Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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It was in the visual aspects that his influence was most strongly evident. Elements of
the Romantic Sublime were present in the way the landscape was depicted, and Ward
drew on his art-school training for the Expressionistic aspects of the film – the use of
settings to express the psychological state of the characters, the creation of an
atmosphere of terror in the scenes in Hell, the use of lighting and colour to create mood,
the use of carefully-composed images and the film’s interest in dreams and the
subconscious mind. Despite Ward’s desire to maintain artistic control over the film,
Polygram had made a huge financial investment which the company needed to recoup
by ensuring that the film appealed to the widest audience possible. Ward was required
to make compromises that weakened some aspects of the film, especially the ending.
As it turned out, the film did not do well at the box office – arguably it did not succeed
fully either as an art film or as a mainstream film – and this did not help Ward’s
marketability. The film was still a remarkable artistic achievement in many respects,
but it clearly did not reach its full potential. The experience of working in Hollywood
was ultimately frustrating for the director who wanted to make films he passionately
believed in, but found himself at odds with the industry which wanted him to be more
conventional in his general approach. Other New Zealand directors who had gone to
Hollywood such as Roger Donaldson, Geoff Murphy and Lee Tamahori had effectively
accepted the devil’s bargain of increased resources in return for reduced individuality.
On at least some of their projects, they had become “guns for hire” (something Ward
has stated he wished to avoid). One way to interpret Ward’s experience would be to see
his intense auteurism as incompatible with Hollywood. We might, however, see the
problem as residing in his particular style of auteurism, since some auteurs did find
ways of operating within the commercial system (the Hitchcock paradigm). Map of the
Human Heart and What Dreams May Come might be seen as unsuccessful attempts to
find common ground between the mainstream, multiplex movie and the specialised, arthouse
film. Finding such ground was not impossible, as demonstrated by at least some
of the films of New Zealand expatriate Jane Campion. The Piano was a successful
“crossover” film, whereas her later films sometimes fell between the two stools. The
size of budgets – necessarily large where fantasy or history was involved – influenced
the level of risk. The career of Orson Welles, known as the auteur’s auteur, remains
relevant in its sad chronicle of compromise and unfinished later projects. Ward’s
experience to date has unfortunately been closer to Welles’s than to Campion’s. In
addition to the problem of reconciling commercial with cultural priorities, Ward has