Queenstown Writers Festival co-founder Tanya Surrey sat down for a chat with our feature guest for the 2023 festival.
It was a sunny morning in Wellington when I arrived at the home of New Zealand filmmaker, Dame Gaylene Preston to discuss the Queenstown Writers Festival.
As we sat and talked about the world of film, and I lounged back on comfortable cushions, I felt like a character in a film myself. I’m a fangirl who has grown up with Dame Gaylene’s films. I never imagined myself sitting in her homely kitchen watching the tūi in the garden while this powerhouse of New Zealand cinema made me coffee. She makes a great flat white. It was slightly overwhelming.
Gaylene sees filmmaking as “making something people want to see that takes them to a place they wouldn’t normally go, so they emerge with something to think about having had a memorable time”. She has spent a lifetime translating stories into films and was involved in some way in writing the screenplays for all her films.
It was while on her OE and working in the library of a psychiatric hospital in Cambridge that Gaylene began making films with some institutionalised patients in a drama therapy programme.
Returning to New Zealand she began work with Pacific Films and has never looked back, since going on to make a number of highly acclaimed films.
My favourite piece of her work is Bread and Roses, the miniseries based on the life of union leader and politician Sonja Davies.
The film transports you back to an era that shaped New Zealand’s social history. It was intriguing to hear the back story of making the film. It took seven years of pre-production work to get it to the screen.
Gaylene told me that everything in Bread and Roses happened according to Davies's autobiography. She also talked of the responsibility that comes with bringing someone else’s life to the screen.
Graeme Tetley did the heavy lifting in the adaptation while Gaylene met with Sonja to discuss progress and show her the scripts.
There were many conversations with Tetley and producer Robin Laing about how to translate a book full of anecdotes and political rants into a compelling story on screen. They found a central question that helped the drama rise above the merely episodic. It was this – how did the illegitimate daughter of an establishment family, an outsider in her own family, became a leading force in pushing for change for women in the post-war era? Sonja’s urge to be influential drives the story.
It was years after making that film (also a miniseries) that a friend pointed out to Gaylene that in many ways Sonja was her: the filmmaker from the West Coast was also an outsider battling to be influential in the mainstream.
Gaylene’s family has inspired much of her work. Her mother Tui featured in War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, an honest look at the experience of the women left behind in World War II. The making of this film also gave Gaylene an insight into the dynamics of her own family life with long buried secrets coming out of the woodwork.
Home by Christmas is based on a letter Gaylene’s father Ed had written about returning from World War II. The film production became a family affair, with Gaylene’s daughter Chelsie Florence playing the role of Tui Preston in the film. Gaylene‘s sister Jan wrote the music for it.
Gaylene considers herself lucky to have had a brother and sister who support her work, particularly in writing the memoir Gaylene’s Take. During the process of writing the book she realised a memoir is not just about your life but also that of those around you including family, friends, old boyfriends and colleagues. It’s a balancing act to do justice to the stories in both books and films.
Throughout all the career successes, it’s clear that Gaylene is proudest of her daughter, Chelsie. It was Chelsie who inspired Gaylene to write her own script when as a 7-year-old she told her mum that all her films were telling other people’s stories. Inspired by the honesty of her daughter, Gaylene thought she’d “better do one that’s mine”.
That script became Perfect Strangers, a wild feminist fairytale. Shot on the West Coast and starring Sam Neill and Rachael Blake with Joel Tobeck, the film is a trail-blazing genre bender – a “chilling romance”.
Gaylene’s most recent film was My Year with Helen, a fascinating documentary where she followed Helen Clark in her bid to become Secretary-General of the United Nations. Hopefully it won’t be her last film. She plans to keep telling stories for the screen.
I asked Gaylene what her advice to aspiring film makers would be. Her first comment was to have plenty of personal support. The second was advice that could be applied not just to film making but to life itself, “there isn’t one way to do it. There’s only your way”.
After two hours it was time to head away. Still feeling slightly like a film character, I walked down the steep stairs of Dame Gaylene’s character villa and into the rest of Sunday. I was inspired by her comment that everyone has a film script in them. She told me “the trick is to distill that great idea into something manageable that can be written down. A good script has to sing.”
As I left the tūi were still enjoying the sunshine in the garden.
– Dame Gaylene will join local filmmaker Holly Wallace in conversation at Te Atamira on Saturday afternoon at 4pm. Ticket price includes a glass of wine from Two Paddocks.