at that stage? These days, of course, people think of him in terms of being something of a political institution - the mayor of Waitakere, a Film Commission board member and so on.
He was running one of the most successful advertising agencies in New Zealand at the time - one of the first boutique advertising agencies - and was at the cutting edge of the advertising business. I met him at a party at a photographer's studio. We got to know each other, he gave me some of my first work and the relationship sort of expanded from there.

Speaking of commercial work, am I right in thinking the vast majority of film work you'd done up until shooting Sleeping Dogs had been television commercials?
Well, that's not true, that's how I got going but what happened was I'd take money from making commercials and the other six months of the year I'd spend that money making films. So I did a number of documentaries, some of which Bob Harvey was involved with and some I did on my own, like the World's Fastest Indian documentary, Offerings To The God Of Speed. It all sort of changed when I met Ian Mune through Shirley Duke, an actress who was a mutual friend of ours. We hit it off right from the beginning of our first meeting - he was an actor and a stage director and I was shooting and directing films, making documentaries and commercials, so he said, "Why don't we combine our talents and try and do something in the world of drama?" And so we did combine our efforts and not long after we met we made a 40-minute film called Derek, a black and white drama that we were involved in writing. After that he and I went on and did a series of seven half-hour films called Winners and Losers. Those were some of the very first dramas -perhaps the very first dramas - that NZ had ever sold overseas; I think to 52 countries. There was a real interest in those films and they really were a big step in us getting going.

So was it on the back of winners and losers and the success of the ads that the money became available for Sleeping Dogs?
Yeah, that was where I got the enthusiasm and the belief that we could go bigger and better. The little documentary that's on the DVD that is about the making of it is probably more accurate than my memory. [The excellent doco in question was directed by John Reid and is included as part of The Roger Donaldson Collection DVD, which consists of Sleeping Dogs, Smash Palace and numerous extras. Recommended. - Ed]

In that documentary you say something along the lines that the money for Sleeping Dogs was available for a very short period of time…
Oh the money was never really there, it was patched together and it was really under-funded. Luckily we managed to get more funds towards the end to finish it. It got to a point at one stage where we ground to a halt because we had run out of money. Larry Parr was a big factor in helping getting the money together for it - he was working for Broadbank, which was Don Brash's outfit at the time.

That's pretty funny thing these days, Don Brash popping up in a completely different context.
I know. [chuckles]

And as I understand it, the money was obviously very tight, from what I remember, originally the budget was something like three, three-fifty [thousand] and that went up to about four-fifty [thousand] once you got some more money for post.
I don't think it was that much.

Really? Not that much?
My memory was that it was sort of like a hundred and something [thousand]. It might have finished up around the figures you quote but I don't think it started out like that.

Those were figures I gleaned from the documentary, so of course they may have adjusted for inflation. But the doco also suggested that once or twice maybe you disappeared from the shoot and actually direct a commercial to pay the wage bill.
That's right, yeah. That was more money in the kitty. [laughs]

I understand you were pretty involved in the script process with script writers Ian Mune and Arthur Baysting, and you had a fairly strong idea of how you wanted the film to go?
I knew the sort of movie I wanted to make. I wanted to make something that was a bit ambitious and have a story that had an appeal for the country and would also be something that held a message and some cultural significance for the country.
It's very hard to put myself back into that framework, but obviously I hoped it was going to go further afield than NZ, but I didn't really have anything to do with that, other than my previous history I'd had with the short stories that we sold.

Was there a sense you had that this was a valid look at the possible future for New Zealand?
I don't think I saw it as that, I saw it more as a cautionary tale that could apply to anywhere really, not specifically NZ.

Do you recall how long it was from the time you rang Ian [Mune] and asked him to do a treatment and when you actually began shooting?
I don't, but I'm sure it wasn't too long.

Was it a matter of months?
I would think probably six months or so.

Ian thought the actual shoot was maybe seven weeks…
I don't remember, I know it wasn't very long. It was a big movie if it was that long, for that time.

