Temuera Morrison: The peacemaker

By PETER CALDER

You know you've made it as a movie star when they've pressed your plastic likeness into an action figurine. To New Zealanders, Temuera Morrison is Jake the Muss, the violent villain of our most successful feature film, Once Were Warriors, or the Dr Ropata who was "not in Guatemala now" when Shortland Street hit our small screens.

But next winter, when the fifth Star Wars franchise, Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, lands in cinemas, the world will know him as The Bounty Hunter - and he'll have the toy to prove it.

Morrison is too gracious to object when it's referred to as "the Tem doll". Chuckle all you like; he's got enough smarts to know that a plastic doll looks damn good on a CV when you're trying to make it big in the movies.

Morrison, modest and self-effacing to a fault, plays down his achievement in landing the role.

"You may think you've hit the big time, being in Star Wars," he says "but they've got every actor in the world wanting to be in it. There's no negotiation. I was trying to get a cut of the merchandising but old George [Lucas], he wasn't having any of that."

But he is quietly confident it will do plenty for his international visibility.

"I think next year stuff will happen because of Star Wars," he says, as he picks at an omelette in his favourite Devonport cafe. "I've got a feeling that will get me noticed. That's how it works up there."

"Up there", of course, is Los Angeles, where the 41-year-old has spent the past week pounding the pavements, doing the meetings which just might make a star of him.

"I don't enjoy it but if that's as bad as it gets, it's pretty good. But I am waiting for that time when you can actually sit at home and the scripts come to you."

He's had roles in a string of forgettable Hollywood exports - Barb Wire, opposite the pneumatic Pamela Anderson; Speed 2; Six Days, Seven Nights, starring Harrison Ford; The Island of Dr Moreau, with Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer; Dusk 'Til Dawn 2; and, most recently, the high-altitude thriller Vertical Limit, shot in the Southern Alps, in which he sported a pretty dodgy Pakistani accent. ("The director kept telling me I sounded like Peter Sellers in The Party," he says with a Billy T-style chortle.)

But of all his roles, it's Jake the Muss who gets Morrison in the door in Tinseltown.

"They've all seen Warriors," he says "Maybe not Joe Blow from Minnesota but all the producers. I can tell because their eyes go up [here he rolls his eyes heavenward and mimes looking up at a giant] when I come into the room and then they drop down and say: 'We were expecting this big, burly guy and you look like a leading man', and I say, 'That's all right with me, bro'."

Morrison's firmly based in Devonport ("Who would want to be based anywhere else in the world?" he asks extravagantly).

"But if you want to work up there you've got to go there, do the walking bit. Go round and do the meetings. I've been up there three times. Some big films, mate. But the timing wasn't right or the paperwork or whatever."

On a recent Wednesday, though, he was "down here" eating breakfast at 2 pm and recovering from an all-night shoot on an episode of the Maori-language television series Aroha.

"I like to pitch in and help because I know one day I might be knocking on their doors, asking for a few favours. And it's good to be working around people with passion.

"It's variety and I love variety. One day you're sitting in some fancy restaurant on Sunset Boulevard bullshitting along with everyone else and the next you're freezing your arse off in a warehouse in Dominion Rd [where Aroha is shooting]. You're six months unemployed and then you get offered three jobs all in the same month."

While he waits for Star Wars - and that plastic doll - to launch his career to another level, Morrison can enjoy the local visibility conferred by Crooked Earth.

Certainly the biggest, if not necessarily the best, of this year's crop of local releases, it's essentially a Maori Western, in which Morrison plays a good guy.

He's Will Bastion, an Army veteran who returns from East Timor to his home town of Raukura, where he is faced with the challenge of assuming the leadership of his people who are under the thumb of his brother, Kahu (Lawrence Makoare), a radical, dope-dealing land rights activist.

It's a big-screen saga - with a high body count and lots of horseriding shot from swooping helicopters - which was six years in the making and dogged by problems.

Robin Scholes - who is one of the country's most commercially successful producers, whose other two big-screen credits are Once Were Warriors and Broken English - was dispirited enough by the long process to declare that it would be her last.

The writing alone was a drama. The storyline in Greg McGee's original script didn't impress Paris-based Pandora Films, which was coughing up most of the production finance and it was rewritten twice before director Sam Pillsbury's version of the story, written by Wahoroi (Wassie) Shortland, was given the go-ahead.

Then, with cameras almost ready to roll, Cliff Curtis, who was to have played Kahu, walked from the project, concerned at the linking of land rights with criminal extremism.

Morrison admits that he felt some misgivings at that point. Curtis, a long-time mate who had played the lowlife rapist Uncle Bully opposite Morrison's volcanic Jake in Warriors, is also his brother-in-arms in Hollywood where he's had roles opposite Nicolas Cage, George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"I told him: 'I need you for this one, bro'," says Morrison, "but he just didn't like the script."

Curtis' exit, barely two months before shooting began, put the pressure on Morrison, who felt much of the project's viability depended on his name being attached.

"I was a little bit hesitant but it came off the page a lot better than it read because of Sam's direction. I was blown away."

It's fair to say that the Kahu character doesn't do Maori land rights activism any favours. People connected with the movie - perhaps hoping to excite the controversy which is publicity's best friend - allude to the project's unpopularity with some Maori and hint darkly that it will anger pakeha too.

But Pillsbury - a US-based Kiwi who hasn't made a movie here since Starlight Hotel in 1987 - is unrepentant about Kahu.

"Nowhere in the film is there any suggestion that he is morally right. Someone has to handle it the wrong way so that someone else can handle it the right way."

Likewise, he doesn't accept that a Maori director should have made the film.

"In 1975 I made a documentary [Birth With R.D. Laing] which changed the way women had babies in this country. I'm not a woman. In the end it's not about who you are; it's about whether you've done a good job."

In terms of what ends up on screen, Crooked Earth is a remarkable achievement considering the compromises which Pillsbury was forced into because of the tight $6 million budget. He shot the dramatic finale in a single night and found himself constantly leaving locations before he had exactly what he wanted because the accountants were fidgeting.

The helicopter shots, strategically edited into a film which is actually quite small and earthbound, give it a sense of scale and make it seem much more than the sum of its parts.

Pillsbury says the aerial photography was used to highlight the land, not just the landscape, since it is one of the principal characters.

"I wanted to imbue the land with a sense of power and magic because it is what is at stake in this film."

He clearly doesn't relish the memory of the tight financial constraints he worked under but he does say it was "a joy to be back here, working in New Zealand on a film, about something important, a film which is, hopefully, an engaging adventure but has both feet in an important issue."

Morrison recalls a classic New Zealand moment during shooting when extras, bussed to Port Jackson at the top of the Coromandel for a marae scene, had to be held over for background shots the next day.

"The local motels gave sheets and blankets, the caterers knocked up kai for them and everybody pitched in. That's how we make New Zealand movies."

* Crooked Earth opens on August 23. What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? screens on Sunday, 8.30 pm, TV3.