Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

101
that could respond to her work and really comprehend it, and yet re-interpret it too in a
way that was also true to a sense of cinema, and not just a very reverential
adaptation”. 336 This was a highly sophisticated response considering the freedom with
which the young men had adapted her novel. This response of one artist to another was
a totally different way of negotiating film rights than the hard-nosed commercial
transactions that characterized the mainstream film business in most parts of the world.
It was also a very lucky way for White and Ward to launch their film careers. (Like his
collaborator, White would go on to do important work in film.)
Funding and Pre-Production
Having cleared the copyright, Ward and White were able to apply for funding. They
wrote a treatment, which they knew had to be completed by March 1977 in order to
apply for assistance from the Department of Education before the end of the financial
year. (In those days, government departments were inclined to make generous grants at
the end of their financial year to ensure that their budget was spent in full.) They also
made an application for funding to the Arts Council. In this application, it is evident
that the film was intended to be a much smaller project than the film in its final form -
thirty minutes in length and having a budget of $7,500. 337 $3,000 of this was hoped to
come from the Arts Council, $1,500 from the Department of Education and $1,160 from
a television license fee. The balance of the budget would be made up by personal
investment ($1,000) and the purchase of prints of the film by the National Film Library
for school use ($840).
To keep costs down, White and Ward decided not only to restrict the length of the film,
but also to attempt to hold the shooting ratio of film shot to 8:1 (quite a low ratio for a
complex drama by inexperienced film-makers). 338 The crew would be kept to a
minimum, fifty percent of their wages would be deferred, and the locations for the film
kept to “within reasonable distance of one another, to ensure [that] traveling costs
would be kept low”. 339 White points out that there were subsequently two occasions
when the initial budget had to be adjusted: firstly near the beginning of the first shoot,
when it was clear that the film would probably be fifty minutes in length, which
336 Lynette Read, interview with Timothy White, 29 September 1999.
337 White, “Application to the Arts Council”.
338 They would use Eastman colour negative 7247 stock.
339 White, "Production of a Film Drama," 9.