This is an extended version of the interview that appears in the October 18 2025 edition of The Listener.
It wasn’t the deaths of 29 men in the Pike River mine that made Robert Sarkies want to make a movie about it. It was the lives of two women in the aftermath.
In 2016, six years after the explosion, the film-maker saw Sonya Rockhouse and Anna Osborne on television. They were successfully blocking access to the concrete trucks that would seal the mine. There was his film.
“There was a decent period of time when I was looking at Pike River from the outside and thinking there must be a story to be told here. But I don’t know what it is because it all seems terrible. I didn’t see any point in making a film about a group of families doing what they could to fight against power and losing, getting nowhere. What’s the message here? The message is, ‘don’t bother fighting’.
“And a movie is only really a movie if it’s got great characters … but when I met Sonya and Anna I could see they were great characters and there was hope as well.”
Sarkies is on Zoom from his Wellington office with a Pike River poster on the wall behind him. He’s just back from Greymouth to check on preparations for the New Zealand premiere before an audience that would include many who worked on the film. Some played the 29, wearing actual Pike River headlamps in scenes aboard a real Pike River drift runner vehicle repaired for the shoot.
Sarkies and his teenage son drove via the Cook Strait ferry from their home in Karori and visited other West Coast mine sites along the way.
“When you’ve got a 13-year-old who loves Minecraft, he was completely fascinated by walking around mine sites and climbing into slightly abandoned mine shafts. It was really quite cool.”
It was different, of course, back when Sarkies first visited the entrance to Pike River.
“We all know what it looks like because we’ve seen it so much in the news. To stand in front of it, which I’ve done many times, it just feels ugly. You’re very aware there are 29 men inside, entombed. But what you’re seeing is this sort of industrial detritus … and it’s weird, because if you turn your back on Pike and look the other way you’re in the wilderness.”
As he probably doesn’t like to be reminded, Pike River gives Dunedin-raised Sarkies a trilogy of tragedy in a career which started out with the comedy Scarfies. In 2006 he delivered Out of the Blue, his gut-wrenching drama about the 1990 Aramoana massacre. In 2014, it was the television film Consent: The Louise Nicholas Story, about the woman who took the police officers she said raped her as a teenager to court as an adult.
But as he reiterates when asked about why these darkest-days stories have become a specialty, Pike River is a David versus Goliath story, as Consent also was. “It’s the same essential narrative.”
Osborne and Rockhouse were keen to have their story on screen. Sarkies’ friend, director Tony Sotorious, who was filming a documentary on trade unionist Helen Kelly before her death and becomes a character in Pike River, suggested he talk to the pair.
“He told me that they they wanted their story told, but they’re not particularly readers, they didn’t necessarily want a book written, or even know how they would even start that, but they loved watching telly and going to the movies.”
Sarkies and his producer-partner Vicky Pope shoulder-tapped seasoned screenwriter Fiona Samuel, who had done the script for Consent, to write Pike River. They shared the research, spent a lot of time in Greymouth drinking a lot of tea talking to the families, reading everything, including the transcripts and report of the Pike River Royal Commission to Tragedy at Pike River Mine, the 2013 book by then Listener journalist Rebecca Macfie (“Anyone who sees the film should read that book” … the film, in a way, starts where the book leaves off”).
Not all the families wanted a film made, or to be involved. Some of those Samuel and Sarkies interviewed had put Pike River behind them.
“Often we’d get to the end of the interview, and this was around eight years after the tragedy, and they’d often say ‘well, that’s actually quite good to talk about we don’t talk about Pike River very much’. There are family members who as they described this to me put the Pike River experience, which is obviously just an awful experience for them, in a box and try to close the lid on the box and park it somewhere. They can’t. It’s always going to be with them. But they don’t want it to sort of take over their future lives, I suppose.
“It’s a challenge, obviously, making the choice to talk to a filmmaker and those who talked to us, made that choice and went back to that place. But I genuinely think there’s some small aspect of catharsis that happens every time you tell and retell a story. Even if you then put it back in its box and park it again, it helps.”
That human story starts on November 18, 2010, the evening before the day of the mine explosion, at the Osborne family home. There, Anna (Melanie Lynskey) suggests to husband Milton (John Leigh) that perhaps he should call in sick tomorrow. The next morning Milton has joined the shift that also include Rockhouse’s two sons Daniel and Ben. They gear up, drive into the mine. Only two of those – Daniel Rockhouse and Russell Smith, the man he dragged clear, come out again.
It was my gut instinct to not show the explosion really at all. But still I hope for us to feel it.
The film doesn’t go into the mine. The explosion isn’t recreated. The news trickles out by phone call and word of mouth.
“I had a strong instinct from the get-go that if this was going to be the story of the families’ fight for justice and reflecting their experience that we should not show things, mostly, that the families hadn’t experienced. It was my gut instinct to not show the explosion really at all. But still I hope for us to feel it.
“This is the thing about tragedy. When something awful happens to you often you find out in the most benign ways … we were just trying to make it as relatable as possible and reflect the experience of these families.
“We sat down with Anna Osborne and she essentially told us the story that you see in the first 10 minutes of the film even more evocatively than I can ever hope to depict. But as a dramatist you’re scribbling down every one of those details because it’s the details that make drama specific and also relatable.”
The film itself starts with a helicopter shot of the rugged terrain around Pike River, where seams of coal can be seen in the cliffs that stand like giant headstones. But it’s the film’s sound as much as its visuals that carries as much of its atmosphere and emotion. Whether it’s the wail of the families gathered in a Greymouth hall after they have been bluntly told by mine boss Peter Whithall and police superintendent Gary Knowles their men are dead, or sound of the pit itself.
