Film Festival: Magik and Rose

Rookie director Vanessa Alexander tells MIKE HOULAHAN how she took the West Coast to Cannes.

There were no second chances with the biggest film shoot of fledgling film-maker Vanessa Alexander's career.

The 28-year-old director was set to film the final 15 minutes of her debut feature, Magik And Rose, using the annual Wild Food Festival and Barn Dance in Hokitika as a backdrop.

"Producer Larry Parr rang the day before the festival and asked, 'What's your plan B?"' Alexander says. "There was no plan B - plan A had to work."

The festival scenes were vital, being the setting where all the loose threads caused by the meeting of Magik (Alison Bruce), a fraudulent fortune-teller tracking down the daughter she had put up for adoption, and Rose (Nicola Murphy), battling infertility, were woven together.

"The hardest thing was to create the illusion that people weren't looking directly at the camera," says Alexander, who describes her work that day as not so much being a director as a crowd-controller.

"Our biggest problem was stopping people coming up to Oliver Driver - he's super-tall and sticks out and they all recognised him from Shortland Street. Right in the middle of a shot, particularly as the day wore on and they'd had a bit to drink, people would be running into shot going, 'Mate!'

"We had to station people all around to stop them. But it works really well and gives the film a bit more scale."

Such a big shoot was ambitious for a production the size of Magik And Rose. The second film made under Larry Parr's no-budget film scheme in association with the Film Commission - the first was Hopeless - Magik And Rose had the princely budget of $350,000 for Alexander to spend.

She wasn't complaining. The holder of a post-graduate diploma from the Victoria College of Art in Melbourne, Alexander figured the no-budget scheme was the most rapid entry she was likely to have into making feature films.

Brought up in Los Angeles and then, in stark contrast, Oamaru, Alexander had always imagined her debut film would be set in the South Island.

"Larry had a lot of reservations about shooting at Hokitika because of the expense of taking everyone down there.

"But, looking back, if we hadn't done that we couldn't have made the film that we did.

"The people of the West Coast were amazing. We had scenes with extras where we couldn't afford to pay them, so we put on a party at the end of the shoot ... I don't think you could have found people in Auckland who were so responsive.

"Things like the food festival ... how can you put a festival on a budget, let alone our budget? It made a lot of our decisions for us because we couldn't control our shooting environment. We had to plan really carefully, and then make a lot of compromises."

When the Magik And Rose crew - bunking three to a room at the Kokotahi Hotel - reached Hokitika for a 28-day shoot, the cast were already well grounded in their roles after a three weeks of rehearsing the character-driven script.

Magik And Rose opens with the housetruck-driving Magik arriving in Hokitika and setting up her fortune-telling stall. Her first customer is Rose, a chemist shop assistant married to the local artificial insemination technician, Stuart (Simon Ferry).

Magik sees a child in Rose's future but it's a dream becoming ever less likely. Rose confronts Magik with her childlessness, and is in turn told Magik had returned to Hokitika to find the child she had given up for adoption 15 years earlier.

The pair become co-conspirators as Magik - who wants one more chance at motherhood - causes a sensation by advertising for a sperm donor in the local newspaper.

"Maybe the main story was always the relationship between Magik and Rose, but I guess what I wanted to do was look at how, at different times in your life, you have these relationships or friendships with people that profoundly affect your life," Alexander says.

A few months ago, Alexander was on the beachfront at the Cannes Film Festival, thinking about how Magik And Rose had affected her life, and how proud she was to be among the world's film glitterati with a movie about small-town New Zealand.

"I found myself thinking I was about as far away from Hokitika as it was possible to be." - NZPA

* Magik And Rose has a sold-out showing at the Auckland International Film Festival. It screens at Rialto cinemas from July 27.

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