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It's all very well making a creepy thriller with lots of blood and gore. But when you're also dealing with a proud and passionate culture - like the Samoan culture - it has to be done with courtesy.
"It was something we had to do very carefully," says Peter Burger, director of The Tattooist.
"But I was acknowledged as a Pacific cousin, if you like," he laughs. "They're a very proud and independent culture and I'm not Samoan so it was something that I needed to approach slowly."
As it turns out, halfway through filming, both Burger and his leading man, American actor Jason Behr, were given the title of matai [chief] by the Samoan community during a traditional five-hour ceremony.
During the making of the movie, Burger and his team had two main Samoan advisers, orator chief Pa'u Tafaogalupe Mulitalo (Tafa) and master tattooist Tuifa'asisina Saofaga Letelemaana (Tui).
Burger made it clear right from the start that the film was going to be a scary ghost story.
"They were like, `Yeah, yeah, we like scary films'," he says. "That's when I realised that you can make a genre movie involving another culture so long as you do it respectfully.
"So if they're watching us, then the basic premise is okay, and the way we execute the film is okay, then that's about as good as we can get in terms of trying to do it right. We stayed very close to each other through the whole process."
The initial idea for the spirit's look came from scriptwriters Matthew Grainger (Wasted, The Market) and Jonathan King (Black Sheep), who described it as being "glimpsed between light and shade".
Burger and production designer Gary Mackay trawled hundreds of images looking for examples of how the spirit could be portrayed.
"I knew that he was going to be black, or very dark," says Burger, "so looked for images of out-of-focus things, or images through glass, and that's how I came up with the idea of him only being visible in a mirror unless you are a victim."
They also liked the idea of the spirit being black to contrast with the bright vibrant colours of scenes at places like the Otara markets. "The colours of life are the rainbow colours and the angry spirit is the opposite, with an absence of colour," says Burger.
Making something scary isn't as easy as it looks. but luckily, Burger is a big fan of Alien. "It was my best reference for creating the spirit, managing his presence, general scariness and also knowing when to reveal and how much to reveal of the monster."
Burger has dealt with Maori spirituality in his previous work - specifically in the TV series Matuku - and he was interested in Samoan culture because of the rapid change it is going through in New Zealand.
"I'm just really interested in cultures meeting each other and being forced to change and adapting.
"Samoan New Zealanders are going through a lot [and] that's represented in the film - the church element, the tatau element, the America influence. So it's a good place to set drama."
