Pike River is a film about many things: the mine explosion that took the lives of 29 men in November 2010, the conditions that allowed it to happen and a community’s struggle to hold power to account in its wake. On another level, it’s about the place where it happened; the land captured in its opening images, which is not always lovely but always in charge.
But more than anything in Fiona Samuel’s script, it’s about two women and the friendship they found in adversity: Sonya Rockhouse, whose youngest son, Ben, died in the explosion, and Anna Osborne, who lost her husband Milton. The former is played by Robyn Malcolm and the latter by Melanie Lynskey. The casting was so important, director Rob Sarkies tells the Listener, that the project might not have gone ahead if he hadn’t been able to secure the pair to play opposite each other.
The responsibility was not lost on Malcolm and Lynskey who not only had never worked with each other but also had never met. They were, however, long-time mutual admirers.
“I think she is New Zealand’s greatest actor and it’s been a dream of mine to work with her,” Lynskey says. “So it was a huge draw for me that Robyn was doing this; it was very exciting.” Happily – “thank god” – she also liked her.
Malcolm adds with a laugh, “I think it might have even been on the first day when you said to me, ‘oh my god, imagine if we’d met and we really didn’t like each other?’ And very quickly, we both just went, ‘oh, I love you – you speak my language.’”
Hours after they met each other they met the women they would be playing. “We went out for dinner with Sonya and Anna that night, so it was all just like little magnets going off,” says Malcolm. “And then it was easy.”
They were just off camera, and you’d see them out of the corner of your eye, just weeping. It would be very, very emotional.
“Yeah,” says Lynskey, “it’s a lot of pressure, because you want to get it right. You don’t want someone to feel like you’re doing an impersonation of them. And Rob did not want us to do impressions. I’ve done it so many times, but I’ve never worked closely with the person that I’ve been playing. I also just love Anna and I wanted her heart to be in it, because she has such a beautiful, big heart. I wanted to show her love for her husband more than anything. And her love for Sonya, obviously, which is the entire story of the movie.”
“It’s a really lovely exercise to do as an actor because it’s just not about you,” says Malcolm. “And they were there. There were some moments when we’d be working and you’d look just past the camera and one of them would be standing there. They were right in there.
“But the other great thing about them is that they’ve got such brilliant senses of humour. Despite what they’ve been through they did hold everything quite lightly. So, you know, you’d get to an end of a take and they’d take the piss. They’re like, ‘that was shit, do that again!’ They were not frightened. Because we got to know them so well they just felt like they were a natural collaborative part of the story.”
Lynskey: “There were some times when we were filming – the scene waiting at the mine or other particularly devastating moments – and like Robyn’s saying they were just off camera, and you’d see them out of the corner of your eye, just weeping. It would be very, very emotional. What must this be like, to have these people recreating the worst moment of your life? I felt a huge responsibility.”
In real life, Rockhouse and Osborne didn’t become friends until after their loss. Though Rockhouse had two sons working in the mine, she didn’t live locally and was to some extent an outsider. But they bonded first over shared grief then a mutual determination to get justice for their men.
Although national news coverage focused largely on the Pike River families’ demand for the mine to be safely entered and the men’s bodies to be recovered, Rockhouse and Osborne also saw the reopening of the mine as a means to gather more evidence about what had happened and why supposed safety measures turned out to be missing.
They succeeded, with the support of then prime minister Jacinda Ardern (who briefly plays herself in a cameo in a scene with Malcolm and Lynskey), and a team of police officers who spent years investigating in a way the then Department of Labour had not. But by then, WorkSafe (its creation was a response to the disaster) had already done a deal with Pike River boss Peter Whittall in which he would pay $3.41 million and not be prosecuted. The Supreme Court later found the deal was an unlawful agreement to prevent prosecution.
Malcolm says, “I’ll never forget when Helen Kelly and I were talking to unions about the Hobbit stuff. We were in Christchurch and Helen had been over in Greymouth at the first memorial for all the men who were lost, and she arrived in Christchurch with this white-hot fury. She was so angry because Whittall and all his lot sat in the front few rows of this memorial and all the families were pushed to the back. She was just beside herself.
“A lot of people at the time were saying Peter Whittall should be up for New Zealander of the Year – and I remember Helen sitting there going, ‘no, you wait, you wait, he’s the villain.’ People were like, ‘stop being so Helen Kelly about it.’ But her commitment was to go and work for those families.”
Kelly, the Council of Trade Unions president who died in 2016, is played in Pike River by Lucy Lawless, who is a little taller than the real Kelly but captures her unfussy determination.
Lawless said recently in a production interview she saw Kelly as “a fighter for the little guy”, and that if she had not swung in behind the Pike families “nothing would have changed because the affected people were so crushed by the wheels of industry – not just the miners who died, but all their families and the notion of justice itself. Helen, along with others who care about justice, who care about the law, became the connective tissue in that fight. For Sonya and Anna, she gave them the knowledge and the wherewithall to press on for justice for their loved ones.”
“I see Helen Kelly as the ultimate warrior. She was a remarkable woman, very gentle, never swore, never raised her voice; she was ‘strong like a willow’. Her flexibility and her determination to fight for the little guy I think was her life-blood.”
Kelly, who was dying of lung cancer, did this in the last months of her life. Osborne was also diagnosed with cancer – a return of Hodgkin’s lymphoma – just before her husband Milton died in the mine and underwent surgery and chemotherapy while she was campaigning in 2016. In 2018, doctors told her the disease had spread (she has since had stem-cell therapy).
At the same time, her first grandchild was born three months premature – and she and Rockhouse were invited to walk together up the 30m drift into the mine. Their efforts had helped lead to the concrete seal at the entrance being broken. This is not a film that needs to go around looking for its emotional heft.
It’s also a film whose true-life story is not yet settled. The police investigation has not been officially concluded, the seal could be broken again, and in June this year, several Pike River families were represented in a court hearing in Wellington, the details of which are suppressed. In August, RNZ National reported WorkSafe officials had warned the government its changes announced earlier this year to the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 risked “repeating the failure” that had led to Pike River.
That tragedy shouldn’t have happened, and the fact that this latest government is starting to really tear down some of that workplace safety I think is awful.
Malcolm says she wants people who see the film “to take away a deep admiration for Sonya and Anna, to know that these are two women who are, heart and soul, such a beautiful representation of Kiwi tenacity. Their ability to get over their own grief, their own pain and depression and all that, to fight that fight. I think that’s important.
“And also on a more political level, there’s the work-safety environment around those miners. That tragedy shouldn’t have happened, and the fact that this latest government is starting to really tear down some of that workplace safety I think is awful.
“So, there’s a very relevant and current thing that I hope this film injects into people. Just that sense of ownership, you know, as a country. I remember exactly where I was when that mine blew. It’s a part of us, you know.”
Pike River is in cinemas from October 20.
