NZ National Film Unit – James Bowman

Introduction: Morning – we’ve got James Bowman; he’s a local film producer, and you’ll often seen James actually round the village when he’s on another project. He’s done all sorts of things – he’s done a very good one on Duart House. So James is really interested in anything historical or heritage; at the moment he’s doing quite a lot of recording of what’s actually happening in Havelock North. James used to work for the New Zealand National Film Unit, so I’ll pass you over to James, ’cause he’s going to tell you all about what he does, and what he has done.

James Bowman: Thank you for coming along. So what we’re going to do this morning is to speak a little bit about the New Zealand National Film Unit, and when it was formed and what it used to do, and how I got involved. And during the course of this talk we’ll be showing some excerpts of [from] films; some of these are really interesting if you’re as old as I am [chuckles] … not many people are. I’m very old, and slow.

So the Weekly Reviews from the 1940s … just a few clips will be the first one I’ll show a little bit later. I then want to show a short six-minute film to illustrate something else I’m talking on; that one’s about a church at Puketapu. I then want to show my latest one which is called [cough] ’Duart House’, and if there’s time at the end, just to razz you all up and send you away feeling happy, we’ll show you some more little Weekly Review clips – you’ll be able to see Mabel Howard … anybody remember? [Chuckles] First woman minister, who’s notorious for holding up a garment in Parliament, which I’m too shy to mention. [Chuckles]

But anyway, in about 1988 something rather odd happened in a small town at the lower end of the North Island. And you know, the local people … people who just lived up the road … had gone down to the shops to the dairy, to get their Saturday paper, and they couldn’t believe what they saw in the middle of their street. This town didn’t have much of a street, but right in the middle of it was a fire engine. And they thought that was a bit odd because there hadn’t been a fire; there hadn’t been any wind, there were no rooves blown off houses. There hadn’t been any siren, so they didn’t quite know what this thing was doing there, particularly since the firemen were just lounging around, chatting. And about that time, four cars arrived. Now the thing about these cars – this was in the 1980s – they were older, ’bout 1950s; quite nice looking, well spruced up and that, and if you’d looked around the corner, ’cause there was one corner at the end of this street, you would’ve noticed that the old grocer’s store which had been empty for a while, had surprisingly and miraculously morphed into a tearooms overnight, called The Pavilion Tearooms. More vehicles and people arrived and stood around, and nobody quite knew what was happening. And then a great big truck arrived, blue; and that’s when everybody realised what was going on, because on the side of this truck it said, ’New Zealand National Film Unit’. And what they were doing was setting up for the first day’s shooting of a Maurice Gee story called ’The Bee King’, which they were filming in Paekākāriki. So, Paekākāriki – we took over the town really; had to do a lot of leg work first of all, and how I know that is, I’m the guy who had to organise it, dammit. [Chuckles] And production manager is a bit like a stage manager in a play, I think, you’re sort of holding everything together backstage. But we got on with it. And the fire engine was there of course, not to put out fires, but we were doing a rain sequence, so they supplied the rain. [Chuckles] They shot the stuff … you know, they’re pretty powerful hoses … shot the stuff up and it splattered down on the actors where it had to splatter down, and not on the rest of us, who we screw around. And that’s what that was for.

And so I joined the National Film Unit in 1971, and four years before that I’d gone to England with my wife, Desma, sitting there … you awake, dear?

Desma: Yes.

James: And I spent two years learning the trade at a place called the London School of Film Technique. It was a full-time course, Desma went off to work, and I sponged around learning how to make films. The trouble was, everybody was younger than me there, and that’s always been a problem; and when they graduated a lot of them went off to the BBC or other television networks. But I was older than them all – they were all twenty-one and I was thirty-one, so I was a bit old to be trying to get jobs then. So what I did was to do whatever films I could get to do … industrial films, fund raising films for a place that raised money for children, really, who suffered from sort of crippling diseases … things arising out of the use of thalidomide, I remember, was one of them. And we did that sort of stuff until we felt we ought to come home; and came home late in 1970.

And in 1971, at the beginning, I was asked would I like to join the National Film Unit. Well there wasn’t anything else to join – I mean, not really. Nobody wanted to work for television, ’cause hell! You know, that was … film makers were really snobby, you know – television was where you went if you couldn’t succeed at film making. So I started at the National Film Unit.

