Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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His account of working with Ward offers a vivid description of the special demands
made on an actor: “He [the director] is extremely single-minded, he knows exactly what
he wants and you have to reach out for that”. Because the script was “extremely
ambitious and would be very difficult to achieve”, Whitten knew Ward was “trouble”,
but he trusted him on the basis of having been impressed by his earlier work. He also
felt there was a personal link with Ward because “we did share the thing of both coming
from a farming background and being that peculiar transplant that ends up in the arts”.
For him, the experience of working on the film was challenging because the character of
Ethan like the other characters in the film was “quite frightening to play. It was a
responsibility to try to come first of all near, as near as we could to Vincent’s image of
what he wanted. And then […] to be able to make the transition from yourself into that
person, to draw on as much of yourself as exists in that character, but then also to go
beyond that”. He added the memorable comment that “the dialogue was so spare it was
fantastic to play, because you knew […] when these people had to speak, whatever they
said came from a big well”. He described some of the things he was required to do for
the role as being “pretty scary”, such as having the responsibility of carrying Gordon
Shields, the person who played Toss’s father, who was not an actor, over his shoulders
when they were up high in the hills. Whitten recalls that “there was one moment when
he just realised that he was totally in my power in the sense that if I fell, he would fall”.
Working with Ward was a challenging experience. “You think to yourself, this is
absolutely intolerable, he can’t expect us to do this. But you achieve that, then he goes
one step further. And I found that admirable in a way […]. He wasn’t putting us in a
position of personal danger, but he expected courage on every level”. 636
Whitten describes the process between an actor and such a director as “a mystery […].
You become like lovers in a way, you have a shorthand […]. And an actor always has
to put forward the proposition. That is their job, to act, not take an action. And Vincent
would say no. And then you would come up with another one, and he would say no. I
must say, sometimes it was quite difficult to discover exactly what he wanted”. This
process was similar to Ward’s scriptwriting – he was more clear about what he did not
want than what he did. Whitten cites as an example of an actor’s input into the film the
gesture that he used to calm Toss’s suspicions of him when she came to his hut:
636 Lynette Read, interview with Frank Whitten, 13 April 2002.