Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

179
just how much goes on the floor. That shocked me, a week’s shoot on the floor, and
you realise it’s your fault as a writer”. 599
The sometimes very long speeches he had written for the film needed to be much
shorter, and he learned that “it doesn’t matter what you’re doing […], in a film, there’s
only one main character. We’d gone ahead and I had been thinking that what we were
doing was making this current and this story that moved towards a logical conclusion
that was to do with the dynamics between four people – four co-equals – Birdie, Toss,
Ethan, Elizabeth”. 600 This was reflected in Draft Two of the screenplay, which includes
four scenes before the opening proper, described as The Old Man (a scene of Birdie
working on the metal hawk in his hut at night), The Hunter (Ethan hunting deer in the
early morning), Elizabeth (Liz making bread for breakfast) and The Child (Toss coming
into the kitchen before breakfast to tell her mother that she wanted to accompany her
father on his work around the farm that day). The opening of the actual film is a longshot
of Justin working on the farm at the edge of the cliff, followed by scenes of the
other characters around the farm. Each of the four characters is given equal screen time,
but significantly, Justin, who figures only briefly in the film before his death, is seen
initially only in long-shot as a distant figure dwarfed by the cliffs. Ward comments that:
I felt that each of the characters had his (or her) own story. When Graeme
Tetley and I were writing the script, it was a battle in the early stages as to which
character would emerge as the central one. Even though it turned out to be the
child, all three (Toss, her mother and grandfather) had something in common:
they were all going through a period of incredible change in their lives […]. It
was probably because of the mother that I had the film set in the mid-1960s
instead of, say the 1930s, because the 1960s was a time when women were
undergoing all kinds of upheaval, social, political and sexual. 601
As pointed out by Tetley, there is significantly less dialogue in the film than in the early
drafts. (This had been the case also with A State of Siege). Initially some of the
backstory of the film was made explicit through the addition of minor characters but
these were later dropped. In Draft Two for example, there was a scene between the
mourners at Justin’s funeral where one of the mourners explains that Justin had little to
599 Lynette Read, interview with Graham Tetley, 4 December 1998.
600 Lynette Read, interview with Graham Tetley, 4 December 1998.
601 William Dart, "Interview with Director, Vincent Ward," Rip It Up March 1985: 92.