Sam Neill remembers the first time he saw his name on screen. It was for a 10-minute short, a little drama he’d cut, which played before a feature at the 1974 New Zealand film festival – its first and last screening.
In the audience were his drinking buddies from The Duke of Edinburgh hotel, a “dubious dive” in Wellington he used to frequent on Friday nights. “It’s not there any more, they demolished it,” he says, then pauses. “Just as well.
“I was keeping a low profile, anyway. The credits came up with our names, then one of them yelled out, ‘For fuck’s sake. It’s a New Zealand movie!’”
Forty-two years later, and Neill’s had a career of almost unparalleled versatility, taking in drama (Dead Calm, 1989), cult classics (Event Horizon, 1997), blockbusters (Jurassic Park, 1993), and television (last year’s BBC miniseries And Then There Were None).
With it has come the kind of international profile that in New Zealand means you’ve made it: the rest of the world thinks you’re Australian.
That may be about to change. Hunt for the Wilderpeople – Neill’s new film, which premiered in competition at this year’s Sundance film festival – couldn’t have come from anywhere else. With its “egg” sledge and “skux” honour, it’s so quintessentially Kiwi as to defy explanation. A comment on a Guardian review of the film asked if it was going to be subtitled.
“We had no idea what was going to happen at Sundance – it was heart-in-throat stuff,” says Neill, nursing a milky coffee at a plush Sydney hotel (the waiter had assumed it was for me: Neill’s got the facial hair for a long black). “To our surprise and delight, people were laughing from the moment it started.”
In 1974, New Zealand film was “the funniest idea”, remembers Neill – “the stupidest, most ridiculous thing you could possibly consider”.
These days, it has a reputation for well-received, weird comedy, thanks to Brett McKenzie and Jemaine Clement of The Flight of the Conchords, the comedian Rhys Darby, and the filmmaker Taika Waititi, with whom Clement and Darby collaborated on the vampire-mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows.
Neill calls them “the school of cool”. And at 68, he wanted in.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople is Waititi’s fourth feature film, based on the book Wild Pork and Watercress by Barry Crump, a New Zealand author of comic novels about his experiences as a “bushman”.
“I grew up with his books – we all did,” says Neill. (The national encyclopaedia says Crump’s novels have sold more than a million copies domestically. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but there are only 4.5 million New Zealanders.)
“So the idea of that kind of blend of cool, strange New Zealand comedy, which is like nothing else on the planet, with the old-school, rough-and-ready stuff that Barry Crump represents – that was fairly irresistible.”
Neill plays Uncle Hec, a bushman of few words whose world is split open by the arrival of Ricky, a street-smart foster child played by Julian Dennison.
The gruff father-figure, who has his edges smoothed against his will by chipper children, is reminiscent of his character in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Jurassic Park – easily Neill’s highest-profile role with the millennial generation, as was clear from the affectionate nods to it in last year’s blockbuster reboot, Jurassic World.
“Well, there were certainly a lot of the same gags [in Jurassic World],” he says without missing a beat. “Like, get a couple of kids in a pod or a car or something, then beat the shit out of them with the worst dinosaurs you can possibly imagine.”
The untimely, brutal end of Bryce Dallas Howard’s character’s assistant – “the poor girl with the mobile phone” – unsettled him. “Poor thing. I had nothing against her at all ... She was stuck with these kids – who wants to be stuck with kids that have nothing to do with you? It’s one of the themes of the Wilderpeople. It’s reasonable.
“Other people’s kids! Jesus! Give us a break!”
Off-screen, Neill says, his relationship with the child actor Dennison was more “a meeting of 12-year-old minds”.
“We’re both pretty juvenile. We both finds farts funny. He knows the words to different songs than I do, it has to be said.”
He recounts, with increasing disbelief, Dennison telling an interviewer that his favourite group was Coldplay. “Coldplay! I mean, what the fuck? He’s full of surprises.” (One of which was Dennison’s disapproval of swearing: “I had to watch myself. I swear all the time.”)
The film follows Hec and Ricky’s madcap adventures on the run (through stunning scenery – aerial shots of glassy lakes and snow-covered mountains must be a condition of government funding for all New Zealand films), with their sometimes fractious bromance at its heart.
“There’s something about this film that really touches people,” says Neill. “I’m not entirely sure what it is, but we can all identify people that are on the periphery. They’re all outsiders, these people – they’re damaged, they’re sidelined.”
That makes the film sound more edgy than it is. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is essentially a buddy comedy that bridges generations, so eminently family-friendly (it’s set in the capital-G great out-of-doors, for goodness’ sake) so as to almost seem quaint.
But that’s part of its otherworldly, anachronistic charm – it’s hard to know whether it’s set in the present day and just dated (the way so many rural New Zealand homes are), or actually of the past.
“Things date and suddenly you can no longer see the performance because you’re just riveted by the shoulder pads,” says Neill. “‘Oh Christ, look at their hair!’”
In contrast to the heckles that met his short in 1974, New Zealand has thrown its weight behind Hunt for the Wilderpeople in unprecedented fashion. After the biggest opening weekend ever for a local film, it has made more at the NZ box office than Fast & Furious 7, The Avengers or any Harry Potter or Hunger Games movie. The publicist tells me that about one in nine New Zealanders have seen it.
Neill has been relishing the positive response on Twitter, where he regularly tweets – with more enthusiasm than attention to punctuation – to 87,500 followers (“140 characters is about as long as I can make a sentence, or even a cogent thought”).
My drawer full of desperately lonely , solitary socks . The tragedy is - THEY USED TO BE TWINS . Identical twins .
— Sam Neill (@TwoPaddocks) May 1, 2016
In late April, he shared a link to an opinion piece published in Fairfax New Zealand by Russell Harding, who praised the film’s “nostalgic but authentic” depiction of the country – one he recognised from a time before it became obsessed with house prices and its people turned “soft on the outside, and cold and hard in the middle”.
Harding concluded: “Kiwis aren’t clapping at the end of the movie for no reason.”
Neill had already heard about the spontaneous applause, and marvelled at it: “That never happens.”
Just as rare is an unsettling experience he had en route to Australia. “People were smiling at me at the airport. Well, that never happens. They were smiling! At me!”
Aren’t you a national hero?
“No. I think they think, ‘Oh my god, it’s that prick. Move on quickly’.”
It seems there’s something about Hunt for the Wilderpeople that prompts the patriotism, whether the New Zealand it depicts ever existed – or never went away. After its smash-hit success at home, and its warm reception at Sundance, the question will be how well it is received further afield; it has yet to be tested in Australia, the US and the UK.
But the world loves to see New Zealand as a wonderland of warm-hearted weirdness, as was evident from international media coverage of its government-mandated flag debate, which cost millions of dollars, took more than a year – and, inexplicably to outsiders, resulted in the same flag.
Neill voted for retention. The proposed alternative design, he says, was “just cheap and nasty and embarrassing ... it looks like a logo for swim shorts or something. It’s just all wrong.
“If we’re going to change the flag, let’s do so when we become a republic.”
That seems inevitable both sides of the Tasman, he says. He remembers being asked what flag to put on the arm of his character’s overalls for the 1997 science fiction horror Event Horizon, in which he played an Australian astronaut.
“I took the Union Jack off it and put the Aboriginal flag in its place. That stays contemporary, that little touch ... I said, ‘The Australian flag will not look like that anymore’.”
- Hunt for the Wilderpeople is out in Australia from Thursday 26 May. It is distributed in the United States from 24 June. Neill also stars alongside Adrien Brody in Backtrack, a coming psychological thriller from director Michael Pertroni
