Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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The idea for The Navigator originally came to Ward while he was making Vigil. As he
recounts,
We were shooting a fantasy sequence involving a joust. And standing on the
set, you could see that the horses were the wrong size, the doubles didn’t look
like actors, and the weapons were made of Styrofoam. It all looked fine on
screen, but at the time, it was rather amusing – everything was so different from
our perspective. It made me want to do something in which images and events
were interpreted in vastly differing ways, depending on the characters’ point-of-
view. 711
The story of The Navigator has similarities to Vigil in that it is told from the perspective
of an imaginative child, Griffin, and like Vigil, the story had its genesis in the director’s
own experiences. In addition to the “joust” he recalls an event that occurred while he
was hitchhiking in Europe. He tried to cross the busy autobahn, where there was no
speed limit, but could only get half-way across. It occurred to him that someone from
the Middle Ages might feel the way he did, stranded on the median strip of a motorway,
and the notion of a film introducing medieval villagers to the twentieth century as a way
for a contemporary audience to view the familiar in a fresh light, started to germinate.
The idea took further shape when Ward read about two Papua New Guinea highlanders
who were on a cargo boat that stopped at an Australian port. They spent half a day of
their one day’s shore leave trying to cross the busy dockside road and the other half
trying to make sense of the lift in a building opposite the wharf. 712
Peter Hughes’ article in Cinema Papers mentions two other catalysts for the film:
Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror and “the survey released to the press a few years
ago which indicated that teenagers were fearful and depressed about the future, and
their major fear was nuclear annihilation”. 713 Tuchman’s book on life in the fourteenth
century draws a number of parallels with the twentieth century, including the calamitous
wars that took place in both centuries and the onset of diseases for which there was no
known cure – in the fourteenth century, the “Black Death”, and in the twentieth, AIDS.
711
Ward quoted in Andy Klein, "The Navigator: Visions of Vincent Ward," American Film (1989): 61-
62.
712
Peter Calder, "The Navigator: Vincent Ward's Four Year Odyssey," New Zealand Herald 3 Feb 1989:
1.
713
Peter Hughes, "The Two Ages of the Navigator," Cinema Papers.72 (1989): 26.