Years before co-creating the thrilling historic Hawaiian saga Chief of War with Jason Momoa, Thomas Paʻakaiokahonua (Paʻa) Sibbett once worked at Kualoa Ranch. It’s a nature reserve and cattle farm on O’ahu which has served as the backdrop to many Hollywood movies. It’s the sort of place that offers tours to see locations from Jurassic Park, King Kong, Jumanji and Hawaii Five-0 – the Hawaiian Hobbiton.
And it was there, where he returned during the making of Chief of War, he tells the Listener, that he first decided he wanted to be a screenwriter and create something about Hawaiian history. After all, the story of King Kamehameha, who united the eight islands in the early 19th century, had long suggested itself as a Polynesian Braveheart.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson thought so. In 2018, he was announced as the star of a Kamehameha film by Braveheart writer Randall Wallace, to be directed by veteran Robert Zemeckis. Nothing has been heard since.
So with Chief of War, a nine-episode series for Apple TV+, Momoa and Sibbett got there first.
However, the show’s main focus isn’t actually on Kamehameha, it’s on Momoa’s character Kaʻiana, a high chief of Kauaʻi and a man of changing loyalties, who went into the outside world aboard European ships, then returned.
So did the show. Of the many months and many dollars – the first season has a reported budget of US$340 million, roughly NZ$537m– spent filming it, there was only a month’s shoot in Hawai’i. One was a black lava-field battleground not far from the actual historic site.
The rest was done in Aotearoa where the production, according to figures released to the Listener by the NZ Film Commission, spent some NZ$180 million, less the $30m screen production rebate.
That makes it the biggest television production to film here since Amazon’s The Rings of Power. It’s also the biggest show, after Mr Corman and Taika Waititi’s Time Bandits, made in NZ for Apple TV+, the streaming television arm of Apple, a tech giant which pays minimal tax in this country.
Ask Sibbett why Chief of War couldn’t be made where it was set and the answer is complex. The production tax incentives in Hawai’i were too limiting, he says.
“I would have had to sacrifice far too much story in order to keep us in Hawai’i, and lost major, major set pieces. It just felt like in order to preserve the ability for this story to be able to reach a worldwide audience, we needed to find a new location.”
As well as a production-friendly environment, Aotearoa offered “a lineage connection”.
“There was a budgetary requirement, but to be honest, it just made the most sense. We knew we could lean on people who understood our story because we are culturally connected and culturally aligned.”
Sibbett remembers one day where he encountered a group of Pasifika extras getting ready. “They’re wearing the regalia, wearing the costumes, and wielding the weapons. I just stopped to talk to them and asked, ‘What’s it like for you guys, people of the Pacific, to be wearing this? Because technically, the nuances are Hawaiian, right?’ One of the men in one of the big capes and the feather helmets, he says, ‘I could feel something but I wasn’t quite sure. So I had to go down to the beach to see if the ancestors were present, and I could feel them.’
“I gave him a big hug and I walked right into the production truck, and I said, ‘That is why we are here, because we don’t have to explain what we’re trying to film.’ We don’t have to talk to them about these nuances and how Hawaiians feel. They understood 100% and they supported us with the same ferocity that we would have expected Hawaiians to support us. That’s what we got, and you can’t pay for that.”
The first two episodes of the series are all in subtitled Hawaiian, with roughly 50% English dialogue in the rest. Sibbett and Momoa insisted on the show using ōlelo Hawaiʻi – the Hawaiian language – for authenticity. There was some pushback from Apple.
“There’s no precedent for this. If you put something out in Spanish, they understand the demographic, they know the potential of what it can do, as far as the money it brings in. The Hawaiian language has no precedent for what it can bring in economically. Obviously, we understand that this is a business, so we can push it as far as we can go culturally. But we had to be collaborative, and I think we found the balance.”
The series features Māori actors in prominent roles. Among them are Cliff Curtis as Keoua, a disgruntled rival to his cousin and future king Kamehameha, Temuera Morrison as the brutal King Kahekili of Maui, and Te Kohe Tuhaka as Namake, one of Kaʻiana’s brothers.
