Coming-Of-Age Cinema in New Zealand by Fox Alistair;

Author:Fox, Alistair;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Figure 10.1 Terrified children listen to their parents fighting in Once Were Warriors (dir. Lee Tamahori, 1994).

For the violence in the film, the director drew upon his own experience. The son of a Māori father and a Pākehā mother, Tamahori reveals that ‘I had grown up amongst a lot of that, seen a lot of it in my sort of “young man drinking” days.’24 While his own family was not like that – Tamahori says he had a poor, but loving working-class upbringing – he nevertheless ‘came out of a young man’s hard drinking culture with fights erupting in bars all the time. I knew street violence, not from taking part in it, but from dodging it all the time. I also know my own east coast Maori community pretty well.’25 Thus, on top of the passionate indignation emanating from Alan Duff’s personal experience, there was superimposed a further layer of emotional investments that helped to influence the reshaping of the story in the process of its transposition from page to screen.26

THE GENRIFICATION OF ONCE WERE WARRIORS

In order to adapt Duff’s novel, Tamahori was faced with a need to find ways of making it more cinematic. Whereas Duff had painted on a very broad canvas, contrasting the lives of the Māori who live in the abject squalor of the Pine Block housing estate with the affluent and genteel lifestyle of a Pākehā family who live in a mansion at the top of the hill, and included a whole series of interior monologues as the narrative perspective shifts from one character to another, Tamahori achieves a tighter unity of action by narrowing the focus to emphasize family issues more, and by reconstructing the novel so that it becomes more concerned with Beth’s personal growth.27 At the same time, ‘in the film, the young people are clearly portrayed more positively than in the novel,28 which helps to give the movie an “up” ending,’ as Riwia Brown puts it.29 This is why it is important to acknowledge the role of the coming-of-age elements in the film, even though the graphic depiction of adult violence may tend to overshadow them.

Tamahori’s adaptation is, in fact, a generic composite, illustrating once again the tendency of the coming-of-age genre to hybridize with other genres, as well as the inclination of New Zealand filmmakers to combine elements from different genres, illustrating Peter Jackson’s contention that ‘in New Zealand we tend to cross genres … we end up muddying the genres. We do a bit of this and a bit of that and throw it together.’30 In Tamahori’s case, this genre-mixing is particularly evident: one can identify in Once Were Warriors a blend of elements drawn from the family melodrama and its sub-genre, the maternal melodrama; the social-problem film of the sort exemplified in the films of the British filmmaker Ken Loach, for whom Tamahori professes his admiration;31 the action movie; the coming-of-age film; and the film style of the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. Because Tamahori believed that

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