Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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important that it remained clearly audible, even if the sound sometimes had to be
actively degenerated in order to make it sound distant.
Unlike some members of the crew, Morris recalls the shoot as being “intense” but also
“very enjoyable”. There were a few tense moments, for example, in situations where
there was a long lens shot and the RTs played up (as they tended to do) and there was
no means of cueing the actors except by using hand signals. The assistant directors
became “a bit tense” and some shots were lost due to a lack of communication. These
were, however, isolated incidents, in Morris’s recollection. He perceived Ward as
someone who treated the film with the greatest seriousness, requesting that the crew
wear clothes that fitted in with the landscape – drab-coloured parkas, rather than
brightly-coloured ones – and when one of the actors was required to fall in the mud,
even going so far as to show how to do it by falling in the mud himself. 669
Ward spent a much longer time on the sound editing of the film than most other New
Zealand filmmakers had done up to this point, and he is quoted as saying in a 1984
interview: “Sound for me is very very important. Often there is a special sound that I
like and a scene will evolve from it; it’ll suit the storyline and the flow of the film […].
In practical terms, I had a very good sound recordist and boom operator on location, but
I also like to manipulate the sound track a lot”. 670 The sound design for some scenes
became highly complex - the soundtrack to the jousting scene, for example, had sixty
different tracks. 671 He has also described the soundtrack of the film as being “highly
selective” or subjective:
I demand that each sound contributes to the film: to the emotion or the feeling or
atmosphere of a scene. For example, I minimised the use of bird song to keep
the sense of landscape stark and bare. There’s not a lot of talking in the film.
This reflects the kind of people they are, isolated, inward-looking people who
each inhabit their own world and have their own, idiosyncratic view of things.
This makes any conversation that does occur all the more pertinent. It’s
communication which always carries an underlying sub-text, currents of
feelings, which are expressed obliquely rather than overtly. It’s an aspect of
669 Lynette Read, interview with Graham Morris, 28 August 2003.
670 Martin, "Vincent's Vigil," 17.
671 Ward, Lecture to Film Students at Auckland University.