The obvious question for someone with as strong an Australian accent as movie producer Tim White is whether he even remembers seeing or experiencing the Aramoana tragedy – the killing of 13 people in November 1990 by lone gunman David Gray – at the time. But White had only been in Australia for a decade by then: he was born, raised and educated in New Zealand; he went to art school with Vincent Ward. Asking White whether Australians immediately weighed it up against their own recent mass shootings – seven dead in Hoddle St, eight dead in the Melbourne Post Office – is irrelevant. To a homesick Kiwi it cut deep. All through that decade, White had craved news from home and got bits and pieces – rugby, quirky items. But the terror and sadness of Aramoana played bigger and hit hard. “I remember being shattered by this thing that was popping up on network news across all the channels,” he says. It connected with and undermined his nostalgia about New Zealand, “fond memories of growing up in South Canterbury, a farm boy and all the rest. I had a misty-eyed view of New Zealand. This was like a bolt out of the blue.”
So he didn’t need much convincing when, more than a decade later, after producing such films as Oscar and Lucinda, Ned Kelly, Angel Baby, Spotswood and No 2, he was approached by Auckland film producer Steven O’Meagher with an idea: Aramoana. White and O’Meagher had been working on another project that had hit a speed bump, O’Meagher says, and he was “walking down Ponsonby Rd feeling blue” when fate or luck steered him into a second-hand bookstore and towards a copy of Bill O’Brien’s Aramoana: Twenty-Two Hours of Terror. The newly reprinted paperback edition sits on the boardroom table before us and every now and then O’Meagher picks up the book, checks a fact, scans the photos. The night before, White, O’Meagher and film director Robert Sarkies had screened their film adapted from O’Brien’s book, Out of the Blue, for media in Auckland and White had spoken of it being “the most intense experience, in terms of responsibility” of the 23 or 24 films he had made. About four days earlier, O’Meagher and Sarkies had hosted four private screenings in Dunedin, for about 70 people connected with the tragedy. All three were now gearing up for screenings at the Toronto Film Festival, where the film would go on to attract three separate offers for North America, each involving a theatrical release.
“Tim’s a classically smart guy,” says O’Meagher. “He knows good material. He’s hard-arse. I gave him two stories. I don’t remember what the other one was – it was, ‘Forget about it.’ You’re not going to die wondering with Tim.” (White is out of the room while O’Meagher says this.) How Sarkies then came on board is an issue that they can’t agree on. O’Meagher says that Sarkies – who grew up in Dunedin and made Scarfies there – was their first and unanimous choice of director; Sarkies says that he heard about the project from a mutual friend, thought to himself, “Gosh, that’s full on”, and phoned White for a “long discussion about the morality of telling this story”. In any event, Sarkies was signed. This was about 2003.
Sarkies’s next job was to read O’Brien’s book. He had the same response as White 13 years earlier in Melbourne: the jarring incongruity of the event, the familiarity of the setting. He recognised the characters that made up the Aramoana com_munity, he recognised Gray. “I know several David Grays. I see something of myself, in my past life, my twenties, in David Gray. It just happened that my obsession was film.” He was affected by the small, ordinary details: Helen Dickson crawling across a road to put a duvet over a dying man. This kind of flavour – a no-fuss Kiwi modesty – made it into the finished film, as in this exchange between Dickson and that man, Chris Cole, as he slowly bleeds to death:
“How you going?”
“Not so good.”
“I’ll give that ambulance another ring, shall I?”
David Gray was 33. Just before 8.00pm on Tuesday, November 13, 1990, he shot Garry Holden, 38, his next-door neighbour. Then he killed Jasmine Holden and Rewa Bryson, both aged 11. Then James Dickson, 45. Then Tim Jamieson, 69, and Victor Crimp, 70. Then Dion Percy, five, and Ross Percy, 42, and Vanessa Percy, 26. He killed Aleki Tali, 41, and Chris Cole, 61, and Leo Wilson, six. Finally, he killed Sergeant Stu Guthrie, 41. Then he hid from the swarms of police for more than 20 hours.