Now the sort of things that they’re well known for doing are Weekly Reviews. The National Film Unit sort of was officially formed in 1941; but it was actually there before then but it wasn’t called that, and it wasn’t sort of a government body. Some sort of film activity had been going in the 1920s, through the 1930s; in fact at home I’ve got one film from the 1930s called ’Railways of the South Pacific’, which was done just towards the end of 1939.

So the National Film Unit set out to make lots of Weekly Reviews, and we’ll see some excerpts soon. What they were trying to do there was to show people at home the progress of the war; and show people what people at home were doing to help the war effort. So you’ve got lots of things … all sorts of things as you will see. And this went right through to the 1950s, when they stopped making Weekly Reviews because there was some indication … well, some people somewhere thought that the material in the Weekly Reviews was too much biased towards one of the political parties. That’s all right – we changed the name, and called it ’Pictorial Parades’. That was slightly different, but this went right through to 1970, when they did the last one. So there’s hundreds and hundreds of these newsreel clips, and the one I will show, just to whet your appetite, is ’The Creation of a New Suburb in Hutt Valley’. It’s called Naenae. And they mention in the commentary that there are further plans to make another one just a bit further up, and they’re going to call that Taita. [Coughing] Then there’s ’Refurbishing the Wanganella’, in the dry dock; there’s ’Children Pruning Roses’; and there’s another – a ship; they’re fixing it. Those are the type[s] of things. What’s so interesting about these things is when we look at them now, we can think, ’My God! Just about every man wore a hat!’ And just about no men wear hats – I mean, carpenters and that up on the roof, and young guys – they all had hats, just about all of them. They also had something else – a fag stuck in their mouth [audience assent] … when they talked the cigarette went up and down. [Chuckles] And it’s those sort[s] of things that the movies are really good at capturing. I mean still photographs are vitally important as well, ’cause film makers have to resort to them anyway, as you’ll see when you see the one I did on Duart.

And you know, there were guys there building a railway in Lower Hutt; well, you forget – what happened was they had about twenty burly guys with great crowbars and things just lifting up these railway tracks, you know – “Everyone, get a grip of it, and on three; one, two three”, and it all went crash! Like that – well you don’t do that now. And also, there were guys up on the roof; no way of catching them if they fell down, and they’re using hand tools because there weren’t any power tools, laying asbestos on the roof. And these sort[s] of things are really good.

I remember when I went to see the manager of the Film Unit, and said, “I’ve got this great idea, Jeff” … Jeff Scott … “great idea for a film.” And he [chuckle] … oh, God! He listened to the whole thing; he’d already made up his mind anyway. He says, “But you know, we ought to be making films about things that are happening today for people who’ll want to see them later on.” And I had to admit that was a pretty good argument. And that’s just what I’m doing today, showing you films of then. So that’s how they got to do those sort[s] of things – all those Weekly Reviews, and there’s lots of them down at the Film Archive.

Well anyway, when I joined the Film Unit it was at Miramar. That had been a sort of a film studio there before, in a whole lot of houses really. They knocked a few walls down and made a long house out of one bit down in Para Road [Street]. And at the time I joined, and I was there just on twenty years, they were making lots of publicity films, a lot to do with tourism because the Film Unit had then become part of the Tourist and Publicity Department. So we trotted around New Zealand … film crews went round New Zealand … doing all sorts of things to promote New Zealand, but we also did stuff for government departments – Ministry of Works, you know, Building Roads and Bridges; and one I did was Training Traffic Officers; How to Pack a Wool Bale; Civil Defence was another one – all those sort[s] of things. And most of the 35mm [millimetre] colour films that we did went to the cinema … went to the picture theatres as shorts before half-time. Those were the days when you stood up for ‘God Save the …’ [Chuckles] Yeah.

And we did travel quite a bit. The film crews went as far as India – anywhere where New Zealand was, strangely enough, selling milk powder. [Chuckles] So up in the Islands they went quite a bit, filming stuff up there, and in and around Singapore and those places, and India was as far as they went that way. And then they went to the Antarctic, which … I didn’t really want to go there, so that was okay.