Do you remember anything about the casting at all?
I remember one very memorable part of the casting - I had wanted Jack Nicholson for the American character and I remember I had the phone number of his agent here in the States, so I called him up - I suspect the only reason he took the call was because it was a call from New Zealand. Anyway I got through to this guy and he asked what I wanted and I said I wanted Jack Nicholson for this film I was going to make. And he asked how much I was offering Jack and I said, "We've got $5000 in the budget." He was less than impressed with this figure and said, "Look, I don't think Jack's going to be coming," and I was obviously so disappointed and the call was so wacky that he said, "I'll tell you what, I've got this other actor I represent, Warren Oates. He's a fantastic actor." The truth was I didn't know who Warren Oates was at this stage - he told me the movies he'd been in and I remembered Badlands and The Wild Bunch but I couldn't remember him specifically so I did have to go back and look at those films to check him out. But he agreed to come for what was basically a couple of first class airfares and some fishing.

So were you slightly intimidated by him when he turned up?
I'm sure I was, he was a very experienced actor, but he had a great manner about him and he was fun to be around. And I wasn't too unsure of myself either at that point in my life. I felt like I knew what I was doing.

Sure - in the doco you talk about having a certain wilful blindness to what you were doing...
Yeah, if I'd known what I do know now, I never would have started doing it. [laughs] It really was hard going, I remember. But I also obviously enjoyed doing it or I wouldn't have done any more.

It struck me that that a certain amount of that bloodymindedness has stuck with you, given the hard road it obviously was in getting to finally make The World's Fastest Indian.
I think it never gets easier, I know that - when you're making films there's always something that goes wrong every day. Nothing is predictable and I think it's one of my strengths to tackle problems when they arise and solve them and get on with it - don't let them distract me and keep going.

In the doco Geoff Murphy makes some kind of suggestion that you have a bit of a visual orientation and you really need to see what people are referring to and have a look at options, but once you've got them in front of you you're very clear about which way you want to go. On Sleeping Dogs it also seemed there was a certain amount of seat of the pants stuff on the day because you were also an AD.
Well, you know, I'd put it a little bit more kindly to myself. [laughs] For me the creative process is an ongoing one until the film is going through the camera, so signing off and locking yourself down too early can stop good things happening. Or you can go with a preconceived idea of how something is going to happen and invariably you get to a location on the day and the weather's different. Unless you can really think outside the box you can get locked down and very bogged down. So if you can keep the creative process going you can solve it and make it an asset rather than a hindrance.
To use just one example from The World's Fastest Indian, the weather down in Invercargill on one particular day was horrendous. We had one scene, the one where the motorcycle guys pull up and gives him some cash. It was a scene that was going to be done on the road - the vehicles were going to be moving - but with the weather there was just no way we were going to get that shot and our schedule was such that we had to shoot it, so I said there must be able to find a gas station or something under cover. And literally on the day that we shot it we raced around town and found a location that was empty and we could make into a gas station. The art department had some petrol barrels and things so we put them in there - we only had half a day to set the new location but we shot it under this verandah and we were able to get the shot that was in the movie, and we kept on schedule.

An example from Sleeping Dogs was a slight mishap with some stunt driving which meant that there was some four by four sticking out of the flat windscreen...
Yeah, so we just kept it there and made it a point of how Sam [Neill] and Ian got rid of the lumber. Good stuff in the movie, with Ian doing his own stunt driving, with the camera strapped to the bonnet of the car. That's something we would never do now. [laughs]

Bearing in mind it was 30 years ago, was there any particular memory from the shoot that sums up the whole experience for you?
Well, I think it was a great experience working with a lot of great people. I didn't make this film on my own, there were a lot of people who were part of that group. They're having this anniversary of the making of it and I think the great thing about it is that the people who were part of it feel part of film history. Everyone from Michael Seresin and Sam Neill to Geoff Murphy and Andy Grant, the list is a long one. Everybody who was involved in that movie was really an integral part of making it happen. We were a small number of people and most of us had never really done the job before and we were thinking on our feet and learning as we went.

