Feature
A special effect
by Pamela Stirling
Young, gifted film-maker Cameron Duncan would forget the pain when the camera rolled.
They christened him Cameron, and rarely has a name foretold such a talent.
“There always is a camera on in my head,” said acclaimed young film-maker Cameron Duncan, who died of cancer two weeks ago at the age of 17.
He made his first handicam films at seven years old. At 13, he began his award-winning public-service commercials for the annual Fair Go Secondary School competition with a road-safety advertisement so good that it was used by the Land Transport Safety Authority. And in the year before he died, Cameron Duncan made two extraordinary prize-winning short films, DFK 6498 and Strike Zone.
He visualised even his death through a lens. “I died brilliantly last night,” he told us the early spring afternoon that this photograph was taken at the softball park in Mangere, where he had been up filming his semi-autobiographical softball film Strike Zone till 5.30am.
“Man, that scene was good. I just sort of suddenly drop on my face into the mud. In action sequences, you don’t rehearse dying. I picked that up off Spielberg: you just do it and you get a more real reaction. I was explaining it all to the people in the crowd scene in the grandstand, and I told them that this guy the coach – who’s me – has cancer and he coaches this team and then suddenly he dies, and they’re all, like, ‘Oh!’ They were saying, ‘No, he doesn’t have to die. He can just wake up from a dream!’”
But Duncan understood the power of emotion. “Everyone always wants the hero to survive. But the reason guys like Leonardo DiCaprio do so well is he keeps dying. He hardly ever lives to the end of a movie.”
And Duncan understood, far beyond his years, the power of simple truths. “I realised these cool things about dying that I wanted to use; lines such as ‘You sort of know when death is coming because you start remembering your life more than you actually live it.’ I know that’s true.”
And there was another reason for the death scene: “You always kind of wonder what it would be like to be at your own funeral.” So in true Huckleberry Finn style, he staged the funeral of his character Cameron in his Strike Zone movie. “It was quite a sad turnout!” he says, laughing. “And I even provided pizza! I was like, ‘Thanks, guys, at least I know you care.’”
When he received a thunderous standing ovation at the premiere of Strike Zone, he knew how much we cared; how treasured both this disarmingly unself-conscious boy and his astounding talent had become. That night – Duncan just out of hospital and having to sit because he didn’t have the strength to stand on the stage – revealed just what it cost him to make his film.
One of the tumours in his lung had burst during filming, leaking air around his heart. His parents had already been told one night in June that he would not make it through till morning. By the time he made Strike Zone – and, just three days earlier, his moving organ donor ad – his blood count was so low that he wasn’t well enough even for chemotherapy.
It was freezing cold and raining the weekend he made Strike Zone – his breath is captured on film forever in the chill of the night he did his death scene – and he had to keep his titanium artificial leg moving for circulation. There was a constant high-pitched whistling in his ears, legacy of the chemotherapy. He had heart damage. His voicebox was “stuffed from throwing up so much”. But “I tend to forget about pain when I’m filming,” he said.
What he wanted to do most at the premiere was express his thanks to all those Blacksox softball players and film people who turned up voluntarily that cold wet weekend in Mangere – Nesian Mystik still cheering him on at midnight on Sunday – to help keep the dream alive.
Peter Jackson was in no doubt, he said at Cameron Duncan’s funeral, that this remarkably gifted writer and director would have become one of New Zealand’s greatest film-makers. “I am in awe,” he said, “of all he has achieved in his young life.”
Jackson affectionately recalled how the teenager would help him out with “tips” while editing. And how Duncan shared the secret of the awesome explosions on the WWII backyard movies the teenager had made with his mates – just as Jackson had done as a boy. Jackson was “really excited” about trying out the bomb-effects formula – household cleaners in a Coke bottle.
If Jackson was his hero, Duncan regarded Fran Walsh as “the nicest person, with this whole aura about her when she came onto the set”. In turn, his passion and courage helped inspire the lyrics written by Walsh for the Annie Lennox song at the end of The Return of the King.
There was to have been a small part played by Duncan in the film. His health didn’t permit it.
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