Drawn Out

BY THIS TIME MY MOTHER was living with my sister Sally, her husband, Bruce, and their brood on a small-holding outside Hamilton. Mum had been a tremendous help to Sally and Bruce when the kids were young. They were grateful, but Mum wasn’t always the easiest person and they needed a break from her and vice versa. Mum needed some independence and a home of her own, but where?

There was a huge basement under our house. It wouldn’t be cheap, but after giving it a great deal of thought and discussing it with our respective families, Averil and I decided to build two granny flats under our house. We commissioned Athfield Architects to design it. The one binding stipulation was that the new basement flats had to perfectly match the same colonial style as upstairs. They had to look as if they had always been there—or more precisely as if they had been there since the 1890s.

JOAN, THE PLAY I WROTE about my mother, is not the reverse side of the coin of my play about my father, The Daylight Atheist. Nor is it an antidote—though it will have medicinal properties for anyone still reeling from that confronting piece. It is first and foremost, front and centre a stand-alone work that requires no a priori knowledge of my family history. All that is needed to appreciate Joan is to be of woman born—to borrow from Macbeth, my mother’s favourite play.

Tolstoy said that all happy families are alike but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. That was certainly true in our case. When you are growing up you have no initial basis for comparison but it gradually dawned on the Scott children that both our father and our mother were singular and utterly unique.

Joan follows the arc of our mother’s life from a humble but magical and mystical childhood in Southern Ireland between the two world wars, to raising six children in gruelling, reduced circumstances in small-town New Zealand with an angry, alcoholic husband, ending in a measure of qualified peace and contentment in a genteel retirement home in Hawke’s Bay.

Joan is a piece for two performers, who share the narrative load and are in constant conversation with each other—Joan, wounded, disappointed and cynical, who feels robbed by life, and Johanna, her younger self, who is full of fun and optimism. A continuing tension throughout is that Joan knows what is coming but in the natural order of things cannot reveal them to her younger self—Johanna must find these out on her own. The play ends with past and present resolving and folding into each other.

EXT. WELLINGTON

Strains of John Coltrane’s ‘TOO YOUNG TO GO STEADY’ from Ballads comes up—

JOAN: Tommy and Averil offered to build two granny flats under their house in Wellington’s Town Belt—one for me and one for Averil’s mum, Claire. They flew me down to Wellington to talk it over. Tom picked me up at the airport. I’d not met Averil in person yet. It was hard keeping track of Tom’s love life. This was the complete reverse of high school when he had plenty of hair, but no girlfriends.

JOHANNA (as AVERIL): I’d heard a lot about Joan of course, from Tom, and was looking forward to meeting her. She got out of the car—and before I could say a word—walked briskly back down the driveway and stood stock still for a few moments.

JOAN walks to the far side of the stage, pauses a moment, ponders something, then walks back—

JOHANNA (as AVERIL/amused): Then she came striding back, shook my hand and smiled.

Sorry about that, darling. I thought I was about to fart.

IN 1993 I WAS STILL in Hillary screenplay-research mode, and with Averil’s blessing I returned to Nepal with Ed and June again for the fortieth anniversary of the first ascent. Many of the surviving members would be in attendance, so it was too good an opportunity to miss. Mark Sainsbury came back as well, with independent award-winning director and producer John Keir on board to make an hour-long documentary on Ed for TVNZ.

At a function in the ballroom of the Kathmandu Hotel the expedition climbers sat on stage at a long table, like disciples at the Last Supper. There was no disputing the god amongst them. Ed had a commanding physical presence that put him head and shoulders above his climbing companions.

The leader of the expedition, Sir John Hunt, pointed at me and asked George Lowe questions. When the formalities were over, he made a beeline in my direction.

‘Tom Scott, what a thrill to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you!’ In 1953, Ed resented Hunt replacing his hero, Eric Shipton, as expedition leader, but when they met he was immediately won over by his charm. I now knew why.

I was able to interview all of the surviving climbers and returned to my desk in Wellington with screeds of notes, jottings and interview transcripts. Hemmed in by mounds of reference books, and to put myself in the right mood listening to CDs of beautiful Nepalese folk music by Sur Sudha, I spent every spare second of the next year fashioning such a sprawling treatment that you risked rupturing a lumbar disc if you picked it up without bending your knees first.

