Welby Ings' new film, which stars Tim Roth as an alcoholic boxing coach, finally fulfils a commitment made to his dying partner more than 20 years ago. He talks to Joanna Wane about what it is to be a man
There's a pivotal scene in Punch — Welby Ings' long-awaited debut feature film — where Whetu, a tough, alienated gay Māori boy, pictures his dramatic exit from the small town that's made his life a misery. "Suddenly out of the sky this huge burst of light is going to come down and pick me up and I'll be gone," he says. "All that will be left is dust … and sequins falling."
When Ings started working on the screenplay, those were some of the first lines he wrote. These days, the author, academic and award-winning film-maker is on Te Awamutu College's Hall of Fame. But in the 1970s, he was expelled after being caught in a compromising position with another boy, who promptly restored his reputation by getting a girl pregnant a few months later.
Ings was allowed back to finish his University Entrance exams on the condition he didn't return the following year. A decade later, he was on the frontline for gay rights, being spat on at marches for homosexual law reform, having eggs thrown at his house and receiving cigarette packets filled with human excrement through the mail.
That was nothing, he says, compared to the way it hurt when the kids at school sang God Save the Queen as he walked into class. "But I was also the school's best cross-country runner and they liked that, so on one level you were adored and on the other, you were a pariah.
"When Whetu talks about getting out of town, every kid who's been there can relate to that. I remember thinking I would walk down Alexandra St [Te Awamatu's main drag], turn around and go, 'F*** you!', the sky would open and I would just disappear. I don't think you have to be gay to know that story."
Punch, which has its world premiere at the New Zealand International Film Festival this month, is Ings' first full-length feature after three acclaimed shorts (Sparrow, released in 2016, has won more than 20 awards). A coming-of-age story that is both joyful and jarringly brutal, it's about the love between men but framed by emotional intimacy (or the lack of it) rather than sex.
The heart of the film is the connection that tentatively develops when Whetu's life on the fringes intersects with 17-year-old Jim, a promising small-town boxer on the verge of his first professional fight. The other core thread is the fractured relationship between Jim and his alcoholic father Stan, who's also his boxing coach. What happened to Jim's mother is never explained, and her absence in their lives is all the more powerful for that.
Signing headline star Tim Roth to play the key role of Stan was critical to finally getting Punch over the line. "I'm no good at schmoozing," says Ings, who'd struggled for 15 years to find backers for the project. "I'm actually insufferably shy."
During pre-production, Ings spent six months in regular contact with Roth, an Oscar-nominated actor who grew up in the rough underbelly of South London and became a cult figure in the mid-90s through Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. "We talked a lot online about alcoholic fathers," Ings says. "I was really clear that I didn't want him to play a boozy dad."
Roth, who's based in LA, flew into Auckland to film his scenes between Covid lockdowns in late 2020, a time of relative freedom here while the rest of the world was under siege.
"In New Zealand safe and sane," he posted on Instagram, along with a video showing an endless expanse of surf and black sand at one of the west coast beaches that feature prominently in the film. When he heard Jacinda Ardern was making an appearance at a local park, he popped down for a selfie.
American film critic Pauline Kael once called Roth's acting "a form of kinetic discharge", but in Punch he gives a restrained, melancholy performance as a defeated man who pours whatever hope he has left into relentlessly driving his son. Notoriously prickly, he was so impressed with his young co-stars Jordan Oosterhof (Jim) and Conan Hayes (Whetu) that he'd signed both of them with his agent in London before the end of the shoot.
It's clear Roth did have his moments on set, but Ings found him to be a generous actor, with the capacity to portray a character who is physically weak but has a powerful inner will. "Tim can be a challenge but if he believes in something, he's only a challenge because he really, really wants to get it right," he says.
"In a tender scene, he never tried to eclipse Jordan, and he could have with the movement of an eye. That's why it's such a wonderful thing to work next to a very accomplished person, because if their artistry has involved getting their ego under control, they're magnificent."
Punch is a deeply personal work for Ings. His late partner, Kevin Todd, grew up in a small-town boxing family and the story is loosely based on Todd's estranged relationship with his own father. While he wasn't an alcoholic — that aspect of Stan's character is based on someone else — Ings says Kevin's father never quite forgave his son for walking away from a promising boxing career and later struggled to accept him coming out as a gay man.
Todd, who instead became a triple jump champion and trained some of New Zealand's top women athletes, died of Aids in 1998. When it was no longer possible to care for him at home, Todd moved into a hospice on Jervois Rd. Ings remembers sitting out on the porch with him one day in the final weeks of his life.
"As you get close to death, all the rubbish falls away," he says. "You can talk about the truth, and you know that one of you is going to go on living. And I said to him, 'I want to make the story of you and your dad, but change it from something that ended in such a difficult way to something that gives hope.' And he said, 'You know you'll never do it because you won't suck up to the right people.'"
