By RUSSELL BAILLIE
Niki caro rings to say, sorry, she's got her international time zones wrong and, anyway, she's too fried to talk.
It's midnight in a snow-covered Park City, Utah, where the influential Sundance Film Festival is reeling through more than a hundred films to an audience of American movie practitioners, industry insiders and media all keen to spot the Next Big Thing.
The effusive director says she's got lots to tell, barely containing her excitement behind her festival fatigue. But right now her hotel bed beckons.
Caro and two of her Whale Rider cast, Keisha Castle-Hughes and Rawiri Paratene, have spent four days at the film's third and possibly most important festival.
It's effectively its launch into the United States where it will start screening in June after screenings at the Toronto Film Festival (where it won the audience-voted People's Choice Award) and Spain's San Sebastian Festival (where it got a standing ovation).
And at Sundance, to an audience full of cynical seen-it-all-before let's-do-lunch types?
"They are very jaded," Caro says when she rings back the next morning, "but when we screened Whale Rider on Saturday night, the truth is, it was just an overwhelmingly positive response. Longest standing ovation we've had."
Among those applauding was Dustin Hoffman and family. The Whale Rider gang accosted him on the street and invited him along. He's already familiar with one of the cast - Cliff Curtis is in his next film (see story E5).
After the screening Hoffman asked: "Do you realise how important your film is?"
"He was very moved and hugely complimentary. He's crying, we're crying. It's your standard Whale Rider screening really," she laughs.
The last time a film had that sort of reaction at Sundance, she was told, was another little-known Antipodean film, one which went on to great things.
"The response was quite unusual for Sundance and people are very anxious to tell me that this is not normal. The last time anyone could remember a response similar was way back when Shine premiered here."
By the time, Whale Rider has its fifth Sundance screening, on Sunday New Zealand time, Caro will be back home.
Caro says she'll be glad it can finally be seen by New Zealand audiences. The New Zealand official opening was in Auckland last night and it arrives in local cinemas on Thursday.
Now she can think about something else. Not that's she complaining but after the emotional toll of getting the film on screen, the sales and PR work since has been exhausting: "I'm going to need a long sleep."
A few weeks earlier and Caro remembers when Whale Rider was a cause for insomnia.
She was frightened at the prospect of taking on the story and directing her own screenplay in what is only her second feature after debut Memory and Desire, a rarefied, intense, intimate drama about a Japanese woman whose husband drowns while on their New Zealand honeymoon. It won best film at our 1999 film awards but went largely unnoticed by local audiences. Caro also has behind her a solid body of short films and has helmed television drama including episodes of Mercy Peak.
Part of Caro's anxiety was being a young Pakeha woman telling a story that is not only the work of renowned writer Witi Ihimaera but also closely tied to the myths about how the Ngati Konohi - a hapu of the East Coast's Ngati Porou - centred on the settlement of Whangara where Whale Rider was filmed.
"There were nights and nights and nights I didn't sleep. I was terrified but it's the story of the film really and it's the story of many of us making the film. I felt a terrible responsibility to do great work.
"Being Pakeha and to a certain extent being female and taking on the great creation myth in Maoridom - for some people that's always going to be transgressive. There is nothing I can do about that.
"I think that there's a lot to be discussed about who can tell Maori stories. And for my part I hope the film can be part of that dialogue because I do think there is a merit in the argument. But at the same time I think it's important not to be so staunch and hold so fast to politics that the occasional piece of magic can't be allowed to happen."
Ngati Porou's most famous film-making son, Lee Tamahori, had been offered Whale Rider during its early stages of development as a feature which began in 1995 with Ian Mune writing his version of the screenplay, but he turned it down because there where other Ngati Porou stories he wanted to make.
"And it was also very similar to a movie I had worked on that Mune had written - The Silent One which was also about kids and underwater and myth and legend and stuff," says Tamahori.
"I hear Niki's done a great job. I sometimes feel very good about turning things down when I hear other people have done a good job of them."
For Caro being an outsider, she says, made it easier in some ways. "In many ways ignorance is bliss - ignorance is still ignorance, of course - but I tried to learn everything I could and listen to the right people.
"I had great advisers but in a way there is something about coming to the culture from the outside which means you aren't so burdened with the politics of the culture. And we were very upfront about what we didn't know and very, very willing to learn and I think that brings a freshness to the storytelling.
Caro won the blessing of Ngati Konohi. A sign of it hangs around her neck as she talks. It's a riverstone pendant - which kaumatua Hone Taumaunu, one of the film's iwi advisers - gave her "in my darkest hour".
"And when he gave it to me he said you have our support. We want you to make this film."
The cast included 12-year-old Castle-Hughes, who had never acted before, at its centre. Says Caro of her young star: "The kid is all class. She's incredible."
There were other challenges. Like making a certain pod of sea mammals, which feature in the story, look like the real thing without blowing the modest budget.
Like telling an emotional story without resorting to sentimentality or melodrama. Like making the humble settlement of Whangara look like a place where the natural and supernatural could co-exist.
And then there was the scene which delivers the biggest strain on the tear ducts - Pai's speech. It was the hardest but the most heartening moment of the shoot, says Caro.
"It's the moment in the book where everybody cries and it was seven o'clock in the morning in a freezing, stinky old hall - it's a hall they play bingo in three times a week, there is nicotine just dropping off the walls - and there is this tiny little girl on stage doing that. The crew - all of us - were howling and that's when I knew: we're doing it, we're really doing it ... "
"As Cliff Curtis said: 'Boy, we're on the waka now'."
Herald feature: Whale Rider
The storyteller: Niki Caro
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