Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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to the film in that, just before Birdie finally came out of the hut, he imagined seeing a
military band from World War I playing outside the hut, and thought he was back in the
war. Ethan’s truck was then seen leaving the farm, Toss’s differences with her mother
were resolved and she snuggled up to Liz, while the old man, who had been chasing the
runaway tractor, finally caught up with it and urinated into the tractor radiator (a shot
which according to Tetley was modelled on another film and was Ward’s way of paying
homage to that filmmaker). The last shot in the script was of Birdie standing on the
bonnet of the tractor, cursing at the sky. Such scenes were so different from the final
version that they provide a dramatic example of the fluid way in which the film
evolved. Though no less vivid in their own right, such scenes came to be seen as
dispensable. Some useful information was lost as a result, but intensity was a more
important criterion.
Draft Three was significantly different from Draft Two. This was the result not only of
Ward and Tetley’s on-going dialogue but of input from others. Ward is a filmmaker
who constantly bounces his ideas off collaborators. He is slow to adopt new ideas, but
interaction with others is an important part of the process by which he becomes sure of
what he himself wants and intends. As a typical example, there was an interesting
exchange at this stage between Ward and Roger Horrocks to whom Ward had given the
script. Horrocks’s comments also serve as a summary of how the script looked at this
stage in its development:
The script is most successful when it is creating images, and scenes in which
individuals are doing something alone (or are together-but-alone). It is less
successful when evoking the emotional give-and-take between people. This is
not to say that the scenes of interaction between people are unsuccessful – they
include many powerful moments – but this is clearly the aspect of the script that
needs more development […]. By contrast, the possibilities of image and
symbol have been very thoroughly developed. At times they are even a little
over-developed. 606
Horrocks suggested that the relationships between characters would benefit from being
“workshopped”. He made comparisons between Ward and Tetley’s script and the films
606 This is from an undated letter by Roger Horrocks to Vincent Ward (from the records of Horrocks’s
correspondence with Ward, after the film-maker had asked him to comment on a second draft of the film).