As I understand it, the number of people working on Dogs who had actually made a feature before was very small - there were maybe a couple on the crew, with [cinematographer] Michael Seresin being particularly significant in terms of his prior experience.
He was obviously a big help to me. He knew what we needed. But I remember Geoff Murphy was also an enormous help to me. Geoff did the special effects, but he was also a filmmaker himself so he was a great sounding board. He had lots of bright ideas, from how we should make the script better to how we should put some of it together.

Did you have any inkling of how significant and what a watershed the movie would turn out to be while you were making it?
No, I didn't really. The truth is that when things are happening in the present, you don't see what impact they ultimately may have. When you make a movie you don't know if anybody is going to turn up to watch it. As it turned out it was successful and I think over the years there's probably a fair percentage of the New Zealand public that has seen this film.

What about when it was released? Was the response pretty much immediate?
Yeah, people were ready to see themselves up there on the big screen. They enjoyed seeing a film that wasn't an embarrassment to them, where the accents were local accents and the actors were people they had maybe seen on TV. You know, they responded to it in a great and positive way.

Certainly I can remember when it came out - well, maybe a few months later when it finally came to Masterton. I was eight years old, so I didn't go to see it, but I remember a kid next door who was a couple of years older and obviously had parents who were a bit more permissive than mine and he reported back that he had seen this great movie. Obviously we spent a great deal of time re-enacting all the violence in great detail, the amount of blood and so on etc. But what I also remember was that one of the things he was really excited about was the fact it was set in New Zealand, something that my brother and I had a certain amount of difficulty getting our heads around - "A movie set here?" But I do remember having this inchoate feeling of excitement that there would actually be a movie about New Zealanders, that this people and place were actually worthy.
[laughs] There was a lot of excitement making in it and we got all sorts of cooperation - especially considering what the plot was - from the New Zealand armed forces in making the film. They were incredibly helpful, and one of the most memorable parts of shooting the movie for me was to go in one of the Skyhawks - I shot the film from the Skyhawk. I still remember that vividly, probably more so than any other part of making the film, it was such an amazing ride.

There is a bit of an urban legend about the Skyhawks sequence that suggests when you see them letting off their missiles that it is actually a special effect.
No, they were real missiles. Why it looks a bit like that is that I actually step-printed it - that makes it look more like a special effect, but they are the real thing.

Did you have a feeling like somebody was walking over your grave when only a few years later your costuming and approach to props for the police came to pass with the Red Squad during the Springbok Tour?
Well, the parallel was definitely there in some people's eyes. In fact I filmed some of a documentary [Patu!] that Merata Mita was making of those riots, it was sort of like being back in the days of shooting Sleeping Dogs in its own way.

I presume the last time you saw this film was when you were recording the commentary for he DVD about four years ago, how did you feel about it at that time?
Considering the conditions under which it got made, I feel very proud of it for what I was trying to do, and given the obstacles that were in front of us. I think the standard of much of it is incredibly high, really, even 30 years later when the standard of filmmaking is very different.

Anything else you'd like to mention?
No, I'd just like to acknowledge the contribution of everybody who was involved in making what was the beginnings of the New Zealand film industry as we know it today.

What are you up to at the moment?
I'm working on a few scripts. I've just finished a film, a bank robbery film set in London that I made there and is a very entertaining piece. Jason Statham is the lead in it, it's called The Bank Job, it's not really quite the sort of stuff Jason has done before he's not playing so much a action hero - it's more reality based, in fact it's based on a real robbery, with a really fantastic cast of English actors, and the movie's turned out really well. Right now I'm writing and looking at some scripts and hopefully one of them will get made…

© Copyright Onfilm magazine,
October 2007 www.onfilm.co.nz