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was filmed near a Te Kuiti farm. Broadley recalled being puzzled by the script.
“When the guy is having a heart attack, he’s still trying to order me out of his car.
Well, I guess that’s part of the character, but even so, it puzzled me.” 6 An effective
detail which reinforces the drama of the situation is the sound of the car horn set off
by the dead man collapsing onto the steering wheel. During the shooting of the
sequence, Broadley had accidentally hit the horn and this gave O’Shea the idea of
using it as a dramatic device. Broadley added: “Gil was a marvellous dead body. He
made no reaction, no matter what we did or where we were going. He just shut
himself off so his mind was inactive to everything that happened, and he was as
floppy as a dead man would be.” 7 Having dragged the heavy body to the gate, David
pauses to thump the top of it to express his frustration and despair. At the time,
O’Shea instructed Broadley to bang on the gate for some time. However, in the final
cut, he would decide to shorten the whole scene, and insert a cutaway of the dog. The
dog belonged to a local farmer and O’Shea, seeing the dramatic possibilities of having
the animal barking loudly, incorporated it both in the scene where the body was being
disposed of, and the subsequent scene where it was discovered. Like the horn, the
dog was one of those extra details that occur to a director on location. The fact that
the death and the discovery were filmed on the same day (according to the logic of
film production) helped to crystallise this creative link.
Plate 17: Tom Morton (Gil Cornwall) has a heart attack while he and David Manning are wrestling for the driver’s
wheel – a scene shot with the car on the trailer