The motto of St Gilbert’s College in Dunedin is “he iwi tahi tātou”, the legendary, and probably mythological, statement that Governor William Hobson supposedly made at the first signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.
St Gilbert’s headmaster Mr Slane likes to intone the phrase frequently. He does it better than that bloke playing Hobson did on telly series The Governor a few years before. He does it when wondering aloud about the rabble protesting against the Springbok tour. St Gilbert’s might be a Catholic college for boys, but its true faith is rugby.
When Mr Slane invokes the four words of te reo he knows, they largely fall on deaf ears. There are only a few brown faces among all the grey jerseys and blue blazers that bear the motto.
It is Dunedin, 1981, after all. One of the few Māori kids on the roll is Josh Waaka, a bookish, bespectacled member of the underperforming second XV and the younger brother to Jamie, St Gilbert’s past rugby star and former Junior All Black, who suffered a career-ending injury not long out of school. Both brothers live with their mum, Shirley. Dad Pita died a few years earlier. Shirley had emigrated from England to be with him. Now, she’s got a job as the school’s cleaner, one son with his dreams dashed and one who’s a misfit in all sorts of ways.
Welcome to the world of Uproar, the local feature film that sets a coming-of-age and self-identification story against the dark days of 1981. But one its makers hope will find a wide audience, mainly because it’s a feel-good dramedy that stars Julian Dennison and his fellow graduate of the Taika Waititi starmaking academy, James Rolleston, as those Waaka brothers. Veteran English star Minnie Driver plays their mother, Rhys Darby is Josh’s mildly maverick English teacher, Brother Madigan. And Dunedin, in all its unspoilt-since-’81 glory, is a star in itself.
It’s a film that will have those (like this writer) who attended single-sex schools in that era feeling slightly triggered by all that uniformed adolescent menace and the pressure to fit in. It may well bring on some déjà vu for those on the frontlines of the anti-tour protests.
The former is what it was like for the film’s executive producer and co-director Paul Middleditch, the seasoned commercials director whose best-known previous local feature was the 2009 Tom Scott-penned divorce black comedy Separation City.
His initial idea for the film was rooted in his own experiences at Wellington’s St Patrick’s College in the early 80s. His creative leanings didn’t fit in with the school’s rugby ethos. He was a small kid in glasses who was bullied, he tells the Listener from the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film premiered to decent North American reviews.
The idea took a while to turn into a script. Among those who worked on its first script was Keith Aberdein, the veteran NZ television drama pioneer who wrote The Governor and co-wrote Utu in his early days. With script duties then passing to Sydney-based Kiwi screenwriter Sonia Whiteman, another development meant a bit of a rethink – Dennison read the script and wanted to play the lead.
“Julian came up to me and said, ‘Look, this character is me …’ He had a lot to say about how he feels about himself, the world that he’s in and the things very important to him.”
Middleditch now had the young and internationally recognised star of New Zealand’s biggest movie – The Hunt for the Wilderpeople – in his film. So, it was now a coming-of-age story about a Māori kid in a largely Pākehā school. The film was going to need some Māori input.
It got more than that. It got Northlander Hamish Bennett (Te Arawa, Patuharakeke, Kāi Tahu) as co-writer and co-director. The Listener was among many who thought Bennett’s 2019 debut feature, Bellbird, was the best local film in ages. He, though, felt he had to tread carefully.
“It’s a slightly tricky thing coming to a kind of already existing project and one that’s been around for quite a long time,” says Bennett from Hawaii, on his way back from Toronto. “You obviously need to respect that source material but at the same time, feel like you have the freedom to take it to places that you feel it needs to go.”
Bennett brought more than a cultural understanding. Like his parents, he’d been a teacher before turning film-maker and he occasionally returns to the classroom. “Paul [Middleditch]’s deeply personal connection to the story was something that I could easily find a way in with. I’ve been a schoolteacher for most of my life and it’s not hard to find empathy and understanding for those kids who find it hard to find their place at school.”
