Movie Review: Matariki

A New Zealand Film, out now!

Recently Guide to Auckland had the absolute pleasure of being invited to a screening of the New Zealand film Matariki.

Winding our way down the cluttered staircase of the Academy Cinema in Auckland’s CBD, we eagerly anticipated a film we knew little about. The thrill of the unexpected, along with the overwhelming aroma of coffee would keep us awake for the first ten minutes, but would the entire film be able to keep us focused after a hard day at the office? And was it worth finding a park for?

Quite simply, yes. Yes it was.

Matariki is a gem of a film that explores how one personal event can alter the lives of many. It weaves through the lives of 5 central characters with smooth transitions and without loosing depth of character. From a gay netball player to a young car thief, each character has their own story to tell and every one is just as intriguing as the other. Unlike many films with this many plot threads Matariki successfully manages to keep the audience’s interest and evokes strong emotional responses (yes we wept like babies!)

Guide to Auckland loved the film so much that we sent a few questions to the film’s director Michael Bennett (pictured). Here’s what he had to say:

Guide to Auckland: What attracted you to the project? Where did the story come from?
Michael Bennett : The seed of the film was a one-man play by a wonderful actor and dear friend, Iaheto Ah Hi, about his cousin who was a one-man teenage crime wave. This guy was completely obsessed with fishing, if he'd grown up in the islands he'd have been a master fisherman. But he grew up in urban New Zealand and became a master car thief. He didn't hunt turtles and sharks, he hunted Bluebirds and Subarus. 
I knew this was an amazing thematic ground zero for a movie - someone with big dreams and potential but who is heading fast down a slippery slope taking him far away from what he could be. 

Working with Gavin Strawhan, this became the spine of the movie. We interwove other stories around it. Stories about people in the same place and time – here, today, now – and stories about characters who are all facing similar crises in their worlds.

How long has Matariki been in the pipeline?
From first seeing Iaheto's play to our premiere last Monday was a journey of about 12 years. Which sounds like a long time – and it is – but 99% of screenplays that are written never get made so it's just a privilege to have this one on the screen.

Was it difficult to find financing?
There were false starts. But the Film Commission was always supportive. It was more a case of our wanting to make sure we had the screenplay as good as it could be before we went for financing. When we felt our ducks were lined up properly, the financing came together relatively smoothly.

With such a large cast to work with, it must have been fun casting them all. How did the casting process work out?
This cast is spectacular. I was blessed and privileged to pull together a remarkable and incredibly gifted ensemble of the finest actors around.

Christina Asher was our amazing casting director, and Steph Wilkins was my right hand woman in working with this beautiful jigsaw of a cast. The process was pretty involved, we searched long and hard and underwent the usual processes of call-backs and workshops before we settled on our core cast. The longest search was of course for the two youngest actors, they truly had to be “found”. Ironically the young guy who was eventually cast as the car thief Aleki was actually the first actor I met when I went hunting around different acting troupes. And Susana was a huge find, an incredibly talented and completely new actor who only came to our attention because the Onehunga High School drama teacher insisted she audition.

The location is almost a character in itself in Matariki; did you have any trouble finding locations to use?
Our locations manager Jacob McIntyre worked miracles. Shoot in Otara markets with a choir on a truck in the middle of 1000 real market goers on a Saturday morning? Sure. Get permission to throw someone off Mangere Bridge? Why not. I have no idea how Jacob did it but he did it.

Why Otara?
When I first moved to Auckland (I'm originally from Motueka), Otara was one of the first places my girlfriend dragged me to. I was blown away by the colour and energy of the place, by the fact that you walk down the street and hear five languages being spoken within 100 metres. Otara kind of becomes another character in the film, with the markets forming a kind of centrifugal centre to the different stories - all the different characters end up passing through the markets at some point. It's just an amazing part of the world, and it doesn't get onscreen nearly enough. 

