For many months, Chelsie Preston Crayford agonised over her first feature film. About three years ago, the 37-year-old actor considered discarding it altogether because she felt the writing wasn’t working.
She had written and directed three short films, including Falling Up, in which she played a recently separated young mother (the baby played by her own daughter Olive), which won Best NZ Short Film at the 2018 NZ International Film Festival.
Her forthcoming debut as writer and director is also inspired by her family and growing up as the daughter of pioneering film and documentary-maker Dame Gaylene Preston.
Caterpillar, she says, is “about three generations of women living together, all at pivotal life stages when they’re bumping up against one another’'. She’s worked on it for six years, much of it during the pandemic when acting work dropped off.
I first talked to the actress and film-maker before Christmas, when she finished the busiest year of her three-decade career. Tired but exhilarated, she wasn’t long back in Auckland after the five-week Caterpillar shoot in Wellington.
As she approached the editing stage, we squeezed in a Zoom interview when she was craving time with 9-year-old Olive, her fiancé, comedian Guy Montgomery, and friends.
At the start of 2024, she had promised herself a better work-life balance, frustrated that a career in the arts can be feast or famine. Those hopes were dashed. “I completely didn’t achieve that in any way, shape or form,” she groaned.
But Preston Crayford grew up fitting in with her mother’s working life, and she’s very mindful that “you never know if something’s your last job’'. Her big question is this: “How do you sustain a career in this industry and still also manage to have down time?”
Preston Crayford has been acting since getting cast in a water-safety TV commercial at the age of 4. She took part in her first play as a 13-year-old, and by the time she graduated from Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School, she had already racked up feature film credits – including playing her own grandmother Tūī in Gaylene Preston’s film about her parents during World War II, Home by Christmas.
Since then, she’s become a ubiquitous figure on the NZ big and small screen – especially last year when she featured in two major crime dramas. In Dark City: The Cleaner, the series based on a novel by Christchurch crime writer Paul Cleave, she played Melissa, a woman who becomes a rival psychopath to the story’s star serial killer Joe.
Straight after press interviews for that last February, Preston Crayford was on the plane to Queenstown to shoot the role of Detective Inspector Anais Mallory in the crime series A Remarkable Place to Die.
But it hasn’t all been murders down south. In 2023, she shot Vince, a comedy series co-written and starring Jono Pryor as a morning television media star who is stood down and shamed on social media after an unfortunate on-air wardrobe malfunction.
Preston Crayford plays a newly arrived London lawyer named Heidi who Vince first meets when she moves into the apartment next door. The early episodes suggest the pair will have some legal and possibly romantic entanglements.
It’s rare as a woman to be so completely naughty and self-serving.
“There’s always a nice light atmosphere when you’re doing a comedy. Jono is a total sweetheart. He had such a big workload but was so considerate with everyone’s experience every day – cast and crew. It made it a lovely set to be on.”
Acting in two crime thrillers challenged her in new ways, as she switched between roles at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Melissa in Dark City has become one of the favourite characters of her career and a complete contrast to her life as a working mother. “It’s rare as a woman to be so completely naughty and self-serving. Melissa was a character who didn’t do a single thing that she didn’t want to do. She was being led by her own desires and instincts at every moment, and I’ve never had that in a character before. I revelled in it. It’s fun to visit the feeling of being the danger.
“Like most women, I’m wary of being out walking by myself at night. I got to experiment with this, even though it’s just a character, to toy with not being scared of anything and actually being the scary thing was a complete shift in mindset.”
Preston Crayford adds that Melissa is often playing a character herself including wearing wigs. “It was such a different journey finding that character, but once we had her, she was such fun.”
As Anais, in A Remarkable Place to Die, she played a serious, straitlaced detective and had to learn to hold a gun. “Initially, I was thinking: ‘Oh, is she really boring?’ But I don’t think she was.”
After playing naughty Melissa, any character would seem rather tame, she suggests.
“I’m never interested in playing a female character who is tough or sexy. So many female characters are like that. If you play Melissa [as] tough and sexy, she’ll be a boring version of a psychopath.”
Her constant career challenge is turning characters who have been “written externally” into someone she can relate to as a woman. “Certain scripts require that more than others and that’s always part of my approach. I’m always determined to make sure that I am convinced that this is a real woman.”