But I stayed in New Zealand, and it was, you know … it was pretty good because you had a lot of equipment there. They had every sort of piece of equipment you could think of. And so you know, if you wanted some special effects and that it was no problem. The Film Unit was a totally self [sufficient] thing; it had its own big processing laboratories for doing black and white and colour; it had its own camera repair shops; obviously it had all the production departments – camera, sound, production, editing and all that. And every couple of years they’d be getting new cameras, and the old ones didn’t get sent anywhere, they just got stuck up in the loft.

So we could be quite imaginative in the scripts. Now one I did there … I arrived there with this bit of paper from the London School of Film Technique, and they said, “Yeah, nah! Jeez, no mate, we don’t want to know about that.” [Chuckles] “I’ll show you what we do here.” So I thought, ‘Well that was wasted, wasn’t it?’ [Chuckles] So I started as a production trainee, at thirty-two or something, the oldest one around. And what you did was just carry bags around, and get the car out and make sure it was full of petrol, and do what you were told. And gradually though, you went up the ladder a bit and eventually they said, “Right – you’re going to start writing some scripts now; we’ve got some subjects.”

My first one was ‘Training Traffic Officers’. It was really interesting, because you had to go out and do your research – that’s one thing they didn’t have, was anyone to do research; you had to go and do your own. So you went out and did your research, and you came back, talked to the producer about it, and then you wrote out your script, which was your vision of what would appear on the screen. So it would just be in loose terms; say the film opens with a shot of a police car, whatever it was … traffic car speeding down the road, and you would just tell what you would see, not how you would see it. You didn’t mention low angles, helicopter shots, aerials and that – just so anyone could read it and get a [the] gist of the story.

Well the next thing you had to do was to sit around with six of your colleagues who were more senior than you, and they ripped this thing to pieces; they said, “This is a load of rubbish.” One thing they weren’t allowed to do though, was to say ‘this is a load of rubbish’ if they didn’t straight away tell you how to fix it. Anybody could say it’s a load of rubbish. “We don’t care about that. What we want to know is what do you do about it?” So that was quite a good bit of discipline there.

And then you know, there were a few quirky things; when you were wanting to put in a few steam locomotives because you’re a steam engine fan and the producer, who was the top sort of production person, would say, “No, we don’t want six shots of steam engines in there, for heaven’s sake!” And you don’t get to toss them – you only really wanted one in there, but you knew if you put six in and graciously agreed to drop out five that he’d feel satisfied, and you’d get what you wanted anyway. It sort of worked like that a bit.

Another thing that happened while I’m rolling here … towards the end of the film you’ve spent a lot of money on all this pre-production, [coughing] and using cameras and having crews going out; you know, some of the crews are thirty people, and some are just five. But anyway, it all costs money. And then you get right to the end where you’ve just got a bit more shooting to do, and they’re saying, “Just gone over the budget, so you can’t do any more shooting.” Well you’ve sort of really got them caught, because they’ve spent $100,000 so far, and they’re unlikely to can it just before you edit it. And so they used to say, “Well grumble … don’t do that again”, you know, so you could get your things through that way. But generally it was a happy sort of thing.

I wanted to tell you too, about some of the things we had to do when we had to build sets in places like the Waitomo Caves; we were out on some beach at Riversdale. I’m going to stop now though, and show you these little Weekly Reviews; it’s only a few minutes long, and you have a look and see how many hats you can see. [Chuckles]

Question: What year was this?

James: 1945. There’s a few little dropouts there; these are seventy years old.

[Introductory & background music]

Narrator: ‘Late on a Saturday night the wool store of Levin & Company at Kaiwharawhara near Wellington catches alight, and in a short time the whole building is ablaze. Within a few minutes of the alarm being given twelve fire engines and seventy firemen are on the job, but the fire has spread too rapidly and the store, with contents, is clearly a total loss. By the morning nothing remains but some walls, which for safety’s sake are pulled down, a mass of twisted steel girders, blackened roofing iron and a pile of bricks. Two thousand five hundred bales of wool have been destroyed, valued at many thousands of pounds, and the building itself is a serious loss. The nearby railway line was cut for several hours, and repairers kept working until communications were restored. The destruction of so much valuable wool cannot be measured just in money, but rather as a loss in clothing to a world that still needs food and clothing so badly.’