WITH NO REAL IDEA WHAT to do next, I set off in 1995 to the American Film Market (AFM) in Los Angeles, bumping into a number of Kiwi film-makers who had their travel and accommodation paid for by the New Zealand Film Commission. I remember looking at them with awe and unabashed admiration, thinking, wow, how do people do that?

To steal a line from a sports writer and crime novelist I admire, Paul Thomas, the AFM had all the charm of a third-world zoo in a heatwave. Like a little old lady holding a racing guide, I made appointments with every company whose name or logo hinted at anything mountaineering—Crampon Pictures, Frostbite Films, Pulmonary Oedema Movies. You get the picture.

On several occasions I would be halfway through my pitch when producers would interrupt me kindly, ‘Hey, dude, this would make a great film. You’re in the wrong place. We make shit!’ When I protested feebly, pointing to posters of what looked like great films being made, they confessed that many of their movies started with the poster and worked back.

I was staying with Sam Pillsbury at the time, and noting my growing despair and despondency he decided I needed a change of scenery. One evening he took me up into the Hollywood Hills to meet a producer friend who might be interested in making a film about the conquest of Everest.

Jim—I’ll call him Jim—was a short, angry guy with a headful of very strange crinkly orange hair. I tried my best not to look, but it was impossible.

‘Not really, no …’ He then insisted on explaining that he was an ugly Jew whose receding hair had been forcing him to have sex with women his own age.

He gagged, and for a moment I thought he was going to be sick. He went on to explain that he’d recently had a hair transplant. The dermatologist wanted to do the plugs in stages but he insisted on doing them all at once. They ran out of hair on the nape of his neck so they harvested his armpits, and when that wasn’t enough they took pubic hair to fill in the top of his scalp. You couldn’t help thinking that his head would look better wearing underpants. Then against all medical advice he went straight back to work. His scalp got infected, turning into a seething, pussy cap. The infection got into his bloodstream, spread through his body and lodged in his lower spine. He was facing paralysis. They had to operate. They accidentally severed nerves to his dick. Now he had a full head of hair and a dick that didn’t work. It was a total bitch.

You gotta like a guy who shares that sort of stuff with you. We met up a couple of times in Santa Monica coffee bars.

‘I see him as a big guy from Nebraska. What if he was a lanky guy who comes from Nebraska? Just a thought!’

I thought it best not to tell Ed and June about Jim. I was wondering what my next move should be when I was rung in the middle of the night by a young producer and hot-shot rock climber, Kevin Cooper, who had heard about the Hillary film project. He liked the sound of what I was doing. He flew me back up to Los Angeles for a scriptwriting conference and I flew home with more notes to add to my growing pile.

In the meantime, the fortieth anniversary of the first motorised crossing of Antarctica by the 1955–58 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition was fast approaching. Ed was deputy leader of that expedition and famously upset the British by beating them to the South Pole. Inspired by Mark and John Keir’s example, I tentatively suggested to TVNZ a one-hour documentary commemorating this event. To my delight and terror they agreed. I had never made a television documentary before in my life.

I was still digesting this when American Zoetrope flicked Averil and I business-class tickets and invited us to a meeting in LA. By sheer chance, also in business class were TVNZ’s commissioner of programmes, the giant Aussie Mike Lattan, and his trusty sidekick, the diminutive Andy Shaw. At one point in the journey Mike came back to our seats, crouched down and said, ‘What are we fucking around with one hour for? This guy is on the five-dollar note, for fuck’s sake! He’s gotta be worth four hours, surely? I wanna know why he’s on the note! Give us four episodes!’

View from the Top was conceived then and there, high above the Pacific. I had been panicking about making a one-hour documentary and now I had to make four. Holy Jesus! Holy Jesus!

Buoyed by this, Averil and I went to lunch with Fred Fuchs and Kevin Cooper in a plush Santa Monica restaurant. They sipped mineral water from a mountain spring. I swigged wine straight from the bottle and regaled them with tales from my travels in the Solukhumbu with Sir Ed, full of bravado and derring-do. They were suitably spellbound.

