NZTECHO Summer 2018 Issue 79
Waka Attewell pays tribute to Geoff Murphy
On a Geoff Murphy shoot every part of everyday is going to be guaranteed a ‘shit I love this job’ moment.
Charging horses, blowing shit up, car stunts, more blowing shit up, tracking vehicles festooned with high speed cameras, guys in armour on horseback, slo-mo and dangerous. Orc’s for Africa! And the perfect director, Geoff Murphy, with a fag and smile and the next idea which would start with the words ‘what if the…..” It was always outrageous and audacious, with a let’s give it a go attitude… and then we’d blow some
more shit up because we could.
It was his 60th birthday (2nd unit LOTR) and I hadn’t seen him since LA a few months before… there he was shambling across the Twizel tundra, running his hand through his hair, and my heart swelled when he said ‘good to see you, I heard you’d be joining us’ – then I swear we finished the last conversation that we hadn’t quite finished the last time we met. It was like we’d always have this ongoing conversation that we’d pick up every few years. We always did politics first and then established who the ‘bastards’ were that we might be fighting, then we’d list the immediate tasks. Big horse action, big stunt action, Orcs all over the place (or it may’ve been), kids running over the hill, hanging the miniature, pacing out the special effects, rigging the motion control… always thought through and well planned. I needed to have his approval, I would seek this out, and I wanted to make it work for Geoff and this was so for everyone on the crew.
Whatever was planned still had a string and rubber band methodology, our ‘son’ had returned and the flash world of Hollywood hadn’t dulled that handmade craft thinking of Geoff’s… analogue attitude with new world thinking in a digital world. Like who would’ve thought of a simple in-camera glass shot to achieve the burning of the king when everyone else was thinking CGI? Hardly even computer enhanced in the final cut.
Geoff was the master.
A yellow mini pulls up beside a young lone female hitch hiker: ‘Get in’ – she doesn’t think that’s a good idea – ‘It’s alright’, says Gerry, ‘He’s queer and I’m driving’ – this is the Murphy world where blokes were blokes and sheila’s had a lot to say and authority was shunned because they got in the way of getting stuff done and having fun. PC and Rules? What were those?
Goodbye Pork Pie would became the first local film to gain blockbuster status as it spoke directly to the kiwi zeitgeist, with edgy flawed characters that were stamped out from of our own rawness. A road movie, yet a journey that could only end in a no exit road, and we devotees to our pure Nu Zilandness were more than happy with the quest’s inevitable doomed destination. It summed up our K-1- double U– one to a tee. Land locked on an island with nowhere to go but, hell, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey attitude.
I first came across the subversive Geoff Murphy film world in the mid 70’s on Percy the Policeman after the Blerta bus pulled up and kids and wives and hippies from the Waimarama commune spilled forth into our Pacific Films lives.
I had the job of protecting the relatively new camera equipment from the falling sets, the prat falls, the odd bang of gun powder and the hastily planned and executed car stunts. The shoot also achieved some pretty spectacular rope action, using all the main actors, meticulously planned over a two floor drop and every stunt pre-tested, usually
by Geoff himself. Health and safety? Heck no!
Geoff at the helm doing every job there was to be done. Writer, director, set builder, special effects… Suffice to say Percy (the Policeman) was a loveable idiot and Burglar Bill (Bruno Lawrence) was naughty, very naughty indeed; a commissioned kid’s show that was completed and delivered, as per contract, but never went to air because it was deemed um err, well, a bit naughty. At its heart it was a kids show about ‘US’ and ‘THEM’. The representation of authority didn’t get the sort of run that the programmers at TV felt was fair, and I guess the Muldoon Government (looming large over the whole country) might have put the TV management of the time in a position of ‘hell what shit will rain on us from the PM if we screen this?’
The shock of the new way of working with the all-in approach to doing everything. This was the 70’s and work and family were separate, but Geoff thought that this state was what was wrong with modern society and hence the bus and the travel, where everyone travelled together and lived together, worked and played together. It was anarchic, inclusive, opinionated and collaborative, but all of the communal ways that Geoff worked was offset by being continuously surrounded with kids. Before we’d met Geoff, people around Wellington had already been speaking of the ‘Magic Hammer’, a film Geoff did when he was a school teacher, and the pupils of that time will still say that making that movie with their teacher was still the best year of their lives.
After Goodbye Pork Pie came UTU. Ambitious and audacious, a big idea done big, which was finally returned to the director’s cut Utu-redux decades later and then, to follow that up, a high concept movie The Quiet Earth, a big movie conceived and done here, in Nu Zeeland, with production value and great ideas… perfect. Geoff was saying “See it can be done”.
But what did success look like in the world of Geoffrey Murphy? Success was never losing who you were or selling out the ‘to the man’, telling the story from the position of truth and integrity, being loyal.
Perhaps, in summing up his professional life, you could say focused, ambitious, opinionated and determined – beholden to no one, and always suitably messy. Of course, this self-determined independent characteristic was expected in the LA scene but, at the end of the day, not tolerated. The absolute truth of the matter was that Geoff was never going to kowtow to neurotic Hollywood executives anyway.
He started from nothing in the local film scene by forging his own pathway and built an arts movie making commune in Hawkes Bay, which, in the beginning, created strain over putting food on the table for an ever-growing family. Yet self-belief, and determined focus, saw Geoff becoming one New Zealand’s top movie directors within a decade.
It would fair to say he ran out of road after The Quiet Earth in New Zealand and Hollywood seemed like the best option. Young Guns2 and Under Seige2 both functioned well in the box office, but the process of arguing with the producers didn’t make Geoff a perfect fit for their world or them for his, though if part of the exercise had been proof he could make it in Hollywood then he certainly had made it.
Micky Rourke would drop around to the LA house, not because this is what celebrities do but because they were friends. Geoff subverted the Hollywood way by being who he was. It was about the movies, the story and the work, not the bullshit. A man who could name drop some of the big names of Hollywood and the rock world. Helen Mirren and Mick
Jagger. But he didn’t play that game. But his proud kids might let slip over a beer or you might find out in passing that he’d just been hanging out with Mick Jagger on his private Island, as Mick had invited the family in for the week.
Even Geoff has described his personal life as occasionally tumultuous. His 22-year marriage to Pat dissolved after a long affair with Diane, who took him back. But he also had previously abandoned both women to pursue and marry Merata Mita, with whom he has a son. And, from his memoir: ‘the stress of directing overseas and the constant separation do strain relationships’.
Geoff could’ve been an engineer, or a historian, or just settled on being a musician, but he chose the hard road to an almost non-existent movie business and created a path that only a pioneer could follow. If you wanted to name the justly considered New Zealand movie classics then Goodbye Pork Pie, Utu and The Quiet Earth would be my picks and, if my opinion counts, then the re-cut of UTU – redux is still his best movie. This list alone represents the career of a great man, yet 6 kids, 20 grandkids and 3 great grandkids also reads like a great life.
It’s been a bloody great journey, Geoff. You cut a path that no one else could see through the undergrowth so we could follow and discover the possibilities for ourselves. You expected the best from us by leading by example, you pushed us into places we didn’t think we could be by making us believe in ourselves. The bus is leaving for the next show. Thanks Geoffrey Peter Murphy. We couldn’t have got here without you.
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