‘After more than nine months in the Wellington floating dock, the trans-Tasman liner ‘Wanganella’ is nearly ready for sea again. Her new bow is complete except for one plate left ‘til the last to provide access to the hull from the bottom of the dock. With the last plate in position the major part of the job is finished. The bottom gets a new coat of paint, and also the ship’s upper works. There is still some repair work to be done on board, but with the new bow finished ‘Wanganella’ is ready for her flotation tests, and preparations are made to lower the dock. The valves are opened and the dock sinks slowly for the first tests. If the new bow plates prove watertight, ‘Wanganella’ will be floated off. The ship’s chief engineer checks the height of the water outside the hull by the draft marks and relays the information by phone to men who are watching for leaks deep down in the hull. The dock is stopped at eleven feet to re-caulk a plate that is weeping slightly, but that is quickly dealt with and soon the ship is low enough to give the ship buoyancy. The shores which have been steady in here are removed, and a tug takes a line to tow ‘Wanganella’ from the dock. When she leaves the dock ‘Wanganella’ will go alongside the wharf where her refit will be completed in a few weeks. The successful re-floating of the ship is a tribute to the men engaged in the biggest ship repair job done in New Zealand, and ‘Wanganella’ will soon make a welcome return to the trans-Tasman run.’

‘The Union Company’s motor vessel ‘Aorangi’ is back on the Pacific run after a spell of war service as a troop ship, followed by an extensive refit in Sydney. When she entered Auckland Harbour again on her first trip to Vancouver, ‘Aorangi’ was all decked out for the occasion, and she is now painted white in place of her pre-war dark green. When she was launched in 1923, ‘Aorangi’ was the largest motor vessel in the world, and carried nine hundred and forty-seven passengers; but since her refit she carries only four hundred and eighty-six with more spacious quarters for both passengers and crew. On her first trip she had a full passenger list, and her re-entry into the Pacific service will help to relieve the present serious shipping problem.’

‘At Hataitai School Wellington, roses are being planted. Four dozen rose trees were presented by the Wellington Rose Society, who will maintain the plots for the first year and teach the children how to care for them. This is the first of a series of gifts to schools and hospitals by the Rose Society who hope to create a greater interest in rose growing in New Zealand.’

‘At Wellington a trial shipment of pinus insignis is being loaded for South Africa. As well as being the first soft timber to be exported to South Africa, this shipment is also an experiment in loading. Instead of loose cords, one-ton bundles are made up at the mill and these are loaded directly onto the ship. By this method timber can be handled six times as quickly. With these shipments, the State Forest Service is looking to the future when New Zealand will have a large surplus of pine timber.’

