Loren Taylor’s cinema career started in a cinema. After the 17-year-old arrived in Wellington from Palmerston North to start a soon-to-bloom acting career, she also wielded a torch as an usher at the Penthouse Cinema in Brooklyn.
There, she remembers, one of the many films she saw many times was Before the Rain, Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski’s 1994 acclaimed debut film of three seemingly disconnected stories. She loved it. Still does.
Nearly 30 years later, after a working day that starts with a chat to the Listener in which the Manchevski film comes up, she’ll be back at the Penthouse. She’s seeing another acclaimed film of three seemingly disconnected stories in its NZ premiere. And her name will be on screen as director, writer and actor.
Taylor’s The Moon is Upside Down is a darkly funny, sexually frank, deeply felt, brilliantly acted, tragicomedy and directorial debut.
The film was influenced by many things, she says. Among them, the Manchevski film and its Venn diagram of a plot; Relief, her sister Anna’s award-winning collection of short stories; her left-field movie leanings that started with seeing Jane Campion’s The Piano at an impressionable age and helped by her cinephile parents; and her treatment for breast cancer in the 2010s. Taylor plays public hospital anaesthetist Briar who is slightly numb to the world around her.
She says her illness was one of a couple of reasons her creative career stalled after she co-wrote and starred as the painfully shy Lily in Eagle vs Shark, the attention-getting 2007 feature directorial debut of her then-partner Taika Waititi.
She still gets fan mail for the character who was inspired by Gelsomina, the simple-minded character in Fellini’s La Strada. The springboard the film provided for Waititi and Jemaine Clement, who was just at the beginning of The Flight of the Conchords television series, didn’t extend to Taylor, who then went by the surname Horsley. But many years on, she has no regrets. “It was going to be a springboard into somewhere where I probably didn’t quite fit, anyway.”
The Moon is Upside Down stars Clement, who was Jarrod, the eagle to Taylor’s shark. But unlike the arrested adolescence of EvS, the new film is about the messes adults make of their lives – including their sex lives – and the quiet desperation that goes with it.
The film also stars Robyn Malcolm as Clement’s sister, Hilary, Australian actor Victoria Haralabidou as his Russian mail-order bride, Robbie Magasiva as Briar’s long-distance boyfriend and Rachel House as Hilary’s girlfriend.
Getting her own storyline, Elizabeth Hawthorne shines as a woman dealing with the lonely death of a tenant in one of her property-developer husband’s flats.
Taylor, who has worked as a casting director between occasional acting gigs, has personal and professional connections to most of her ensemble. She and Magasiva go back to the early 2000s series The Strip and she and Malcolm to the made-here-for-the-UK teen comedy Atlantis High.
Today, Taylor is at home in Wellington’s Lyall Bay, where she says the southerlies across the surf beach a block away often sandblast the house she shares with her husband and 4-year-old daughter.
“I wonder if my psyche would be different if I were somewhere a bit more gentle,” she says with a laugh, having just demonstrated what her hair might look like if it was as wind-bent as the local flora. But her extended family, including her sister, live nearby.
From early draft to screen, The Moon is Upside Down, has been nearly a decade in the creation. For a supposed first-time feature director – even one who had acted in many, co-written one and directed a bunch of commercials, music videos and shorts films – a multi-narrative juggling act might seem quite ambitious.
“I wouldn’t do it now and I’d do it different now. But I just sort of felt like I had nothing to lose. That’s where my curiosity was … but yeah, I know. Everyone’s like, ‘You did a multi-narrative for your first proper film by yourself? You dick.’”
And she also cast herself. She blames the film’s casting director, who told Taylor she’d written herself into the role, so she’d best try out for it. “So, I did a horrible thing I thought I’d never do – auditioned some other people first and then auditioned myself and then cast myself. Yeah, appalling. Was it narcissism or a desire to exploit myself? It was one or the other.”
Also in on the act in one scene is Taylor’s 92-year-old grandmother. She plays a post-op patient telling Briar she’d rather have died on the operating table. “She was totally up for it. No elder abuse was involved in getting her to do it, I promise.”
Still, it’s quite dark. The scene was inspired by Taylor overhearing a chat between doctors and a patient in the next bed during her own time in hospital. “It felt incredibly potent.”
The scene is a favourite of Elizabeth Hawthorne’s, who admits to the Listener she didn’t realise when she first read the script how much of a comedy it was.
“I think I took it all terribly seriously because I really felt for all these people … so no, I didn’t find it terribly funny. I’m not a great insightful script reader but I do find it funny when I’m watching it, I do laugh, a lot.”
With Hawthorne and Taylor, the other female character driving one of the three intersecting storylines is played by Russian-born, Greek-raised Haralabidou, whose character Natalia’s observation of the southern skies from her new rural home gives the film its name. She also finds the new life she’s been promised with her Kiwi betrothed, Mac (Clement), might not be as advertised. Haralabidou spotted the movie’s humour early on.
“I’m going to pull my Greek card – comedy is someone else’s tragedy. That’s what defines comedy for me. Like many New Zealand TV series and movies, it’s always there. There’s always lightness even in the darkest things.
“It’s about finding those moments – but not playing these moments, because the audience is not stupid.”
Haralabidou underwent a quarantine hotel stay to be part of the film, which was shot between lockdowns in 2021.
For Taylor, the pandemic also sped up her and her husband’s adoption plans for their daughter from Thailand. Five days after she finished the three-week shoot, she became a mother. It meant the editing could wait. And when the movie was nearly through post-production, Taylor came down with Covid. “I was going, ‘Is the universe telling me that I shouldn’t be making films?’”
It was finally finished last year and the movie headed to Estonia’s A-list film festival, PÖFF Tallinn Black Nights, where it won best first feature from a jury headed by Nicolás Celis, producer for director Alfonso Cuarón’s much-awarded 2018 film, Roma. Taylor couldn’t attend because of family commitments so Hawthorne and producer Philippa Campbell went to fly the flag.
That early response has given Taylor the confidence to do it all over again, she says. Possibly the next film will be co-written with her sister and greatest supporter.
“The process on this taught me that I do know what I want to make, and I can do it, and with a bit more support and a bit more space and fewer forces majeures, I can keep going and keep discovering stuff.”
The Moon is Upside Down is in cinemas now.