Fred disappeared to make a phone call and came back flushed. Francis Ford Coppola himself, no less, wanted Averil and I to have lunch with him the next day. They would fly us to San Francisco in the morning, a limousine would pick us up at the airport and whisk us over the Golden Gate Bridge to Geyserville, and we would dine al fresco with the great man under a spreading oak in his vineyard.

It was finally happening. A feature film on Ed Hillary by the genius director who made The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now was just one pasta meal and two bottles of zinfandel away.

We were too excited to sleep that night. I gave up counting sheep and instead counted my chickens. Big mistake.

Some time before dawn a despondent Fred Fuchs rang us with bad news. Kenneth Branagh, the filthy bastard, who was acting in as well as directing Frankenstein, was bonking his female lead, Helena Bonham Carter, the filthy cow. His wife, the lovely, pure Emma Thompson, found out and was demanding a divorce. A shit-fight of epic proportions was brewing and Francis had to fly off to London to hose it all down. Lunch was off.

We flew back to New Zealand with mixed emotions. The Ed movie would have to wait, but the Ed documentary was happening, and happening fast. Filming and assembling that soaked up the rest of 1996 and most of 1997.

Easily the best part was the week Averil and I spent with Ed and June in their sunlit Remuera home going through boxes and boxes of newspaper clippings, photograph albums, old magazines, cards and letters. I did the picture research and Averil went through the newspaper clippings and personal correspondence between Ed and his first wife, Louise, who, along with their daughter, Belinda, was killed in a plane crash in Kathmandu in 1975. Ed set up a desk for Averil in the washhouse, where she worked furiously, making copies in longhand of everything that might be relevant. I have read those notes several times since in the course of writing screenplays and I am always dazzled by the sheer amount of hard work she put in and the astonishingly acute story judgement she displayed.

Ed must have discerned this as well. There was a cupboard on the wall labelled ‘Louise’s papers’, unlocked but protected by an invisible force-field. Ed opened it one morning and, reaching in, pulled out an envelope wrapped in plastic.

‘Gosh, I haven’t seen these in years,’ he remarked calmly. He proceeded to show Averil charred photographs of the Hillary family. They were from the small photograph album Louise carried with her everywhere. Ed had picked them up from the smoking crash site, just feet away from the blue tarpaulin under which lay the scorched remains of his wife.

Averil and Ed shared a special bond. Belinda would have been close to Averil’s age had she lived.

Of the five trips I have made to Nepal, my favourite was the one where there was only Ed and June, George and Mary Lowe, Averil and me. We detoured off the trail to Everest to the remote village of Beni. In a hamlet en route, the only toilet was a Dr Seuss-like structure cantilevered precariously over a wild river. Undeterred, George strode towards it purposefully, returning quite some time later when we were on our second rough Nepalese rum and Coke.

‘How was the toilet?’ enquired Averil, expecting a report that was structural and engineering in tone and content.

‘Well,’ said George matter-of-factly, ‘I went into my usual squat and after a very great deal of effort managed to produce a pellet you could sell to any army in the world as an armour-piercing shell.’

In Beni they baked a birthday cake for Ed. A monk seated beside Ed wanted to know who Averil was. Ed explained.

‘Ah, many young!’ Ed nodded and smiled. Then the monk wanted to know who I was. Ed did the honours again.

‘Ah, big fat!’ I made the mistake of telling John Clarke this and it became his email greeting for many years.

DURING THE MAKING OF View from the Top we also took Sir Edmund back to his old climbing haunts in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. We accompanied him on a fundraising tour of North America. We took him to the holy city of Varanasi, where he had undergone a life-changing religious experience while leading a fleet of jet boats up the Ganges. We were with him at the unveiling of a commemorative statue of Tenzing in the hill-town of Darjeeling. Best of all, we took him back to the South Pole, the place he had driven to overland in 1957–58 in a convoy of humble farm tractors.

