Legendary cinematographer Alun Bollinger has shot such landmark New Zealand films as Goodbye Pork Pie and Vigil, Heavenly Creatures and River Queen. Yet he rarely gives interviews and prefers to spend at least half the year away from the film business, at home in Blacks Point near Reefton. "If I can't relate to a script," he says, "I don't get involved."
Years ago, the houses at Blacks Point, near Reefton, had verandahs with prams and drooping washing, old cars and overgrown gardens – a hippie kingdom with an air of blissful neglect. I used to drive past and feel envious. These days, all is sleekly well cared for. The handful of houses are trimly painted, gardens are luxuriant but orderly, only the background is unchanged – hillsides of native bush shimmering in the sun. A little slice of Kiwi paradise. I feel envious all over again.
Cinematographer Alun Bollinger and his wife Helen moved from Hawke’s Bay to Blacks Point in the 1970s. Their knocked-through kitchen/living-room is all bright, strong colours and full of books, paintings, pottery and a piano-top covered with awards. And Bollinger, with his longish hair, beard and earring, fits perfectly into the once-were-hippies scene. Negotiations about an interview had been spread over several months, and were along the lines of yes/no/maybe/no/yes. But in the end I was welcomed with genuine warmth and generous co-operation. As the cameraman explained, he is “a bit averse to personal publicity”.
Despite his near-legendary status in the film world – here and abroad – 58-year-old Bollinger regards himself as just one of the locals in Reefton. Currently, he is helping to establish a skate park. He laughs when I tell him that the barman at my hotel in Reefton said there were some “important people” living in the town and cited Bollinger as one of them. He says, “I think one of the beauties of New Zealand culture, especially rural culture, is that you can’t put yourself on a high horse, because you’ll either be ignored or pushed off. We have a Tall Blacks basketball player and a netball player who come from around here. Coasters are proud of people who do well, but they aren’t going to treat them any differently because of it.”
Several members of the Bollinger family live at Blacks Point or nearby, including, from time to time, the Bollingers’ four sons. There are 10 grandchildren, including “ring-ins from all the relationships”, who regard visiting their grandparents and tearing around the half-hectare block and beyond as their idea of holiday heaven.
In a way, this family commune replicates an earlier one. Before coming to the West Coast, the Bollingers were living in Waimarama, in Hawke’s Bay, in “a communal set-up with a film connection, with people like Bruno Lawrence, Martyn Sanderson, Geoff Murphy and their families … lots of kids”.
Because Bollinger has been associated with most significant New Zealand films over the past 30 years – from Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs in 1977, through to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Vincent Ward’s River Queen – it was a little surprising to hear that he is freelance. He says, “Most cinematographers, and a lot of other workers in the film industry, are freelance. A few have permanent jobs and a few have their own businesses – which makes them essentially freelance anyway … A director may need 20 to 100 people for a project, but he doesn’t need them in between projects. I think part of how I’ve kept my interest and enthusiasm for my work is by not doing it fulltime.”
The cameraman has his priorities firmly in place. He makes sure that half the year is spent at home. And he has become discriminating about scripts. “When I was younger, I wasn’t fussed, I took on most things. And there wasn’t so much work around, either. These days, if I can’t relate to a script – and I find now I have to really relate to it – I don’t get involved. Because it takes a serious commitment to leave home, it’s an upheaval. And y’know, we’ve produced enough crap on this planet without me contributing to it.”
In 1966, straight out of school, 18-year-old Bollinger was accepted for a job with the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation. “They were setting up an in-house cine-camera section – before the days when you could carry video cameras around – and wanted two trainees. The other guy they picked had done a bit of film work with the navy. So I learnt by doing. The second bit of film I ever put through the camera went to air – news footage of the Wellington motorway under construction. I’d been on the job two weeks.” By filming current affairs programmes and documentaries, the teenager began to hone his skills. Over the years, his role has varied from camera operator to DOP (director of photography) or sometimes a combination of both.
Most of his work has been in New Zealand, with a couple of stints in Australia (on For Love Alone and, recently, Oyster Farmer). He explains, “If I’ve worked offshore, it’s usually been on New Zealand-initiated films – like working in France on Larry Parr’s A Soldier’s Tale (1988). I’ve had a few offers from other parts of the world, but, um … If I don’t like the script, I just can’t … and another thing I find limiting is the idea of going halfway round the world for months on end.”
As we talk, two kittens tussle on the floor. One disgraces itself in a corner, and with a muttered imprecation, Bollinger rubs the kitten’s nose in it and drops it out the window. Later, as the kitten scrabbles to get back in the window, Bollinger says gently, “Come on, you can do it.”
Undoubtedly, film-making is stressful, says Bollinger – especially in the pre-production and planning stages when crucial decisions must be made. When filming begins, it gets easier. “Once you start shooting, virtually from the first day, you’re on a roll. There’s no turning back. You are still making decisions, but they are pragmatic, on-the-spot decisions.” Obviously, the heaviest load of decision-making is carried by the director. Asked if he is keen to do further directing after his short stint towards the end of River Queen, he gives an are-you-kidding? sort of laugh. “No, I’ve directed projects before and I just don’t have ambitions in that direction.” His time on a project is brief, compared to that of the director, and that’s the way he likes it. “As a cameraman, I come on to a film and basically do four to six weeks – depending on the scale of the project – of pre-production. Then there’s the shoot, which is a solid block, then the editing – where I can poke my nose in, if I’m invited. Then the final grading.” He is long over any heartbreak about shots he has carefully filmed ending up on the cutting-room floor. He quotes actor/director Ian Mune on this: “When it starts to hurt in the editing room, you know you’re doing well.”
