Kerry Warkia's television credits include Find Me a Māori Bride and Flat3 as well as the award-winning anthology features Waru and Vai.
Kerry Warkia made the switch from acting to producing because she wanted to tell stories that better reflected Aotearoa's diversity. Warkia's television credits include Find Me a Māori Bride and Flat3 as well as the award-winning anthology features Waru and Vai. Kāinga is the third film in that trilogy and will premiere at The New Zealand International Film Festival. www.nziff.co.nz
My mother is Scottish, from the clan Paterson and my father is from the Lemene clan in Papua New Guinea. I've always loved how both their cultures use the term clan to determine family groups.
My mother's family moved from Scotland to South Africa, but because her parents were quite racist, she really butted heads with them. She absolutely disagreed with apartheid, and even went to jail a few times after going to protests. When mum was in her 30s, she moved to Papua New Guinea where she met my father and they fell in love. Mum's parents disowned her when she told them she'd married dad.
My parents both volunteered for the YMCA, where they taught teachers and ran education programmes for women. Mum loved volunteering, because she disliked the construct of money, and much preferred to barter. This meant she fit in well in Papua New Guinea, because there it's all about exchanging food and favours. The only time she worked for a pay cheque was when she was saving up to take us to Scotland.
When big containers filled with donations were sent to the YMCA from Australia, mum was responsible for distributing items through the communities. My sisters and I would also get some of those things, so all our books and clothes were second-hand. If we were ever given a gift, for a birthday or Christmas, we were only allowed to keep the thing for six months, then we had to donate it back. Once though, I had a pair of roller skates I couldn't part with. I loved them so much, I begged to keep them till I grew out of them. I couldn't even do much skating, as our compound was mostly grass, but there was one long slab of concrete and I skated on it over and over again.
Because our parents were volunteers, our lives were pretty interesting in terms of how we got by, but it was also a wonderful childhood and mum was always finding ways to broaden our horizons. We were also raised by a village and we grew up very traditionally, my two older sisters and I. We'd collect fresh water from wells on the beach, and take buckets back to the village. Once, when I was visiting with my two younger kids, I was collecting water to give them a shower. It was about 4.30pm, and I wanted them to wash before the sun went down, as there were no lights in the village. I was showering them out of a bucket among the banana leaves, and at that moment the penny dropped for my daughter. She looked at me in wonderment and asked, 'did you grow up like this?'
Storytelling and performance, dance, carving and painting, all those things were a big part of my father's culture. My mother also loved the arts, from films to plays, Shakespeare to poetry. When my parents took us on a big trip to Scotland when I was seven, we also spent 10 days in England. It was 1987 and every single night we went to the theatre because one of mum's cousins was a director at The Royal Shakespeare Company. He got us amazing seats to musicals, Shakespeare, Tolstoy - for children from Papua New Guinea, that was utterly incredible.
My parents worked lots of extra jobs to save money for that trip. Dad was so worried that people would reject us for being mixed race, so he said we had to be the best behaved, and do lots of work around people's houses when we stayed with them, like washing windows, doing dishes and tidying. But mum's cousins were not racist and they'd say, 'please don't go to those lengths, because we love you'. My sisters and I joke about it now, but because mum's dad had been so staunch, the ramifications for our dad were scary.
I went to the international school in Lae where I was with students from 72 different nationalities. I don't know how my parents made that miracle happen, as it was very expensive, but it meant I had the privilege of being rooted in both worlds. Then, when an Australian theatre company visited our school to devise a show I got a taste for being on stage. They created a version of A Midsummer Night's Dream with us. It was a fusion of Shakespeare and traditional Papua New Guinean storytelling. I played this old Papuan grandmother, which everybody loved, so I decided I wanted to be an actor. I applied to drama school at Toi Whakaari in Wellington and Unitec in Auckland, and that's how I came to New Zealand.
That was 1999 and I was only 18, so it was a big culture shock. At first, I was very homesick, but the teachers at Unitec wrapped support around me and I made really good friends. I also met my husband that year. When I saw Kiel [McNaughton] for the first time, I knew he would be important in my life. I didn't know how or why, I just felt that he would be.
We didn't start dating till after we left Unitec, and early on I told him I wanted six children. I was just laying that out. On Kiel's side, he's Māori and Chinese and his mother had 13 brothers and sisters his dad had nine siblings, and we've both been around big families, so he was cool with that. We were married and had our first baby when I was 23. Three years later Kiel was cast on Shortland St and that started opening doors. We were also able to buy a house, but when I was pregnant with our third child, Kiel said to me, "I can be an awesome dad to three children or an okay dad to six" and because our careers were starting to take off, we stopped at three.
Auckland Daze was the first show I produced and I loved it. I loved working with writers, the director and crew. I also loved realising a film all the way to the end. Auckland Daze was also one of my last acting roles because I discovered I wanted to be a career producer.
We decided early on that our family would be the centre of everything we did. As our careers took off, we looked at ways to set up productions that made room for children and working parents. If childcare fell through, we made it possible for people to bring their children to set, because when we hire directors who are mothers, we want to help them do the best work they can do.
We live like that too. Our children had me all to themselves for seven years, so when I went back to work, It wasn't fair for me to just walk away from them, so I looked at how to include them. Early on, I had a meeting with the TVNZ commissioner Tina McLaren. I said I was bringing all three children to the meeting, and Tina was fine with that. It was then I put a line in the sand and said, I'm a working mother, so you're going to see my children. They're not going to be invisible.
When we shot Waru we had nine woman directors, so we were dealing with a lot of children, the same with Vai and Kāinga. Children are a big part of all those films, and the world we live in, and that influences how we build productions and make room for family, because family is so important.
This film trilogy has been a labour of love since 2015. In Waru, nine Māori women tell their stories. Vai tells stories of the Pacific and Kāinga is focused more on Asian voices. Those voices have all been under-represented in the fabric of New Zealand film-making and we wanted to change that. Of course, we still want our work to entertain, but it should also provoke and help people see life from different perspectives.
Mum died just before our first child was born, and dad died when our second child arrived. I am so grateful to my parents, for everything wonderful they gave me. Mum was such a staunch advocate of variety, of ensuring her children got their hands on everything. Dad was a huge advocate for teaching us about our culture, of making sure we knew where we came from, as children of Scotland and Papua New Guinea. Coming from a small island nation, they wanted us to be armed with knowledge, and to be able to walk in both worlds. I always look at my work through that lens today.
The Hollywood star is 70 but has no plans to retire from acting.