Denis Harvey from the TVNZ sports department was the producer, Haresh Bhana was the sound recordist, Mike Single was the camera operator and the late John Carlaw was the director. John was a heavy drinker and could be brusque to the point of rudeness. Ed asked me once why I hadn’t smacked him one on the nose. In truth, I knew very little about documentary film-making and John was savagely bringing me up to speed. In the end he trusted me enough to do the paper edit, which was really his job. He accepted I knew the story, and how to tell it, much better than anyone else, and to the surprise of us both we became mates.

After the first episode went to air I got a very generous congratulatory note by fax from Peter Jackson, which I was chuffed about. I should have photocopied it because it has since faded into non-existence. I turned to Peter for advice when American Zoetrope asked me to trim my bulky storyline down to a succinct treatment. He invited me around to his zany house on the Seatoun coast and spent several hours with me going over the three-act structure and explaining how the treatment should reflect that division in no more than thirteen pages. Impossible, I thought, but no! Peter patiently explained that if I couldn’t do that I didn’t have a tale that could be told cinematically—I had a book or, worse, a small library.

I went home hugely inspired and encouraged and spent weeks rendering my Moby Dick of a manuscript down to a single chalice of real oil, and dispatched this to Fred Fuchs. He immediately flew me up to Los Angeles to pitch the project to Hutch Parker at 20th Century Fox, Alex Gartner at Fox 2000, Gareth Wigan at Columbia Pictures and Betsy Newman at TNT. I was often the oldest guy in the room, babbling rapidly to confident young men in Hawaiian shirts and cowboy boots that they placed on the table when they leaned back in their chairs. They didn’t seem to see any need to take notes, which was disconcerting.

Things looked up at Columbia. For starters, Gareth Wigan was older than me, which made a nice change. As co-vice chairman he had a huge corner office on the top floor. He couldn’t wait to tell me that as a young university student he was part of the huge Coronation crowds lining the streets of London. He remembered how they stood in the drizzle and cheered when they heard the news over loudspeakers that Everest had been conquered by a New Zealander, Edmund Hillary, and the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. I thought, We’re quids in here, and I set off on an emotional spiel that reduced me and everyone else to tears. When Gareth had finished dabbing his eyes he took us to lunch at The Commissary. His parting words rang in our ears like church bells on Coronation Day: ‘I want to make this movie!’

As we drove out the gates, an ecstatic Fred Fuchs told me it was the best pitch he’d ever heard. He was absolutely convinced that our long quest was over.

I think we might have passed the new owners of the studio as they were sweeping in. Within days Gareth was gone. In the end they all passed, though Betsy Newman at TNT did say they didn’t actually need to make my film; they just needed to film me making my pitch—my passion was amazing and my accent was adorable.

Although they seemed fascinated by the idea, I think there was some hesitation regarding your experience as a screenwriter in tackling this unique subject. I have hopes that the right script would attract Francis as a director as well as a producer. Not unlike many great films we should not be dissuaded by the initial response …

It was time to stop telling people what a great script it would make and make it into a great script. It was time to piss or get off the pot. I had spent four years accumulating more and more data. I was using the research process as an excuse not to start.

WHEN I FINALLY SAT DOWN to write I found it an exhilarating, cathartic experience. Whole days flew by in what seemed like a flash. I resented sleep because it interrupted my flow. It seemed to take no time at all. As promised, I dropped off a copy at WingNut Films for Peter Jackson.

‘Congratulations. I’m quite surprised, to be honest. It’s very good. Fran wants a quick word.’ Peter’s wife, Fran Walsh, came on.

Fran came around to my house with script notes for the next draft and they were intimidatingly brilliant. Phew! These people are smart! I predict a big future for them both. You heard it here first.

I got another phone call from Peter. Could he direct it and produce it after The Lord of the Rings or even instead of if—God forbid—LOTR didn’t happen? At that time things were wobbly with Miramax, who wanted one movie only and something reasonably modest. Peter and Fran were desperately searching for new production partners who would allow them to make two movies grand in scale, which they felt they owed to the much-loved books.

I wished him luck, got off the phone and promptly went on an odyssey lighting candles, igniting joss sticks, laying flowers and making offerings in every church, chapel, mosque, synagogue, monastery, temple, gompa and Masonic lodge in the lower North Island, praying fervently that Peter and Fran would fall arse over kite.

