KEY POINTS:
Acclaimed costume designer Kirsty Cameron is widening her focus to writing and directing films 'that make the earth move'.
She digs into an old cardboard box that holds her inspiration and guidance. Torn notes singed by cigarette ash, serviettes ringed with the stains of red wine - all bearing the shrewd words of acclaimed film-maker, the late Brad McGann.
"There are five million bits of paper, bits of things he told me," says Kirsty Cameron, in her own right a luminary of the New Zealand film industry for her work as a costume designer.
She dips into this box often, using the words of her mentor and friend to help her own writing - after 16 years of design, Cameron is finally realising her dream to make her own films.
Cameron and McGann, who died last year after a nine-year battle with cancer, were childhood friends in Pakuranga and he lived at her house in Muriwai while he worked on the script for his only feature-length film, In My Father's Den, adapted from the Maurice Gee novel.
McGann and Cameron worked together on that movie - one of 10 New Zealand feature films to which Cameron has lent her artistic eye - and on McGann's award-winning short film, Possum.
"I definitely use all the things Brad said and talked to me about in my own film-making. I share a similar sensibility with him," Cameron says. Although some are surprised 44-year-old Cameron has made the move from costume design to script-writing and directing, she knows McGann wasn't. He encouraged her to pursue her long-time passion; when she was moonlighting in design for commercials, it was McGann who urged her to give the ad work away.
Cameron has stamped her unique design mark on some of New Zealand's most visually evocative films - Whale Rider, Rain, In My Fathers Den and No 2 - and television dramas and series such as Rude Awakenings. Now her own stories of resonance and gravity are being brought to the screen.
"I've known for the past 16 years that I wanted to make film. But until the last few years, I couldn't say what it was I wanted to make," Cameron says. "I was under surrender to costume design. I needed to get to the point where I felt I could do it without it asking for every single drop from me. Then I could focus on making my own work as well.
"My intention is to make films that make you feel the earth has imperceptibly moved a little. It's a lofty ambition at the best of times, but especially when the craft - from the writing upwards - can feel like a 5000-piece jigsaw puzzle.
Cameron won't be hanging up her tape measure though; costume design will still figure large in her life.
"To do both jobs would be perfect, and I think I can do it. It means a lot of dedication, but I don't have children and I'm newly single, so time is my friend. I want to try to keep it like that.
McGann would be proud.
In the history-rich house in Auckland's eastern suburbs where Cameron was born, the unheralded star of her latest film lazes on top of the fridge.
Lady Fox, the languorous Tonkinese cat, plays a key role in Cameron's latest foray behind the camera. It's a 10-minute short, The Lethal Innocents, which has screened to high praise in this years New Zealand International Film Festival.
Lady Fox is one of four cats who share the Pakuranga house with Cameron and her mother, and was an on-screen natural, following Cameron as she prepared to shoot scenes, imploring to be in the limelight. Fortunately, the storyline called for a cat.
The Lethal Innocents is a "suburban fable of metamorphosis" a girl who doesn't conform to the teenage norm, bullied relentlessly by the queen bees who push her a step too far. Cameron was intrigued by the themes of teen ostracism, bullying and suicide, and the "need to escape".
The Lethal Innocents is not Cameron's first short film - two other works, Behind Me is Black and Cross My Heart, with Danielle Cormack in the lead, have featured in past film festivals.
One critic called her latest work "uncomfortable, challenging, but eminently worthwhile viewing". It's now been invited to screen at the Stockholm Film Festival next month. An invitation that Juliette Veber, who markets short films for the New Zealand Film Commission, says could be the start of something big for Cameron.
"It's great for Lethal Innocents - it fits perfectly with the Stockholm festival - and it's great for Kirsty," Veber says. "It's the best way to rate the success of a short film, and it helps raise your profile for feature films. It's always difficult for someone who's worked in the industry their whole life to make the actual step to film-making and find their own voice. But Kirsty has done it."
Lethal Innocents was Cameron's most challenging project yet her first shooting on 35mm film, which brings restraints on money and time. Now she's taking the next step, writing the screenplay for her first feature film, called Swansong - a contained, "low budget or no budget" project that's an ode to her family home. It's a domestic drama involving an estranged couple coping with the crisis of a teenage daughter on acid.
But the house may steal the limelight - a century-old sharemilker's cottage which Cameron's parents extended with avant-garde architecture in the 1960s. Their home is to be sold at the end of the year, so Cameron is fast-tracking the project, and she's prepared to fund it herself.
"I'm under no illusion the work I want to make will be commercial because it won't be. It will pay its way, but it won't make millions of dollars," she says. "If I was chasing the dollar, I would have put my name forward for work in the United States as I've been asked to. But it's never been about that."
Cameron decided decades ago that Hollywood wasn't for her. While she was at Elam art school, she worked on set design for Tommyknockers, an American TV movie of Stephen King's novel, filmed in Northland.
"It was lots of fun, but I felt absolutely no relationship with what we were making - neither the aesthetics nor the storytelling. It felt bland. It was very much a commercial product, and pretty much the last American thing I did," she says.
But it did its job, reeling Cameron into the film industry.
As a child, Cameron loved dolls. She would create her own stories with them, playing solo mothers and flatmates. Her cast of characters would grow and transform: my brother would mangle their heads or set fire to their hair, so we'd take them to the dolls hospital in K Rd and choose them new looks.
