Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, in the "lost" New Zealand gender-horror film Jack Be Nimble, directed by Garth Maxwell. Photo / Supplied
David Herkt talks to Garth Maxwell about his 'all or nothing' film Jack Be Nimble, starring transgender actor Alexis Arquette and NZ's Bruno Lawrence in his final role.
Ask film director Garth Maxwell what his movie Jack Be Nimble is about and he is succinct: "Working out what matters and fighting for it."
It is a summation of Maxwell's own approach to life, creativity, and, in particular, his long struggle for acknowledgement of a New Zealand movie that originally premiered at Cannes in 1993.
Despite Jack Be Nimble being hailed by the New York Times as having "hallucinatory power and psychological refinement", its purchase and a botched global release by an overseas company meant a total disappearance from the world's screens for nearly 30 years. Now, an acclaimed rediscovery means it is headlining a festival screening at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and is available on Blu-ray DVD for the first time.
"Making Jack was an act of survival," Maxwell remarks of the circumstances of creating his first full-length movie. "It was all or nothing. One chance."
Jack Be Nimble features Alexis Arquette, the late American actor who, along with sisters Rosanna and Patricia, and brother David, can be considered third-generation "Hollywood royalty". Alexis was paired with New Zealand actor and artist Sarah Smuts-Kennedy as Jack Be Nimble leads.
"This was a country where everything was boiling like crazy lava, barely beneath the surface," remarks Maxwell. "Men were bashing men for showing gayness. Men were being taunted by women for showing weakness. Sexuality was being policed at a micro-level. Schoolboys were terrified of showing gentleness or affection. Danger was everywhere all the time.
"This was what I tapped into and what powered the film."
Arquette and Smuts-Kennedy were cast as Jack and Dora, two siblings orphaned as toddlers who attempt to reunite in later life. Jack Be Nimble has all the elements of a contemporary fairy tale-turned-Gothic horror. At times it is a dark fable of revenge but with a final transcendent redemption, set in a Kiwi landscape that veers from rugged back-block farms to manicured suburbia in an image-potent plot.
Dora is chosen from the orphanage by a nurturing family. Jack, however, goes off to live with a sinister rural couple and four older stepsisters. When Jack finally rebels against his brutalised life, he goes in search of his own real sister while being hunted by his adoptive siblings like terrifying harpies out for retribution. Meanwhile, Dora has begun to have extra-sensory experiences…
It is a movie about myth, about repression and release – and it finds some measure of resolution, though not quite the one we expect.
"To me, it was a change of direction, shrugging-off previous identities: a convergence of art and life, a rejection, a return, a seizing of control, a bringing together of what I had learned and read and seen and been perversely drawn to," Maxwell explains.
The movie's shots have been composed to have maximum impact on the psyche. "Since the beginnings of cinema," pointed out David Overby in a review of Jack Be Nimble, "the best horror films have been a way to approach and explain the terror of life, pushing it back a bit but allowing us to look it full in the face."
"There is a special thrill in being scared, when your heart is in your mouth. We always go back for more," comments Maxwell, "but is Jack a horror movie? Perhaps it's more a spiral of increasingly outlandish tableaux – and there's an appalling pleasure in being taken off the rails like this."
Movie-viewers will not easily forget Jack being punished by his stepfather, bent over a farm gate and being whipped with barbed wire, nor the heart-stopping image of Smuts-Kennedy sinking beneath black waters surrounded by yellow flowers. Even small filmic details resound: the loud slap of laundry on a clothesline, sinister wild-tressed silhouettes in a pursuing truck, or the preponderance of tangled and the wind-tousled hair on many of the characters that would put Kate Bush to shame.
"It really is a movie about hair," Maxwell laughs.
"The film is in synch with people seeking self-fulfilment outside of constricted official options," he continues more seriously. "Jack allows for mutability, self-determination, and bizarre pagan transformations. The plot hinges on female characters wrestling fiercely for power – they are the spine of the plot, the good and the bad.
"Death is not death. Pregnancy is accelerated and subversive. In the era of #MeToo and Trans Lives Matter, I'm so thrilled to get these aspects acknowledged by its re-release and its inclusion in the upcoming 'Horror and Gender' section of the Museum of Modern Art summer festival."
