Remembering Ron Highfield
You could always tell a Ron Highfield design - each movie would be its own complete world with its own colour pallet, its own atmosphere. He created two worlds for me - ‘Hot Friday’ and ‘Golden Weather,’ both in cahoots with the sublime Barbara Darragh on Costume. Oddly, I never saw these two in the same room, but they must have talked to each other because between them they created unique and singular worlds.
Ron always enjoyed my colour-blindness - red/green. You had to be careful with Ron. His tongue was always firmly planted in his cheek, so when we were scouting the town of Eltham for Came a Hot Friday and stood in admiration of the classic old pub and Ron said, “Be nice if it was red,” I just assumed he was having a dig at me, so I laughed and said, “Yeah, Ron.” Then the night before our first day’s shoot, which was to feature our quaint colonial town and iconic pub with Prince Tui Teka up on the balcony with his sax, I was driving down the main street and nearly died of shock when I saw this vast red building squatting like some giant poisonous spider in the middle of my colonial town. I raced down to Design and grabbed Ron. “What are you doing to me?” “What?” “The pub! It’s red!” “Yeah. We agreed.” “I thought you were kidding. Can you repaint it?” “Well, yeah. But it’ll set your schedule back two days and really screw my budget. What’s wrong? I think it looks great.” I had no choice, so I approached the next day with a sense of dread. Until Paul Leach lined up the shot and I looked through the camera. As our heroes’ beat-up car rolled up in front of it, the pub was perfect. After that, each new set, each new location, fitted perfectly into a world that had a garish red pub.
Ron was the guy who would always come out a different door to everyone else. He was a creative artist just like Dick Frizzell, Michael Parekōwhai, or Rita Angus, or any other artist you want to name. The difference is that where they worked in a one-on-one relationship with the object they were creating, Ron was a fully engaged problem-solving artist in the movie business, leading a team creating a world for other people to bring to life. When the rest of us were immobilised by an insurmountable problem, Ron would come up with a solution that made the insurmountable problem irrelevant.
On 'Golden Weather', I had the hero boy writing a romantic fantasy about a Princess running away from a Wicked Witch in her castle, pursued by knights on horseback - on Takapuna Beach!
In the days long before the digital revolution, the idea of building a castle on the cliffs overlooking the beach was an insurmountable budgetary problem. But Ron came up with a solution that cost about ten bucks. On the day, a bright yellow castle about three feet wide and a foot high sat on a C-stand at the foot of the cliff, and, looking through the camera, it nestled comfortably on the top with the Princess and a dozen mounted Knights charging through the foreground. One didn’t even ask, “Is there a bright yellow castle anywhere in the world?” In the world of Golden Weather, there was - Ron had decreed on day one that the palette for Golden Weather was to be yellow and blue.
I guess his tray of VBs and his irascible tongue-in-cheek humour didn’t go down well with Production people, and that’s a real shame, because Ron disappeared from our screens, which was exactly where his value lay - on screen!
I’m going to keep on missing you, Ron.
Ian Mune