And she made them clothes stunning wardrobes in the latest fashions and fabrics; obsessed from her first sewing lesson at the age of 8. "When I dropped French for clothing in the fourth form, my mother wasn't very impressed, but it was the choice I made," she says.
At 17, she had a stall at the Cook St markets, and progressed to opening two clothing shops in central Auckland. Her style had attitude, "it was eclectic, raw and really cool," she says. But when club kids started buying it, I got put off.
Making clothes is still an itch Cameron wants to scratch, but she recognises it's ludicrous to think we can do everything.
After a job cleaning the house of influential art dealer Denis Cohn, her focus turned to art, studying at Elam. Her work evolved from print making, to video installation and film.
Art directing music videos in the early 1990s, Cameron was asked to work as a wardrobe standby on her first New Zealand film - The Summer the Queen Came, the first short film by director Niki Caro, also an Elam graduate. It was on that job Cameron fell in love with the film industry.
"It's incredibly seductive, passionate and generous. People talked of the outside world - the set was 'this world' - and I loved that," she says.
"I had this overwhelming sense of family, with this lovely collection of people -from actors, to grips and producers - all working together to tell one story. There's almost a circus quality to it - up at 5am in the dark, guys sitting around with water boiling on a fire.
"When it's great, it fills your heart; you have a sense of working for something that's bigger than you. OK, it sounds romantic, but it's also incredibly stressful."
It was the start of a long and mutually beneficial working relationship with Caro, who invited Cameron to create the wardrobe for a Montana series television drama, Plain Taste, before they broke into the big time - feature films Memory and Desire and Whale Rider.
"I have a lot to thank Niki for. Like a really good director, she sees talents in people that others don't see in themselves," Cameron says.
"While I was working on the Montana series, I realised I could do something with costume design. It made perfect sense of all my passions - people, psychology, clothes, fabrics, story-telling. I remember going 'yeah, I could do something in a way that's different to what others do'. I could do something here that would be mine."
She succeeded. With Whale Rider - an experience she describes as "like being in love, the crew with the community" - she won best costume design at the 2003 New Zealand Film Awards.
Juliette Veber, who worked alongside Cameron in production on The Price of Milk, Topless Women Talk About Their Lives and When Love Comes, says it is Cameron's background as an artist that gives her an incredible eye for detail in design.
"She always has an eye on what's fashionable and she gives films a fantastic look," she says. "I love everything she's been involved with, but I especially love the style she created for In My Father's Den. I guess she took a personal interest in that, because of her friendship with Brad."
Her insight into film-making adds depth to her costume design, says Catherine Fitzgerald, production supervisor on In My Fathers Den and executive producer of The Lethal Innocents.
"It's one of New Zealand's edges, where heads of department on set are also film-makers who put the film first. A lot of people around the world do their job and go home, but Kirsty is one of those people who actually want to see the film be the best it can be," she says. "She understands the colour palette and textures, the layers of meaning in a story - she understands how the costume design can support the director's images."
Cameron is a hoarder - of clothes and ideas - who has built a personal wardrobe of classic Kiwiana fashion since her days as a voracious op-shopper. "I was wearing 1950s dresses in the early 80s. I'd often go down the line to competitively trawl the op shops, when they were veritable treasure troves," she laughs.
"So when I came to styling and costume designing, I had a huge collection of idiosyncratic clothes and accessories to use."
Much of her inspiration comes from watching how people in the street dress. She has a collection of writings called I Saw - "descriptions of a guy with a boogie box tied to his belt, or a teenage girl walking down the side of the motorway with a suitcase."
For each character, she creates a suitcase wardrobe. She looks for things to help the actor discover the character - Grant Roa felt as soon as Cameron found his green and white beanie he became Whale Rider's Uncle Rawiri. "It can be that small, but that significant," she says.
She is now shopping for her next costume-design project, The Strength of Water, the debut feature film from award-winning short-film director Armagan Ballentyne the poignant tale of a young Maori boy dealing with his twin sisters death. The visual mood of the film took root in Cameron's brain well before she began work on it.
"I was at the Avondale markets a few months ago, when I saw a ratty old sheepskin jacket and immediately thought of the film. I haven't read the script for years, but I knew it had taken root in my head. The awareness was there," she says.
"I really love mood and texture. I know my work can really contribute to that layer of the film. I've always seen my role as a vitally important part of film-making, even though when I first entered the industry, wardrobe design wasn't given that much credit. It's still under-rated on a pay level, but there's definitely a lot more awareness."
Cameron remembers her over-whelming nerves working on her first feature film, Memory and Desire, but how her eye for fashion and colour instinctively kicked in.
"It's funny how I can do that for other people's work but I'm still struggling to do it in my own," she says. "I guess it comes more naturally to give everything to someone else."
"I think it's why I waited so long to start, with a quiet determination, to make my own work.
"This is really what I want to do," says Cameron. "It's time to step up. I've waited a long time to see what kind of films I wanted to make, but now I feel like I'm in this for the long haul. I want to make a great body of work."
* The Lethal Innocents is part of the MIC Toi Rerehiko Homegrown 2007 programme, which runs in the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festival in 16 centres nationwide until November. www.nzff.telecom.co.nz.
