Of the top 20 films that have made the most money at the New Zealand box office, a fair chunk of them have come from books – Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Once Were Warriors, Whale Rider, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tale, In My Father’s Den.
A few Kiwi novels have recently attracted financial options from film-makers or are in production. But it seems as if nearly every week, Reese Witherspoon has bought the rights to the next Big Little Lies or Lessons in Chemistry, or across the Tasman there’s a new screen version of a Tim Winton or Trent Dalton. And many Kiwi creative types – including producers, screenwriters, agents and authors – think we’re barely scratching the surface of our literary talent: there’s massive potential in stories just begging to be made into first-class films and TV series.
John Barnett, the screen veteran behind the global hit Whale Rider and the Australasian smash Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tale, believes it. “I do think that we haven’t drawn on the wealth of material that’s been created here, and where there is an audience. I think we’ve got some fabulous authors and their imaginations are very fertile and expansive.”
Kathryn Burnett, an award-winning screenwriter and playwright whose credits include The Brokenwood Mysteries, agrees: “I am really aware that there’s an absolute glut of extraordinary talent here. A lot of great stuff doesn’t get made, whether it’s a book or a screenplay.” Given the amount of “pre-existing content” in New Zealand books, it is surprising more isn’t adapted, she says.
So, what’s the problem? Partly, it’s the familiar story of being a largely English-speaking country with a small population and comparatively tiny screen budgets, so we are swamped by films and series from Australia, the UK and the US. But it seems other factors are also involved, such as producer attitudes, the perceived conservatism of funding bodies, a lack of mechanisms for getting books in front of the right people, and perhaps even the kinds of books we write.
Barnett, who ran South Pacific Pictures for 24 years and reckons he’s made eight films and four or five TV series based on books, says there has been something of an obsession with the idea that directors create raw material. “And so you get a lot of pet projects that a director thinks they want to make – television is slightly different – but with feature films, the premise that these things are generated by the director means that, quite often, the content is original to the director, and they’re less keen to take on an existing work or an existing story.”
Most screen ideas don’t make it past first base. “When I was running South Pacific, we might look at 300 to 400 ideas a year,” says Barnett. “And they weren’t full scripts, they were books, five-page outlines. And out of that, we might option eight, and we might make two.
“And that’s pretty much wherever you go in the world. You look at an awful lot of stuff and think, can I make it?” As a rule, he says, many New Zealand creative teams don’t start from the critical premise of who is my audience. “Who am I making this for, and how are they going to see it?”
Says Burnett: “It’s tough here, because we don’t make that much. You can really see why so many producers in particular would say, ‘I want to be very careful about optioning a book’. It’s a huge commitment of time.” Also, most NZ production companies are quite small and few have dedicated development people, she says. It’s common for producers to have to do development also.
Barnett thinks it unlikely Peter Jackson would have got his blockbuster trilogies made had it not been for JRR Tolkien’s books and fans. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that Peter would never have got a series of films of the magnitude of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit had he sat down and written his version of the story and then taken that around funder studios. The question [becomes] merely, do you think he can do it?”
Literary agent Nadine Rubin Nathan wonders how much screen industry people are aware of our literary talent. “Do all the producers know what all the publishers are doing? I’m not 100% sure. I think it happens quite randomly.”
Authors wonder also. Paula Morris had her novels Hibiscus Coast and Ruined optioned by film-makers, the former by NZ producer Robyn Scholes and the latter in the US by James Gandolfini’s production company. She says: “We might get more NZ books on to our screens if people read more NZ books and could see the opportunities.”
Carl Shuker might agree, though he sees the scale of the task of getting novels on to screens. His Ockham-shortlisted medical drama, A Mistake, has become a film with high-flying Kiwi director Christine Jeffs and American star Elizabeth Banks. It’s now showing at the NZ International Film Festival. He noted in 2022 when the film was in production: “More production companies should read more novels. I know a lot of production companies are optioning material locally, but options are cheap and getting a film financed and made after that is truly Herculean. Like, aligning-planets hard.”
Resonating themes
Barnett also suspects at least some of our books may not have readily lent themselves to the screen. “I think we’re telling some stories that might be interesting but they’re not necessarily universal,” he says. “I think another reason why there are fewer adaptations is that a lot of NZ literature is ‘internal’, and less adaptable than broad comedy or historical. That’s not a criticism, but it’s about how practical – or difficult – it is to adapt some of the more successful literature to another medium.”
The books that most easily transfer to the screen are often those with themes that resonate across cultures. Says Barnett: “If you think about something like [Witi Ihimaera’s] Whale Rider, it is a beautiful piece of writing.” The film also had the merits of Rawiri Paratene and Cliff Curtis and a cinematic whale, and made Keisha Castle-Hughes a star.