Bennett decided to move the story to Ōtepoti/Dunedin and give Josh a Pākehā mum and a father with Kāi Tahu ancestry to give the character an extra challenge to finding his turangawaewae.
“As much as it’s a fictional story, I felt a real sense of responsibility and obligation to get that right. It was all just part of allowing me to shape Josh’s character and make his character as nuanced as possible in all of those lovely shades of grey that you want in the character.”
Middleditch, who has Pākehā Otago ancestors back to 1840, says with a laugh that Dunedin, as lovely as it looks in a sunset wide shot, is a good place to shoot a 1981 period film. Not just for the architecture but for the ready supply of era-specific vehicles from local enthusiasts – including the same model of yellow Mini that roared through the city in the 1981 movie Goodbye Pork Pie. It’s a sly nod to the runaway hit and its anti-establishment spirit.
The car is stationary, but the film already had (sorry) a Minnie Driver. The actor and sometime singer seems to be slowly applying for NZ citizenship. She has opened for the Finn brothers, appeared in the Rose Matafeo romcom Starstruck, and is appearing in the NZ-filmed second season of the Waititi-Darby pirate comedy Our Flag Means Death (see page 53).
For the soundtrack of Uproar, she recorded a duet of the Nick Drake song Saturday Sun with Troy Kingi. Her name appeared on a list of British possibles, says Middleditch, and she arrived with some very clear ideas about her character and her surfboard for use on days when she wasn’t required.
“She was really fighting for all the things that were right for the character. She was a consummate professional in demanding what she felt was right for her role, because she’s such a tough character. All those things were really exciting.”
Bennett: “And what was particularly gratifying was her desire to kind of get things right, particularly from a te ao Māori point of view.”
Both men laugh when the Listener asks if Middleditch (late 50s) had to explain the early 1980s to Bennett (early 40s). The younger man says his family was affected by the split the tour caused – his father resigned as secretary of the local rugby club, but his grandfather and uncle still went to games.
Middleditch says aside from getting the Dunedin protest scenes looking like they aligned to the news footage of the time, another period challenge was getting the schoolboy rugby looking like it was being played in 1981 when it was a different game.
Amusingly, a couple of the St Gilbert’s First XV training scenes are soundtracked by songs of the day by Th’ Dudes and Split Enz, both bands who had their origins in a rugby-strong Catholic boys’ high school. That was unintended but, laughs Bennett, they will be claiming the credit.
Another cultural icon of the era is also employed – Greg McGee’s 1981 play about Kiwi masculinity and conformity, Foreskin’s Lament. It’s introduced by Darby’s teacher to Josh, as the promising actor vies for a place in drama school.
Bennett introduced the idea of the play having a place in the film and talked to McGee about it. “While Foreskin’s Lament certainly isn’t Josh’s story, I think the parallels are there. There’s something that felt kind of right for this character.”
Another thing that felt right for the film was repurposing “he iwi tahi tātou”, the phrase that’s become synonymous with “Hobson’s Pledge”, the right-wing pressure group.
No, Aberdein didn’t have it in his early script. Bennett came up with St Gilbert’s motto and a relished line for Mark Mitchinson’s imperious headmaster.
“In its true spirit, it is a positive comment to make, but it’s the appropriation of the whakataukī to serve your own means that I found interesting to put in there,” says Bennett.
Both emphasise that the film may have a historical-political context but that’s not its reason for being. Middleditch: “It’s a unique snapshot of a period of time that defined us as a country, but we wanted to make sure that this film has a wider audience.
“When we’ve screened it, one of the reactions was that there is a little bit of Josh in all of us. Hopefully, that’s the thing New Zealand audiences will get.”
Bennett: “The politics is a backdrop. It’s not the point of the story. The politics is absolutely the catalyst for this young man’s journey of discovery.
“But it’s a story that is ultimately a hopeful one.” l
Uproar opens in cinemas on October 5.