‘The first State houses at Lower Hutt were built in 1938. After seven years they’ve become part of the landscape; their gardens are neat and well kept. The war called a halt to building for two years, and for the last twelve months it’s been a case of making up for lost time. Two hundred and forty State houses completed here in the year have made up some of the leeway. And turning back to flats, the blocks that have been changed from flats to service hostels during total mobilisation, means homes for another twenty-odd families. Now comes the task of providing for the thousands who are still homeless, and here in the Naenae area a big start has been made. In the last eighteen months the Housing Department has built a new suburb for Lower Hutt; one thousand new homes are well on the way to completion. This was the boom town of 1944, but it’s a boom town that has been most carefully planned. Every house put up here fits neatly into the layout of an attractive and convenient suburb. There’s more to building a new suburb than finding bricks and timber for the houses; a new reservoir is needed, this one to hold two and a half million gallons. Drains have to be laid, footpaths and kerbs put down, and new roads formed. In all ways this is a big job. Only machinery can deal with the task of supplying enough shingle to build a new town. Backwards and forwards across the Hutt River, carryalls are pulled bringing eighteen tons of shingle in one load. Screening the shingle is another machine-sized job, and this bucket picks up metal by the cubic yard, then swiftly, easily the crane swings the bucket and drops the gravel on the screen. Where shingle is handled in these quantities a fleet of lorries is necessary to carry it for concrete, for road metal, and for railway ballast. Extending the Waterloo branch line along the eastern side of the Hutt Valley is another part of this scheme of suburb building. Here too, speed is important, so slick bales have been lifted bodily from an unused track, to be relaid here. By this time-saving technique, railway and houses will be ready together. For the three or four thousand people who will live in the new houses, this railway will provide handy transport, so distance from town will be a small inconvenience. In spite of all the difficulties of wartime construction, these houses are being finished to time. Substitutes have had to be found for war-scarce materials; asbestos roofing instead of corrugated iron has been one of them, but for design, these places match up to the pre-war State houses. With these houses nearly finished, the Housing Department is getting ready to build another block at Taita, a few miles further up the valley. This will be an even bigger scheme; here sixteen hundred houses will be built. Building a stopbank to keep the Hutt River on its present course has been the first requirement, and now roads are being formed. Very shortly the first houses will be going up, and within a year there’ll be yet another new suburb. For the house hungry this is the promised land.’ ‘Raw material for glass making is being shot into the furnace of this Auckland factory. New Zealand is well supplied with a cheap ingredient, pure silica sand. The North Cape is said to have enough of the purest glass making sand to last the whole world’s glass trade for a thousand years. This sand is so pure that it needs no cleaning in the factory. Besides sand, the other ingredients are soda, limestone and some coke dust for colouring beer bottle glass. At the high temperature of furnace the sand, soda and lime melt and react chemically to become molten glass. [Dropout] Here, lengths of molten glass are being cut out and dropped into spinning moulds. The glass emerges in the familiar form of preserving jars, which are cooled off gradually in annealing ovens. Packed in boxes, they go out to preserve summer fruit for winter use in innumerable households. The jars roll out of the ovens. This is a profiling lathe which turns squares, hexagons, octagons and so on. The lathe cuts fine shavings and seems to take a man all his time. [Dropout] shape’s turned up make the dies for shaping fancy jars and [?]. There’s nothing fancy about these bottles … when they’re empty anyhow; out of the mould they come and along the belt. They’re still hot and soft. This bottle’s no good; they forgot to anneal it. Un-annealed glass bottles bounce on concrete, and would be very useful if only they didn’t explode when anything is put inside them.’

James: Well, there we are – you can see what I mean. You know, being able to see these things, there’s two or three things came to my mind while I was watching that. The first [cough] thing that I suddenly realised was, everybody had a job. They needed so much manpower … person power, I should say … because technology wasn’t how it is now; I mean there was bolting railway lines with a huge spanner, by hand. You’d do a power thing now, [makes drill sound] it’d be done. But you know, the other side of that was that it needed lots of labour.

And I remember when I got sacked from a job – I was a tanker driver in Palmerston North, and I was filling up a bit tank truck with three thousand gallons of kerosene for Ohakea. And I got off the top while it was filling and went down onto the ground to have a row with another driver, and while I’m down there it overflowed at the top. And that’s why you’re supposed to stay there, because it’s a quick-release little stop valve, you know, that’d stop it. [By the] time I got up a hundred gallons had gone. Now the trouble was, the boss didn’t know about this, but – kerosene doesn’t evaporate quickly. It sits around for ages ‘cause it’s sort of oily stuff. And eventually the boss sort of saw it and I got the sack. But no problems; three days later I had another job – there was so much work around. That was 1956-57.

I remember gentlemen used to – if you passed a lady … well, a woman … on the street that [who] you knew, you’d raise your hat. I remember … Desma, that’s my wife, gives me hell about this one … using a slate at school, with a slate pencil, [chuckle] and that makes me feel really old. [Chuckles] Or if a funeral was going past, [cough] you’d stand by the … you know, with your hat off. Bring ‘em back, I say, let’s have some quality to life. [Chuckles]

Anyway, I’ll just tell you a little bit more about some of the things we did at the Film Unit; then I want to talk to you about filming heritage things, and the kind of special things that you have to look for. One of the things we had to do when we went out filming is we sometimes we had to build sets or change things to suit our needs; and some of these things are very expensive, but were very effective, too.

