It might be set in 1954 and have a title in the past tense, but We Were Dangerous is making a timely arrival home. The film, which is the feature-directing debut for Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu and the first feature for its screenwriter, Maddie Dai, will open this month’s New Zealand International Film Festival before having a wider release.
That also means their tale of three teenagers at a home for delinquent girls is hitting the big screen just weeks after the release of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State and Faith-based Care report. It’s a fictional tale set 70 years ago but, as Stewart-Te Whiu says, “Yes, it’s a period piece, but really, we haven’t come that far.”
We Were Dangerous is set mostly in an institution on Ōtamahua/Quail Island in Lyttelton Harbour, which has a real-life history as a quarantine station and leper colony. There, the trio of Nellie (Erana James), Lou (Nathalie Morris) and Daisy (Manaia Hall) and their fellow adolescent female misfits receive daily instruction in living a virtuous life by the place’s devout matron (Rima Te Wiata). But while the days are filled with Christian guidance and lessons in domesticity and deportment, the nights start to deliver sinister state intervention in their lives.
The story is fictional, but Dai wove together historical elements – such as the 1954 Mazengarb Report into juvenile delinquency, which arrived in the wake of the Parker-Hulme murder earlier that year and the pro-eugenics pamphlet “The Fertility of the Unfit”, which won support among many in NZ in the decades pre-World War II.
Dai had her own family history involving a Lithuanian great-great-grandfather being interned on Matiu/Somes Island in Wellington Harbour during WWI. But the initial idea for the story wasn’t all serious, Dai says from London, where she is juggling a snowballing TV and movie-writing career with her art director and cartooning one. Her wry work has appeared in the New Yorker since 2017.
And after all, she says, the Aardman-animated movie Chicken Run – essentially a poultry-themed remake of the POW movie The Great Escape – was a formative film for her. She also wanted to write a comedy adventure with teenage girls as protagonists.
“I grew up in Wellington with just a bunch of irreverent and funny and spirited and wild and hilarious teenage girls that I felt I didn’t see that often in films.”
Back home during the pandemic, on a whim she sent her draft to Piki Films. There, despite it being her first feature script, producers Carthew Neal and Morgan Waru said yes. They brought in screenwriter Stewart-Te Whiu, who, after directing a couple of shorts, was ready to take on a feature.
But she saw a personal connection – an “in” – to Dai’s material before they jointly started working it into a filmable script. Her father, Hohepa Te Whiu, had been raised in a state-run boys’ home, and she says he has received a small compensation payment for his ill-treatment.
With the script finished and the cast in place, Stewart-Te Whiu brought her father and another state-care survivor into a table read before shooting began. She says he was a little starstruck by Te Wiata. But a few weeks later, they went for a long walk “and he really opened up to me about his experiences there and what rang true for him with the script and what it brought back for him”.
Stewart-Te Whiu, her cast and crew shot the film in August 2022, using Ōtamahua/Quail Island and other more accessible beaches and hills on Banks Peninsula. For a grim institution, it certainly has a scenic backdrop.
“But also, what I kind of loved about it is that it could be anywhere. It doesn’t necessarily feel like New Zealand. Also, what I liked is that there weren’t a lot of native trees. I felt like the landscape itself has also been sort of stripped away or colonised, in a sense. That’s totally reflective of the film.”
Dai recalls watching the Australian classic Picnic at Hanging Rock while writing the screenplay and reading an essay about it, which drew an analogy between the harshness of the landscape and “these untameable girls who just have a sort of spirit that can’t be denied”, something she thinks has parallels to the backdrop to Dangerous.
Dai joined the shoot, putting her illustrating skills to work in the art department, helping create period posters and other touches. It also gave her a chance to observe and learn. “In some ways, there’s no greater, no more humbling and useful experience for a writer than hearing actors absolutely slog through your lines. I didn’t fully appreciate the role of an actor, aside from, like, charm, accents and being able to cry on command. I was left in awe. It’s a dark magic.”
Of the leading three, James and Morris are relative screen veterans. The younger Hall is a first timer, who had never acted. She sent an audition tape from her home in Wairoa and got two recalls before the producers asked if she could come to Auckland – at which point she thought she had better tell her parents, who were, thankfully, supportive.
Stewart-Te Whiu says editing proved tricky. It was an effort to wrangle the film’s overall tone and finding the balance between its comedy and drama took a long time. Veteran German cutter Hansjörg Weissbrich was roped into the project, which Stewart-Te Whiu described as “a blessing”.
“[He gave] a totally different point of view, different world view, different sense of humour … because he was less worried about the politics, and he was just purely focusing on the story.”
The film has already been on the international festival circuit. It screened at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, where it won a Special Jury Award for Filmmaking, a youth-focused festival in Sweden, the British Film Institute’s LGBTQIA+ Flare festival in London and the Sydney Film Festival.
We Were Dangerous is the opening night film at the NZ International Film Festival nationwide (except Christchurch) including Wellington, July 31, Auckland, August 7, and Dunedin, August 14. It goes on general release on August 22.
