Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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Ward wanted to get Robin Williams to play the main part because he thought Williams
could play a serious character with the required sense of humour needed to leaven the
seriousness and drama of the material, but the studio had to be prepared to make
Williams a “pay-or-play” offer, by which the star was paid a large amount of money
before he would read the script, and there was no guarantee that he would agree to take
the part. Fortunately, Williams had read the book on which the screenplay was based,
and loved the story, so he agreed. Ward was also a prime mover in casting other well-
known actors such as Cuba Gooding Jnr and Max von Sydow. He wanted Cuba’s
character to have “a sense of humour, a kind of puckish, mercurial quality, all of which
Cuba has” and persuaded him to take a larger part than the one he had originally
wanted. 917 One of the untrained actors he cast in the film was his mother, who at the
age of seventy-four, came over from New Zealand to be used as a kind of stunt-woman.
“She had to balance on a wire forty feet above the ground. Mum said she hadn’t had
that much fun since she served in the British Army during World War II”. 918 Another
interesting choice of actor to play a small part was Werner Herzog who asked Ward if
he could be in the film. For his part in the “Sea of Faces” scene, a sea of heads that
Chris (Robin Williams) encounters in Hell and which he has to walk over, Herzog
requested that Williams step on his face, because: “It would be very real”. Williams
refused, so Herzog asked him to smash his glasses instead. 919 Herzog’s total
involvement in the part and his willingness to suffer for the sake of art, is reminiscent of
Ward’s willingness to do so, as he had often demonstrated during the making of Vigil.
As in Map of the Human Heart, Ward’s methods of visualising the script conflicted
with the screenplay writer’s methods:
It had a strong dialogue-driven narrative, and I just allowed for a very strongly
visually-driven narrative to interact with that [but] every line of dialogue with
Ron was like a negotiation. He fights with every director he works with for his
words […]. He wants to make sure that the narrative is really, really clear, no
matter how it’s shot, and then as soon as you bring in someone who’s used to
917
Sam Gaoa, unpublished interview with Ward, 17 October 1998.
918
Michele Manelis, "Vincent Ward," Pacific Wave, the Inflight Magazine of Air New Zealand
December/January 1998-99: 34.
919
Wong, "Development Hell," 35.