They didn’t, of course. Their one-picture deal with Miramax became a three-picture deal with New Line, which I must say has left me pretty disillusioned with religion on the whole.

This pushed any shooting date for Higher Ground well beyond 2005, by which time Sir Edmund would be hitting 86. Peter understood that I wanted to make this movie while Ed was still alive, and he was candid with me—while he would like to make Higher Ground he could not guarantee absolutely that it would be his next project. Anything could happen in the five-year interim—priorities change, other utterly compelling movies could scream out to be made. I understood that. We agreed that I should try to get it up with someone else. What happened after that belongs in another book.

THERE WAS A WONDERFUL UPSIDE to all of this. A few years earlier, Chris Hampson asked Averil to be the accountant on a small first film written and directed by Anthony McCarten—Via Satellite. It was Averil’s first film as well.

Since his BAFTA award and Oscar nomination in 2015 for his screenplay The Theory of Everything Anthony, a good chum and brilliant writer—you could publish his emails—has deservedly been farting through silk. For a long time it was sackcloth and ashes. He will never have to make a small film again. It’s blockbusters only for Anthony from now on. Nothing less will do—and he may well work with Averil again. Peter’s bold gamble with New Line meant she got to work as the accountant on the LOTR trilogy, then The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Water Horse, Avatar and The Hobbit. She has just finished a stint as the financial controller on Mortal Engines, the Peter Jackson-produced big-budget action drama set in a dystopian future (is there any other kind?), and is about to start work on Mulan, a live-action remake of the animated classic. Like her brother Grant, she is a terrific team leader and gets the very best out of people who work for her, all of whom would take a bullet for her (again, just like Grant, which he greatly appreciated when he was head of the Armed Offenders Squad).

I was about to quote Oscar Wilde and say she lacks a single redeeming flaw, but I should put on record that she suffers from hay fever and at the height of the pine pollen season she goes through multiple boxes of tissues in a single night. As a consequence our bedroom floor can resemble a snowdrift some mornings. Wading ankle-deep to the door en route to the bath that I have run for her, she can spot a sock of mine buried in a crevasse of scrunched, damp tissues and will roll her eyes at the ceiling in exasperation. ‘Do you have to do that?’

There’s no point arguing with her. She runs rings around me. She has a prodigious memory, she is a fabulous cook, a generous friend, hates gossip, refuses to judge people, is a wry and witty storyteller—mostly against herself—is super-fit, always dresses elegantly, takes care of my appearance as well, reads voraciously, is just as obsessed about world affairs as I am, loves travelling, doesn’t mind losing luggage occasionally, loves going to movies, hates bullies, insists on drinking good wine, hates eating leftovers, wins most board games … but she can’t draw. Hopeless! Bloody hopeless!

However, this didn’t stop her arguing the toss with me when we were going over the plans for the flats we were building our mums with a fine-tooth comb, and they are all the better for it.

INT. GRANNY FLAT—DAY

JOAN: I can’t believe how old, staid and stale me own children have become. I much prefer the company of me grandchildren now. They’re fresh and full of curiosity. You can tell them anything without fear of being patronised or having them stifle a yawn.

Rosie, Sam, promise me this. Promise your old Nana! If you ever find me lying in me own shit, shoot me!

Do we have to talk about this at the dinner table, Nana?

Yes, Rosie. We DO have to talk about this at the dinner table. What could be more appropriate? We all eat. We all shit. If ye find yer old Nana lying in a pool of her own shit, put a pistol to her temple and blow her brains out. Promise me Sam you’ll do dat for your old Nana!

Averil’s little boy, William, is not my flesh and blood, but there’s something special about that kid. So polite and considerate. Not at all rough and tumble like Stewart when he comes to stay with his old Nana.

JOHANNA (as AVERIL): One time Will went downstairs to play with Stewart and came back up almost immediately. When I asked what had happened, Will explained that Nana Joan thinks Stewart is getting over-excited and needs some time out. When I ask what Stewart was getting over-excited about, Will said he wasn’t sure, but he was using the ‘F’ word a lot.

