Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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deeply about and to get access to huge Hollywood resources without too much
compromise. His optimism would again be put to the test.
The script’s initial appeal to Ward was that “it was a very intimate story”. The other
reason he wanted to direct it was because he could “create an experience for an
audience and investigate [the afterlife] vicariously. And I love the idea of the afterlife
being something very personal”. 913 What originally drew him to the script was:
It picks up on several strands I’ve explored in different ways in my work. One
is this very New Zealand thing of going out in our 20s, like to war, or OE, and
seeing these extra-ordinary places, but actually ending up finding out more
about ourselves. It’s actually often a journey to do with identity. In several
films I’ve done stories that have taken a narrative leap in terms of the scale of
the journey, but ultimately they’re human stories, about people trying to find out
about themselves, and me as a filmmaker trying to find out something about this
business we call living. At the heart of what I do is an intimate story. This is an
intimate epic. 914
Although Ward did not write the script himself, he became very involved in the scriptwriting
process after the story idea had been presented to him. He liked the original
script, written by Oscar-winning screenplay writer, Ron Bass who is best-known for his
screenplays of Rain Man (Barry Levinson, 1988) and My Best Friend’s Wedding, (Paul
Hogan, 1997), but he was unsure how to visualise the story on film. It was not until he
came up with the idea of Annie being a painter, and Chris’s version of paradise being a
painting she had done for him, that Ward solved the problem. “It served the idea that
was in the story already – that paradise is what you make it. It showed how much Chris
cared for Annie by making his paradise her painting”. 915 One of the major differences
from his Australasian experiences that Ward had found when he was working on Map
of the Human Heart was that “I had to find a way that it would work as a film before it
could even get financed”. 916 In the case of What Dreams May Come it took three years
before Polygram (the same company that had co-financed Map of the Human Heart)
agreed to back the film.
913 Leslie O'Toole, "The Navigator," Pavement October/November 1998: 82.
914 Ward quoted in Wong, "Development Hell," 35.
915 Ward quoted in Robert Ward, "After Life," New Zealand Herald 5 November 1998: D3.
916 Sam Gaoa, unpublished interview with Ward, 17 October 1998.