Steven O'Meagher & Tim White.
Feature
The spirit of Aramoana
by Philip Matthews
The movie about the 1990 massacre that rocked New Zealand is a restrained, sad, moral tale of a small South Island beach community where everyone knew one another by their first names – even their killer.
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.
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