Maybe Stewart doesn’t know the ‘F’ word is a swear word, darling.

Actually, Mum, Nana Joan doesn’t know either.

If Averil gives up film accounting she could go into casting films. When we were auditioning guys for the role of Errol the fireman in Separation City, a man with anger issues who terrorises a men’s group with his admission of domestic violence, she insisted I should consider a young runner and general dogsbody on LOTR, Mike Minogue. She told me how she went into the Stone Street studios kitchen one Monday morning after a weekend shoot. The place was awash in filthy plates and cutlery. Mike had already washed and dried a huge pile of dishes. An even bigger pile stretched out behind him, waiting to be attended to. Wearing rubber gloves, enveloped in steam, he was working furiously at a sudsy sink with a pot scrub. Just ducking in to make herself a quick coffee, Averil felt obliged to ask him, somewhat guiltily, how things were going.

She was right about him playing Errol. He knocked the audition out of the park, and he came to the read-through match-fit and ready to rumble. Jason Hoyte, who played oily Steve from Guidance in Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby, did the same thing, lifting, inspiring and giving courage to all the other actors around them.

INT. THOMAS HOME, LIVING ROOM—NIGHT

French doors open onto the pool. Three couches surround a coffee table. Aboriginal artefacts cover the walls. Cushions litter the floor. Eight men are gathered in a nervous circle.

Some are husbands from the dinner, plus four others, including a powerfully built fireman, who has brought his toddler with him. KLAAS enters last—

ERROL: All quiet on the Western Front.

SIMON: I’m married to Pamela and we have three lovely children. That’s about all really.

KEITH: Any issues you’d like the group to address?

SIMON: No.

HARRY grins knowingly—

HARRY: Don’t be shy.

SIMON flashes HARRY a dirty look.

HARRY (cont’d): We may tell other people, but only in strictest confidence.

ERROL: Nothing, but fucking nothing, goes outside this room!

HARRY: There you go.

KEITH: Perhaps you could introduce yourself at this point, Harry?

HARRY: Harry Ronayne. Journalist. To be honest, I’m only here because my wife insisted I come.

ERROL: Good for her!

HARRY: I really wanted to go to assertiveness training but Joanne wouldn’t let me.

Some of the men smile.

KEITH leans forward earnestly—

KEITH: What exactly are you trying to hide, Harry? Maybe it’s time you dropped your guard and got in touch with your feminine side.

HARRY: Trust me on this, Keith. If I had a feminine side, I’d be touching it all the time.

ERROL explodes in anger—

ERROL: If you think this is one huge piss-take you can fuck off right now.

KEITH is alarmed at ERROL’s vehemence.

KEITH: Ah, Errol. Perhaps you could come in at this juncture?

ERROL: No sweat. I’m Errol the fireman. I left school at fifteen. I’ve got one little nipper, Tracy, who is sleeping like a log in Keith’s bed. Thanks, Keith.

KEITH smiles wanly.

ERROL (cont’d): I’m here because I used to thump the missus. Every time she questioned my authority I freaked out and decked her. Put her in hospital twice. I’m not proud of meself. Why are we men like this?

KEITH is unhappy with the tenor of ERROL’s introduction.

KEITH: It is certainly our intention to devote a number of future sessions to power and control issues.

ERROL smacks his fist angrily into his other palm—

ERROL: We’ve got to learn to express our anger without using our fists. And why are we so fucking angry in the first place?

KEITH: Quite.

After this scene was shot the German actor Thomas Kretschmann came up to me at the craft services table in the garage of the large house we were filming in and said that Mike was the best actor of all of them. Better than him, better than Joel Edgerton, and better than Les Hill—and they were professionals who had been doing it for years, and this was Mike’s first acting role. He was just as stunning playing a cop in Rage, the telemovie about the 1981 Springbok tour that I co-wrote with Averil’s brother Grant. I wanted Mike to play Hillary in my TVNZ drama series of the same name, broadcast in 2016, but for reasons I still can’t fathom the producer and the director went behind my back to replace him with another actor. That actor did a fine job, it has to be said, but Mike would have been spellbindingly good.