Arquette, who portrayed a young male with mixed strengths and vulnerabilities in the film, was also involved with gender transformation in a more personal way. By the time the movie was launched at Cannes, months after shooting, Arquette was appearing as a blond woman, in high heels, tight white jeans and a red blouse.
"You could see the jaws of the potential distributors dropping," Maxwell comments. "Alexis evaded preconceptions and publicists' trite summaries of who she was. It was hilarious, eye-popping and beautiful!
"Straight men were drawn like iron filings to her female personas, and she had all those years of Hollywood club performances to draw on to keep them in her power. Like the snaps of her cavorting outside the cinema in Cannes show, she was in constant motion, throwing looks and shapes at cameras and crowds in a blur of hotness – you couldn't tear your eyes off her."
But there was a very serious actor there as well.
"I recall when we were in pre-production and Alexis was learning the New Zealand accent. Tony Barry - actually Australian, who played Clarrie - was the voice coach and Alexis spent hours wandering around the Tucker Films car park, a little figure in a hoodie, with headphones and a Walkman, very focused, absorbing the peculiarities of our accent.
"She was doing this crazy reversal at a time when New Zealand actors were attempting faux-American accents for better or worse in the stuff shot here. This was full-immersion therapy for Alexis in our odd culture."
The role also involved Arquette being trussed like a pig, strung upside down with complex prosthetic eyes and ears stitched shut.
"These were scary scenes to shoot as she was so vulnerable, yet Alexis was so in control of herself and so calm, so able … Nothing went wrong due to her outstanding professionalism. We had the full works – wind machines, multiple cameras and the most demanding emotional material for Sarah Smuts-Kennedy. It was almost unshootable yet these two actors brought utter control and discipline to the work. It makes the climax of the film unbearably moving.
"When you teamed Alexis with Sarah – it was a match! Brother and sister. It was unreal.
"Sarah was 25 when we made the movie," continues Maxwell. "I credit her with providing the emotional depth, sincerity, ballast, and beauty to power the film, to match Alexis, and to embody the craziness of the material with dignity. Without her, and her mane of wild black hair – as I said, it is a movie about hair, and I wasn't joking – the film would have been a disaster. In every scene she's in, and she's in most, you can't take your eyes off her."
There was also Bruno Lawrence, the star of Goodbye Pork Pie and Utu, a veteran actor and musician. Jack Be Nimble was to be his last film.
"We were so lucky he was interested in the role. He never auditioned. Those big names don't, you just have to hope they're into it and that they are right for you. He was, on both counts. I love the age gap between Bruno and Sarah in the film which feels so interesting and so inherently dodgy, with so many red flags in today's anxious terms."
Maxwell also compliments Elizabeth Hawthorne.
"So much of the scare value of the movie is generated by Elizabeth's voice – sensual and demented. Her work in post [-production] was terrifying and thrilling, curling around the psychic realm of disembodied voices that we were painstakingly creating in Dolby stereo to haunt and taunt Sarah's psychically receptive character.
"Tony Barry was another great find for me. His drunk, thuggish farmer Clarrie – unable to father sons – was the perfect foil to Elizabeth's demented harpy wife. Tony brought comic genius to a dark picture – plus his craggy face like a lunar landscape. Explosive violent anger is just what I prayed for."
The return of Jack Be Nimble to screens is the result of several factors. Frank Jaffe rediscovered the film and his company, Altered Innocence, became its new distributor. Then, entirely coincidentally, MoMA selected it for their summer series, Horror: Messaging the Monstrous, promoting it as the festival's "find", and flying Maxwell to New York to introduce the screening.
Arquette completed gender-reassignment surgery in 2006 – although her brother David has referred to her as "gender suspicious" and she often continued to appear as male. She died in 2016 from cardiac arrest stemming from HIV. Bruno Lawrence died in 1995. Smuts-Kennedy exhibits as an artist.
Now billed as "a lost classic in the canon of gendered horror", Jack Be Nimble finally seems to have found its cultural moment.
Jack be Nimble screens at MoMA, in New York, on Tuesday, July 12. It is now available again in a 4K Restoration on a region-free Blu-ray DVD through Altered Innocence: https://www.alteredinnocence.net/jackbenimble
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