Ka Whawhai Tonu director Mike Jonathan wept when Shayne Radford finally agreed to become his production designer, the person responsible for a film’s visual style via its sets, props and locations.
Jonathan, who describes Radford as a “living legend”, has worked with him on a number of projects, including Taika Waititi’s 2010 film Boy and the 2012 documentary Charlie Shelford Rebel Hero.
“He was always a really nice person to talk to about detail,” he recalls. “I said to Shayne [during Boy] ‘I’m gonna get you to make my first feature film.’”
Ka Whawhai Tonu is that film. But when Jonathan first invited Radford to come on board, the latter had just finished work on another long shoot out of town and wanted a breather back home in Auckland.
Jonathan didn’t give up. “Shayne and his wife Ange and I met at a cafe in Avondale, and I shared my film bible – a four-year compilation of references, photos and diagrams from the siege of Ōrākau,” he says. “When I asked, ‘Can you do my film?’ and he said yes, I lost it ... I cried like a baby for about five minutes. I just knew I was going to be in safe hands. I think Shayne and I are very similar. We’re both softly spoken, full of ideas and we share a passion for Aotearoa history.”
“When we met, I was so taken by what he was saying, I had to do it,” Radford adds later. “ He cried, Ange looked at me with bleary eyes and it all worked out.”
Radford’s primary task was to build a replica of the doomed Ōrākau pā erected at speed in 1864 by an alliance of Māori iwi as the British troops advanced towards them.
“We had a look at Ōrākau where it happened,” he says. “I was trying to figure out what sort of materials they had available for building the pā. There were sketches but no photos.”
Radford used two books to research the pā's layout and dimensions: The Colonial New Zealand Wars, an illustrated military history published in 1986 by Tim Ryan and Bill Parham, and Te Pā Māori, a 1927 survey of “fortified villages” by ethnologist Elsdon Best, which he found in a Christchurch bookshop many years ago.
“Best went through the whole country and every pā site is mapped and in here except Ōrākau, which is mentioned. What this book told me is that there was a massive change in the construction of pā sites because of muskets.
“Once the muskets came, Māori developed trench warfare and trench warfare is Ōrākau.”
Radford discovered a plan of the pā in the Ryan-Parham book, including its tunnels, bunkers and light-weight palisades suspended above trenches which protected Māori fighters panning their guns around at the troops.
He pulls out a large diagram traced on builder’s paper. “After the British had won the battle, they went in with their surveyors and drew the whole thing. This is the military plan of Ōrākau.”
Radford and his team built the pā – 40m long, 25m wide and 1.5m deep – on farmland owned by Tura Te Ngākau iwi on the outskirts of Rotorua. The land, farmed by Haydy and Linda Rika (who have since retired), took Jonathan and Radford an hour to reach from the main road on their first visit, driving along a rough track.
“Once we decided we were going to do it there, Haydy and Linda got their digger and carved out a road and put shingle on it so we could take all of our services through.”
The construction became a community affair, with Rotorua drainage company C.H. Builders providing two digger machines at a bargain rate, along with a skilled young driver, Riley Payne.
“I marked out where the pā site needed to be and Riley took three days to dig out the big stuff. He was always careful not to mark the grass in the surrounding areas. He came in with the little digger to do the curves and corners. Then we went in with hand spades and made it look like the walls had been dug by hand.”
The film’s head carpenter, Jim “Chippie” Love, sourced the construction timber. “Chippie was invaluable,” says Radford. “He went to the local mill and sourced a lot of Oregon timber, huge pieces that had been lying around for a long time and got a big stack for a good price. We used that to build the bunkers which were sheltering the rangatira [chiefs], the kids and the women.
“I also made exact replicas inside the studios that we shot the interiors in so we could get out of the weather.”
Radford says Ka Whawhai Tonu has carried a deep significance for him, partly because it resonates with Utu, the first film he worked on, as a wig-maker and hair stylist, in 1983. The experience fascinated him, prompting a switch from a successful career running a hair salon in Wellington (Bananas in Cuba Mall).
“If I’d stayed in the hairdressing thing, I would have a really nice house and all the accoutrements, but this has been a better life,” he says, “much more interesting.”
Forty years down the track, he has worked on many New Zealand films, including River Queen, Rain of the Children, Desperate Remedies, Once Were Warriors, Boy, One Thousand Ropes, Bellbird, Mysterious Ways...
With filming on Ka Whawhai Tonu complete, the battered pā will remain on the site as a reminder of the past.
“Before we filmed too much of the battle and spoiled the look of the pā, we had the site 3D-mapped and scanned for an education website being developed in conjunction with the film so students can digitally explore the whole pā on their computers,” he says.
“They have left the whole site intact in its after-battle state and now they are taking high school kids up there for tours already. That part of it was one of the things that inspired me to want to do it even more. This is an education piece.”
