Bulibasha

From Bulibasha to Mahana

In 1993 I travelled to Menton, France, as the Katherine Mansfield Fellow. I planned to stay for six months and to write the long-delayed sequel to my novel The Matriarch, published seven years earlier in 1986. As soon as I had unpacked my bags and started writing, I knew I was in trouble.

The sequel was The Dream Swimmer. There I was, in a country on the other side of the world, totally separated from the mythic, historical and geographical library resources I needed to assist me to create the metafictional, post-modern, post-colonial hydra of the story. In those days when internet research was in its infancy, I had none of the books and manuscripts that would help me build the historical and cultural bones to enable the sequel to, well, swim.

I didn’t have Dad with me, either, my wonderful storyteller father upon whose oral stories I relied. Long-distance phone calls with him only took me so far, and ominous intervals in the writing process started to open up like chasms.

In Katherine Mansfield’s Villa Isola Bella, where I was writing, my poor dream swimmer began foundering in her sea of dreams. What had I been thinking?!

I went around Menton or down to the sunny plage, muttering foul imprecations against any poor unsuspecting French boulevardiers if they got in my way. I was still very cross when, three weeks after my arrival, my friends William and Nelly Rubinstein drove me to the government immigration offices in Nice where I could apply for my carte de séjour, the identity card all visitors need to stay in France. On our way back to Menton, we came across a strange and motley group of cars and caravans parked by the side of the road. People were standing or sitting around the vehicles, and the women were cooking on open fires. Children were laughing and playing on the verge and, as our car passed, some of them came running to the window to ask us for coins.

‘Who are they?’ I asked.

‘Oh, they are gypsies,’ William answered. ‘They come to the French Riviera every year to sell their wares, tell fortunes and …’ he paused and, knowing my penchant for drama, added, ‘… steal babies … and maybe torture grumpy Maoris like you.’

Instantly the clouds dispersed and I knew my troubles were over.

My memory went back to the times when I had been a young boy in the 1950s. My family was part of an extended Maori clan that depended on shearing sheep for our livelihood. The head of our family was my formidable grandfather Pera Punahamoa, and he ran three shearing gangs, and my Dad was the padrone of one of them.

One night, as we were driving from one shearing contract to the next, we picked up a gypsy boy from Romania. He came to work with us and stayed for the season.

What had he called Grandad?

Bulibasha, the Romany title for the King of the Gypsies.

I wrote Bulibasha, King of the Gypsies in six months in France. As soon as I started, the story or, rather, stories of the ‘gypsy’ Smiler family, our shearing history, sporting and cultural kapa haka group came up and out of me without hitting the sides.

More to the point, they did, the colourful members of my huge, rambunctious, larger-than-life clan. Among them was my grandad, Pera Punahamoa, like an Italian Godfather, and my grandmother, Teria, his beautiful and refined donna. And of course my carelessly muscled father, Tom, and my mother, Julia.

While I was relieved that I would be able to show something from my Menton sojourn, the situation as a writer is this: once you start writing a book, the characters sneak up on you, look over your shoulder, jostling you as you are doing some shopping in the market or, ‘Kia ora, nephew,’ putting a towel and flax kete beside you as you sun yourself on the nude beach.

They never leave you ay-lone.

I had no option but to live again with the family who had once taken over my life and were now crowding my personal space. Like my hockey-playing aunties or dashing haka-boogie uncles, they began bossing me around and taking over my ambition to be, well, a literary writer of fine quality fiction. Even so, I hoped that I might maintain some standards, and so I tried to emulate if not Mansfield at least Marcel Pagnol, whose books Fanny, Jean de Florette, Manon des Sources and especially La Gloire de mon père and Le Château de ma mère were among a number of family-oriented sagas that inspired my attempts at writing a Maori family into existence in New Zealand fiction. Being a Maori Marcel Pagnol had a comforting ring to it.

Nice try, Witi.

Even worse, Dad’s and my uncles’ (and, okay, I will admit it my) love of illustrated comics and 1950s movies began to infiltrate any attempts to aim for a higher literary purpose. Instead of Pagnol, Bulibasha decided to model itself on films like Shane, The Eagle and the Hawk, High Noon, Bullwhip, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and River of No Return. The race to the church comes straight out of the film Friendly Persuasion.

‘This is all your fault,’ I said to Dad during one of our phone calls. ‘I’m in France to write something that will lend lustre to the Fellowship and instead I find myself writing a … a … puha Western.’

‘At least that’s something of yours I might read,’ he answered.

I gave up and let myself be run over by a convoy of shearers on their way to a shearing shed. As a consequence the words gushed out of me, surprising me with their uninhibited zest for life. They made me rediscover the joy of spontaneous creative energy and, ever since, I have always tried to write without really thinking. I imagine myself drinking clear water from a virgin spring that comes from high in the mountains.

I now trust that spring.

By winter, when the swallows were skimming across the Mediterranean to warmer climes, I had completed the book. There was no better place to do it than in the south, close to Italy, where the temperament, passion, pain and laughter were so much akin to the Waituhi Valley’s own passionate involvement in life, death and history. As I returned to Aotearoa, I paid tribute to the sun, mountains and peoples bordering the great Mediterranean Sea.

Bulibasha, King of the Gypsies was published the next year, 1994. I dedicated it to my grandfather, Dad and the great Smiler shearing gang of hard cases, studs, roustabouts, fleecos and sheepos.

