In recent years, Temuera Morrison has spent a lot of his time on screen playing an alien bounty hunter or hanging out with superheroes. In Far North, he’s just an everyman, the still point at the centre of a mad story that actually happened right here on Planet Earth.
“It was beautiful to act without a helmet on my head,” he says. “That can get a bit tedious.”
Morrison, best known to the wider world as Star Wars’ Boba Fett, comes out from under the helmet to play “Ed”, opposite Robyn Malcolm as “Heather” – the first time they’ve acted together since they were both on Shortland Street in 1994. Their parts are based on the real-life Northland couple who found themselves caught up in a comically bungled plot to land half a tonne of Chinese methamphetamine on the beach at Ahipara in 2016 and called the cops.
Far North had its birth when writer-director David White knocked on the couple’s door to ask if he could tell their story. He drove to Ahipara to find them, he says, after reading a news report about the bust and thinking, “I don’t truly believe that all the facts are being told here.
“I met ‘Ed’ and spent two hours talking to him about it and I thought there is so much to the story that is not in the public eye yet and it’s so fantastical on so many levels – everything from the size of the drug bust to how they weren’t particularly good at it. I just knew there was something in it. I basically offered to buy their life rights on the spot.”
The thing about Far North is that as “based on” stories go, it’s remarkably close to the truth. White wasn’t able to meet the Tongan conspirators (“the lawyers either wouldn’t allow me to go talk to them in prison, or they didn’t want to be spoken to”), but he had 2000 pages of court records to work with – and, in places, just paste into his script.
“I used entire transcripts inside my script sometimes. There’s a scene with a Customs officer with the Tall Guy character in episode two and that is some of the best writing – in fact, when we sent the scripts away, people were like, ‘Oh, man, that’s really good writing.’”
The series launches here with international deals already in the bag – White’s treatment and the first draft of his script were enough to convince Paramount+ in Australia and Sundance Now in the US to come aboard.
“They were fascinated by the international element of the drug ring, so automatically, it starts to broaden out. Even though 90% of the show is set in Ahipara, this is not just happening in New Zealand – this is a story that could be happening in any one of these countries.”
Ironically, it wasn’t the criminal capers that the production’s foreign partners queried, but Heather and Ed.
“People keep asking us from overseas, ‘Are Heather and Ed really, truly like this? Are they really that nice?’” says White. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s crazy. Those two people are the nicest humans.’ But they’re also two people that you don’t want to push too far. Once they realise there’s something terribly wrong, they do stand up to it. The thing that attracts me to that story is very much, ‘What would you do in that situation?’ And for them, they finally called the cops.”
The show uses the real-life couple’s house as a location, and Morrison says spending time with them was a highlight of the project.
“I was blessed to have the real people around me every day. The real Ed was a wonderful man. He reminded me a little bit of some of my uncles – they’re just talented with their hands, they can fix anything. So I really enjoyed just wearing the clothes, sitting on the tractor – besides me graunching the gears and almost drowning the engine a few times and getting it bogged in the sand. We’d have a few refreshments afterwards and a few sing-songs, and it was great.”
‘He got to drive the tractor, he got to hang out with the boys,” White confirms. “And I think that really comes through in his performance. One of the things that I’m so proud of him for is it’s a character you’ve never seen from Tem before, because he often plays very patriarchal characters. There’s so much warmth throughout his performance. You know how good an actor he really is. And also that he was just having the best time.”
Although Morrison and Malcolm are used to working overseas, the international partnerships represent a big break for younger cast members, especially those playing the would-be Tongan smugglers.
“They’re all really fantastic,” says White. “I think we’ve made them very human, so they’re not just your typical druggie bad people. They all have their own personalities and there’s a real heart in those characters as well. I don’t really see them as goodies and baddies and all that kind of thing. I see them as all humans.”
White worked on the script with Tongan playwright Suli Moa and University of Auckland screenwriting student Mingjian Cui to make sure the Tongan and Chinese characters respectively felt authentic, and says he’s proud of the fact that – for the first time in a local prime-time production, he believes – the Chinese characters speak Mandarin with subtitles.
There was another group of people to get right with – the Ahipara locals, some of whom were initially uncomfortable with another story about Northland and meth. White spoke to a community meeting about it.
“I said, ‘This is a story about outsiders coming into your town and importing this drug. It’s not another meth story; it’s a comedy of errors, it’s about outsiders doing something malevolent – and how this town actually, in the end, stood up to them, and said no, not in our district.’”
White has directed feature films before – the Shihad: Beautiful Machine documentary and This Town, where he first worked with Malcolm – but readily acknowledges this is the biggest thing he’s ever worked on. So big, in fact, that he had to write a non-fiction book, which will be published alongside the six-part series.
“The book came about because I just had so much information, the court records and the research I’d done interviewing the people up north. I just went, ‘There’s so much more to the story than I can ever pack into a show.’ There’s a whole back story from the drugs leaving China, for example.”
White says he still shakes his head every now and then at the fact that his story is true.
“Reading the court records, every few pages I’d go, ‘What the fuck just happened?’ Even now, I’m in the middle of mixing the show and sometimes you just go, ‘This is insane.’”
Far North, Three and ThreeNow, from Monday, August 14, 8.30pm.