“But for me, the key of that story is its adaptability, if you like,” Barnett says. “This is an absolutely universal story. It doesn’t matter what society you go to in the world, you’ll hear a story about young women whose views are not accepted and they’re not seen as being credible. And told through the specific lens of the people of Whāngārā and the Māori perspective on it, that makes it interesting.
“I think that the books that are most successful have a character and a journey that, wherever you are, you read it and it excites you or it energises you or it makes you reflect, and that can be translated to anywhere in the world.” Until recently, technical and historical aspects were more of a hurdle to production locally, he says. “That’s getting a lot easier. But am I excited when I read something, does it move me?”
In simple terms, says Burnett, what makes an adaptable book depends on whether it has lots of people doing things rather than thinking about things. When you adapt something for the screen, you have to tell the story in images. “Interior” books are not an insurmountable problem, says Nathan, particularly if an author lets a screenwriter develop it so it plays well on screen.
Australian producers have had some big international successes. Big Little Lies is perhaps the biggest, a black comedy novel by Liane Moriarty that was relocated from Sydney’s northern beaches to an upscale Californian coastal town, starring Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon and Zoë Kravitz. Are the Australians just better at this stuff?
Barnett: “The advantage they have is a population that’s five times as big as ours. And also, it’s more likely that in an international market, there will be possibly more focus on Australia than New Zealand because a couple of Australian books have really taken off as adaptations.”
He reiterates that New Zealand has some “absolutely terrific” writers. “And quite rightly, whether it’s Eleanor Catton or Catherine Chidgey, they’re looking to tell stories that they want to tell, but they are increasingly writing content that does attract the interests of international distributors and reviewers. And those are the kinds of things that help when you’re funding a film.”
As if on cue, a TV series based on Emily Perkins’ novel Lioness, which took out the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, was announced last week by Made Up Stories, which helped make Big Little Lies.
Barnett, who now heads his own firm, Endeavour Ventures, thinks crime novels and thrillers often offer an easier path to adaptation. “Because, if somebody robs the bank and tries to get away with it, we all understand it doesn’t matter if it’s in middle America or middle New Zealand, the essence of the story is the same.
“It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, the content of these characters and the bad things that people do to each other are accessible to an audience. They get this.” The huge growth in recent years in New Zealand crime and thriller novels, and their authors, may flow through into screen production down the track.
Another plus for novels as sources for stories is that they often already have enthusiastic audiences, sometimes global, Barnett says. He is adapting thrillers by Paul Cleave and the New York Times bestselling Kiwi author Nalini Singh’s A Madness of Sunshine. “When you look at somebody like Paul or Nalini, their audiences already exist worldwide. So, whenever you talk with whoever you talk to about a creative process, or who’s going to fund it, they can read a book and get what it’s about. And so from a film or TV producer’s point of view, that makes for a much quicker process than if I came up with this idea about a guy who’s a cleaner in a police station but he’s a killer by night. I mean, they read the book and say this will make terrific TV, end of story.”
Dream to screen
To go from page to screen is expensive. Novels can do anything or go anywhere their authors want, but screen productions have budgets and physical limitations. “The author is one person who has sat down and created something for which there are no boundaries,” says Barnett.
He recalls a festival talk Eleanor Catton gave about adaptation. “She said, ‘I’ve set up a story and I’ve got 40 people in a bus and they’re going up a windy road through really difficult territory, and they hit something and the bus goes over the edge and 30 of them get killed.’ And she said then somebody picks up the film rights and says, ‘Jeez, we can’t afford a bus with 40 people, we can put five in a car.’” These are the realities of adaptation, he says.
Catton adapted her own book, The Luminaries, after several writers passed, writing “hundreds” of drafts of the pilot episode. She called the process a “nightmare”.
“Looking back, I doubt I could have picked a more difficult project for a first outing,” she said in earlier interviews. “It took me longer to adapt the book than it did to write it. The adaptation is such a reinvention of the novel. Structurally, it turns the story inside out and back to front, and there are very few lines of dialogue, or even scenes, that are lifted straight from the book.”
By comparison with novels, film and TV are highly constraining, in terms of time, space and budget – none of the epic shipwrecks from the book survived, she said. “So, while a novelist communes directly with the reader, the screenwriter’s job is to inspire the cast and crew to see, in concert, something that doesn’t yet exist.” And scenes might get dropped, rewritten or reimagined.
“A line of dialogue can become unnecessary if the actor nails the emotion with just a look, for example. And it can also be the case that scenes are created in the edit, with shots cleverly cheated and dialogue inserted after the fact, in order to address a problem that was never apparent on the page.”
