Sam Neill, played Hector Faulkner
Taika Waititi’s film Boy is one of my favourites ever, so when I got the Wilderpeople script I was already well disposed to it. Hec is sort of a New Zealand archetype. When I was at university, during the holidays I’d work at cutting hay and shifting sheep and fertiliser. There was always a Hec driving the truck. They were men of very few words, but when they did say something it meant a lot. It was clear I was never going to have many lines in the film.
Hunt for the Wilderpeople is based on Wild Pork and Watercress, a novel by Barry Crump, a legendary figure when I was growing up. A lot of his stuff is very amusing, but not this one – it took Taika to make it funny. Just about every comedian in New Zealand is in the film. I was probably the only non-comedian, but the film has a complexity beyond the humour. A lot of that comes, I think, from Rima Te Wiata. She plays Hec’s wife Bella with such warmth, compassion and empathy that when she dies both Hec and Ricky are suffused with grief. That grief gives a powerful dimension to the remainder of the film.
The Ricky Baker birthday song seems to have become a sort of informal national anthem, but it’s only in the film because the traditional Happy Birthday song wasn’t then in the public domain. The scene was all set up with Rima about to play the conventional version on her little keyboard when the producer came running in and said: “We can’t use that, we don’t have copyright!” Rima, Taika and I had to write something new in 10 minutes, but it was mostly Rima. Sometimes, working under pressure produces the best things.
I didn’t have the best relationship with the canine actor that played Hec’s hunting dog, Zag. I’m a dog guy, but he wasn’t the pal you would expect a dog to be – he had other things on his mind. The wild boar that wounds Zag was realised on screen in a mixture of ways. But on location we were reacting to a couple of guys operating a kind of puppet pig! The finished scene is pretty full-on. A lot of people have to comfort their children after it.
People often stop me and say it’s their favourite film. They remember it with affection, and when something is taken to heart, that’s a wonderful thing to have in your CV. The only thing that irritated me after its release was some people saying Julian stole the film from me. I don’t think there was any theft involved – the film was always his in the first place.
Sam Neill gave this interview in June, a month before his death on 13 July.
Julian Dennison, played Ricky Baker
I’d worked with Taika before on an anti-drugs advert and didn’t have to audition. Ricky is this broken kid stuck in a system of foster care that’s failing him. I come from a community where that happens a lot with young people – I had cousins who acted like Ricky Baker, I had friends who dressed like him and my brother listened to Tupac.
I knew Sam Neill was big and lots of people liked him, but I didn’t really know who he was. Knowing there were going to be all these scenes of just him and me in the bush, I thought: “Man, I hope he’s not lame …” He turned out to be very young at heart, like an older cousin. I had the best time and loved hanging out with Sam – sometimes it felt like both of us were 12 years old.
I grew up in a religious home and went to Sunday school, and I wasn’t a big swearer like Ricky. When it came to lines like: “Shit just got real!” I was like: “Am I allowed to say this?”
Rachel House, who played the child welfare officer leading the hunt for Hec and Ricky, was also my acting coach. She taught me tricks like recording my lines and listening back to them the night before we shot a scene. I still do that today. The movie is full of pop-culture references from way before I was born which I didn’t get while I was making it, but I see the bigger picture now.
Taika was open to ideas, which often arrived while we were all practising our lines in a hot tub. In the scene where Ricky and Hec are trying to come up with an escape plan with Rhys Darby’s character, Psycho Sam, there was a line in the script about an underground bunker. I said: “Wouldn’t it be funny if Sam opened the door and realised he hadn’t dug the tunnel yet?” That ended up in the movie.
The big car chase at the end was shot on the ancestral land of the Ngāti Rangi tribe, who were really welcoming and helpful, as were the army, who use some of their territory as a training ground. We had to travel in a truck with army people when we went from the filming base to the location. I guess they’d lost some of their mines or something – they’d be like: “If you see metal things sticking out of the ground, just let us know.” If anything was spotted, someone would come over with bright pink spray paint and draw a circle around it, like some people do to draw attention to dog poo.
