Remembering Michael David Hardcastle

“It will come as no surprise that I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the 21st century since it began.”

A line in a recent email from Mike Hardcastle. Wryly expressing his despair at the stupidity and greed that is making this planet uninhabitable.

Alongside the professionalism, courtesy, generosity and quiet stoicism, the utter reliability that anyone who worked with Mike will recognise, there was this obdurate passion, this anger, the other side of his love for the sea, his love for the stories of people that he saw through his camera, and that as editorial alchemist he painstakingly sifted and assayed, and found the authentic metal to be made into films. I think he loved documentary above all because it began with discovery and through it, in it, he hoped he could find truth.

I met Mike in 1975 when I was at Downstage and he was at Pacific, and got to know him better on Middle Age Spread. But I didn’t really get close to him till the last seven years. He was a paradoxical figure, funny, kind, warm, a rare friend, but also beset for long periods by grim and overwhelming pessimism. There was something of The Old Testament about him. You could imagine him stalking through a desert wilderness, bearing his granite prophecies, his intransigent manifestos, his apocalypses of revelation and cataclysm. He’d been devout in his youth, and had rejected it. Singularity of belief still marked how he thought, even if he had long abandoned the theology. (Remember how his complicated friend, that reprobate apostate Barry Barclay, never gave up arguing like a Jesuit?) For Mike, unflinching rectitude could be a strength and a burden, like his uncomfortable scorn for small talk, and his reactionary commitment to baked beans on toast.

He raged at the dying of the planet, but not at his own dying. He did dislike the indignities his failing body and medical palliation inflicted. In the conversations we had about what was happening to him he expressed a calm acceptance he hadn’t expected. Toward the end he whispered, smiling, wry: this too will pass. He’d already held a frail boat steady through a long and violent storm, the only one standing.

Seven years ago Mike, Waka Attewell and I had a go at putting together a film about death and madness and art and other ordinary things. The film didn’t happen, which didn’t really matter because other ordinary things did. Hundreds of three-way emails. Mike dreamt of growing his own spuds and tobacco in a town where a river meets the sea.

There wasn’t time. And now he’s gone.

For a man who could be such a grim old git he left a broad wake of love behind him.

Stephen McCurdy

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Dearest Mike,

The tears are jumping on me at the strangest times… I know you’d think that all rather unnecessary under the circumstances and then you would’ve said something slightly spiritual but still self-effacing, yet very humorous.

I’m driving across the Auckland Harbour Bridge… tears, remembering that shot you told me about showing all the cars. Stacked up and floating… toxic drain on precious resources. I drive past a marae and feel your devotion to kaitiakitanga… more tears.

Yesterday on a documentary shoot filming an economist about the human dilemma of wealth and inequality, moral issues and broken political agenda… the tears drip onto the viewfinder as I remember a conversation you and I had predicting these times and the demise of humanity – would’ve been around 1991– in a time before the term global warming had made itself into the political arena of denial and stupidity… Mike you saw it coming. You knew already where the banking system was taking us as they foreclosed on the oyster farm… it was you who told me that banking trick of forced-over capitalisation and debt collection. Yet, despite all that disappointment and grief you found yourself again, and a true love in Anne; then telling the inner truth with your film and documentary work that never failed to inspire… picking yourself up and never compromised your beliefs.

I’d admired you even more.

Thank you for that love that only a true friend can share. You can only have one friend like that and that was you Mike.

But mostly thank you for showing me how to be a better person… I will miss you immensely.

Waka Attewell

It’s how you define yourself that matters.

Yesterday I went to the funeral of Mike Hardcastle. He was an extremely talented filmmaker and editor. I first worked with him when he volunteered to be part of the team making short film clips to denounce the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and I instantly wished I had met him earlier in my life.

I liked him because he was an honest man – by which I mean a man who knew himself, spoke his mind; a man who was not driven by money but by other demons: what we are doing to the planet, what we are doing to each other through the neoliberal agenda.

He was also a pragmatist. When diagnosed with stage-four cancer he dealt with it in a matter-of-fact way. It was just part of life. “All things die eventually” he said.

As I listened to those who knew Mike talk about how he had touched their lives, I was reminded how we are defined in so many different ways by others.

To some we are a father or a mother, a friend, a business colleague, a next-door neighbour. Others define us by such things the place we live, the job we do, our education, the money we earn, even the clothes we wear or the way we adorn our bodies with tattoos and piercings – or not.

In life we take on many roles. Some we create, some are thrust upon us. How well we perform them, is again, for others to assess.

In the end, however, it is how we define ourselves that matters. For if you are not honest with yourself you cannot be honest with others.

In these devious times it is always a joy when you meet an honest person. Mike was one of those. An honest man.

I shall miss him.

PS: You can watch some of Mike’s work on NZ OnScreen. His award-winning documentary When A Warrior Dies is an exceptional film which is well worth a watch. You can find it on their website.

Bryan Bruce

Michael Hardcastle, what the hell are you doing lying in bed all day, full of morphine?

It just doesn’t seem right that the most supportive bloke I’ve known in this tough screen production caper should be in such a state.

We’re all headed along the same path of course – you just got there first – but I wish it weren’t so.

It’s many years since you were at Pacific, in the days when we were all naive and enthusiastic, when grand visions just might, maybe, turn into something real, and everything seemed to be happening for the very first time.

I don’t think you ever lost that feeling. All you did lose was naivety and inexperience, to be replaced by expertise and down-to-earth practicality.

By the time we worked together on a biggish shoot, your skill level was very high indeed.

When checking that I was placing something in the right part of the frame for appropriate emphasis, a glance at you was all it took, and few words, if any, were required.

Although (apparently) I’m regarded as a persnickety bastard with an overly precise idea of how a scene should be framed and shot, with you behind the camera the idea of walking over to look down the viewfinder just seemed a waste of time. You knew what I was doing, and I knew what you were doing.

Seeing the results in rushes/dailies, on the rare occasion that there was a slight variation from what I had in mind, the variation was always slightly better.

But... my strongest memory is of your quiet unfailing support through the worst organised production I’ve ever seen.

A decade or so later, no longer based in NZ, but visiting, I called in on you (and Anne, Kate and Tom) at Kerikeri, where you practically demanded that I take your car for a day, to whip round to Russell and see a tall ship and some shipmates from a filmed adventure.

You’ve probably taken that good-natured thing too far. I’m trying to think of an occasion when you’ve been a pain, but can’t come up with anything at all.

Professionally, your low-key approach has kept you out of the public eye (and the associated baloney), but amongst those in the business you are, of course, held in the highest regard.

It’s my good fortune to have worked with you, and even greater good fortune to have known you.

Shelly also recalls you fondly (along with the red Jacques-Cousteau beanie).

Derek Morton