Todd might have been right, that the idea would never get off the ground, but there was a pivotal moment for Ings when Todd's father came to the hospice to say goodbye to his son. At first, Todd refused to see him. "But his dad didn't leave," says Ings. "I saw him sitting there, crying, and he was lost."
Finally, Todd relented. "His dad came in and … f***, this is why I did make the film," says Ings, his voice cracking with emotion. "He sat on the edge of his bed — Kevin was too weak to even close his eyes properly — and his dad … sorry… his dad reached out and didn't quite touch him. He sat there for 20 minutes and never said anything. Then he got up and walked out."
It wasn't exactly closure. It certainly wasn't a happy ending. But Ings believes it was important that he came, and that Todd knew he was there. "Looking back at what happened, I realised the world is not a redemption narrative. There were years and years of deep scarring there.
"I was so saddened because they were both good men, but they'd been shaped by different worlds and different sexualities and different roles of manhood. And that's why, when I created Stan, I didn't create him as a bad man."
Ings still lives in the house he built, hands-on-tools, for himself and Todd, deep in the Henderson Valley bush. He's not a spiritual person but he can feel Todd's presence there. In a folder on the table, filled with ink illustrations, is the world he drew for Punch as he felt his way into the story.
A professor in art and design at AUT, Ings not only wrote and directed the film but made most of the props by hand — from weaving Whetu's kete and designing the labels on Stan's whisky bottles to stripping and refitting Jim's car, an old Morris Minor bought for $150 off Trade Me. When the palette was being created for Stan and Jim's house, he described the colour he wanted for the living room as "all the awkwardness that the father can't say to the son".
Todd's younger brother, Cameron, did go on to pursue a successful boxing career. Now one of New Zealand's leading coaches, he came on board as the film's boxing guide, running Oosterhof through three months of intensive training to make him "fight ready" for the shoot.
Oosterhof was a delight to work with, says Ings. However, it's Whetu, despite his vulnerability, who is arguably the strongest man in the story. Finding the right person to cast in the takatāpui role was challenging, but Ings describes Hayes' performance as electric. "He doesn't embody the character, he possesses it."
Resisting pressure to make Punch an historical piece, Ings has given the film a contemporary setting. For all the talk of inclusivity, he says, deep-seated prejudice still exists, especially in communities where notions of masculinity remain rigidly defined.
"I kept running into people going, that doesn't happen today. I teach quite a number of queer people in post-grad and it's still bloody hard, especially for those who are gender non-binary. But it's more comfortable to believe that if there's a matching wedding suit, everything is all right."
Ings, who has a natural affinity for outsiders, has never done anything strictly by the book. Incredibly, he couldn't read or write until he was 15 and was put in the "slow" class, suffering acute anxiety attacks whenever he was tested or asked to read out loud. (Now a passionate reader, he's just worked his way through Thomas Hardy's entire back catalogue.)
Despite his many creative talents (painter, ceramicist, woodturner, graphic designer), he didn't make it into art school, either, after submitting a portfolio inspired by life on the family farm. "It had drawings of cow's vaginas, which didn't go down too well," he says, throwing back his head in one of the full-bodied laughs that pepper his conversation. "I thought I was being very radical."
As a young man at teachers' college, he was suspended for being "too stroppy" but ended up making a career in education anyway. His 2017 book, Disobedient Thinking, calls for sweeping changes to a system he sees as dehumanising and stifling potential.
For teenagers who don't fit the traditional academic mould, his approach has been transformational. Auckland artist, designer and DJ Jaime "Junior" Robertson was one of his students at Western Springs College in the early 90s. He remembers Ings as "this incredibly eccentric, pretty wild teacher" who opened up pathways he had never believed existed.
"I can't do exams; the school system isn't designed for people like me," he says. "But from the very first class I had with Welby, I knew this was something special, and everyone else felt the same. It's what got us off the field smoking weed and into the classroom. He basically said anything was possible — there are no limits to what you can and can't do. That was it for me."
Ings, who considers himself a story designer rather than a film-maker, still doesn't play by the rules — refusing to be restricted by what he calls the tyranny of the three-act structure. He visualises his stories long before he writes them. In Punch, the opening and closing sequences appear as drawings on water-stained paper. His short film Sparrow, set in the 1960s, has no dialogue at all.
Punch is a haunting work, with a powerful sense of stillness and an extraordinary attention to detail. At a test screening, the audience was asked to write down some adjectives to describe it. The three words that came through most strongly were beautiful, sombre and hopeful. Ings was touched by that. "I'm fascinated with beauty but not with prettiness," he says. "And I think that adversity has an astounding beauty to it."
* The New Zealand International Film Festival opens on July 28. See www.nziff.co.nz