While preparing to make Out of the Blue, “I was scarily aware of Bad Blood,” Sarkies says. “A brilliant New Zealand film. It was a terrible experience watching it: ‘How can we ever come close to that?’” Filmed on the West Coast in 1981 by British director Mike Newell with two Australians in the lead roles (Jack Thompson and Carol Burns), Bad Blood is about Stanley Graham, who killed seven people in 1941. There are overt similarities and fundamental differences between that story and the Gray one. Both men felt paranoid and victimised; both had been appreciated in their communities for their man-alone can-do qualities (“He’s a resourceful bugger,” someone says admiringly of Graham in Bad Blood); both stories end with the killer’s house being burnt down in an attempt at exorcism. But Newell, maybe because he was an outsider while filming here, is sympathetic to Graham, whose plight seems romantic, almost heroic. In Bad Blood, there is something grotesque and stifling about the solidarity, the Kiwi pack mentality, the wartime conformism of all the others – the quiet men in black suits sipping beer. Graham is trying to break free and, in this account at least, you feel for him. It’s much, much harder to get any kind of sympathetic angle on Gray.
“The difficult thing about the David Gray part of the story was that it couldn’t help but be compelling to us,” Sarkies says. “I was shown photographs of the inside of his crib. Fascinating. You can’t help but be fascinated, but we didn’t want the film to be his story.” At one point over that long night, Gray takes a kip in a crib. It wasn’t his; it belonged to a woman whom Sarkies interviewed 14 years later. She described the ashtray full of cigarette butts that Gray left on the bed, the clock radio he unpacked and listened to. “What would that be like? To have done that and then sit alone all night?” At times, he and co-writer Graeme Tetley even began to feel sorry for Gray, but “there are elements of the story you can’t rationalise. There’s no rational reason for killing 13 people including four kids.”
It’s a restrained, sad, moral film. Its emotional centre is a scene in which police officers played by Karl Urban and Paul Glover rescue three small kids propped up in the back of a ute. There are no street-lights and the night is pitch black. Gray could be anywhere. The cops don’t know it yet, but two of the kids are dead, and the third, three-year-old Stacey Percy, has been shot in the abdomen. Before they see her, they hear her voice: “Don’t shoot me again, please.” Later, Urban’s cop keeps her awake by going over memories of when she played with his son. That’s the haunting thing about Aramoana: everyone knew one another; the cops knew Gray; the cops knew the dead; everyone called Gray by his first name even as he shot at them. The film gets all of that – it gets the spirit of the community. Early on, before the shooting, Gray is described as eccentric, but there’s “no crime in being eccentric. They’d lock up half the Spit.”
The violence, when it comes, is oddly flat, ordinary. And that makes it strange: killing after killing on a warm spring evening near a beach. “When someone gets shot on a beautiful sunny day, all that happens is that someone points a gun and they fall over,” Sarkies says. “There’s not the big close-up, that’s Hollywood.” But the thing about this kind of restraint, the urge to make a positive film about a community and not a dark film about a gunman, is that Gray gets pushed to the edges of the story – marginalised again.
O’Brien’s book is dedicated to “those who died at Aramoana on 13 November 1990”, and there’s a roll call of the 13 dead. But 14 people died over those 22 hours: Gray was the last of them. There’s a way in which he’s become dehumanised, not fit to be remembered. But Sarkies is right: there’s no way of rationalising his actions, justifying them.
The tough task of rehumanising this figure fell to relatively unknown actor Matt Sunderland, who is remarkable in the role, especially as he has almost no dialogue and almost no one to act with. Even before he auditioned, many people – including Sarkies’s brother, Duncan – were repeating “Matt Sunderland – David Gray” like a mantra, such is his ability and intensity (method-style, he lost 17kg to become as thin as Gray was at the end).
White saw him on video and was instantly convinced. “I was in Sydney with casting tapes coming through. My youngest daughter is a wannabe thespian, so she had a great deal of interest in the auditions. The kids were exceptional, the two young actors selected to play Stacey and Chiquita Holden.” Then Sunderland came on screen and a gasp went up in White’s living-room. “I think she said some language I can’t repeat – he is essentially one scary mother. There’s an intensity there. Robert had the benefit of seeing the humanity in the man and there’s plenty of that. There’s a sincere, deep-thinking person at work there. He’s more scary because you do have an empathy: you don’t just see anger, you see pain.”
