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ONFILM: The New Zealand Motion Picture
Industry Magazine, Profile Low Budget High Profile pp
17-18 (Volume 3 No 4, 30 June 1986, Wellington).
Gaylene
Preston has recently been in Paris, where Mr Wrong
featured in the Filmes de Femmes festival at Creteil.
She talks to Merrill Coke.
When Gaylene Preston and
Robin Laing first decided to do Mr Wrong they set out
to make a film that cost
X amount
of money and in three years would return X amount
of money, so that it would balance the books. They expected
that their lowbudget feature would have a commercial
theatric release in New Zealand and would show on
television
in most other places. In fact the reverse has been
true, Preston says.
“We didn’t get a commercial
release in this country, we had to go independent. We
ended up in the equivalent
of the New Zealand art houses and overseas we’re
getting a more middle ground commercial treatment.
We’ve
sold theatric – United States, West Germany,
Britain (which is also tied in with a BBC deal),
India, Spain,
Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and France. Also
we’ve
been invited into an Italian festival or two.”
The
film was nominated for eight categories in the National
Mutual Gofta Awards – including best film,
best director and best female performance (Heather
Bolton
as Meg). Plus it was voted second most popular film
at the recent festival of women’s films at
Creteil, France. As Preston says, not bad for a little
film that
only has to return $650,000. “When I say $650,000
that’s not our production budget, that’s
our entire budget. That includes sales, marketing,
legal and financing everything. That is the total
amount that
the film cost before it starts to return money.”
Preston
and Laing decided to make a feature in 1983, when
they were both at Cannes. They based their budget
on the return that could be expected from “your
average New Zealand film that wasn’t selling
great”.
Hence Mr Wrong. Preston explains: “One main
character, shot within two miles of home … cheap,
cheap, cheap.”
Having accepted the financial restrictions,
Preston and Laing then said the film idea was not going
to be
messed with, they were not going to compromise one
scrap. “In
Mr Wrong we flew a few flags,” Preston says. “They
were quiet little flags I suppose, but we were saying
first of all ‘I don’t reckon that just
because you’re making a genre film it has to
follow the formula and if it doesn’t follow the
formula, it won’t sell internationally’.
And that’s
quite a big challenge. Secondly, we can be terribly
culturally specific within the genre – we can
define New Zealandisms; thirdly, we don’t have
to play all those silly games about putting ‘glamour’ into
our movies and we don’t have to be sexist or
racist in terms of the way we go about it. We can do
it on our own ground
and still sell internationally.”
They are very
happy, Preston says, because Mr Wrong has proved all
of those things can be true. Not that
it’s
an easy film to distribute, because it breaks so many
rules. The film got “locked out” of Kerridge
and Amalgamated and Preston and Laing are still pushing
it centre by centre. (The clips shown on television
in conjunction with the Gofta Awards, are “brilliant” for
them.) In fact the Napier release delayed Preston’s
trip to the Creteil festive, held in April.
“There was this feeling that
the French wanted me to be present at Creteil and I got
this telegram saying ‘Good
news’, basically telling me I had to drop everything
and go to France. Robin took the first message and
said ‘Oh,
she can’t, she’s got to go to Napier’,
which was quite true. We took the 16mm print of Mr
Wrong to the Napier art gallery for the weekend and
that whole
thing rested on me being present for opening night.” (Mr
Wrong did fantastic business in Napier – after
all costs had been deducted the producers returned
as much from a weekend in Napier as from their first
week
in Auckland and one weekend turned into two.)
So Preston
went to Creteil after Napier. She leapt on to a plane,
wearing her New Zealand nuclear-free
badge,
and arrived in Paris 36 hours later severely jetlagged. “And
you can’t imagine how frustrated I was … here’s
this big building full of really interesting women,
a few men – probably 20 percent of the audience
were male – and after every film there was a
big discussion about the film … couldn’t
understand a word of it.”
Preston says any film
in the world that has been made by a woman is eligible
for the Creteil festival. The
organisers, employed fulltime by the French Ministry
of Culture, had about 500 films submitted to them last
year. Nine features were actually selected for the
festival, so the fact that Mr Wrong was on the programme
was quite
something.
“Being laconic New Zealanders,
our film is selected for a festival and we say ‘Oh
God, where’s
the print, it’s going to cost money’. In
fact I got over there to find the people there were
taking
it very seriously and there were rather a lot of them.” Preston
can’t really talk properly about the festival
as a whole – jetlag combined with talkie, relationship
films in languages she didn’t understand (the
sub-titles on the other European films were in French),
sent her
to sleep. “I got jetlagged and I missed it, is
the short answer to the festival in terms of seeing
the films.”