One of the ones that we did was, we were filming for the Ministry of Works, making a thing about roads; but one major scene involved a merry-go-round. Well where do you find a merry-go-round? We found one in Hawera; we had to pay to have it trucked to Riversdale Beach, which is thirty … so many miles off Masterton, and we got the Ministry of Works to bring graders in to level the beach. [Chuckles] They levelled all the beach – or not all the beach, just the bit we wanted, ‘bout a hundred metres – and then we put this merry-go-round there. This was a film that had to start shooting at dawn, so we posted a camera man out at Riversdale; the rest of us stayed at motels in Masterton. And he was to get up and have a look, and tell us what the weather was going to be like, and the reason is that one or two pieces of equipment we had to hire. It was either that, or we only had one of these things, a camera lens, which was so big that the hire rate was something like £500 a day. It was just a very expensive thing, and you didn’t take it out unless you were going to use it, ‘cause … you know. And so he’d have a look, and we’d jump in the car from Masterton and rush out there and do this filming. And we did the filming all right – Ian Mune was one of the actors, I remember, and I was production manager on that. I don’t know how we got this thing back to Hawera, but that was one of the more unusual things.

A real eye-opener though, was at the Waitomo Caves. Now if you’ve been to the Waitomo Caves and you know anything about films or photography – well films actually; photographers can get round this – there’s not enough light there to film properly. And you can’t have a whole lot of light if you’re going to film the glow worms. So we went in there and we filmed the things you could film; but we got the Electricity Department to run a power line from the road right up into the caves, and give us enough light to film a few shots. Those lights are quite hot … couldn’t have them on for too long or it would start to damage the things in there. So what we did, we filmed people, for instance, getting into the boat, pushing off into the gloom.

Back in Miramar we took over the sound stage. Now a sound stage is a really interesting thing; when you’re recording sound in films you can get interruptions by extraneous noise … an aeroplane going past, or you know, a chainsaw or something … and you can get shocks if someone slams a door. So the sound stage is a floating thing; it’s completely in its own separate building, and if you drive a truck into the wall [on] the outside, it won’t make [have] any effect at the recording area, and you won’t hear any sounds at all apart from the ones that you’re making. So okay – we’re on this sound stage, and we got the Art Department to recreate the glow worm caves. And this is how it’s done – they put down what amounted to a shallow swimming pool … they put down some four by two wood – quite a big bit, as long as this room – and they put black polystyrene sheeting in it, filled it with water and put a board across the length of it on which the camera would move. They took some … what’s the other white stuff that you can form? Yeah, big piece of it, and made little holes in it. They sprayed that black and they put lights; they then lit the scene so it represented a darkened scene, but there was some light in there. They first of all pushed the camera slowly across, pointing at the water which was still and reflecting the glow worms. And then they got the live footage of people getting in the boat – this is up in the air – the thing moved, took their shot, inter-cut them, plus getting out of the boat and that sort of thing, edited it into the film and showed it. And a guy – not a New Zealander, an American guy – “Well, Goddammit!” He says, “I don’t know how you guys did that, but it was really superb! And it’s so difficult to film in those …” [Chuckles] It just was totally believable. And that’s why I wasn’t upset the other day when David Attenborough said, “Oh, that thing where we were filming” some animal “having sex in a burrow, was actually done in the studio in London, not in …” [Chuckles] There’s some things you can’t do. So those were the good things.

I like filming heritage things;  I film steam boats, steam engines … my current project is mentioned [cough] in this pamphlet here which Lily Baker has given me, and the thing is called, ‘The Maraekākaho Wool Shed’, and that’s quite a good example. We’ve been filming out there, and you have to really be sort of careful. How I operate, I go out by myself to a place as I did here, or anybody could do here, and I have a good look at it and I think, ‘How am I going to present this? Am I going to do anything in the way of choosing camera angles, or lighting, or sound or music or the length of shots, which will negate the feeling you get from this place?’ What it means is, you could go and film Duart House here, and you could fill up the whole film with endless commentary about facts and figures, about the sort of wood, and how long … you know, all that sort of stuff. You could spend ages talking about the history of it, and what you would then relegate the house to is just wallpaper. The shots in your film are just going to be this place which is the background for me to talk about it. I like the place to speak for itself a bit, and that means – have some commentary, tell some of the facts, but let’s shut the commentator down for a while; and it happens to be me … [I] think my wife is pleased about that … and let’s get a feeling for this place. And it’s the same thing with this wool shed. Now I went out there, saw the farmer who rents the land around it, and spoke to the owner too, and they gave me the key to go in. And it’s a vast place, and it has a great sort of feeling to it. So the shots I took were to sort of show the exterior – I haven’t edited it yet – and show the interior and get that feeling of spaciousness, of importance and all that sort of thing.

