English star Ray Winstone talks to Helen Barlow about playing a South African chasing Temuera Morrison in the New Zealand high country
When British actor Ray Winstone headed to New Zealand to chase Temuera Morrison up hill and down dale he might have been forgiven a sense of deja vu.
The last time he headed to the colonies - Tracker is set in 1903 - was for 2005 Australian film The Proposition, in which he played a late 19th century Outback police captain pursuing a gang of brothers.
In Tracker, he's a Boer War veteran and expert tracker, who, just off the boat from South Africa hired by the British, his former enemy, to track down Temuera Morrison's Kereama, a seaman who has gone bush after the killing of a British soldier.
Both films don't just have period similarities. Winstone says they are among the most memorable of his career. And quite a career it's been, having gone from his breakthrough roles in gritty Brit working class dramas like Nil by Mouth and The War Zone to Hollywood with the likes of Spielberg (the last Indiana Jones movie) and Scorsese (The Departed).
Not only did he learn an enormous amount about Maori culture while here, he found himself intrigued by the history of the Boer War - which was the first time New Zealand sent troops to a foreign war as Britain battled the descendants of mainly Dutch settlers in what was to become South Africa.
"My 9-year-old daughter, Ellie, taught me how to use the internet," says Winstone, a man who didn't last long in school, though spent plenty of time in the gym and in his youth, boxed for England.
"I started reading about the Boer War from the Boer point of view. It was like guerilla warfare with a man standing on his land, dying for his land. What happened in Vietnam, Korea and maybe Afghanistan tells you about that. You fight for something that you love and believe in."
Tracker is a New Zealand-Britain co-production directed by Englishman Ian Sharp. Winstone plays Arjan van Diemen, a Boer farmer who having lost everything in the war, arrives here to start a new life, only to become a bounty hunter as Morrison's character flees for the hills. The movie's pursuit takes some liberties with geography, starting off on Auckland's West Coast but ending up in tussock country near Queenstown.
"I track him across New Zealand, and I catch him, then he catches me," explains Winstone, "and I had one hell of a time. I am a kid out of East London and then you go to New Zealand and you walk around every corner and there is something else to look at and it just blows your mind away. I have got to say it is the most beautiful place I have ever been to in my life. Really. I have filmed in Vancouver, which is beautiful, out in the Rocky Mountains and I have filmed in the Moroccan desert, which is quite beautiful in its own way. But New Zealand just wiped me out."
Previously the only time he had seen a haka was before a rugby match. In the film, his character gets a personal challenge from Kereama.
"It's that kind of thing where they all stand there and we love it. But we don't understand what it means or anything like that. For Tem to actually do that in a film, and in a different way, I started to learn a little bit about it, about what it means, the stories, the background of the Maori, how they got to New Zealand and of course their own Land Wars."
Ultimately the two characters come to realise they have much in common, as did Winstone and Morrison. Winstone spins a line that the two actors made their names playing drunk wife beaters in Nil by Mouth and Once Were Warriors, but that underneath they are like two pussycats. Was the former boxer able to keep up with Morrison?
"Tem's a fit guy!" he moans, recalling their fight scenes.
"There are broken ribs and bruises and you get up in the morning and you can't move and you have a hot bath before you go to work. But you feel like you are going to work, you feel like you are doing something. No, I can't f***ing keep up with him."
-TimeOut