Thomas Kretschmann was being too hard on himself. He was brilliant playing the lecherous Klaas. After one particularly tense scene, where his wife, played by Rhona Mitra, confronts him about his infidelity, the crew burst into spontaneous applause. The director, Paul Middleditch, ran forward shouting and clapping his hands. ‘Wonderful acting guys. Wonderful!’

‘Fuck off!’ said Thomas, who was going through marital woes of his own in real life, ‘It’s wonderful writing. Tommy, come in here and take a bow, man!’ I left the monitor and walked out onto the set, where he shook my hand.

INT. KATRIEN’S LOUNGE—NIGHT

KLAAS’s paintings of Amsterdam line the walls. KATRIEN’s cello sits in one corner. KATRIEN is curled up on a roll-back couch in front of an exposed brick fireplace. KLAAS holds a photo of their wedding and attempts light conversation—

KLAAS: Your mother was so shitty about the paint on my hands, remember? I bet she never hung up that painting.

KATRIEN: What is it you want, Klaas?

KLAAS: Have you told the girls about Kimberly?

KATRIEN: Kimberly? How charming. Of course not. Give me some credit. I said mummy and daddy were arguing a lot and needed some time apart.

KLAAS gets tearful.

KLAAS: I behaved very badly, Kati, I know that. I’m very sorry.

KATRIEN: Yeah, sure.

KLAAS: I didn’t want this to happen.

KATRIEN (acid): It’s my fault, I should never have held that gun to your head and forced you to fuck that girl.

KLAAS: Please, Kati. I don’t want us to break up.

KATRIEN: How could I ever trust you again?

KLAAS: She meant nothing to me, Kati, nothing!

KATRIEN: But you fucked her!

KLAAS shrugs.

KLAAS: It didn’t mean anything.

KATRIEN: You don’t understand, do you? Sex is something very special and beautiful.

KLAAS (bitter): If sex is that fucking important how come we never had any?

KATRIEN has no answer—

When it came out in 2009, Separation City got a pummelling from a lot of New Zealand film critics. Peter Jackson saw it differently. He said it was the kind of film New Zealand should be making and was effusive about my handling of ensemble dialogue.

Evan Williams, the film critic for The Australian, wrote that Separation City was the screenplay Edward Albee might have written as a sequel to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, had he been raised in the suburbs of Auckland. He said the best moments of the film had an energy and exuberance worthy of Billy Wilder and some of the gags were of Woody Allen standard.

Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby also got a towelling when it was broadcast late at night by TVNZ. Some critics said it was the worst comedy ever made in New Zealand. But in Australia it was a big hit for the ABC, which repeated both series several times. My daughter Rosie, who was studying architecture in Melbourne at the time, excitedly reported back to me that fellow students were spouting Gormsby monologues at parties. When Australian sports fans descended on the capital for a sevens tournament that year, they cleaned out all the stores of Gormsby DVDs. Dozens of blogs were set up in Australia devoted to Gormsby, the tone almost universally one of admiring disbelief. ‘Why can’t we do this?’ they asked.

Gormsby also garnered good reviews in the Australian press. ‘Enough to make me laugh shamelessly,’ said the Sydney Morning Herald; ‘Not since Father Ted has there been a television series so willing to trample on every kind of sensibility and so triumphantly gets away with it,’ said The Age; ‘A devastatingly witty spoof of the New Zealand education system,’ said The Courier-Mail.

I was in the Rumdoodle bar in Kathmandu, having just finished the sad task of filming and assembling a tribute documentary on Sir Edmund Hillary to be aired when he died, which was looking to be very soon, when a tall teenager sidled up to me. His English-born mum and Tibetan-born dad lived in Kathmandu, but he had just finished his high-school education at Geelong Grammar, just out of Melbourne. In the boarding school they compiled a top-ten list of their favourite film and television comedies of all time. The usual suspects—Fawlty Towers, Monty Python, Blackadder, Seinfeld and Father Ted—were all on it. So was Gormsby.

The TVNZ staff and NZ On Air apparatchiks responsible for commissioning and funding Gormsby, on the other hand, were deeply ashamed of it, changed their names by deed poll, altered their features with plastic surgery and denied all involvement. Go figure.