Can we talk about the Dunedin screenings? “All I can really say is, it was really emotional,” says Sarkies. He needs to stress that the film wasn’t made for the victims, “there was no need for them to see the film of this really hard period in their lives. It was made for New Zealanders. But we wanted to make sure that the film wouldn’t damage the very people it was about.”
O’Brien believes that they have succeeded. He was at the first of the four Dunedin screenings. He still stays in touch with many of the people he interviewed for his book, including Dickson, whom he visits in a nearby rest home. He interviewed 70 people in all and wrote 60,000 words. The book took him only four weeks to write.
“That was my first effort. I’ve now written about 20 books. I mainly write for children now, so that’s quite a change.”
He was still in the police then – he was media liaison officer during the tragedy – and was granted leave to finish the book. It’s the official version and it’s vivid, spooky, thorough. He kept seeing misinformation in the media in the months following the tragedy, journalists and commentators wondering why the police didn’t shoot Gray earlier, whether the police screwed things up, asking why they seemed under-equipped, and that rankled.
“I remember they caught him just before the network news,” says O’Meagher, himself a former journalist. “I remember they were thrilled about that.” He also remembers the media’s general frustration: “For goodness sake, we were told Aramoana was so tiny and yet the police couldn’t find him. Where was he?”
“I was in the police 35 years,” O’Brien says, “and I would say that the operation at Aramoana was as well-conducted as you could possibly do with the resources and the manpower we had. It was an exceptional thing the way they contained that and resolved it. I’ve studied similar situations that happened in other parts of the world. Hungerford, for instance, was much the same [16 people killed in a small English town in 1987], where police were criticised because they didn’t come in with enough weaponry and armed police, but if you’ve got an unarmed service and something happens as quickly as that and you don’t know what it is – you only know that someone’s been shot and there’s a fire – you go to it with the resources you have there and then, and then you call for back-up. The Armed Offenders Squad at that time had good weapons, but David Gray just had better.”
O’Brien’s book was ultimately a tribute to the police, to some startling acts of bravery: searching Gray’s house without knowing whether the killer was in fact inside and waiting for them; ferrying the dead and injured from the crime scene back to safety while the killer was still at large. “It takes a fair bit of guts. I was able to say, ‘Well done, guys.’”
White and O’Meagher optioned O’Brien’s book, but in a way, they also optioned him. Along with Sarkies and Tetley, they persuaded O’Brien that they were going to make a film with sensitivity, tact and integrity, and then they asked him to act as a go-between, to assure the community that they were well-meaning, legit. “It put an onus on me,” O’Brien says. No one connected with the tragedy was against the project, as far as he knows. Most were happy to talk to the film-makers; a few wanted to quietly bow out “and that’s fair enough”. He was impressed that Sarkies and Tetley rented a crib in Aramoana for a week and left the door open for anyone who wanted to come in, talk over the project, argue about ethics.
“I relate it to old soldiers coming back from a war, who don’t talk about war much, even to their families,” Sarkies says. “When they have an opportunity to talk, to a documentarian, or the writer of a book or a film-maker … No one was being forced to talk, but we had really long interviews with people. They told us their stories.”
Sarkies knew many of these people from books, clippings, news footage and a “stunning, incredible” TV doco called Aramoana, produced by Taylormade in Dunedin and made on the proviso that it could be shown once – on the first anniversary of the killings – and never screened again. For him, after seeing all this, the survivors had taken on the patina of movie stars.
The only resistance came from Chiquita Holden. She was nine when she saw her father shot by Gray. She ran into a neighbouring house; her sister Jasmine and her friend Rewa both died there. Fourteen years later, she stood before Sarkies and Tetley and vigorously challenged them on their moral right to make this film. They argued for two hours and Holden left unconvinced. Sarkies continued to feel uncomfortable and six months later, when he and Tetley had a first draft, he contacted her, “but she wrote back and said her views had changed. It was coming up to the 15-year anniversary and she was recognising that the event was part of history.” In the end, she helped Sarkies out with factual details and art department, and so the film, they hope, comes to honour a community as much as mark an event.
“This wasn’t just an odd tale of someone who ended the lives of people that weren’t known to him: the gunman who stood on top of a bridge and fired at cars driving underneath, not much different from the kid who might throw a rock off,” White says. “There was something running much deeper and it involved a whole community.”
OUT OF THE BLUE is released on October 14.