Year of the Snakeskin

The new local movie Snakeskin isn't just the wildest Kiwi road movie since Goodbye Pork Pie, it's a bold feature debut for writer-director Gillian Ashurst. She talks to RUSSELL BAILLIE.

By rights, we should really be talking to Snakeskin director Gillian Ashurst while driving in a large car under big southern skies with something by Nancy Sinatra playing loud on the stereo.

But she's a very busy woman, what with her debut feature about to launch itself on to local screens.

So it's a Jervois Rd cafe instead, no car and no Nancy.

Ashurst and cast members have just started a national promotional jaunt from the south of the South Island in one of the three '75 Valiant Rangers used in the road film. It's now her own car, Ashurst smiles, goes like a rocket apparently.

In person, it's hard to reconcile the diminutive, quietly spoken Ashurst with what she puts on the screen. Snakeskin could be pitched as a Girl's Own Goodbye Pork Pie, On Drugs, starring as it does Melanie Lynskey as Alice, who gets into all sorts of trouble after she and friend Johnny pick up a mysterious American hitchhiker and head from the Canterbury Plains across the Southern Alps while being pursued by various colourful locals.

It's quite a collision of modern Kiwi gothic and Americana and it follows Ashurst's earlier shorts Venus Blue and Sci-Fi Betty - "an 18-minute tribute to 50s pinups, fantastic lingerie and sci-fi time loops".

Clearly, Ashurst's own Yankophile urges have surfaced in Alice.

"I didn't think about it too carefully. We can't deny the influence of Americana here - the majority of the TV and film we get comes from America and I just went on my own experience of growing up here. The big films that made us go out and do wild things are mostly American and there was always this desire to get out of New Zealand and go to a big, fictional place.When you are 16 years old you think that everywhere is better than the little suburb where you are from and if you can't leave you start trying to recreate it."

The biggest influence on writing Snakeskin, which she started while still at film school in the mid-90s after her post-university OE saw her working as a travelling journalist, was her love of road movies. An affection which dates back to seeing Geoff Murphy's Goodbye Pork Pie when she was 11 or 12 - Snakeskin pays homage to the Kiwi yellow Mini caper.

"I just grew up loving road movies and I love cars and I love the whole journey thing. Pork Pie was an influence. But then movies like Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde and that kind of stuff from America was an influence as well. But it was Pork Pie that put me on to those movies though, because I was so young when I saw it."

Another influence was the Canterbury landscape where Ashurst still lives, on a farm an hour out of Christchurch.

"I grew up in that whole region and I love it and it was pretty much a homage to the landscape down there and we used to take that journey when we were teenagers. I've always loved it. The landscape is definitely a character."

But what about about being under the influence? While Pork Pie had a faint whiff of marijuana about it, Snakeskin encounters all sorts of drugs on its travels. But no, it's not a "drug" movie, says Ashurst. " I think it's bit narrowed-minded to call it that. Yeah, the drugs are there but it's not a movie that focuses purely on the drugs and in a way they are there just as a reality of that culture. That is the reality of kids in NZ these days."

Unusually for a New Zealand film-maker, Ashurst can't offer a struggling-artist story about getting her debut feature funded and made.

"It wasn't as hard as people told us it would be, to be honest. You go to film school and get told 'it's very hard to get a feature' but the script was very well developed when we took it to the Film Commission - they immediately said yes and because we had a good script we never looked back."

Still, it's an ambitious first feature - lots of characters, cars, some computer-generated imagery and a six-week coast-to-coast production in out-of-the-way places.

"They always say 'your first feature on a small budget should be in a house with four walls and don't move around too much' but we broke all the rules.

"Sometimes when we were running out of time we would get quite guerilla style and we'd tie the DOP [director of photography] to the bonnet and have the actors start driving and I'd be in the boot with a little monitor and headphones and we'd just go for it and the rest of the crew would be left behind somewhere. We'd go off, film what we had to and come back so it was actually quite fun. It felt like real film making."

So, who's it for?

"I guess it's for everybody really. I think young people can really enjoy it because it's fun, it's got fast cars, it's got action and guns and cool characters. I think from the festival screenings older people are loving it too and there is a lot going on behind it - there are a lot of layers so you can take it as a purely base level action road movie or you can see more things about New Zealand culture and what's going on."

* Snakeskin opens on Thursday.