Kiwi film-maker Maddie Dai.
Maddie Dai is a New Zealand film-maker, writer, illustrator and a New Yorker cartoonist, contributing more than 70 cartoons for them since 2017. For the Show Me Shorts 2023 festival, Dai directs Ministry of Jingle. George Fenwick caught up with her in London, where she is based.
Maddie Dai - screenwriter, director, New Yorker cartoonist - has lived outside of Aotearoa for most of her adult life, but today, she’s not happy about it. It’s hot when I meet her at a bar in East London - hotter than we all know it should be in September - and all Dai wants is to jump in some water. Hackney’s oily canals don’t count.
“There’s truly nothing like leaving [Aotearoa] to make you feel so deeply appreciative for all the genuinely good things,” she says. “I mean, when the weather’s like this and you can’t go dip into the ocean, you’re just like, what is the point?”
Dai has just returned to London, where she has lived since 2016, from an 18-month stint back in Wellington. While home, Dai wrote and directed her first short film, Ministry of Jingle, which premieres at the Show Me Shorts Film Festival in October. Tonally somewhere between The Office, Severance and Melancholia, it stars Moana Ete as Melody, the latest hire at the Ministry of Jingle - a fictional government department tasked with writing those trusty rhymes that educate New Zealanders on various threats to life (think Stop, Drop and Roll). When she decides to tackle a natural disaster for her first jingle, Melody finds herself face-to-face with the creeping dread of climate calamity.
The film directly addresses climate change in Aotearoa - footage of the catastrophic floods earlier this year features in the film - so it feels grimly ironic that we should be meeting during a heatwave on the other side of the world. For New Zealanders, London’s distance from the coast only agitates our homesickness, which echoes a curious feeling Dai has: despite leaving Aotearoa straight after school, and her career flourishing in both the US and the UK, she only seems to miss home more with each passing year.
“Moving back to London, I was like, ‘What the hell, man?’ This town is huge and busy and I truly can’t believe I ever lived here. I feel like I’ve spent the last few months re-assimilating.” Her feelings are mixed: “My girlfriend’s from London, so that’s a big part of it,” she says. “And it feels like with job opportunities, if you establish yourself, you are pulled in a few different directions.
“I love living at home, but I also love living overseas. It’s a brutal calculation. I’m always homesick for somewhere.”
Dai, born to a Chinese father and Pākehā mother, grew up in Wellington and attended Saint Catherine’s College. She left at 17 after winning a scholarship to a school in Hong Kong through the United World Colleges programme, which “shaped the trajectory of my life”, she says. She minored in studio art and majored in religion, despite not being religious herself. “I was raised Catholic, and I’ve always been interested in questions about who we are, and how to live a good life,” she says. “I became interested in the way those questions were answered.”
She takes a moment here to encourage young readers to apply for United World Colleges: “I just applied and I didn’t know what country I would end up in … they’re a little geared towards kids who are interested in ‘doing good’ broadly, although not all of us, or many of us, live up to that lofty title,” she laughs.
Hong Kong was followed by another scholarship to a university in Vermont in the US, from which she took a design job at an advertising start-up in New York City. Years of trying new things followed - including cartooning, screenwriting, and now directing.
“I feel like I was a late bloomer,” she says. “I was just distracted for most of my 20s. I mean, I don’t know how anyone ever works out what job to do at this point, but every week I have a new epiphany about how to figure it out.”
To an outsider, Dai seems to be doing okay so far. It’s not every day you meet a New Yorker cartoonist-turned-successful TV writer-turned-director. Cartooning began as a happy accident: Dai’s job in New York offered professional development budgets. “They were like, maybe you could take a class in Excel?” but Dai chose cartooning. Her first choice was in illustrating graphic novels, but not enough people signed up to the class. “Prior to that, [cartooning] honestly had not truly occurred to me.”
Dai began cartooning for the New Yorker the old-fashioned way: showing up at the office and pitching her designs. “The New Yorker has a phenomenally generous open door policy, and anyone can go on a Tuesday and submit in person to the cartoon editor,” she says. So that’s what she did. “Legends still go. When I was there, George Booth and Sam Gross, who were both titans, would still be there week in, week out.
“If you had 10 drawings and a dream, you could just waltz up and give it a go, and they would take you seriously and give you feedback,” she says. “Bob Mankoff was the editor at the time, and he would look at my batch and say things like, ‘Clowns are done. No one’s doing clowns now.’ He’d say, ‘This finger is held at too assertive an angle for the joke.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh my God. Okay.’ And then he’d say, ‘I’ll see you next week.’”
She cringes remembering her early efforts: “My drawings at first were unbelievably horrible. Like, I’m not an amazing artist. I know enough to serviceably give the joke a go, but some people are real artists.”
The New Yorker clearly disagreed. It only took Dai four months of pitching to have a cartoon accepted (one cartoonist took 25 years to get published), and now, it’s a regular gig. But in the meantime, Dai was already thinking about her next challenge: screenwriting. At her day job, Dai had been experimenting and writing scripts at her desk, but it wasn’t until 2020, as the world shut down around her, when she began “in earnest”, finding herself an agent and getting a foothold in the industry.
“The pandemic was actually a good year if you needed people to be sitting at their desks reading things,” she says. “For people trying to get on the first rung of the ladder as I was, I think it was an okay time.”
It was only up from there. Dai has since worked in writers’ rooms for major television shows such as The Power on Amazon Prime and Our Flag Means Death, produced by and starring Taika Waititi. Her debut feature script, We Were Dangerous, shot in Christchurch, is being produced by Waititi’s Piki Films and is currently in post-production, with Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu (Waru) directing. Such projects would be impressive notches to add to any belt, no less to a career as diverse and interesting as Dai’s - but in a humble, very Kiwi manner, Dai chalks it up to a simple determination to tell stories.
“When I look back at a lot of the art I made in uni, it often was combining words and pictures, and I was always interested in graphic novels, visual journalism and comedy,” she says. “I just didn’t know how to put it all together back then. It’s tragic to say, but I was never one of those kids that was just like creating huge amounts by myself. I was very always driven by an audience. The medium emerged only as the potential for an audience did.”
With Ministry of Jingle, Dai wanted to use these tools to distill her climate anxiety into something tangible, rousing. “It deals with the overwhelming feeling of being so small in a world that feels so complicated, and the immense sense of disempowerment and inertia that can create,” she says. Dai’s script doesn’t leave Melody standing still, however - she ends up facing her crisis head-on, but her final fate is open to viewer interpretation.
“Climate change is a particularly hard issue for humans to psychologically respond to because … it’s so big. Everything that we historically dealt with as a threat looked and felt really different to climate change - it’s not urgent in the same way a sabre-tooth tiger was. It feels like it only will feel solvable or people will do things about it at a moment where it’s a little too late. So the ambiguity was from whether or not [Melody] had to manufacture that urgency in her head or whether that urgency just came.”
The Kafkaesque office setting, however, was inspired by civil servant friends in Wellington: “All my friends work for all these different ministries. I was like, God, there’s really a ministry for everything. You’re so serious in your little jobs and you bounce around your little ministries.”
The result is a short film with one eye on making us laugh, and another on unearthing our deep-set dread. It signals an exciting future for Dai as a film-maker and, with Ministry of Jingle premiering next month and We Were Dangerous in post-production, she’s just getting started.
But true to Dai’s nature, she’s not overthinking it. “Who knows what will happen next?” she says. “I’ll try and write a graphic novel, and end up a patisserie chef or something.”
"I do feel kind of stuck. And I feel like a lot of people feel that way."