Chris Graham keeps it reel

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

Scene 1: Friday night, a few hours after dark, on the outskirts of Apia, Samoa. Two men are sitting on the back of a ute as they head into town for the capital's nightlife. One thinks this is just the place for an interview. The other, video director Chris Graham, is amused by the idea. His crew, who have been filming a video clip for Tha Feelstyle around the island of Upolu for the past few days, are inside the cab.

The filming, and the story behind it, is another story (watch this space) but in the time he's been here, Graham's team have lugged camera gear from village to village, from coast to coast while filming the Samoan-born, New Zealand-raised rapper in the sort of heat that makes you thankful for the evening breeze on the back of the vehicle.

However, that same wind makes conversation pointless and unrecordable. But one good thing has come of it - it means Graham isn't driving. His energetic efforts behind the wheel on some stop-start location scouting - while he gregariously shouted "talofa" out the window to a high percentage of the local population - had those in the back of the van matching the tropical lushness for shades of green.

At the Apia RSA nightclub that night, where the band plays a peculiarly Samoan variation of OutKast's Hey Ya!, Graham proves he dances as well as he drives. But he is fine company. The night's final shot: Graham carrying a round of rum and cokes for everyone.

Scene 2: A few weeks later on a Sunday morning. At Flying Fish production house in Eden Terrace, Graham answers the door grinning but with his eyes looking like he's been staring at a screen for longer than is strictly healthy.

He's been working three weeks without a day off. After he got off the plane from Samoa, it was into an ad shoot for a telecommunications corporation. Now he's overseeing the cutting of Tha FeelStyle's track Su'amalie. That means, with his slick and shiny video for Dei Hamo's We Gon Ride, Graham is about to have two hip-hop clips of wildly contrasting musical and visual styles - one urban jungle, one real jungle - go onto high rotate on the video channels.

Graham is one of a group of young directors who divide their time between Flying Fish, which makes television ads, and its music video arm, Fish 'N Clips.

Graham has directed some big production numbers among television commercials and there's a cross-pollination between the ad-world and the music one - his gumbooted down-on-the-farm video for King Kapisi and Che Fu's U Can't Resist Us led to a job for agricultural company Wrightsons.

Graham's affinity for hip-hop and its artists comes from a long immersion in the culture.

Inspired as many were by the early 80s doco Style Wars, about graffiti bombers in New York, he took up the artform in his teenage year, not the sort of hobby expected by a son of a diplomat and social worker growing up in Khandallah, Wellington.

"It was just what was cool, to be honest with you. It was actually the first thing that grabbed me as a kid. I mean I was really interested in movies. Ever since I fell in love with Star Wars at the age of 7, I was determined I was going to be a film-maker. But, without a camera, I had no idea how.

"Style Wars came out in like '83, and that was on the Tuesday night doco, and the next day me and thousands of teenagers from all over New Zealand were stealing spray paint from neighbours' garages or service stations ... doing our first graffiti and tag in the middle of the night. Most of us getting caught, too, and severely punished.

"So that was the arrival of hip-hop and I just found graffiti art so exciting because it was creative - contrary to public belief.

"It gave me a very early sense of graphic design and balance and composition and perspective and all those basics of the visual arts. I would do it in the middle of the night and sometimes I would get chased by security or police and it was exciting."

At age 18, Graham headed for a course in film-making at the School of Visual Arts in the hip-hop mecca, New York. His father was working in the Big Apple so he had a place to stay for the first year.

His graffiti art gave way to student documentaries about Big Apple graffiti artists which meant overnight adventures into the city's no-go zones.

"But I was protected like a girlfriend by the graffiti artists because I was not only an outsider and a documentary film-maker ... I was also a foreigner with an accent."

Doing some graffiti for a friend's short film, he was robbed. "I was mugged while doing an illegal act, which was ironic."

Another time, he was filming a foot chase for a student film, and four undercover cops jumped out of a taxi, held him and his cast at gunpoint until Graham could explain.

"Character-building, I think my Dad would say."

Graduating with a BFA in directing, he found a job as a production runner on commercials and films. Eventually he got a director's job for a clip by Puerto Rican hip-hop DJ-producer Frankie Cutless. That became his calling card when he returned home.

"That video was my leverage tool when I moved back to New Zealand six years ago. Over a year, I went and introduced myself to Che Fu, P-Money, Scribe, King Kapisi ... all the artists I wanted to work with. So from a New Zealand hip-hop perspective, the fact that I had gone to film school in New York and made a hip-hop video in New York made me one of the frontrunners to do a video for those guys."

Graham has strayed outside hip-hop, with clips for Fur Patrol, Rhombus (with a Goodbye Pork Pie tribute for the track Hello Dub Pie), Bic Runga and the stirring clip for TrinityRoots' Little Things.

Right now, he's the hip-hop guy. Though he says he really should say no more, so he can get on with the next stage - his first feature film.

Given the amount of time he has spent preparing, filming and cutting clips, he probably knows Scribe's singles better than the artist does.

"I would listen to a track roughly a hundred times in the conceptualising of it - just put it on repeat at home, just write for hours with it playing to get into that mood, that rhythm that, tempo and absorb the lyrics while I write the concept. And while shooting you've got playback at least another 100 to 200 times and editing you would hear it 500 times. But you are hearing it in portions - one line for eight hours straight and then you get to verse two."

He's also the guy who has helped to make some of New Zealand hip-hop's stars a little larger than life. He says Dei Hamo calls him his personal trainer after the three-day shoot for We Gon Ride where Graham's call, take after take, was "go bigger".

Graham remembers playing coach to Scribe before his breakthrough performance in front of the camera for Stand Up.

"I sat him down while everyone was waiting and said, 'If you want to be a star you've really got to go 200 per cent on this. You've got to prove you're the best of all the rappers in the country'.

"As a non-MC it was really easy for me to say, but on that shoot it really helped him."

Scene 3: The b.net awards last Friday. Scribe wins Outstanding Achievement award. The man isn't there to pick it up but one of his proxies remembers to thank the man behind his television campaign. "Chris Graham - you are the [expletive] man."