And I’ll show a film soon – it’s just really a short one about a church at Puketapu in which I deliberately didn’t tell you anything at all about the church; in fact there was no commentary at all, and yet I’ll bet you that you get a sense of the church, a sense of religion, a sense of peacefulness, a sense of history. It’s just the way it’s done.

So when we came to Duart House – I mean, I’d been up to the gardens before – I start to plan things. I have a good look round, Rose [Chapman] took me round to have a look upstairs and out at the Bill Dorward Collection – had a good look round. And I went back and I thought, ‘This is a gracious old house standing up here; it’s been surrounded by the rest of us over the years, and I don’t want to do anything which would make it look like some undervalued relic that nobody cares a toss about.’ So I thought, ‘What will I show? I’ll write down the main elements – the house exterior; the gardens; the collections, I’ll call them, they have some upstairs – the paintings – and the ones out the back; activities – what’s it used for? I mean, what value is it to the community other than just to come up and look at the outside. And then I would sit down and think how to start.

Well one thing I like to do when making most films … not all, ‘cause murder mysteries I don’t do, but they’re different … is let the audience know straight away … Where are we? When are we? What’s happening? Not in a murder mystery; if you watch Midsomer Murders [chuckles] they always have some guy lurking in the bushes to start with; he’s got a hoodie on; a crow will go caw, caw … whatever, or a dog will bark; and then somebody will get knifed to death or something. And that’s so you don’t change channels, you see – you get gripped by [chuckles] … you stay with it. We’re not doing that with Duart House, so when I do play the film you’ll see how it starts to set that theme. But one of the problems was of course, in the middle of filming – ‘cause I was doing other projects for about three, four years, so I had to stop ‘cause they painted the house. [Chuckles] But never mind, we did a bit at the end showing the house painted.

But I do think, you know, if your shots are too gimmicky, or your editing is sort of deliberately short shots to up the pace, that is likely to destroy the feeling of the heritage thing. You don’t see steamboats going fast like speed boats, you know, and you shouldn’t edit it like that. You should get a feeling for the place and respect its integrity – that’s probably what I’m saying. Pretty hard to talk about this, but I’ll be showing you shortly, anyway. So let me show you this one about the church, that I’ll tell you a little bit about in a minute.

https://knowledgebank.org.nz/video/puketapu-church/

So the same thing happened there – I went out to that church and I just spent a while going around it and having a look, and getting a sense of [it]. It’d been sort of restored and that, and you could get the key at the local shop and go and have a look. And so I had a really good think … if you had to identify some features to give a sense of the church, what would you look for? And what I decided, if I saw certain shapes written onto the paper I would think of religion, or I would think of a church. And those shapes – the curves of pews, the arms; out in the cemetery but just the curves really of parts of a cross; or looking through a hole. And I was really aware of the fact that if you took an overall shot you’d see a mess probably, because some of the gravestones are really old and tumbled down; the family had sort of died off and hadn’t been able to look after them … those sort[s] of things. So I then went round the outside and looked through trees, and it was autumn, I think, so I also looked on the ground for leaves and thought, ‘Well in the morning they’re going to have nice little globules of dew on them, and if it’s a sunny day they will look really good.’ So the next time it was nice and fine I went round and I made a particular note of what time I should be there to shoot most of those shots; you only had about a minute to do the curve of a pew because the sun moved, and that nice highlight on the curve of the arm was gone. And that applied to all sorts of things.

