This interview is courtesy of Nga Aho Whakaari (from their latest newsletter).
Visit their website at: http://www.ngaahowhakaari.co.nz
The Strength of ‘The Strength of Water’
Briar Grace Smith. Trust me, it is a complete and satisfying sentence. Briar Grace Smith. I know this to be true because when first I asked Briar Grace Smith what attracted her to writing a screenplay, she answered, ‘the potential that something so small can mean so much’. And it was here I began to see that three small names and the space in between them could mean so much more. Briar Grace Smith.
So, far out, what first attracted you to writing a screenplay?
“I was interested in exploring aspects of a story that you can’t reach in a play or on stage. Going beyond the limits of theatre, the way that light falls…”
The Strength of Water is a story about a young boy who tries to deal with the death of his twin sister by eating for her, speaking for her and living for her after she has passed on.
“…the tiny messages and details in an image…”
It is set in a remote coastal fishing town in New Zealand. A place where people, land and sea tip their hats to each other in the morning and evening. A place where there’s a chicken coop, a fish n chip shop, an abandoned home and a broken fridge in a makeshift dump, and space behind each of their doors.
“…and the way that something so small can mean so much, can give off such powerful emotion.”
Cool. How’d you come up with, ya know, the idea?
“I had finished a script called ‘Fish Skin Suit’ and there were two young kids in it and I just became more and more interested in them. It’s hard to ask a kid to be the main protagonist in a play for an hour and a half, but with film it’s possible. I like the way they see the world, their imaginations and the way kids minds can shape and create contemporary myths.”
The names of the twins are Kimi and Melody and they have brothers and sisters both older and younger and a loving Mum and Dad. But while they live safely inside their whare, it is the space beyond the reach of their whanau, outside and inside, where the twins both encounter their own separate tide.
Ha, kids and their minds…
“Yeah, the power of what children can give us. They can actually give you a really big story, one that allows you to operate on two realms – the normal world of the adults and the magical world of the kids. And I like that in it you can give a real presence to the magic.”
The period of the story is modern and contemporary, but eggs are still home delivered in cartons from a homemade trolley and new car stereos are carefully preserved in old car wrecks.
Magic, yeah, magic…so when did all this go down?
“I wrote the first draft almost six or seven years ago. It was fast. I won’t tell you how quickly I wrote it. But I had met the director and we spent three weeks down on the West Coast with my kids. We talked about things we loved and films we loved and the possibility of a film and a story that we would both like to tell. I returned home and felt inspired to write a film.”
Just like that eh?
“It was actually more like an organic outpouring, a mess but with a strong and central idea. And thankfully people managed to see something compelling in it, which is what I think the first draft is all about. But this script has been through a lot of development since then.”
Oh yeah. All good?
“After I had written the first draft it went to this thing called the Aotearoa Screenwriters Laboratory. A week in the Waitakere ranges with some great people. At that time the script raised more questions than answers and I’m fine to say that I didn’t have any answers. People would ask me what the motivation was for that character to commit that act and I’d be the same every time, ‘I don’t know’. Advisers at the lab included Merata Mita, Troy Kennedy Martin and Susan Shilliday. They believed in it and gave me the confidence to keep going and told me that it would be worth the journey. Which is what you need at that stage because the journey is so long.”
True. Six years.
“By the time I got to the third draft I felt like I’d provided some answers but then it hit a wall really. Once you start inviting people to feedback it can go on. I ended up experiencing feedback overload. As a writer I think other people should not be giving you solutions, you should be going through the journey of solving the problem yourself. So I went through a period where people simply gave band-aids and textbook remedies and I actually began to lose a bit of confidence.”
Stink one.
“People often want the drama to be really big and are looking for ways to draw out as much emotion as possible. I took this one big note on from the feedback I was receiving and it ended up completely changing the story and tone. It took a while to reclaim that and take it back to the original path and story. I actually ended up taking a year off. But that was great too. I came back with a sense of objectivity.”
Then it must’ve been time for Sundance. What’d you want from them?
“Sundance asked me the same question and I told them ‘I just want to get excited again’. They had read the script and they saw me and understood what I needed. The great thing about the Sundance Institute Lab was that you’re working with other writers and not necessarily script editors and producers. One had written a film with a child protagonist, another specialised in non-linear structure. They’re all really passionate and they understand the process. While the story went down the ‘popular opinion path’, Michael Goldenberg affirmed my original position and my feelings for my characters. It was quite important to have that support. It helped me go forward again.”
So I reckon lucky Armagan (Ballantyne). Not a very Ngapuhi name though eh?
“Because she was non-Maori I thought I’d start the story out with a mix of Pakeha and Maori characters and stories, but in the end you write what you know. You write what you want to write. With Armagan, I had seen her short films, spent time with her and felt like we came from the same place.”
Tricky?
“One thing that we both constantly faced on our journey was ‘who is the protagonist – stay with the protagonist.’ Always thinking ‘what’s he seeing’ and ‘how’s it affecting him personally.’ Not trying to think what the audience is thinking, or trying to culturally analyse what’s happening. Just stay with the kid.”
Shoot all good?
“It was tough. What I had to deal with in terms of script was peeling things back and making them more real. There’s quite a lot of other worldly stuff in the script. The ongoing challenge was to make the other worldly stuff part of the real world. Even things like readdressing dialogue and action. Armagan was great at that too, keeping it simple and bringing everything back to real. “
Non-actors too eh?
“We had to be mindful of what they did and didn’t feel comfortable with and there were readjustments on the day but it all worked. In a scene that was originally written to show a couple making love, the actual teenage boy really didn’t feel comfortable going there. But he had injected so much of his own self into the character that it didn’t even feel right for the character to go there any more. The scene is much more powerful now because they just hug. And I thought ‘why didn’t I just write that in the first place?’ You learn.”
For sure.
“I feel like I’m gathering ideas all the time or at least I try to be always open to the potential of an idea. Lines my uncles use, people I meet, everything goes in but it’s the ones which stay with you over the years that are the ones. And there’s not that many of them. Not for me anyway or maybe I’m just really forgetful.”
One of the great expressions of art I have ever seen with my own eyes is a carving housed in the Te Awamutu Museum. The name of the carving is Uenuku (The Rainbow Symbol). It is a basic wooden stem, which folds around into itself to form a simple loop. On its head are four small wooden fingers which each carry a slight wave in the joint to distort any sense of a straight line. The fingers reach into the sky, but it is the three slices of space between each material finger, which gives the representation of each colour of the rainbow. It is a very truthful lesson on space and meaning. Good artists have an ability to wield positive and negative spaces together to create meaningful images, which speak far beyond the image and good writers have the ability to do the same. It is easy to see that the strength of ‘The strength of Water’ lies in and on every page of the script. She tells me she’s going to write a novel next. Briar Grace Smith. Ye-ah.
The Strength of Water will be released in September 2009.
Writer - Briar Grace Smith
Producer - Fiona Copland
Director - Armagan Ballantyne
This interview is courtesy of Nga Aho Whakaari (from their latest newsletter).
Visit their website at: http://www.ngaahowhakaari.co.nz