KEY POINTS:
Mia Blake thought about getting a tattoo when she was 17 - she's glad she decided against it.
"I had two close friends and we'd been through all these dramatic things together and we thought we'd get tattoos. We even went as far as designing them," laughs the Auckland actress.
"I really love tattoos, but it's the permanence that gets me. I'm too chicken, not necessarily because of the pain, but because of the commitment to that marking."
After her latest role as the beautiful and innocent Sina, in New Zealand supernatural thriller The Tattooist, you'd forgive her for never wanting to get one.
Although the red hibiscus flower tattoo she gets in the film is stunning, it has nasty, creepy consequences.
Sina falls for American tattoo artist Jake Sawyer (played by American actor Jason Behr), a drifter who travels the world producing tattoo designs that both explore and exploit ethnic themes. At a tattoo expo in Singapore he sees traditional Samoan tattooing (tatau) being performed. He's intrigued, and stupidly steals an ancient Samoan tatau tool which, unbeknown to him, releases an angry spirit.
From this point everyone Jake tattoos, including his new love Sina, is exposed to the wrath of the spirit - "a nasty looking guy covered in black makeup with the body of a 100m dash guy" is how the film's director Peter Burger describes him.
So it's a ghost story, whodunnit, love story and thriller all rolled into one.
The Tattooist, a co-production between Singapore and New Zealand and shot on location in the two countries, is Burger's first feature film. He started out making commercials, directed episodes of TV shows including Matuku and Outrageous Fortune, and short films Turangawaewae and Fishskin Suit, but he's been wanting to make a feature film since seeing Once Were Warriors in 1994, the same year he was at film school.
"I didn't really expect my first film would be a thriller but there were scary scenes that the writers [Matthew Grainger and Jonathan King] had written so viscerally that got such an `Oh my God', response out of me," he laughs.
The creepy, bloody parts of the story - like when the swimming pool becomes a bloody grave for one of Jake's subjects and the "Shortland Street in hell" hospital scene - stuck in Blake's mind too.
"Those terrified me," she says. "It often gets to a point where you're shooting a scene and they call cut and you're just right in there and you have to get your heart rate down, stop screaming, and stop shaking. The scary thing I found was the power of imagination, the power of that 30-second scene you're shooting to push you into a realm where you are actually terrified."
While the suspense and the "wow, cool, that's gross" moments, as Burger calls them, are some of the most memorable, it is Samoan spirituality that is central to the story.
Before filming started, Blake spoke to a woman who wears the female tatau and she explained that the symbols in her tattoo have been carried through her family.
"That to me completely makes sense. She is wearing her family tree and pride and everything on her body. That's beautiful," says Blake.
Although Blake was born in Tonga she says she can relate to the mystical side of Samoan cultural because, for starters, her grandmother is very superstitious - "Like [she] won't eat mushrooms because they're the devil's umbrella, kinda thing," she smiles.
"I spent the first five years of my life in Tonga with my family and was very close to my grandmother. And I had Samoan girlfriends at school who used to cover the mirror if they got scared. So all of the spirits at night and things, although they do differ in Samoan culture, I can relate.
"I'm instinctively quite a spiritual person, I mean I'm not affiliated with any organised religion, but as a person I need spirituality - whether that is just to do with how you treat other people or how you look at the world and say, `It's a beautiful day'. Something's got to be responsible for that, but I don't know what it is," she laughs.
"But I need that in order to just feel more whole and I think that was maybe why I was drawn to The Tattooist because it is a spiritual tale about things that you can't offer an explanation for."
Unlike Blake, Behr, who among other roles was in similarly creepy movie The Grudge and played an alien teenager in TV series Roswell, does have a tattoo made up of a series of Japanese symbols.
Before the movie he had seen people with pe'a and moko but didn't really know what they meant. When he got to New Zealand he and Robbie Magasiva (star of Sione's Wedding), who plays young Samoan tattooist Alipati, went to a ceremony where the pe'a was being performed.
"It was incredibly beautiful and also looked like it was amazingly painful so you can understand that sort of journey one goes on to get that tatau. It was very obvious that the people around him were helping him along, singing to him and from the look on his face you could see he was in a totally different place.
"There's nothing more insightful than being present when it is being done, and to watch the way that they move, and to watch the tatau artist - who's name is Tui, and one of the premier tattooists in Samoan culture [see sidebar] - and watch his rhythm. And what it did for me, because Jake doesn't really perform this type of tattooing, it really did allow me to fall in love and be taken in by that tradition."
Behr was also drawn to the role because the script is unique and he sees it as a story of Jake's self-discovery, which he believes is something everyone can relate to. Combine this with people's intrigue about tattoos, Behr reckons, and the film will have world-wide appeal and not be confined to Pacific Island and New Zealand audiences.
"For me, what was exciting was that the story and the mythology was something I'd never heard about before. That's why I think people that aren't in New Zealand will find it very intriguing.
"Jake is not unlike a lot of people, he's just doing what he can to get by and survive. You are dealing with a man who is completely out of his element in a world he never knew existed and the rules and laws that go with this world aren't necessarily the ones he agrees with.
"It's that struggle to really come to terms with the idea that the line between our world and the spirit world is very fragile.
"Peter [Burger] always wanted this film to be rooted in reality, for it to be a drama, with real characters, real emotions, real conflict in extraordinary circumstances, and then, when the shit hits the fan, it's non-stop and that's when you get on this ride that you can't get off."
Burger admits he had his eye on an overseas audience when making the film because he wants to grow the local film industry "so that we're not just making $4 million movies financed entirely by the Government".
"The challenge is to make sure our culture is predominant in the film because otherwise we have nothing different to what Hollywood has to offer, but at the same time finding ways to make it accessible overseas. The best example is Whale Rider."
And this film, despite its nerve-jangling moments, is quite an advertisement for getting your hide inked.
Behr says: "I think tattoos can mean very different things to different people. In the Samoan community it's a right of passage for young adults into adulthood and, in my own experience they're very personalised. What might seem silly or superfluous to some people, like a Disney character or a butterfly, is incredibly poignant for the person who got the tattoo."
LOWDOWN
What: The Tattooist
Starring: Jason Behr, Mia Blake, Robbie Magasiva, David Fane, Michael Hurst.
Director: Peter Burger
Opened: August 30