Sarkies hasn’t been into the mine but he’s heard it. He found a special microphone made in Slovakia to record subterranean vibrations. He attached it to a pipe at Pike River and listened on his headphones.
“And it was the deepest subterranean of rumble I’ve ever heard … and I knew that at some point in the film we had to use that sound … you can at very least feel the deep weight of [the mine].
The sonic design also served the film’s subtext. “Even though we don’t go into the mine, I actually felt like these families and these two women were trapped like they were trapped in a mine – trapped by the injustice and a sort of toxic mix of grief and anger. I wanted to find a way to subtly represent that.”
Sarkies did consider the possibility that Pike River and its sprawling story, which in the film boils things down like the Royal Commission hearings and decision to three minutes of screen time, could be told as a television series. Something akin possibly to a Mr Bates vs the Post Office or Chernobyl.
“But I wanted to take people into that place and hold them there and then gently release them. I wasn’t sure that it was something that people would want to keep tuning into night after night. There’s something about the experience of watching a movie in a dark room and engaging fully. You’re not doing the ironing while you’re watching Pike River. You’re sitting there consumed by it.”
“I probably mentioned to Sonya that it would be pretty amazing if Jacinda did it, thinking, ‘Well, that’s never going to happen.’ Sonya just immediately goes, ‘Well, I’ll call her’
You’re also possibly impressed by how true-to-life everything and everybody looks, whether it’s Lucy Lawless as Helen Kelly, the depictions of now familiar figures such as Rowdy Durbridge or Bernie Monk, or political figures such as John Key, played by Dan Cleary. Sarkies captures him as a man in the meetings with the Pike River families who appears to be listening but looks like he’d rather be somewhere else. And then there’s a 2017 scene when Rockhouse and Osborne are lobbying politicians at Parliament. They get a meeting with newly anointed Labour leader Jacinda Ardern … as played by Jacinda Ardern.
“I probably mentioned to Sonya that it would be pretty amazing if Jacinda did it, thinking, ‘Well, that’s never going to happen.’ Sonya just immediately goes, ‘Well, I’ll call her’ and 10 minutes later I get a text saying, ‘She’s keen’.
“Of course, I’m aware it’s going to get attention. But it’s a very small moment, and it is actually depicting a meeting that really happened. What was significant about that particular meeting was that it was a meeting between power represented by Jacinda and these two women on the same level, which was very different from the interactions they had had with politicians throughout the years.
“So, it felt worth it to accept Jacinda’s offer because of what it represented. And Jacinda is a massive fan; she’s in awe of Sonya and Anna.”
Asked for comment on her involvement in the film, Ardern’s office replied: “After leaving office Dame Jacinda was asked by a Pike River family member involved with the film to appear. She agreed to briefly appear as herself, in a voluntary capacity. She hasn’t yet had the opportunity to see the film.”
Given the film’s dim view of the Key government and then the Ardern cameo, how does Sarkies think it will be received politically? Especially given the moves by the Coalition Government to dismantle the workplace safety legislation introduced in the wake of the 2010 tragedy?
“I hope that all politicians are open enough to just watch it … there’s a bigger story here, a bigger reflection here of who we are and how we deal with things as a country beyond the direct health and safety aspect. I would love [Workplace Relations and Safety Minister] Brooke van Velden to watch this film with an open heart. It’s not a criticism of this government at all. It’s now part of our history and it involves multiple agencies, politicians and institutions.”
“We don’t have a class system in New Zealand but we’ve got the Koru Club – this band of people represented by institutions who are actually above the law
But Sarkies thinks the Pike River story goes to something in our cultural DNA and how power and justice really work in NZ. Mine boss Peter Whittall walked away from health and safety charges after a $3.41 million settlement was paid – a deal the Supreme Court later ruled was wrong.
“The unfairness of having their men killed is shocking enough but then to not have that initially properly investigated, for there to be no real effort to go in and either get the men out or gather evidence, and then Peter Whittall and others just sort of walk away scot-free … It interested me socially. Why do we in New Zealand work like this, act like this?”
“It’s just part of a narrative that goes back to Erebus and forward to the CTV building [in the Christchurch earthquakes] where on the surface due process has been followed but we rarely prosecute people so they can be judged.
“We don’t have a class system in New Zealand but we’ve got the Koru Club – this band of people represented by institutions who are actually above the law and because we’re so fair-minded and egalitarian, supposedly, historically, we have just let that go.”
Pike River has its NZ premiere in Greymouth on October 13 before screenings in Auckland Christchurch. It got a standing ovation at its world premiere with Osborne and Rockhouse going on stage at the Sydney Film Festival in June. Also there was survivor Daniel Rockhouse who had left to work in the mines in Australia six weeks after the Pike River disaster. Sarkies had only spoken to him on the phone before meeting him for a coffee the day before the premiere.
“I said to him, ‘Daniel, I honestly don’t know what this experience will be like for you. While you and the families, helped us make the film, the film isn’t for the families. You’ve already experienced this. You don’t actually need to experience it again.
“He just said ‘mate, I’m here because I want to be here. I want to see your film’.”
Rockhouse was sitting with his partner and mother behind Sarkies at the screening. The director could hear him nudging his partner and commenting “good looking bloke” about the actor playing him, and swearing when the character of Whittall appeared on screen.
“He definitely found it cathartic so much so that he’s flying himself to New Zealand to watch it again and be part of the New Zealand release. He’s going to be in Christchurch, sitting there again with his mum. He was reluctant to see it but I guess it helped him process.”
Pike River is in cinemas from October 20.