Ward's Winter Odyssey
Sydney Morning Herald
Wednesday November 30, 1988
THE Navigator, Vincent Ward's "medieval Odyssey" was well into pre-production in New Zealand when the money fell through, thanks to a change in the NZ Government's film-financing policy.
That was in mid-1986, after Ward, NZ-born and bred, had already done two years' work.
"We had people crawling up medieval mines in Cumbria (in the UK) and we had done months and months of research and drawings and story-boards," the 32-year-old director said last week.
"The film was cast. When the call went out, we literally had to stop the bulldozers in their tracks. The sets we'd built were chainsawed up and sold off as firewood and 22 people were given notice."
Ward himself was halfway up a mountain in the Southern Alps when he heard, preparing to go down a recently-discovered underground cavern.
"I just kept on location scouting the next day ... you build up so much momentum that you don't really want to accept that the world you have taken so long to set up is actually falling apart."
Reviving the film's momentum took another year. Ward moved to Sydney and his Australian producer, John Maynard, turned the project into an Australia-NZ co-production, with each country committing about half the $3.5-million budget.
Ward kept rewriting his script, the germ of which had been in his mind since he was shooting Vigil, the film which brought him to international notice a few years earlier.
"I heard a story about some people from Papua New Guinea, two highlanders. They had never really been out of the bush before and they had an opportunity to come to a northern Australian city by barge.
"I don't know how true this story is, but they were only going to be there for one day. They arrived very early in the morning and the first thing they came across, after they hopped off the boat, was a motorway. They had never seen one before and it took them half a day to cross it.
"When they got to the other side, they got to a tall building and inside was an elevator. That was what they did for the remaining half day. They went up and down the elevator. At night they panicked and fled back across the motorway and back up to the highlands of PNG.
"The Navigator is not about people from PNG. It's about medieval people, but the thing it has in common is the sense of perception, of trying to see what is familiar to us through fresh eyes - and in this case, through a medieval window."
The navigator of the title is a young boy, Griffin (played by NZ schoolboy Hamish McFarlane), who leads a team of six miners on a quest, seeking God's help. They start out from a Cumbrian mining village in the plague-ridden and war-torn 14th century and after tunnelling for some days, they come out beside a freeway in the Antipodes in the 20th century.
"Most people from the Antipodes, from Australia and New Zealand, are of Celtic origin - Irish, Scottish and Welsh," says Ward, explaining why the film isn't about the two highlanders.
"I liked the idea of what would happen if your far-distant ancestors could come back and visit you one dark night, wandering through the city you live in, taking a sidelong glance and then going home. What would they make of us and the world we live in?
"Normally we make stories of the past that are implicitly judging the past. I liked the idea of seeing it from their perspective, seeing our century through medieval eyes."
So his miners, once they have crossed the freeway, encounter speeding trains, rows of television sets all showing the "Grim Reaper" AIDS commercial and foundry workers whose methods of casting metal are similar to their own. Crossing the harbour of this unnamed Antipodean city, they are almost swamped by an American nuclear submarine.
"There are a lot of comparisons between the 14th century and the 20th century. The film is first of all a quest, a story, but if you want more, then there are many comparisons all the way through, whether about working men of the 14th century, and guilds and unions, and working men of the 20th century, or technology, the catapult being the grandfather of the automobile, or whether it is about religion in a simpler time and how it has fallen away -questions of faith and scepticism.
"The 14th century was a time when there was war on a vast scale. It has an obvious comparison with the 20th century. There was plague and almost two thirds of Europe were wiped out. I liked the idea of comparing the two periods and the idea of two small communities under threat. I never meant threat by disease, in the 20th century. I spent a lot more screen time on the idea of one being able to control one's own nuclear fate."
The film was shot in 11 weeks in the winter of 1987 in some of the harshest, coldest and most inaccessible locations New Zealand has to offer. When the noted German director, Werner Herzog, saw the film at a European festival recently, he said to Ward: "God, it looks a difficult film to make."
Just how difficult is illustrated by the fact that the crew lost one of their $12,000 Arriflex cameras in an underground river. A small second unit had been sent to shoot in a cavern 110 metres below ground, but the camera fell on the way down the rope.
"We filmed in the top of the Southern Alps, in snow that was chest deep, with helicopter access only, with a large number of people, including old people and youngsters, always with the threat of the fog closing in, in which case we would have been locked in there and unable to walk out.
"And there was the fear that night would close in and stop the helicopters from flying in. And it was very cold. Climbers don't normally go there during June. But despite all that, probably the hardest thing for the crew and cast was the continual night shoots. They were working very long hours, under a lot of pressure, with limited resources; the nights just wear people out, more than any of the other things."
Ward doesn't believe he's the kind of director who needs hardship, despite the fact that two of his previous films - Vigil and In Spring One Plants Alone- were also made in arduous conditions.
"It has worked out like that but I don't know whether that is a necessity. I hope it isn't. I'm as happy filming in much easier environments if the story suits that."
The Navigator was the big winner at the recent AFI awards, taking best film, best director and the awards for cinematography, editing, costume design and production design.
It has also won first prize at three European festivals for fantasy film. It opens at the Academy Twin and the Pitt Centre next week.
© 1988 Sydney Morning Herald