Surely, there must be times when he wants to argue the toss with a director? Who has the casting vote when it comes to a clash of wills? He doesn’t need to think about this one. “Always the director … I remember once with Munie, I really wanted a wide shot to round out a scene … but it was no, we had to move on. That’s why we have a hierarchy in films. Not because somebody is more important, but because somebody has to make the decisions.” Bollinger’s part in the hier-archy is running his crew. A gaffer, working on the lights, may make a suggestion, but the final call will always come from the cameraman.
Halfway through the interview, Helen Bollinger brings us cups of tea and toasted sandwiches. We sit back and talk generally. She has just completed an extramural BA degree in history and is researching the lives of women on the West Coast goldfields for an honours degree. The question of retirement comes up. Although Alun Bollinger says that every time he comes home after a job it feels rather like retirement, the consensus is that cinematographers never retire.
Art director Grant Major said in these pages recently (“The architecture of film”, March 4) that lack of finance can result in a film that is “a promise unfulfilled”. Bollinger agrees with this in part, but points out that factors other than finance can be stumbling blocks. “The process of making a film is full of compromises. Hopefully just little ones. I mean, you turn up on location and something’s changed, y’know. A building’s been knocked down or it’s pouring with rain. You do need to be flexible. But I think River Queen is a classic example of ‘if only’. To tell the story we had on the page, we needed double the budget, but we just didn’t have it.”
On the other hand, Bollinger’s most recent film, Oyster Farmer, shot in Australia around the Hawkesbury River, would seem to be a promise totally fulfilled. A first film for New Zealand-born director Anna Reeves, it has already won several awards. The programme for last month’s film festival, where it first appeared here, said, “No Australian landscape ever looked more luminously alive than in the ravishing cinematography of Reeves’s key Kiwi collaborator, DOP Alun Bollinger.” The cameraman was nominated for an Australian Film Institute Award for his work on the film, but in the end the award went to an Australian. Bollinger says, “Anna wrote a good little script, and she got to thoroughly know her people and the environment. She’s got a great ear. A lot of the dialogue is stuff she picked up in the pub.”
With the Aussie/Kiwi mix on Oyster Farmer, you would expect a few laughs. When asked if he found it embarrassing to film the naked love scene on the jetty, between Alex O’Lachlan and Diana Glenn, Bollinger says that O’Lachlan was the embarrassed one. He asked the director not to look, while the scene was filmed. “So Anna went away into the mangroves and left me to film it. I seem to remember saying something to them about the lead-in – not the love-making – something like, ‘Give it more heat.’ But they misinterpreted what I said, and gave the extra energy to the bonking.
“Oyster Farmer was fairly low-budget and we shot it in six weeks, with some pick-up stuff. That’s part of the craft I must say I enjoy – shooting on a tight schedule, making your decisions on the day. In some ways, when you get on to a bigger-budget job, when you have more luxury and can shoot the shit out of things, it sometimes doesn’t go so well. You lose something.”
Being colour-blind is something Bollinger used to keep to himself, but now it doesn’t worry him. It is not extreme, he says, and points out that one in nine men are red-green colour-blind, including himself and friend Ian Mune. “In the early stages of Goodbye Pork Pie, the director Geoff Murphy, Ian Mune and I did the full road trip before we started shooting. We were driving down this green open valley between Raetihi and Wanganui, imagining how the red Mini would look, when Munie said, ‘You know, that car could disappear in this landscape.’ So we had the Mini changed to yellow.”
He can only remember getting caught out once because of his colour-blindness. Filming on a blocked-off street, he was lining up a shot, when a member of the crew looked over his shoulder and said, “Are those road-cones in the shot?” “As soon as I looked I saw them, but things like that don’t leap out at me.”
After a job, Bollinger unwinds by walking in the bush, gardening and tending his bees. No, he doesn’t bring his work home with him or have second thoughts about filming decisions. “Film is all-consuming when you’re on the job 12 hours a day, with sometimes hundreds of people. Even with five to seven people, it is still an intense working relationship, so I like to get away by myself for at least one day a week during filming. Even then, you’re still working at the back of your mind. But no, I don’t do too much revisiting after the event. I try to do the revisiting while I’m still on the job, so I can do something about it.”
Bollinger is a member of the New Zealand Film and Television School Trust, conducts occasional master-classes and gives lectures at film schools. For five years, he has been the national president of the New Zealand Film and Video Technicians Guild (Techos Guild for short). Its 500 members include workers in camera, lighting, construction, editing, wardrobe, makeup and grips. “They tend to have to fend for themselves when it comes to negotiating rates, but we try to keep an eye on working conditions. And we jump up and down if things get out of control – as they sometimes do.”
Before we wind up our talk, we exchange notes on our favourite all-time movies – Bollinger’s is My Life as a Dog by Swede Lasse Hallstrom, mine Dersu Uzala by Akira Kurosawa. As I drive away, I think of his comment on enjoying being at home, hoping the next job offer is several months off. “Why would I want to go away? I think contentment is something to be cherished.” Right on.