How a fantasy adventure story by author Rachael King set on Wellington’s south coast became a family TV series.
Sometimes, a story is indivisible from its setting. So it is with Red Rocks. The idea for Rachael King’s young adult novel, Red Rocks, came to her in 2007, while she was walking her wakeful baby boy towards the seal colony at Pariwhero/Red Rocks on Wellington’s rugged south coast. She dictated the outline into her phone, then wrote notes and a first chapter at home.
She moved to Christchurch and the idea sat in a drawer until 2011, when she resumed work on what would become an award-winning book. Now, 18 years on from the day it came to her, the story of a boy who finds more than he could have imagined on a windswept shore has become Secrets at Red Rocks, an eight-part limited series.
“Like Rachel, I’ve spent time living on the south coast as well, so I could sort of taste it [in the book],” says David Stubbs, who directed the series. “I’ve been wanting to do a story about living on the south coast of Wellington for as long as I can remember. Something that encapsulates that world around Island Bay and Ōwhiro Bay – that whole sense of it being actually on the edge of the world.”
It was still, he says, a risky choice of location. Four or five days of bad weather would have wiped out the shooting schedule and it was even an issue when he cast for the roles of the protagonist, Jake, and the mysterious friend he meets, Jessie.
“The character of Jake is 12 or 13 years old. And he’s pretty much in every scene of the show, so we had to cast a young actor who was capable as an actor, but also had the stamina to do it, to stand up there in the cold, to go into the water.
“It was an extreme challenge for Korban [Knock] after we cast him, and even for Zeta [Sutherland], who plays Jessie. She had fewer scenes, but she’s a petite little girl.”
In King’s book, Jake becomes entwined with a selkie, a creature from Scottish mythology that can shift between human and seal form. Stubbs and lead writer Martha Hardy-Ward have written him as Māori and introduced elements of te ao Māori to the story, working the traditional origin story of the red rocks themselves into the script and casting veteran Jim Moriarty as Ted, the forbidding kaitiaki of the place.
Stubbs consulted representatives of Ngāti Toa and says, “They liked it because of its exploration of fairy tales as being ways to inform contemporary thinking. Fairy tales and proverbs are ways to explain things and to contemplate things, even for a contemporary audience.”
There were modern challenges, too. Wētā Workshop built two puppet seals for the show, one large, one small.
“You know the stories about when Steven Spielberg was making Jaws and Bruce, the animatronic shark, kept breaking down and seawater got into it? Same deal. Even though they weren’t using metal in the puppets, just working in the water in the cold and hiding the puppeteers under the water in scuba gear was tough.”
Stubbs’ last series, the evangelical church potboiler Testify, was consciously urban and contemporary, but he’s happy with the idea of Red Rocks and its themes being timeless. He says he connected with King over her affection for the classic New Zealand kids’ series Under the Mountain and Rotten Fred and Ratsguts.
“And also some of the British stuff as well, Children of the Stars and Sapphire & Steel.
“The show does get quite scary at some points, but kids love to be scared. I think a lot of kids’ drama ‒ Nickelodeon and Disney stuff ‒ is kind of safe. This is a little bit more engaging, a bit more edgy.”
In the end, he says, the key theme that came through from the book is that “it’s about finding courage, but also finding your identity as a person. In solving all the problems that he comes across, Jake sort of figures out who he is and where he fits in the world.”
Secrets at Red Rocks, Sky Open, Sundays, 7.30pm, from March 9. Streaming on Neon.