Sometimes, authors get to sit at the production’s writing table, at least for a while, as Becky Manawatu, Singh and Rachael King have. But authors have to know to let go of their version of the story.
The German children’s writer Cornelia Funke, perhaps best known for the Inkheart series, once told New Zealand film writer David Larsen: “Even if you have the most passionate and creative studio on your side, what happens is this: you spend two years weaving a magic carpet, you hand it to the movies, they give you back a napkin and they say it’s the same. And you can only blame yourself, because you know they’re in the napkin business.”
For some, however, the problems of NZ’s screen production lie deeper than with the source material.
Another film veteran, Steven O’Meagher, told the Herald earlier this year that although a new wave of screen talent has come through, there has been a “failure of imagination”, thanks to a conservative mindset from the funders that flows back to writers and creators.
“It’s been ages since the general public have talked passionately about a New Zealand film or, until recently, a New Zealand TV series with any real enthusiasm,” he said.
Kiwis love local, he said. “Look at our best ads, songs, books. So, why aren’t our latest films or TV shows connecting?” He believes the NZ Film Commission (NZFC) has creatively meddled too much in the past, calling the organisation “notorious for obsessing over minutiae”.
Production values are largely of a high standard, but film-makers try too often to please the commission instead of audiences, he said. Some projects, he believes, are being funded simply because they tick politically correct and cultural boxes.
O’Meagher, whose film of the Aramoana shootings, Out of the Blue, and another about sexual violence campaigner Louise Nicholas were both initiated by books, acknowledges some screen successes. The likes of the recent Cousins, from Patricia Grace’s novel, and After the Party, not a novel but a script initiated in part by star Robyn Malcolm, have become the exception. “Where’s our Bad Sisters, our Squid Games, our Boy Swallows Universe?”
Funding is a perpetual issue. Says Nathan: “On the film side, I think a lot of people are going for the same pool of funding. It’s obviously very hard to break in internationally.”
Green shoots
In addition to the likes of Whale Rider and Footrot Flats, there have been successful adaptations of NZ books over the decades. Came a Hot Friday, Mister Pip, The Quiet Earth, An Angel at My Table, Rain, Sons for the Return Home and The Bad Seed all came from NZ books. Jojo Rabbit is loosely based on Kiwi-Belgian Christine Leunens’ novel Caging Skies. Productions are under way and Ockham winners and shortlisters are at the front. There’s Shuker’s A Mistake and Perkins’ Lioness. Becky Manawatu’s 2020 fiction winner Auē is in pre-production. Eileen Merriman’s Black Spiral fantasy trilogy has been optioned, and Rachael King’s tween supernatural tale Red Rocks is currently being shot. Fiona Kidman’s 2019 Ockham winner This Mortal Boy, about the second to last hanging in NZ, has apparently been optioned. Michael Bennett is working on bringing his Better the Blood thriller to screen. Also in production is another thriller, The Rule of Jenny Pen, starring John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush, and based on a short story by Owen Marshall. If anything unites all these stories, it’s strong characters, universal themes and plenty of plot.
Solutions
So, how do we get to see more of our books on screen? One proposal – suggested by Barnett and O’Meagher – that might help more generally has been to merge NZFC and NZ On Air, similar to what happened with Screen Australia.
Barnett has called for a complete review of all screen-funding agencies. It has a logic, given most audiences no longer strongly differentiate between “linear” TV, cinema, streaming services and online. Barnett found that between 2020 and 2023, the NZFC spent about $85 million on more than 50 films. Their total box office was about $14m. He told the Herald, “That was a woeful 3% of the total New Zealand box office with an enormous NZFC admin overhead which clearly chose non-performers – about five films did more than $1.5m or 100k admissions; 90% took almost nothing.”
If the two bodies were merged, some productions might get a cinema release, but most would be seen on television, he said. Said O’Meagher: “You’d [also] only be dealing with one set of people, one set of bureaucrats.”
Structural and institutional change might be also needed if this happened, as the organisations have quite different approaches. For example, TV projects are unlikely to get NZ On Air funding unless a qualifying “platform” has committed to them, which adds another layer of decision-making.
The government could also begin a push for requirements on the streaming platforms to produce more local content, which would boost local production coffers. This is the intention in Australia. As Irene Gardiner, president of the lobby group Spada told RNZ last year, “Internationally, some territories are going for quotas, some are going for levies, some are going for a mixture of both.”
Or it could look at increasing the tax rebates for international screen productions. Taxpayers already stump up for potential rebates of 40% for qualifying spending on NZ productions, and 20% for international productions (with 5% extra if the production can show it will bring significant benefits to the country). Hundreds of millions of dollars have already gone to productions such as The Hobbit trilogy, Lord of the Rings TV series and Avatar sequels.