I heard you only had a matter of weeks to film, what was it like working under such tight time constraints?
We had six weeks, which in Hollywood terms is nothing. But in NZ terms it's actually pretty good, I've got mates who have had to shoot features in four or five weeks. But yes, it's tight. You have to be bl**dy organised, which I am – you have to have a great cast and crew who are completely onto it, and we had the best – and you have to have luck on your side especially with things like the weather. We only got rain one day out of the whole shoot.

Also time restraints aren't a bad thing in lots of ways. I look at a lot of Hollywood movies whose approach to coverage is just to shoot every possible angle, then shoot a few more, then figure it out in the edit suite. With limited time you can't do that – you have to say - “Okay, this is how I want to shoot this scene, I've only got time for three set-ups, so I'll do these three things because they visually tell the story most strongly”. If you do that, you tell the scene more personally I think, you take a stronger attitude into how you're shooting the drama.

Matariki is all about new beginnings and starting over, if you could do anything differently what would you do?
I'm very proud of this film – we've got a dream cast who do a stunning job, the film has a wonderful unique look, a killer soundtrack, it tells a big story. I'm especially proud that so many reviewers have hooked into the bigness of the film's “heart” - one reviewer said it's a film with a lot of love, which is a pretty cool thing to have said about your movie. That's the job I wanted to do – tell a movie which leaves the audience feeling they've had a journey, and feeling they've seen a story with heart, hope and humanity. Of course looking at the movie you see things you'd tweak if you could. But that's quibbles. If I could do it again, I'd do it pretty much the way we did it the first time.

The soundtrack to Matariki one of the things that defines the film. I'm assuming it’s made up of New Zealand acts, was this an important decision?
Thanks! The soundtrack is very cool, Don McGlashan is an out and out legend, his compositions for the film are stunning, and he's done an amazing job with the music supervision. It's 100% Kiwi – we have one song that is written by a non New Zealand artist, but it's re-recorded by Warren Maxwell and his band – so everything you hear is NZ. Yes, totally it was a conscious decision. This is a proud NZ film, it had to have a NZ sound as well as a New Zealand look. And in any case, our music scene is the equal of anywhere in the world, why would you want to look elsewhere?

With such a large cast and filming taking place in a short period of time, the cast and crew must have grown close very fast. Can you tell us of any antics that occurred? Tell us the gossip!
Not much goss sorry! Yeah we became a real family, very fast. Many many cast and crew talk about how special this job was – there was a real sense of family, a real sense of everyone being on the same waka – it felt like there was a wee bit of fairy dust sprinkled over the shoot. And there was very little ego. I think a lot of this came from the HODs – we were blessed with some very experienced artists working on this job, from the key people on set to the production team, through to the post-production team. I think with experience, people get to a place where they don't have to prove anything any more. You're just out there side by side working together to make sure you tell the best story you possibly can.

Matariki was selected for the Toronto International Film Festival, what was the reception like over there?
That was one of the scariest days of my life. We'd never actually been in front of a “real” audience before – friends and family had seen it and cast and crew, but they all had vested interests in liking the movie. So it was untested in the real world. And, it's a very culturally specific New Zealand film, I was really worried about whether the story would be universal enough to translate. But the applause rolled on and on after that first public screening – the feedback was overwhelming – it felt like the movie had really hit a chord. Which was awesome.

What do you hope people take away with them after seeing Matariki?
I hope most of all that people have had a good time. My job is first and foremost to entertain, that's why it's called the entertainment industry – I hope they've been taken on a big journey, I hope they've cried a little and laughed a lot and fallen in love with the characters and been blown away by the soundtrack.
And if the audience also finds something else going on in the undercurrent, some kind of message in this movie about hope and redemption and finding light in the darkness – then I'm completely over the moon!

Any final words?
Thanks for taking the time to read this far – I'm blown away every time when people engage with the movie to the extent that they want to know more, it's an awesome feeling.
 

Matariki was released on the 18 November 2010 and is now available to view at cinemas across Auckland.

Editorial by Stevie Hopwood 

Picture: Michael Bennett, Director