Our People, Our Stories

Academy Award and BAFTA nominated DOP Stu Dryburgh takes NZTECHO back to NZ’s 1970s and 80s film industry. While today’s wrap parties may not be as epic and health and safety practices are now more robust, may the long-lived passion in New Zealanders for filmmaking go on.

In mid-1970’s NZ the film industry didn’t exist. Geoff Murphy was a trumpeter, Bruno Lawrence a drummer (I can still remember going to see Quincy Conserve at the Downtown Club in Wellington as a young teen) and Alun Bollinger (Albol) was being trained by TVNZ as a cameraman (though there was a problem in his refusal to wear shoes).

But, people were trying to make NZ movies for New Zealanders. Geoff Stevens, David Blythe, BLERTA and Roger Donaldson among others. One of the most successful NZ films ever was Michael Firth’s Off the Edge, a doco about hang gliding in the Southern Alps.

I didn’t really mean to get into the film business, my first love was actually radio, but that is a whole other story…

In 1976 I graduated from Auckland’s School of Architecture, my final year sub-thesis was presented as a 16mm film. (Thank you Professor David Mitchell for encouraging me, and Lenny Lipton for his book How to make an Independent Film.) Mid 1978 and with nothing on my resume other than six months as a Sydney taxi driver, I was the perfect candidate for the nascent film industry. Young, cheap, interested and unemployed – and therefore available.

A stint as a driver/PA/ lighting assistant on John Reid’s Middle Aged Spread, and I was hooked. I worked on a few commercials with DOPs like Jim Bartle and the late lamented Gary Hansen, and suddenly I was the gaffer on Goodbye Pork Pie. We really did take ‘that mini’ from ‘North Cape to Invercargill’. Maybe the best road movie ever. And I learned so much, from Albol and not to mention Andy Grant and Alister Barry.

Over a couple of years in the Auckland TVC business I really thought I had become a gaffer. It wasn’t until I was best boy for Mickey Morris on Savage Islands that I realized how much I didn’t know. But that is also another story…

Dorthe Scheffmann and I had both spent the early part of 1981 working on Roger Donaldson’s Smash Palace, she as the production manager, me the gaffer for DOP Graham Cowley. Dave Brown was the other half of the lighting department. When I got the call from unit production manager Jane Gilbert for (the late) Lloyd Philips and Rob Whitehouse, I left our almost renovated Ponsonby cottage. While it had hot and cold running water, there was a gaping hole in the middle of the kitchen floor, thanks Mike Becroft for coming to the rescue.

So it goes. I was suddenly in Alexandra, as the gaffer on an international movie Battletruck (aka Warlords of the 21st Century). As a kid who grew up in Wellington, and as a young adult in Auckland, Central Otago seemed impossibly exotic. After the first week they replaced the original British DOP, and in came Chris Menges with several feral children in tow (hello Una). Chris, after a career shooting difficult documentaries, and brilliant British independent movies, had been hired as second unit DOP on the second Star Wars movie (The Empire Strikes Back). So suddenly he was the go-to guy for sci-fi. I had been really lucky, NZ DOPs like Jim Bartle, Albol and a whole bunch of Aussies, had taught me a lot about lighting in a practical sense. But Chris was all about windows and natural light, as a motivation for lighting. And I got it.

For total misery it would be hard to beat Vincent Ward’s Vigil. Talk about no art without pain! It was entirely shot in a dank, dark, godforsaken valley in north Taranaki. A really hard shoot. Even though, I got a chance to flex my lighting abilities a little, as Albol focused on operating and working with Vincent on story. They both encouraged me to run with the lighting in ways I had never been given a chance before. The living conditions, while austere, had some benefits. Most of the crew lived in the Uriti motor camp, (now I bet there are some stories) but Brett Mills, Jannelle Aston and I shared a derelict farm house, only months away from becoming a hay shed. The coal range worked, so the kitchen was cosy, and we drank cheap red wine and played chess into the late hours – waking up to one of the best views ever of Mount Taranaki.

And then there was Carry Me Back. Lee Tamahori bouncing BB slugs off the side of our lighting trailer, Brian Kassler and Richie Scott setting white spirit soaked grass afire on the top of a mountain pass in Marlborough. Actually kidnapping and tying up fellow crew members at a dawn party. I have pictures but I won’t share them here, well actually maybe I will… A little after BK had run through a party after a night shoot in a Vivian Street brothel, with a chainsaw clattering (okay, he had taken the chain off first, but how was anyone to know that), 40 very drunk people spilled out onto the street at 8am. There was dancing, drinking and the playing of an upright piano, it was crazy and an affront to regular citizens driving to work, stuck in the crosstown traffic on a Monday morning. Definitely the best time had by any NZ crew, ever, and universally reviled by critics. Mind you, my friend Malcolm Walker reckons it the best NZ movie of the late 20th century. But he is from Hokitika.

In 1985 I made the jump to shooting – my last jobs as a gaffer had included another two stints in Taranaki on Pallet on the Floor, with DOP Kevin ‘Bertie’ Haywood and director Lynton Butler, and Came a Hot Friday, another Hugh Morrisson story brought to the screen by Ian Mune and DOP Albol.

Which leads me to almost my favorite story from that era – a cautionary tale really. Summer 1983 and I was the gaffer on a movie then called Finding Katie, released as Trespasses I believe. Lee was the AD, John Cullinane his second, and Leon Narbey the DOP. The lighting department was me, Millsy and ‘Gooch’ Evans, working out of my newly built Nissan four wheel drive lighting truck. I loved that truck! And it was a very slow day for us. We were shooting out at Bethells Beach, near Auckland, near a small church built on a headland by our designer Kay Hawkins and his art department. A graveyard of polystyrene headstones, day exterior, and a perfect day for it… a little bounce here and there, taking turns in holding the occasional piece of poly. So, at lunch, we hit the beach, and as was the habit of those times, we smoked a little of the local herb. Actually, quite a lot. And top shelf. I mean, what could go wrong? Well, 10 minutes after we were called back from lunch, solid black clouds rolled in from over the Waitakares, and it began to rain. Hard. Very hard. For the rest of the day. Production genius as he is, Lee calls out an audible – “okay everybody, no worries, we can shoot the scene inside the church”. You know how that goes, camera and actors inside, but the lights? Outside in the rain. Which meant that three very stoned electricians were building zip-up towers, rigging HMIs and cabling high voltage in what was effectively a lake. With their brains slowly leaking out their ears. I have never, ever, again taken drugs at work, to this day, ever!

Not to say that my subsequent career as a DOP hasn’t been rewarding, and even fun. Definitely it’s had its weird moments. But the first 10 years as a neophyte gaffer, at the dawn of a brand new industry was very special. The people making it happen weren’t in it for the money, had no expectation of success, they just wanted to make NZ movies, for New Zealanders. May that attitude prosper! Telling our own stories, ourselves.