Making ballet movies isn’t for sissies. Especially Russian ballet movies. That’s what James Napier Robertson found on Joika, the director’s first foreign foray after his three New Zealand features, which included 2014′s great The Dark Horse.
His new film, the first NZ-Poland co-production, was mostly filmed in Warsaw but assembled here. It’s the true-life story of American ballerina Joy Womack, who, as a gifted teenage dancer, arrived in Moscow as an unwelcome outsider in the world of Russian ballet. The film stars Diane Kruger as her ballet mistress at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy. It’s a riveting, visually spectacular drama that isn’t just for dance aficionados.
Napier Robertson wrote the film after his American management pitched him a script that Womack wasn’t happy with. “They were really movie-ing it up and trying to Hollywood-ise it and I didn’t want to do that.”
He flew to the US and met Womack, who told him her story over three days. He said to her: “I want to be quite gritty, and dark and uncomfortable but also beautiful and somehow try to capture why you would love ballet so much, for an audience that doesn’t know anything about it. When I phrased it like that, it seemed like it was a bit of a breath of fresh air for her.”
That first meeting was in 2016. Eight years later, as the film finally reaches NZ cinemas, Napier Robertson says the film-making experience left him mildly traumatised.
“Certainly, The Dark Horse and Joika, they destroyed me to get to the finish line. But I didn’t know how else to do it.”
The four-week shoot in a Polish winter on the eve of the Russian invasion of Ukraine during the pandemic was tough enough. On the second day, he turned up to find six of the film’s heads of department had Covid and couldn’t work.
The pandemic disruptions had already meant that New Zealand star Thomasin McKenzie, who had been cast as lead, was no longer available to play Womack. Her replacement was US actor Talia Ryder, who drew attention with the 2020 Sundance festival hit Never, Rarely, Sometimes Always and whose dance background got her a role in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake.
Having trained for a year, Ryder got Covid the day she arrived in Poland for two weeks of rehearsal with Womack and had to quarantine for 10 days. Two of the supporting dancers suffered fractures during the training. Napier Robertson laughs that by having Womack on set during the dance scenes, he realised what it must be like for others to work with him.
“I found myself making the case for ‘I think that was good enough’, and being told by Joy, ‘No, it wasn’t’. Normally it’s the other way around ‚where someone’s telling me, ‘We have to move on’. Here I was the one going, ‘I think we’ve got it’ and I’m being told, ‘No, up your standard’.”
After the shoot, the gruelling post-production schedule gave Napier Robertson heart palpitations, which landed him in hospital. “With this film, basically the workload and the stress … my body was literally like, ‘Stop!’ But I ignored it.” The whole experience has him questioning the commitment to writing and directing his own films.
Napier Robertson was involved in the acclaimed 2018 small-screen sequel to the 1992 skinhead film Romper Stomper and his next project is a possible miniseries about Sydney cocaine dealers. Yes, TV is easier, and it’s where he got his own start as a teenage actor in the likes of The Tribe, Being Eve and Shortland Street. “Everyone keeps telling me I should just do miniseries now. But I’m like, no, deep down, I just keep wanting to try to make movies.”
Today, Napier Robertson is in the screening room at the Auckland home he shares with his two kids and Canadian wife Dana Lund. She is the composer on the film, as she was on The Dark Horse and Whina, the 2022 biopic of the activist-kuia which Napier Robertson co-directed. After his three local features – his debut was the well-regarded 2009 low-budget thriller I’m Not Harry Jenson –a movie set in a world of Russian high culture might seem something of a left turn.
“It’s funny, because to me, it feels like such a natural progression … the connection is the obsessive, larger-than-life central character,” he says, drawing parallels between The Dark Horse’s bipolar chess genius Genesis Potini and the drive of Dame Whina Cooper.
“This was a chance to explore the question , ‘Is it worth it?’ through this character. She is just outrageously driven, someone who made unbelievable life choices to pursue this thing that can be beautiful and can be soulful, but it will destroy you to try to get there. And in a world that’s so visually and musically stunning.
“I was really struck by her work ethic – and work ethic to me means a lot, just because the only way I’ve ever been able to do anything is by nearly killing myself to do it. I don’t know what other option there is.”
Of the many ballet movies of the past, Napier Robertson says the biggest inspiration was Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1948 classic The Red Shoes. But as far as understanding ballet enough to make a film about it, it came down to a moment when he arrived early to observe Womack teaching at a school in Santa Monica.
“I just stumbled across the room she was in … and she was just dancing with no music just by herself. And it was one of the most beautifully soulful, spiritual things I’ve ever seen. I didn’t really know anything about ballet, but I just quietly watched, and I got it. From a kind of non-religious standpoint, it felt like a relationship to God, and it made sense. So then, my challenge was, well, somehow, I have to capture that.”
Joika is in cinemas from May 16.
