Our best loved poet tells Jacqueline Smith why he let film-maker Tim Rose document his life and career.
Sam Hunt won't let strangers on his property. He has tried, as much as possible, to disconnect from his celebrity - hiding out in Kaipara with the bare essentials for example - and wasn't about to let just anyone turn him into a feature film.
But mild-mannered film-maker Tim Rose was different.
Firstly, all he initially wanted to do was film Hunt performing poems and secondly, he had known him for about 40 years.
Hunt and Rose go back to the days of Bottle Creek, where Sam penned many of his earliest, and most commonly recited, poems. He even wrote Tim into a story that went on to be published in a school journal.
Rose was just a pipsqueak, 5 or 6 years old, and Hunt was his posturing, larrikin, 25-year-old neighbour.
"My parents made their own wine, which was undrinkable. But when Sam came around, he would say, 'that wine your father made, do you know where he keeps it?' and would head into the basement and pull out bottles of wine," Rose laughs.
Captivated, little Rose would tag along behind Hunt, who strode ahead in his tight jeans, accompanied by his headline-hitting dog Minstrel, and he has continued to watch, a little wide-eyed, as the boisterous big-brother-figure grew into one of New Zealand's most treasured personalities.
"The film wouldn't have been made if I hadn't trusted the guy behind it," says Hunt, masking his dead seriousness with that impressive crackly laugh of his.
"I've had a lot of approaches to make the sort of film that Tim's made and I turned them down, because I don't talk to strangers. Well, I talk to strangers sometimes," he says, before qualifying the statement with a long anecdote about a dairy owner and a journalist.
Rose has popped in and out of Hunt's life since those blissful days at Bottle Creek, losing touch only when Hunt cut himself off for a decade to attend to "domestic matters".
That period is barely documented by Hunt, because he has prevented any of the poems he wrote over that time from getting out.
Just one escapes into his latest book, Chords, out on June 1.
"I didn't stop writing, but I stopped writing poems I believed in. I have never to this day figured out whether I don't like them because they are negative, but that wouldn't be a reason, because I see negative as just as powerful as positive. I think they are just poems that were coming from a part of me that wasn't genuine."
It was trying to portray the genuine Sam Hunt - for all his flaws, values and wider worldly interests - rather than the windswept rockstar, that meant the film grew from an extended poetry reading to more of a biography.
"I wanted to capture the Sam that I knew, not just about his poems but also Sam's take on materialism. He's a celebrity but he hasn't embraced celebrity - and that's what I admire," Rose says.
There was no shortage of archival footage of Hunt to draw on, and no shortage of people willing to talk about their experiences with Hunt - be it scathing (C.K. Stead), confused (his older brother Steven) or enamoured (David Kilgour, Karyn Hay and, of course, Gary McCormick).
And, like any conversation with Hunt, there was no shortage of anecdotes and poems to recite. Editing it down to 83 minutes was quite a coup, Rose says, and rather nerve-racking, given their friendship.
"I see my film as just one time of capturing Sam. It's my interpretation, but I think there's a real archival value in it."
To Hunt, the film is like a photo album - nice to have: "I enjoyed it, I just wished it was about something else so I could say how good it was," he laughed, adding that he enjoyed C.K. Stead's attacks on his poetry just as much as he enjoyed admiring his youthful good looks in the archival footage.
He agrees that celebrity is sometimes a strange concept, but adds: "I am reminded of the beautiful lines of Ezra Pound, who wrote, 'Oh world, my poems were written for five people, oh world, I pity you, you do not know these five people'. I love that, it's sort of true. Not entirely true."
A poem, he says, like a documentary, is like birth or a death.
"It takes on its own part of your life. But each individual poem wouldn't be as important as my grandson, who is about 4 moons old. He would be more important than any of the poems. Oh would he be? No, he's part of the poems. The poems are part of him. So, you can't really say, 'well that's the poetry and that's the life', because I don't see it that way. I have never made a distinction."
LOWDOWN
What: Sam Hunt, Purple Balloon and Other Stories. A documentary by Tim Rose.
When and where: Opens nationwide on May 26 and at the Rialto and Bridgeway in Auckland on June 9. The opening session at the Rialto features a live performance by Sam Hunt and a Q and A session with film-maker Tim Rose.
-TimeOut
