Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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executive at the studio approached me three times over the next ten years to redo a
version of my story that was truer to my original intentions”. 854
Map of the Human Heart
Map of the Human Heart was an idea Ward had started to develop before Alien 3. As
the Hollywood experience had proved ultimately unsatisfactory, Map of the Human
Heart represented an attempt to find an international production context that could still
give him the kind of authorial control he had known in New Zealand. The basic idea
had a number of similarities to The Navigator in that it belonged to a recognisable
mainstream genre – in this case, the epic romance –while at the same time
demonstrating some of the features of the art film, in particular, the emphasis on visual
aspects and the film’s strong authorial vision. Timothy White (the Australian co-
producer) encapsulated both these qualities when he described the film as “an ambitious
art movie”. 855
Like The Navigator, Map of the Human Heart juxtaposes an earlier, more “primitive”
setting, with a later, more “civilised” one, although arguably it focuses to a greater
extent than his earlier films on action rather than the psychological state of the
characters. It is, however, a highly unusual story dominated by some extraordinary
visual sequences. It begins with Avik, a Canadian-Inuit, telling the story of his life to a
young cartographer. As a child living in the Canadian Arctic, Avik had met British
map-maker Walter Russell, who was on an expedition to the Arctic. Russell, realising
that Avik was suffering from tuberculosis, took him to a hospital in Montreal, where he
encountered and eventually fell in love with Albertine, a beautiful half-native Canadian.
After they were separated, Avik returned to his people but the process of westernisation
had made him unfit for life in the Arctic, and he was banished from the village. Taking
up Russell’s offer to go to Europe, Avik became a bombardier in a Commonwealth
bomber squadron during the Second World War and met up again with Albertine, who
was now promised to Russell. When Albertine realised her true feelings for Avik,
Russell took his revenge, and they were once again separated, this time on a permanent
basis.
854 Ward, e-mail to Stan Jones, 27 May 2002.
855 Lynette Read, interview with Timothy White, 29 September 1999.