Both Curtis – whose first overseas film was 1994’s Rapa-Nui, about pre-European Easter Island, and Morrison have ventured into the Pacific before. In Chief of War, while delivering their lines in Hawaiian, they both give the sort of performances proving this isn’t just the Jason Momoa show.
Curtis was blown away by his one-time Once Were Warriors castmate. “[Temuera] was born to be a Hawaiian king,” he told ZB. He’s got a whole way that he is in the world as a Māori, as a human being. He’s quite distinct. But when you put him in the role of King Kahekili, it all makes sense.”
Curtis was a co-producer on the series. “We actually begged him to help us navigate our way around Aotearoa,” says Sibbett. “He was crucial in helping us to understand the culture and how things were properly done.”
Even with Curtis in the role of diplomat on a production with Indigenous creators, it wasn’t always smooth sailing when it came to locations and local iwi.
In 2023, The Northern Advocate reported on two mooted Northland locations missing out, much to the disappointment of local businesses. One where a conflict between two iwi trusts put paid to the production filming at a Whangārei Heads beach, and another in a Bay of Islands beach location where the production pulled out without explanation.
“A lot of that is the growing pains of production,” says Sibbett. “I do want to make it clear that if there were any communication issues it’s because of the nature of what we have to do as film-makers. It’s doesn’t lie on the local iwi. It’s not their job to cater to us. It’s our job to figure out how we can help their causes and their locations.
“We had some great relationships and some great locations that we weren’t able to use and that has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with us as a production.”
That Chief of War has been made at all is some kind of miracle. Yes, Jason Momoa is a very big name who got Apple TV+ backing due to having starred in three seasons of its post-apocalyptic drama See. But unlike, Shōgun, the feudal Japan series it has most often been compared to, Chief of War wasn’t a book that had already been made into a miniseries before, and there’s been a long tradition of samurai movies.
It’s also a show about labyrinthine Hawaiian history. One that comes with real stories – such as an intertribal battle involving volcanic eruptions – that seem too fantastic even for Game of Thrones, the show that delivered Momoa’s breakthrough.
Balancing a faithfulness to what is the ancestral and royal history and the need to entertain was difficult, says Sibbett, but he and Momoa had been working and researching the idea for a decade, while the actor’s profile grew.
“Fortunately, this wasn’t an idea dreamed up by a studio who hired a writer who did two months’ extensive research and tried to build a story and then fill the gaps with everything they don’t know.
“But Hawaiian history, Hawaiian studies, that’s my educational background. So, when it came to a position where my career and my passion could align, then I had a different type of preparation than I think most studios would have done.”
Some peripheral characters in the historical lattice have been fused together. “I think Hawaiians that know this stuff will think we found a clever way to do it. Not the perfect way to do it, but that we found a way to honour the stories.”
Talking of peripheral characters, there are a few Europeans, one a sea captain played by Kiwi character actor Erroll Shand. Captain James Cook, the first known European to visit and who was killed on the island of Hawaiʻi in 1779, gets a mention in an early episode.
While his bones were returned to his ship’s crew, in the series he apparently left some souvenirs behind. The show starts about five years later. Representations of precolonial Hawaii on screen have been rare. Sibbett is hoping Chief of War won’t be the last, and not just because he thinks the saga has the potential for another two seasons.
“My parents and grandparents have never heard Hawaiian language on film,” says Sibbett, who, like fellow Hawaiian Momoa, grew up on “the continent” in Seattle (Momoa was raised in Iowa) before returning to the islands. “We’ve never seen the Hawaiian regalia. We’ve never actually been able to enjoy the stories of our people.
“Just on a personal level, it means so much to just have the image of what a Hawaiian is on film, because the traditional image of a Hawaiian wasn’t ours. It was the image that was packaged and sold for the price of a plane ticket. And so for us to have an opportunity to reintroduce ourselves to the world is quite impactful.
Chief of War is streaming now on Apple TV+