Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

244
submarine was then filmed “against a black backdrop and moved up and down on
hydraulics. The camera was set in an underwater housing”. The result, according to
Nichola, was “fantastic. You can’t tell it from the real thing”. The most difficult
sequence to achieve was that of Connor tunnelling through the mine, seen in closeup,
with the camera pulling back to reveal the mine in cross-section through the earth, and
then moving to ground level to reveal a mountain and lake. As Nichola points out: “To
do that as Vincent wanted it, in one continuous shot, was possible but it would have
been cost-prohibitive”, so they solved the problem by building a twelve metre high
‘rock face’ in the studio and finishing the rest of the shot in post-production. 797
Simpson adds: “The original script was astounding and we had to compromise in the
making of the film as you do in every film, but [in terms of] the vision, it was sixty or
seventy percent of what Vincent really had on the storyboards and in his brain”. He is
philosophical about the compromises that needed to be made but agrees that Ward is a
person who finds it harder to compromise than many directors, and that it was probably
“very disappointing” for him to have to drop scenes from the script. 798 Despite the
reductions made in the length of the script, however, the rough cut of the film was still
very long – about two and a half hours, and some further scenes had to be dropped.
The Narrative
What Ward was aiming to create in the contemporary sequence was a world that the
medievals were seeing for the first time, without any prior knowledge. “The film is a
medieval odyssey. It’s the story of people meeting their ancestors, of people meeting
their descendants. It’s naïve, [it] involves a suspension of disbelief, is very childlike. I
wanted a sense of wonder”. 799 Vigil had also had a ‘childlike’ viewpoint and its
narrative had incorporated some mythic elements, but Ward distinguishes between the
two films: “[The Navigator] is not as personal a film as Vigil, because of that adventure
structure […]. It’s a little bit like an old heroic myth, but it obviously takes you places
where old heroic myths don’t normally go”. 800 The Navigator is also structured around
Griffin’s enigmatic dream, and the meaning of that dream - the mystery at the heart of
the film - slowly emerges throughout the journey. The Navigator has been compared to
797 Dowling, "In Search of the Effect," 10.
798 Lynette Read, interview with Geoffrey Simpson, 29 September 1999.
799 Nayman, "The Navigator: Vincent Ward's Past Dreams of the Future," 31.
800 Sally Zwartz, "Vincent: The Odyssey," On Film 6.2 (1989): 12.