Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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some important changes, is the scene where she is painting at the beach. In the draft,
instead of Malfred herself coming to the realization that she is unable to capture the
power of nature with her water-colour painting, nature destroys what she has painted
when a wild wind violently splatters the paint. This is the beginning of the storm that
drives Malfred back to her house and rages throughout the following night. There is
also, as McDonnell has noted, a change in tone, since the draft emphasizes “the
suspense of the thriller-type […]. For example, there were to be shots of an anonymous
hand rummaging through a drawer, only later revealed as Malfred’s”. 352 Finally, there
is more dialogue in the draft script than in the finished film, especially between Malfred
and her mother. In the completed film, the difficult relationship between them is
suggested by the visuals, such as her mother grasping her hand. One striking, long
piece of dialogue that would be retained almost word-for-word from the draft (and from
the novel) was Malfred’s speech on the telephone, supposedly to her neighbour.
White notes in his dissertation that: “a full screenplay as such, was never completed as
the locations were finalized just in time for the shooting script to be written. (Of course,
with a film of this nature, the locations selected often influenced the very structure of a
scene.)” He adds: “the greatest difficulty we faced when adapting the novel was an
inability to interpret in words the atmosphere and mood, that we knew we could capture
visually”. 353 This perhaps accounts for the fact that so much of the dialogue in the
original draft script was eventually omitted, to the extent that only fifteen percent of the
film has any dialogue or spoken words. In a 1978 article for Craccum, the Auckland
University student newspaper, Roger Horrocks quoted White as saying: “We try to
establish a mood and atmosphere rather than dialogue. We set out to capture what Janet
Frame calls ‘the room two inches behind the eyes, a subjective vision of light and
darkness’”. 354 This serves as a useful summary of the distinctive style of the two
filmmakers (and indeed of the novelist).
When it came to choosing the locations for the film, White recalls that they literally
drove around both islands – he around the South Island, and Ward around the North
Island. 355 (Ward would later be famous for his exhaustive location searches.) Although
the cottage in the novel is actually set in the very north of the North Island, they decided
352 McDonnell, "The Translation of New Zealand Fiction into Film," 131.
353 White, "Production of a Film Drama," 6.
354 Roger Horrocks, "A Work of Genius," Craccum 31 July 1978: 11.
355 Lynette Read, interview with Timothy White, 29 September 1999.