Vigil was a film of firsts. It was the debut feature of director Vincent Ward, made in his late 20s. It was the first NZ film to be selected for competition at the Cannes Film Festival, which propelled Ward’s career internationally and had his subsequent films The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey and Map of the Human Heart also vying for the Palme d’Or. Vigil’s poster had lead character Toss hooded by her balaclava and dwarfed by a tall staff. It might be interpreted as an image of Ward putting his own stake in the ground.
It was also the first, and possibly only, local movie production to be covered by Country Calendar. The perpetual rural affairs show reported on the making of the film under its working title, First Blood, Last Rites, and its Uruti, North Taranaki, location in late 1983. The programme noted the valley Ward found had “three essential ingredients – rugged terrain, isolation and reliable rainfall”.
Save for a rainy cemetery scene, Vigil doesn’t stray from that horseshoe-shaped valley edged by hills looking like they were about to collapse into it. Ward and his cast and crew spent three cold, damp, miserable, muddy months in the location among the farm building sets made to look like they had been there for generations.
That was the setting for the story of Toss, an 11-year-old tomboy on the verge of puberty, who lives on the farm with her father, mother and grandfather. When her father is killed while mustering in the hills, the hunter (Frank Whitten, much later of Outrageous Fortune) who retrieved his body is taken on as a labourer. His presence proves unsettling for daughter and mother.
Watching Vigil today, in its rich digital restoration, it’s hard to pick when it was made, or in what time it was set. Ward’s painterly images remain striking. So do the performances, especially Fiona Kay as Toss. The film is a prime example of our cinema of unease but it’s not all mud, blood and loneliness, as audiences have rediscovered in anniversary screenings, complete with on-stage reflections from those who worked on the film.
It’s a few days after the first at Wellington’s Embassy Theatre, when the Listener finds Ward, 68, at home in Auckland, where these days he divides his time between his visual arts career and hoping to get various screen projects into production.
Having seen the film on the big screen again the other night, what do you think of the guy who made it?
Oh, I don’t know that guy any more. It sounds disingenuous, but that was another person, another life, man. I mean, I’ll take ownership for it. But the confidence and absolute belief that guy had in himself. I have belief in myself now, but it’s moderated and the fact that guy was allowed to do this, and that he had the support to do that movie ... Most of my movies don’t sound great on paper – a girl coming of age dealing with her first period and the death of her father. Oh, okay. Or a bunch of guys burrowing through the Earth into 20th-century New Zealand. Yeah, I think I’d finance that.
Where did that confidence come from?
At that stage, there were only two art schools in the country, and they were hard to get into. As a kid, I’d won the art award at one boarding school when I was 15, and then I went to the next school and got accepted to have a special thing devised around me for a fine arts preliminary … and I’d done very well at art school because I could draw. I felt that I had some ability, and people made me feel that I had some ability, and that gave me confidence. I’m not an arrogant person, I don’t think. All that gave me that confidence at that point. That said, I was under-confident as a writer. I had to force myself to not have these six judges in my brain tell me what a piece of shit I was and how hopeless my work was when I was writing. I liked the parts that my co-writer Graham Tetley wrote, which was mainly dialogue.
How did you convince the powers that be, like the NZ Film Commission?
I’d done two short features [the documentary In Spring One Plants Alone and the Janet Frame story, A State of Siege] and they had done extremely well, considering they were student films. Both of them had won a pair of international awards. They’d got fabulous reviews in the LA Times and a whole range of other newspapers and international press. So, I guess, from a funder’s point of view, it was a slam dunk. Here was someone, they were coming up really fast and they were getting great international attention.
This is your most autobiographical film, given your own childhood on your family’s farm in Wairarapa.
Now, I’m very much an urban person – my mind is not the one that grew up on an isolated farm and suffered from issues of isolation. My mother’s alienation as a refugee [Ward’s Jewish mother fled Nazi Germany] permeates the film and even my father’s sense of isolation. He was sort of a loner, in some respects. He worked away on this farm a mile down the road. He broke in over 300 acres of scrub, and he did it with his body completely damaged from the war and mainly with an axe and with a flamethrower …
And autobiographical despite you making the lead character a female.
I never had a younger sister and so I wanted to explore what that would be like by inventing one. I made her a little bit androgynous, so it was easier for me to inhabit her mind.
That’s possibly not something a male filmmaker could do now, is it?
Well, a lot of things you can’t do now. I think you’d still do it, but you’d have to stand up for that choice. I really defend the right of artists and writers to write about those people they’re trying to understand. I’d also say writing is often about sensitivity and imagination and being able to inhabit someone else’s mindscape and experience. And you’ll get judged about whether you do it well or you don’t.
Did Vigil turn out the way you had imagined it?
Yeah, sure. I mean, no film is completely as you imagined. It’s got a lot more detail in it. Would I make that film now like that? No, of course not. But I wouldn’t make that film at all now, I wouldn’t even know how to make it now. I’m so removed from that experience.
Still, the guy who made this went on to make quite a few other films set in harsh environments and done in excruciating detail.
Everything I do is in excruciating detail. I can’t stop myself. Well, I can stop myself, and I do stop myself but the devil’s in the detail and it pays off for that. Geoff Murphy once said to me when he did a couple of nights operating a crane on A State of Siege, with his broad, nasal New Zealand accent: “Jeez Vincent, you fuck spiders,” which means I don’t do the broad stroke in the way that he did. But my films were about tiny moments. My films don’t necessarily have all these huge stunts and often it’s about a tiny moment in someone’s face. It’s a nuanced thing. It’s a tiny thought. That whole film is really about what’s going on in Fiona’s mind.
Looking at it now, Vigil, with its dead trees and the valley collapsing down upon itself, might be seen as an environmental parable. Was it at the time?
Well, it was a human parable of failure. I knew of those stories about soldiers who had come back from World War I and had been given these terrible pieces of land that they could never succeed on, out the back of the Whanganui River and Whangamōmona, and so on. They tried to do what was the belief of the time, which was break in the land and they lived miserable lives until eventually they walked off. The story in that film was about stories that were accumulated from long before. It isn’t just about that moment. It’s about a layered sense of who we are and our experiences.
If Vigil hadn’t been selected for Cannes, where would you be now?
I’d probably be in the same place. But it would be a very small living room.
Vigil is available on NZ Film On Demand.