Latest estimates have the screen sector contributing $3.5 billion to the economy each year, creating work for about 24,000 people, with wider economic benefits. But coalition partner Act is ideologically opposed to the idea. Deputy leader Brooke van Velden said in 2022, “Every dollar that’s spent on a subsidy for [the] Hollywood elite is a dollar that’s not spent somewhere else in our economy.”
What is seeing ourselves on screen worth? By comparison, Screen Australia’s annual Drama Report showed spending on scripted screen production in 2022/23 of A$2.29 billion (NZ$2.51b), made up of a record spend on Australian titles of A$1.51b, plus A$777m spent on foreign productions. Thirty-two Screen Australia-supported dramas had their first release on free-to-air television in 2022/23.
Dating game
Could authors and producers work together more often?
Says Barnett: “I think there’s a lot of mileage in creating opportunities for film producers and directors and authors to sit down together and talk about the content that’s coming up. You need to be building these collaborative environments where people are aware of what the others bring to the table.”
Nathan wonders if book publishers are doing enough to get works to screen. “Publishers want to own the film rights as part of the contract, and yet I’m unsure about how much work they’re doing to sell those rights.”
In most countries, books get the attention of producers through literary agents, but there are not many in NZ, and authors report mixed results talking to producers and directors. Several industry people suggested an annual “speed-dating” session between authors, publishers, agents and producers could be hugely beneficial to the local books-to-films-and-TV pipeline.
Nathan, whose agency has had 10 of its clients’ books optioned, says a similar event occurs at the Melbourne International Film Festival – Books at MIFF. It would at least help ensure that everybody knows what’s out there, she says.
Kiwi authors on the whole make little money from their books – unless they sell overseas and translation rights or their books are optioned (Auē, for example, did all three). Such an event might allow the screen production rights to books being sold before publication, which is what happened to UK debut novel The Ministry of Time.
It was picked up by the BBC to be made into a six-part series with film giant A24 before it came out. That scenario is rare anywhere, points out screenwriter Burnett, but it’s the story people love. “It’s usually people slugging away for a million years.” But authors should still work to get their book on screen. “Because if it ends up being made, you get another chunk of change on the first day of principal photography.”
Rich pickings
The Listener asked a range of industry people, authors and readers which Kiwi books they’d like to see on the screen.
Birnam Wood
A lying billionaire, infighting leftists, a high body count and an incendiary ending – Eleanor Catton’s book could be a brilliant Netflix limited series.
Eddy, Eddy
Kate De Goldi’s coming-of-age, post-quake novel could be a beautiful film, given it’s such a universal story.
The Axeman’s Carnival
Imagine if Catherine Chidgey’s talking magpie Tama met clever, slightly bonkers directors like Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Daniels.
Pet
And Chidgey’s latest psychological thriller would seem very telegenic and could be a ripper six-parter.
Tu
Patricia Grace’s novel about the 28th Māori Battalion would make a terrific movie. Including the Battle of Monte Cassino would be expensive, but the story would resonate all around the world.
Driving to Treblinka
Diana Wichtel’s true tale of her father’s escape from the death camps, with Laura Linney as Diana.
Poor People With Money
Dominic Hoey’s book could showcase Auckland’s grungier side, as the protagonist trains in a kickboxing gym and works in a dive bar.
The Chimes
Anna Smaill’s Booker-longlisted novel could make a fantasy television series to rival the BBC/HBO production of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.
Golden Days
Made more commercial and skewed to a younger audience, Caroline Barron’s novel of 1990s party Auckland could be a great Kiwi film.
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud
Lee Murray’s historical, poetry, story collection mashup, whose narrator is a fox spirit from Chinese mythology, could be a great adapted series.
Painted
Likewise, Kirsten McKenzie’s story about haunted portraits in a house.
Flight of the Fantail
Steph Matuku’s book of teens in the wilderness could easily be a New Zealand version of Yellowjackets.
Also for consideration:
Carl Nixon’s The Tally Stick
Greg McGee’s Necessary Secrets
Eileen Merriman’s Moonlight Sonata
Cristina Sanders’ Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant
The Tito Ihaka series by Paul Thomas
Vanda Symon’s Sam Shephard series & Faceless
Charlotte Lobb’s Hannah & Huia
Brannavan Gnanalingam’s Slow Down, You’re Here or Sprigs
Barbara Sumner’s The Gallows Bird
Mandy Hager’s Heloise
KIDS
Tania Roxborogh’s Charlie Tangaroa and the Creature from the Sea
Weng Wai Chan’s Lizard’s Tale
Leonie Agnew’s The Memory Thief
David Hill’s Strange Meeting
James Russell’s The Dragon Defenders series