By that time, however, I had left the smell of wool, sheep dip and dags way behind. I was already at work on my next — literary — novel, Nights in the Gardens of Spain. I wasn’t really paying attention when Bulibasha became a finalist in the Montana Book Awards in 1995. On the night of the awards, I turned up late at the Langham with Jenny Te Paa, thinking the formal ceremonies would be over and we could boogie away the rest of the night. Geoff Walker said to me, ‘Where have you been?!’ I didn’t even have time to reply because I heard my name being read out and Bulibasha being crowned the winner.

How had that happened?

I blundered my way through an acceptance speech. And then I began to laugh: ‘Dad, this one’s for you.’

Twenty-one years after I published the book, it has become Mahana, the fourth film adaptation to be made from my work.

Luckily it didn’t take as long to bring to the screen as Whale Rider. That film took twelve years; Mahana took around seven. I have to thank my dear friend and trusted colleague Robin Scholes, who picked the project up when it fell off the sheep truck and took it into production.

Robin was the producer of, among other films, Once Were Warriors (1994) and it was her inspired idea to bring Lee Tamahori, the director of Warriors, back home to make his first New Zealand movie in twenty-one years. Not only that, Robin and Lee decided to cast the magnificent Temuera Morrison, who had been Jake in Warriors, as Tamihana Mahana, the patriarch in Mahana. No wonder that some people like to call the film Warriors Meets Whale Rider.

I have to say that my experience with Mahana, not just as the writer of the book but also associate producer of the film, has made me realise that every movie made in Aotearoa is an achievement of considerable tenacity.

Robin brought on board a small team to spearhead the production, including Janine Dickens as co-producer. Robin had previous experience with international scriptwriter John Collee, who scripted Happy Feet, Master and Commander and other important films, and she managed to secure him to write a new script of Bulibasha, which underwent a change of name to The Patriarch.

While the team was being sorted, the money began to be raised in tandem. Film funding, even with ‘star’ participants, is difficult to secure in a competitive international market. Being a Gizzy boy, I had hoped that we would be able to film in Poverty Bay; the beautiful Kaipara Harbour and Helensville were among the twelve Auckland locations that stood in for the East Coast. The budget came from multiple sources: the New Zealand Film Commission, New Zealand on Air, Maori Television, Hopscotch/eOne, Wild Bunch, private equity investors and, in a final scramble, two hundred individuals via the Snowball funding platform.

Thank you, youz fellas.

The next issue was, when was Lee available to direct? As a popular and highly sought-after director, he and his agent had to juggle his schedules but — hurrah! — he had a short window in 2014 which we tried for … and missed. There was another window in April 2015, but would all the funding elements be together to allow the film to start on time?

We had to make it, otherwise the film would have been delayed, possibly another year. Our funders would have lost their window as well and put their money towards other projects. Production staff would have moved on, actors too. We would have had to start the entire production countdown again. Worse, the film could have died on us.

I tell you, making a film is not for the faint-hearted.

Meanwhile, with Tem Morrison at the head of the Mahana family, other casting occurred around him. Nancy Brunning became Grandmother Mahana; veteran actor Jim Moriarty was cast as Tem’s arch rival, Rupeni Poata; and youngster Akuhata Keefe was plucked from Ruatoria to play the plucky hero, Simeon. The cast was a big one but they became a wonderful family, and not only on-screen. When Akuhata’s grandmother died, for instance, his movie grandfather Tem Morrison flew to Gisborne to represent the cast at her tangi.

I was on location when Lee was filming the race to the church. I marvelled at the mastery of his direction and the concentration of the production staff and cast. We are lucky to have had Ginny Loane as our director of photography. I was also on location when she and Lee and her team filmed the ‘rape’ scene. Over and over they went through the rehearsal as a very huge and heavy camera was carried around Grandmother’s house, onto a crane and up, so that the audience could ‘look’ through the window and into Ramona’s bedroom. On the day of filming, the scene took almost the entire day to film. On screen it lasts, say, a minute, but it has such power and potency.

I was also on location during the filming of the Golden Shears sequences. You wouldn’t know it, but the rain was absolutely bucketing down. Extras had been bussed in and must have been freezing. How everyone maintained concentration, I just do not know.

The film was shot over thirty-five days in April and May 2015. Now titled Mahana, test screenings were held two months later. I fell out of my chair with laughter when I saw that Lee had added his own love of 1950s movies by referencing My Darling Clementine, 3:10 to Yuma and Elvis in Flaming Star.

After she saw one of the early screenings, a friend of mine told me she felt that she had been invited into the film and the family. My Dad would have been proud of that comment.

One last memory: when I first went on location at Jonkers Farm, what I saw was a group of film trucks and vans, with crew and cast laughing and taking a coffee break. My mind went back to France, 1993. A Romany encampment. Men and women and children chatting and having lunch just outside Nice. I was with my friends William and Nelly Rubinstein.

‘Who are they?’ I asked William.

‘Oh, they are gypsies,’ William answered. ‘They come to the French Riviera every year to sell their wares, tell fortunes and …’ he paused and, knowing my penchant for drama, added, ‘… steal babies … and maybe torture grumpy Maoris like you.’

When you see Mahana, I hope those same gypsies, shearers, film crew and cast will also steal your hearts.