These roles are often written by men – she reflects on the screenwriting industry being male-dominated – and it’s the job of an actor to bring as much colour and depth as they can to each character. “It was the same for me with Anais. I knew I had to be a convincing detective, but I wasn’t interested in being tough and sexy for the sake of it. I’m obsessed with getting to the bottom of what is motivating the character and making sure that doesn’t come from a male lens.’’
While in Central Otago, and between shoots, Preston Crayford also wrote the final funding application for Caterpillar. The bones of the story come from her own life growing up in a three-generational household, with her mother and Tūī, who suffered dementia, but was the family’s “domestic glue’' until she became ill.
We talk about the highs and lows of writing projects and she acknowledges her own struggle. “I found the writing process incredibly hard ... It was the first time, really, that I had chosen to do something as an adult that I didn’t already know I was good at on this kind of scale.
“I probably had nine months where I wanted to literally throw it in the bin. I was uncomfortable all the time and I really had to make peace with being bad.”
It was only when she was selected for Story Camp in 2022 – a competitive five-day script-to-screen development initiative – that she saw the light.
Mentors and others on the workshop told her the narrative was engaging, and she was only a draft away from the end product. “It was just the kick I needed to see it through other people’s eyes. There was quite a cross-section of people that made me see some value in it.”
My mum summed it up when she came to watch a scene being filmed. She said, ‘It’s crazy because none of it happened, but all of it could have.
The Caterpillar plot follows 15-year-old Cassie, who is living with her mother, Maxine, a trailblazing feminist film-maker in her 50s, and the beloved elderly Huia, who is starting to show signs of dementia.
Since last October, Preston Crayford has spent five weeks in pre-production in Wellington, and five weeks on the shoot. It might not be in cinemas for another year, as it’s still being edited, so she is limited as to what she can say about it.
Initially, Maxine was based on Dame Gaylene, but as Preston Crayford went on with the script, she realised that the film-maker character was also parts of herself.
“My mum summed it up when she came to watch a scene being filmed. She said, ‘It’s crazy because none of it happened, but all of it could have.’
“That’s so accurate. The actual life event that inspired it was my grandma getting dementia and the fabric of our family changing forever. But how do you put that into a 90-minute film? So, I had to, with three lead characters who are all as important as each other. I had to weave a story that told what our story was; we lost a key member of our family, and our family changed. And we had to learn where to go from being held by her to learn to hold her, which is really the story. But the events are all woven into fiction and into what makes a good narrative.”
The theme is universal ‒ in this case it was dementia that broke the family but it could be about the impact of any terminal illness, she says.
The broader theme is intergenerational relationships and unmet needs, again a very universal thing. “The biggest insight was that we are all doing the best with what we’ve got.’’
As he has for many screen productions, her father, composer musician Jonathan Crayford, is writing the film’s score over the next few months.
As the only child of well-known parents in the arts, Preston Crayford is a bit tired of comments about whether she ever considered a 9-5 job, a life a bit more ordinary. It comes up all the time in press interviews, she says with a frown.
She acknowledges some people might think she piggybacked on her mother’s profile. It’s something she worried about as an emerging artist but less so now.
“In the early days, before you have your own voice and you’ve proven yourself, I think that’s inevitable, and I also think that’s fair. But you have to work hard, and I feel pretty confident that I’ve carved out my own way and my own voice.
“It did take work to figure out for myself how I was different, how my voice was different from my parents’ voice and assert that I am my own person, and I am my own artist. Now, at the age of 37, having done this for 30 years, you just don’t get to keep doing it on the basis of [your parents].”
Looking ahead, much of the year will be spent finishing post-production on the film, and Preston Crayford has other acting roles on the books. She hopes there might be another season of A Remarkable Place to Die.
The freelance life of a performing artist is just as much a constant juggle for her comedian partner Montgomery, who is in growing demand in Australia. His stand-up shows have often made mention of their life at home and being a step-parent to Olive.
“I get asked about my relationship a lot and he doesn’t get asked about me. I find that interesting. But I feel so lucky in my life. Olive and Guy are my favourite people and I marvel at the good fortune of getting to make a life with them both every day.’’
Vince begins this month on Three and ThreeNow. A Remarkable Place to Die is on TVNZ+. Dark City: The Cleaner is on Neon.