So I got there and got set up and just waited, and I filmed all those shots according to how I had worked it out – had to be a nice sunny day with blue sky, and it had to be at that time of the year. You couldn’t wait ‘til winter to do it, or summer, ‘cause things have changed. And that’s how I got those things. I also did quite a bit off the floor; that is, the camera right on the carpet. And out in the cemetery I looked for old things, and you’ll notice those sort of picket fence things which are really old, and I waited for the sun to just come round so it caught it on the side and showed you the texture. ‘Cause you know, when you look at me the absolutely attractive thing about me are my wrinkles, [chuckles] and when the sun catches me I [coughing] look like something else. Well, it’s the same with those posts, and the old post ball thing on the top was particularly filmed to throw the background out of focus, and this thing standing there in remembrance of people who’d died a long time ago. And no commentary, not even my name on it. It was just the church. So that’s the sort of thinking I do when I’m trying to do things about old buildings, or this, that and the other thing.

Yeah. And that’s the same thing that’s happening out at Maraetotara, excepting that the farmer guy has let me down, because he said he was going to shear a thousand sheep, and gave me a date. I didn’t hear anything; I phoned him up … “Oh”, he said, “no, I put it off for a while.” So I said, “All right, I’ll phone you in a week.” So I phoned him in a week … “No, no, no, we’re not ready yet, we’re putting it off.” “Well I’ll give you a call on Tuesday.” “Yes, all right. Oh – well we can’t do it yet.” He said, “Give me your phone number.” And I said, “Well, you will remember to phone me, won’t you?” Fatal words; he never did. So I’m going ahead with the Maraekākaho wool shed film with all the footage. We actually have at least one person here – don’t worry, I won’t identify you – who accidentally got into the film; we got the back of her. [Chuckle] Yep – so that’s going down to the Film Archive. And that’s the other thing – Duart. I wrote to them, I’ve got a contact there, and I said, “I’m doing this film about Duart House.” I sort of explained, you know, what it was here in Havelock North, and she said, “Oh, I’d really like to get a copy of that for our Archives.” So they’ve asked for it, and the wool shed one, and they’ve got another one I’ve done on Middle Road here. You know, they’re still collecting stuff like that.

Now there’s time to show you the Duart House one. It’s twenty minutes.

https://knowledgebank.org.nz/video/duart-house/

So you can see, you know, there were times when I worked through that thing, and I thought, ‘This is too wordy; there’s too much stuff here.’ Then I’d take you know, some of the commentary out, and it just didn’t join together.

And what you have to be careful of doing is to get music that is sympathetic to the feeling that you want to express, so it all goes back to your research, really. And you come up and you wander around and you have a look, and you think, ‘What sort of feeling do I want this building to express in the film? Place where they have lots of rowdy parties and things? Or a gentle reminder of how things were, you know, in the past?’ And you can get a sense of this by what people think about it. And if you talk to people who are associated with the house, or you know, know it well even if they’re not part of the Duart House Society, you get a feeling from them as to whether they think it’s a load of junk or whether they think it’s something to be respected and kind of loved, really. The problem with music is that you need to have out of copyright music; and I’ve got an arrangement with an American composer, with a [an] un-American name called Kevin McLeod, who allows me to use his music if he gets a … you know, a name up on the credits.

But still, I was hoping nobody would laugh when we saw the picnic on the grass. The reason that somebody laughed is ‘cause they saw the fly. [Laughter] I didn’t see the fly; when you’re looking through the camera you’re not looking for bloody flies. [Laughter] And I was hoping I could say it was just a mechanical fly I put on there. [Laughter] But I didn’t notice that, even through editing, until … I don’t know, I think it might’ve been Peggy [van Asch] when she looked at it … and I thought, ‘Oooh … I can’t do that again, I haven’t got a spare shot.’ But anyway, so those are the sort of things that happen. Any questions? So that’s it.

Comment: Congratulations on the choice of the soundtrack; superb. The way it just changed the mood.

James: Yes. Well usually, you know, when you get a commentator you get one with the right sort of voice, but they had to put up with me. But I think it was reasonably suitable for that sort of stuff. So that’s really all; I’ve got three minutes to fill in. [Chuckles]

Jim Watt: Well, James, this has been delightful. Thank you. We’re going to have you back, because I know there are more things to see …

James: Yes.

Jim: … and there’re lots more you can share with us. I think some of our best talks here have been the ones where we’ve had people sharing their craft with us, and I think that’s what you’ve been doing today, and very effectively. And I just loved it and I look forward to next time.

James: Thank you, Jim.

Jim: I’d just ask you to join me in thanking him.

[Applause]

James: Thanks very much.