“These days you have to make a decision about what the phone looks like.”
Jonathan King pulls his iPhone out of his jacket pocket – a sleek black thing, a bit chipped around the edges. He cradles it in one hand, like we’re on a future Antiques Roadshow and he’s about to tell me it’s only worth 50 quid.
“Obviously, to have last year’s iPhone would’ve been a disaster – by the time anyone sees the film it would have been out of date.”
The phones in REALITi, King’s third film as director, aren’t a world away from his beaten-up iPhone. They share its shape, its smooth corners. But there’s no screen, no home button or headphone jack. Just an opaque white surface with a yellow light glowing inside.
A still from REALITi Photo: Unknown
They reflect REALITi, a cool and calculated science-fiction neo-noir that’s markedly removed from King’s splatter comedy Black Sheep, and his family adventure Under the Mountain. The protagonist, Vic, a young media executive played by Nathan Meister, isn’t fighting off monsters in a clearly defined struggle of good versus evil, human versus transgression. Instead, he’s fighting his own sense of reality: the thief who stole his wallet has turned up as his lawyer’s wife, there’s been a massive swing in public opinion on a war that no one’s covering, and there’s this strange new drug that keeps popping up on his periphery.
King talks a little more about form, function, the need to keep the phones and other manifestations of the future unobtrusive. Then he pauses. King’s an animated speaker, only pausing to corral segues.
“We’ve been saying that this is a film about ideas rather than special effects. In fact, this film has more visual effects than any film I’ve ever made, but a lot of them are almost invisible. ... When I made Under the Mountain, only five years ago now, visual effects were just astronomically expensive and everything had a massive price tag on it. There was horse-trading – you can have that shot but you can’t have that shot.
“Basically, here, I did the visual effects on my laptop. Other than my time, there wasn’t a price tag on those shots.”
A micro-budget, independently-funded production (“We went down the road with the Film Commission – they had been funding other low-budget films at the time – and they declined to be involved in this one”), REALITi is a different beast from those earlier films, the “amazingly expensive machines” close to King’s heart.
REALITi has different ambitions, different materials, he says. “It wasn’t your classic low-budget script – there were a lot of locations … but a lot of it was people talking in rooms or talking in places, so there was nothing in there that was like, ‘Holy shit, we’re gonna need a lot of money to pull this off’.”
No million-dollar budget and the consequent need for ‘broad-base appeal’ meant that the film could “just concentrate on it being what it was – a bit strange and skewed”. It’s evident in the locations, the kind of imposing brutalist structures and forbidding spaces that would fit right into a 1970s thriller by Alan J Pakula. (King recalls one location, the CIT Building in Heretaunga, with a note of sadness: “It’s this amazing building that’s at the wrong end of anywhere and is sitting there empty now.”) It’s also evident in the cinematography, frequently returning to reflections and refractions, switching between chilly natural light and deep red washes.
But as a science-fiction conspiracy thriller – a Parallax View for the day after tomorrow –REALITi’s sense of “strange and skewed” doesn’t seem all that out from modern life.
King’s aware of this. He goes on, with the glee of a man who’s been proved right: “The first draft of the script was probably six years ago, and it’s actually insane how more on the money it seems to have become since then. ... You don’t want to be too on the nose about it, but it’s sort of ridiculous how accurate it’s become in terms of how the media’s controlled by fewer and fewer organisations, the extent to which you're meant to be pharmaceuticalised to be happy in modern life.”
He also believes the film is stronger for not being beholden to telling a ‘New Zealand story’, describing filmmaking here as being more inclined to “crippling” self-consciousness than that of other countries. “American films are rarely about being an American, about ‘what is our place in the world’. They’re unburdened by their nationhood, and that hangs off almost every New Zealand film.”
A still from REALITi Photo: realitimovie.com
The goal was for REALITi to be “neutral enough” to communicate the story in a universal way, he says. “It’s almost a paradox in that it’s absolutely about modern New Zealand, but it’s absolutely not about New Zealand. The story is about a modern, first-world culture, and we’re connected. The film fits in the world like that.”
The future REALITi depicts is cultural, but the film itself is specific to the future of our national film industry. In recent years, it’s shifted away from the multi-million-dollar mid-range films that King cut his teeth on (and considers himself lucky to have had the opportunity to do so). Now, there’s less money available, but technology is cheaper, more accessible.
So I ask him the wanky ‘state of the union’ question, and he’s unhesitating in his response: “Two things I would love to see happen.” He’s clearly had some time to think about this.
Firstly, he wants to see riskier stuff. “People could be bolder about how they make their films – either with content, a good story, or with where and how they make them.”
Secondly, he also desires more stuff. “If it could be easier to make films at lower budgets and more were being made with more artistic freedom, it could be like the way it became, for example, to make a record in this country 15 years ago. There was a time when making a record other than the four-track was astronomical. But the last 15 years of New Zealand music, people are much more relaxed about listening to New Zealand music and there’d be breakout bands.”
King sees those potential breakout filmmakers in teenagers like Jamie ‘Jamie’s World’ Curry, who shoots, edits and uploads her own shorts to YouTube. To King, the future lies in her and people like her who are “just making stuff”.
“That dialogue and that body of work is ultimately much more important for artists – and for audiences it’s much more important – than aiming for mid-range hits. Our audiences are so well-served by mainstream entertainment from around the world, I feel like it’s futile to try and give them mainstream entertainment with my resources.
“That’s what I’m interested in trying to do – just to keep making stuff. I’d rather do that than make hamburger commercials while waiting to get my mainstream commercial film up.”
REALITi is screening as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival.
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