A legend among motorbikes

Roger Donaldson. Herald picture / Mark Mitchell

Back in his younger days - before he helped kick-start the New Zealand film industry - Roger Donaldson rode an Indian motorcycle.

No, it wasn't the world's fastest. Though it was probably West Auckland's riskiest.

"My Indian was attached to a sidecar and I used to live at the top of the Waitakeres. Mike Smith, my partner [in then company Aardvark Films], we both had motorbikes. We'd hoon off down the hill from near the TV mast to town where we had our business.

"On one particular corner the motorbike and sidecar parted company. The way I remembered it Mike headed off into the bush," he laughs at the memory down the line from Los Angeles.

Or there was that time when he came a cropper riding off-road in the ranges.

"One day it bucked me off and the handlebars pinned me in the mud like I was Christ on the cross. It took me some time to get out from underneath it."

Donaldson, who has long been claimed as one of ours despite being Australian-born (he came here in his 20s to escape a looming career as a geologist), doesn't ride much any more.

He thought it best to hang up the gloves and helmet after his last bike, a 900cc Honda with only 19km on the clock launched itself skyward when he overdid the throttle. He found himself surfing the bike on its side to a halt.

Still, it meant when filming the motorcycle scenes of his dream project The World's Fastest Indian, he knew the physics.

"Motorbikes are just exhilarating. They are dangerous, stupid and a hell of a lot of fun."

Donaldson's motorcycle madness of 35 years ago led, eventually, to The World's Fastest Indian. It's a feature about Burt Munro, mechanical genius, speed demon, Southlander, crazy old bugger. It stars Anthony Hopkins as Munro and Invercargill as Invercargill.

It's the first film Donaldson has made in New Zealand since 1981's Smash Palace. "It's probably got a lot more in common with Smash Palace than any of my other movies."

Like the Bruno Lawrence drama, TWFI is also a film about a solitary rascal who spends too much time in his garage.

But as the film shows, Burt Munro also struck out for the big wide world.

During the 1960s he made frequent trips to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah to race his "Munro Special" Indian Scout against the clock.

In 1967 he rode it to an official American Motorcycle Association 1000cc class record of 183.586mph (295.453km/h).

There's anecdotal proof - though no official recognition, as land speed attempts had to be sustained over a mile and averaged from two runs north and south - that the bike had briefly topped the magic 200mph (322km/h) mark the previous year.

Which is impressive enough. But here's some more numbers. In 1967, Munro was 67 years old. He had a dicky ticker. His Indian Scout, when it was new in 1920, had a top speed of 55mph (88km/h). He souped it up a bit over the years as he raced it. Then he souped it up some more.

No, Munro didn't break any world records. But he won the respect of his fellow speed demons and remains the fastest pensioner on two wheels.

Having shifted from photography to film in the late 60s and early 70s, Donaldson made a documentary about Munro, Offerings to the God of Speed, which screened on New Zealand television in 1973.

While making the doco, Donaldson took Munro back to Bonneville in 1971 for a one unsuccessful last attempt on the 200mph mark. Ever since, he's harboured an idea that there was also a feature in the exploits of the legendary motorcyclist, who died in 1978.

Now, 34 years later with the The World's Fastest Indian about to go out into the world, Donaldson has been restoring the original doco, which Hopkins watched every morning on the shoot as a guide to Munro's accent. It will possibly be an extra on the eventual DVD.

"I just felt it was a piece of my history and it's a piece of this movie's history. So I want to make sure it's been preserved, so I have gone and preserved it.

"I always thought that I never really did justice to the subject, I guess that's why I became obsessed with making this movie about Burt."

It wasn't just Munro's thirst for speed as a motorcyclist, or his ability as a backyard mechanic to constantly rebuild a bike that was already a museum piece, that fascinated Donaldson.

It was that he kept his dream of going faster and faster at an age when most folks are supposed to be slowing down.

"Why I was intrigued with the idea of making a film about this guy's life was when I met him he was in his 70s and he had such a positive outlook on life. He did have heart problems, he wasn't in the greatest of health, but he did feel like many old people feel - like an 18-year-old guy trapped in a 72-year-old body. And I remember my grandmother telling me exactly the same thing and I think that is how a lot of old people feel but few of them act on it.

"Burt just wasn't prepared to give up. He wanted to keep going and that is something that really intrigued me about the guy."

But how to make a feature out of Munro's DIY high-speed life and find a dramatic structure to it puzzled Donaldson for years.

"It was one of those things that when I started I always thought it was a good idea but I never could feel that I had the script right."

Donaldson kept chipping away at the screenplay as his career shifted offshore, having first established himself as a feature director on the likes of Sleeping Dogs and Smash Palace.

His first Hollywood feature was The Bounty, starring Hopkins as Captain Bligh. The relatively inexperienced director and Hopkins famously clashed during the 1983 shoot. But they became firm friends years later.

