Impassioned and quixotic Vincent Ward driven by perfectionism

By PETER CALDER


The very model of the passionate and driven artist, Vincent Ward has a devotion to his vision that is legendary. He came to film at arts school and in 1985, barely 30, said he'd "concentrated exclusively for 10 years on making films; anything outside that is irrelevant and if you separate me from my work, you take away me".

That devotion goes some way to explaining his output of only four films in 20 years. Based in Sydney since the late 80s, Ward has spent as much as half of some years wandering the planet, searching for inspiration for films or locations in which to shoot them. He says he had the idea for The Navigator while trying to cross a German autobahn after sleeping the night on the roadside.

To make his 1979 documentary In Spring One Plants Alone, he lived for two years among the Tuhoe in the Urewera, getting to know the old Maori woman and her handicapped son who would be the subjects of the film. He racked up 30,000km of driving to find the valley in which he shot his first film, Vigil.

Much of his second, The Navigator, was set in thigh-deep snow and a grim joke that did the rounds ran: "Vincent found a new location today. We're not going to use it. You can get to it by road."

This attitude - described as single-minded, obsessive, quixotic and ruthless - resulted in films which, though sometimes narratively garbled, had a signature grandeur that recalled legendary directors like Kurosawa and Fellini.

Cannes loved him: his first two features were invited into competition and the third, Map of the Human Heart, was officially selected outside competition, taking him within a whisker of an extraordinary hat-trick. This should have been the basis of a brilliant career and Ward's fourth movie, What Dreams May Come, starring Robin Williams, took a very respectable $100 million at the box office. But, as one local veteran observes, "he couldn't get arrested in Hollywood after that because he was so difficult to work with". Tellingly, the New York Times said Dreams represented "the uncomfortable collision of two ideas about film-making, one commercial, the other eccentrically, ambitiously dreamy".

Many people have wondered whether that is not at the heart of the present state of affairs. Nick Grant, the editor of local screen industry magazine Onfilm, suggests that Ward "may never have accepted the fact that film-making is the intersection of art and commerce, with all the compromise that often entails".

Ironically, Ward is best known for films he never made. He was hired to direct Alien 3, promptly rewrote the script, but soon left the project. "Nobody called it a film," he said in disgust. "They referred to it as a franchise."

He also wrote the original story for The Last Samurai, the Tom Cruise action film shot in Taranaki which took US$450 million ($840 million) worldwide. One of the people who has worked closely with Ward and who disputes any suggestion that he is an artist out of touch with the commercial realities of film-making is Australian-based John Maynard, who produced Vigil and The Navigator. He says Ward's reputation as a man incapable of compromise is a myth.

"The Navigator was made under terrible conditions and all the time he was willing to make the best of the situation on his hands. He didn't run either of those films over budget. They were as tight as, and they are very fine films."

By contrast, Ward's memory of The Navigator occupies a dozen gloomy pages of his 1990 memoir Edge of the Earth, in which the director describes a film "vanishing from me. It was over budget and behind schedule and there was a very real possibility of the guarantor stepping in. I was beginning to sense hostility among some of the crew. I knew that my slowness and lack of organisation was responsible for some of the problems [but also] my tendency to direct in a monosyllabic and preoccupied manner.

"I was focused totally on my work, unable or unwilling to notice the effect I had on those I worked with."

Maynard hesitates when asked about reports that on Vigil Ward left elderly extras freezing under the spray from a rain machine as he shot take after take.

"Everybody who makes independent films has to push the envelope. That's the very nature of the process.

"He is a dedicated artist and is the best film-maker New Zealand has seen. And history will one day show that."