Mr Wrong was definitely the odd-ball
film at Creteil, unlike anything else that was there.
After seeing it,
a Screen magazine critic who’d sat through a
week and a half of the recent Films de Fantastique
festival,
said Mr Wrong was much more fantastic than the prosthetic,
concrete thrillers she’d been watching.
Preston
was supplied with a translator for the after-film discussion,
because all the directors had to talk after
their films. “The audience comes out and they
want answers. It’s serious stuff.” The
Screen critic was convinced Preston had read Edgar
Allan Poe
and Katherine Mansfield. “When someone says that
to you, they have a whole thesis of questions they
are going to ask you. And I had to say ‘Look
I’m
sorry I’ve never read any Katherine Mansfield
or Edgar Allan Poe. I’ve always meant to and
I’m
sure one day I will.’ You feel a bit of a ning-nong,
you sort of feel as though you should have. And the
other problem was that they didn’t believe me,
they just decided I had to have, because they had,
and they’d
probably come up with this really good theory about
the fusion of Edgar Allan Poe and Katherine Mansfield
in
a New Zealand thriller.”
But the overall reaction
was wonderful, Preston says. Mr Wrong did not have
good screening times at the festival,
yet was voted second best film in two competition categories.
A man came up to Preston after the screening of her
film and said “I’m sorry, my English is
so bad, but, how do you say, I want to distribute your
film in
France.” “I said ‘Yes, I can understand
that’. As far as I know we were the only film
that walked out of there with very definite interest
from
a distributor for theatric distribution.” Preston
explains that, like America, it would be a small release. “Starting
it and letting it build on its own way.”
From
Creteil she went to New York, where the film opened
at the beginning of May in a small cinema in Greenwich
Village. She reckons it’s skin of the teeth territory
whether Mr Wrong, or Dark of the Night as it’s
called there, manages to last very long in New York.
Distributors Castle Hill decided that as it was a small
film they would open it small and if it would grow,
it would grow. “That’s not a bad strategy
but once you’re in a big place like New York
you realise that every week there will be 10 to 12
films that will
open under the same circumstances. It’s just
a bit of luck and hope. Our hope is we can stay on
in that
cinema long enough to build the kind of support you
need to build.”
Although Preston and Laing originally
thought the alternative American title was brilliant – “I
think we just thought it was great because it was so
damned corny,
and we’d been living with this thing ‘Mr
Wrong’ for so long” – Preston now
thinks it might have been better to stick with the
original. “Because
it’s memorable and the real problem with any
American release is to create a profile. I found that
people would
talk to me about the film and I never came across a
single person that could remember the title Dark of
the Night.
Everybody laughed when you said ‘Mr Wrong’ and
remembered it.”
The film has definitely got its
followers in America, Preston says. American film critic
Judith Crist, described
it as a “dandy little thriller marked by excellent
performances”. Crist was guest speaker at a three-day
conference on film criticism, and the film she chose
to show was Mr Wrong. Two women from Village Voice
congratulated Preston on making the first feminist
thriller. “I
said ‘I haven’t actually, there’s
another one that was made before this called Trial
Run.” Mr
Wrong got two bunnies from Playboy’s reviewer,
the same number as Out of Africa and The Color Purple.
Nor is Preston complaining if the film doesn’t
last in New York: “We’re very happy, we’re
in bonus territory. I went to the pub the other night
and this very large man, that I’d never met in
my life, came up to me and towered over me and said
menacingly: ‘Mrs
Wrong.’ I said ‘Yup’ and he thrust
this huge paw at me and said ‘Thanks.’ When
you get that occasionally that’s great.”
Preston
and Laing are planning to embark on another feature.
When? “Seen any money lately?” Preston
quips. But when she’s being serious she says
they are taking six to nine months to work on four
or five ideas. “We’re
still going to keep on making our films one at a time
and slowly, but we want to put a bit of energy into
seeding some ideas – to try and define a really
good foundation of films so that in the future we can
make them. It’s
a 10-year plan really.” All are ideas they are
passionately interested in doing, Preston says, but
they want to have a range of budgets in there. “So
we’ll
have a low budget film. I don’t know if we’ll
ever be able to do a $650,000 one again because it
takes 10 years off your life, but being the low budget
queens,
we’re going to stick with that philosophy. There
are other ideas which are considerably higher budget
ideas and there’s one that we’re terribly
excited about that will involve…I mean it needs
input from overseas to make it work anyway. But they’re
all long term.”
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