Feature
History in the making
by Denis Welch
History man Michael King’s children talk about their new careers in feature film and literature and the difficulties of dealing with public grief and expectations after their father’s death.
This just in: a mob of crazed sheep have escaped from a genetic engineering experiment and are terrorising all in their path. A young man with a lifelong fear of sheep has to conquer his fear and face up to them! Meanwhile, in England, a butterfly collector has returned from the Amazonian jungle so traumatised that he cannot speak of what he has seen …
Well, it’s not exactly New Zealand history, but no one ever said that Jonathan and Rachael King should devote themselves to that, least of all their father, Michael King. Two years on from the car crash that killed the much-loved historian, his two children are starting to make names for themselves – not with historical facts but with their imaginations.
Which are fertile, to say the least. Jonathan, 38, is currently editing his first feature film, a horror-comedy called Black Sheep with the working slogan “There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand … and they’re pissed off”. And for her first novel, The Sound of Butterflies, Rachael, 35, has gone to the Brazilian rubber boom a century ago for her setting. The book is being published by Black Swan.
Black Sheep first. Let Jonathan tell it.
“It’s about the ovinophobic younger brother of a farming family who returns to the family farm to sell out to his older brother, who’s running a reckless genetic-engineering programme; and the day it all happens is the day it goes horribly wrong. And the young hero and his friends must battle their way back across the farm to save the farm and the country from genetically engineered devastation!”
Right. You don’t want your pet lamb to see this. An hour spent on location is enough to put anyone right off their woolly jumper. There are some very lifelike sheep models, complete with dripping jaws and blood-smeared fleece, and special-effects experts from Weta are tweaking the shots of the real sheep used in the film.
For the origins of this torrid agridrama we go back to the director, who wrote the script, herded it through 10 drafts and drenched it thoroughly before being satisfied: “A good part of the idea arrived fully formed,” says King. “Then it bubbled away for a while, then I found a way into the story. Part of that was inspired by visiting my stepfather’s family farm in the South Island – that’s Peter Elworthy’s farm – though the film’s not based on their family at all. But a giant old sheep station like that gave me a way into the story, and once I had my main character I went from there.”
That character, Henry, is played by Nathan Meister, whose first film this is; also featured are Danielle Mason, Oliver Driver and Glenis Levestam. Alas, star sheep Margo was unavailable for interview on the location shoot, a farm near Porirua. She may have been throwing a tantie in her trailer at the time, word having got through that King, after seven weeks of ovine intervention, now takes a dim view of sheep.
“I grew to loathe them all with equal passion,” he says with some feeling. “Margo’s a very capable performer for a sheep, but I wouldn’t work with her again. Creative differences, you could say.”
Rachael King’s chief creative differences appear to have been with herself. For years she struggled to find her feet as a writer. Though she’d had some short stories published, it was while doing the creative writing course at Victoria University five years ago, and working on a novel that bored even her, that true inspiration fluttered by.
“It was weird,” she recalls. “Halfway through doing the course I was thinking about how I was writing a book that I wouldn’t want to read myself probably, if I ever found it in a bookshop, and thinking, ‘Am I ever going to have any good ideas?’”
Glancing up at the butterflies in a display case on her bedroom wall she was struck by the thought that they would make a beautiful book cover. One thought led to another, “and over the course of a day the entire story came to me. I just made pages and pages of notes.”
Much research into butterflies and Brazil followed; she also took up her brother’s suggestion that she set the book during the crazy days of the rubber boom. The whole project excited her, as no previous one had: this was the kind of book you’d pick up in a shop.
The judges of the $3000 Lilian Ida Smith award for 2006 – Chris Else, Stephen Stratford and Tina Shaw – clearly think so, too: they’ve given King the award, the purpose of which is to “assist people aged 35 years or over to embark upon or further a literary career”. King has no doubt that it will help her do that; she’s already well into another historical novel.
“They’re great fun to write,” she says. “What really fires my imagination is putting myself in a setting that I couldn’t possibly know anything about. I don’t think I’m actually that good at writing what I know and describing what I see. A lot of other people do that much, much better than me. I seem to work much better if I have to really use my imagination.”
Page 1 