After finishing his 2003 CIA spy thriller The Recruit, Donaldson realised he either had to get the Munro movie off its blocks or scrap the idea after 30 years of tinkering.

With a script and some money finally in place, Donaldson realised he needed a bankable name up front. He called Hopkins to ask if he was interested in putting on a helmet and bending his lilting Welsh vowels into Munro's Southland burr. The star said yes. Hannibal was to become a human cannonball.

Based on the script, the film had earlier attracted a Japanese investor as well as backing from the New Zealand Film Commission - whose establishment in the late 70s was part-prompted by the success of Donaldson's Sleeping Dogs - and the New Zealand Film Production Fund.

But to get the film started on time - with only a limited number of months in the year to be able to film at Bonneville and any delays meaning Hopkins might be unavailable - meant both Donaldson and producer Gary Hannam were forced to put in their own cash.

"Initially we had to put up a lot of our own money to get it rolling and make it like we were going to make it or people weren't going to take us seriously.

"But I've always had this theory that moviemaking is a gamble. I've often thought that the movies that were the most successful were the biggest gambles."

But there's something more than just his own millions at stake for Donaldson. He wanted to make a movie that strived for things that helming a decade-plus of Hollywood genre flicks could never reach.

"I knew what I wanted to get out of it. It was an uplifting story that had a sort of poignant side to it and it could be amusing. Those are the sort of movies I really enjoy - a movie that just takes me along for the ride and sucks me in. Movies like My Life As a Dog or Billy Elliott, I've always had a soft spot for those sorts of movies.

"Someone pointed out to me the other night, it's a hell of a lot harder to make a film about something that's positive than it is to make films about the dark side of life. I think that's true."

Donaldson turns 60 this year which, given the film's contemplation of age and mortality, makes one wonder how the movie might have turned out had he made it nearer the beginning of his career.

"Ah well, it never really changed about what it was going to be. I mean in this movie there is a lot of my father and I know there is a lot of Tony's father in the movie just because it is embracing those older men in your life that you have always been influenced by. So fathers and grandfathers figure in both our calculations of how we put this picture together.

"My Dad is still alive but when I started wanting to make this film my grandfather was still alive. I always had somebody in my life that this character reminded me of."

Donaldson remembers that after years of falling out over his chosen career, his father came over from his hometown of Ballarat for the premiere of Sleeping Dogs.

"I caught him out on the street after it had opened telling people they should go and see this movie because it was really great. I never expected my Dad to say that. It helped heal those wounds that often exist between fathers and sons."

Yet there's little mention of Munro's own family in the film - he and his wife Beryl divorced in the late 1940s.

Munro's Invercargill-based son John confirms his father's motorcycle obsession contributed to the split. But having visited the Bonneville set himself and been impressed at Donaldson's efforts at period accuracy he says he and his sisters aren't concerned that Donaldson's portrait leaves the family out of the picture.

The film focuses on one trip to race at Bonneville, complete with wide-eyed adventures as he crossed the American hinterland. In reality, Munro was a frequent visitor to the track throughout the 60s.

But Donaldson says TWFI is truthful to the spirit of Burt Munro. He's had to strip much historic detail away to make the film evoke that.

"It's my impression of him. It's a collection. Some of the stuff in it is incredibly accurate. Other stuff in it is complete fantasy. But in my mind it all fits into the spirit of what he was."

And in capturing Burt striking out alone in America, Donaldson says, the film reflects his own feelings about going there and what he left behind in New Zealand.

"There is much of my experience of coming to America in the film as [well as] witnessing Burt's and listening to his stories.

"In the distance I have put between myself and New Zealand by coming to America, I see in Burt Munro something that I think embodies the spirit of New Zealand really. That can-do attitude - that you can make do on a shoestring, that you are not intimidated by the world. You can go out there and take it on head-first.

"But also because it's so isolated you don't really know what you are in for until you get out in the big wide world and that is a bit of a surprise as well."

Donaldson says he's been heartened by the reaction to the film at the Toronto Film Festival, where it got a standing ovation last month, indicating it should find a ready international audience.

Here, there's already an air of expectation around Donaldson's film, which suggests it's a surefire hit. And when it opens this week with a premiere in Invercargill, it could be the start of an Indian summer.

* LOWDOWN

WHO: Burt Munro, speed demon and New Zealand motorcycling legend

BORN: March 25, 1899, Edendale, Southland

DIED: January 11, 1978, Invercargill

MOTORCYLE OF CHOICE: Indian Munro Special based on a 1920 bike he modified throughout his career, though he also ran a Velocette

TOP SPEED: Officially 183.586mph (295.453km/h) at Bonneville in 1967. Unofficially, he may have bettered 200mph (322km/h) the previous year

FURTHER READING: Burt Munro - Legend of Speed by George Begg available from www.burtmunro.co.nz