The Mixtape: Chelsie Preston Crayford

It's a daunting time to make a movie, but Chelsie Preston Crayford is "thrilled beyond words" to get funding for her semi-autobiographical feature Caterpillar.

The New Zealand actor chats to Charlotte Ryan about acting, music and telling a story "set in the world" of her own teenage life in early-2000s Wellington.

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In Caterpillar, a 15-year-old girl is living with her mother - a "trailblazing feminist filmmaker" in her 50s - and her beloved elderly grandmother who is starting to show signs of dementia.

Preston Crayford says her real-life grandmother Tui was "the domestic glue" of their intergenerational household and there every day when she'd get home from school.

"Her brain started to change and as a result the fabric of our family started to change kind of underneath our feet.

"[Caterpillar] is about these three women at these three very pivotal life stages, navigating this huge change transformation and learning how to better see each other in the process."

Preston Crayford doesn't try to side-step the fact that her mum is the acclaimed filmmaker Gaylene Preston, and says the connection "definitely helps" her career.

"It does help for people to know who you are, it helps to open doors. I think then you have to deliver, you know."

She and Gaylene, who she has deep respect for creatively, speak all the time about Caterpillar, which took around five years to write.

"She said to me after one draft, 'Maxine's my hero.' That's the character based on her, so that's great."

Caterpillar is a tribute to Preston Crayford's mum and grandmother - "both of the women that raised me" - and also a personal reckoning with motherhood and her own creativity.

As a young actor desperately seeking approval, Preston Crayford says she was forced to learn how to back herself at the Wellington drama school Toi Whakaari.

"By the end of it, I sort of walked out with my middle fingers in the air and thought, 'I'm not doing things to please anyone ever again.' And I feel like that lesson stuck. It's not like I'm not still afflicted by worrying what other people think, but I did come out different, accepting myself more and my knowledge more and actually just being motivated by that more and less inclined to want to care about or control what other people think."

For an actor, rejection is just part of the job, Preston Crayford says, and after hundreds of times, you get better at receiving it lightly and working around it.

"It can be a really disempowering craft, so I think it's really important to find as much empowerment as you can throughout it, which is part of the reason why I started writing, to be honest, and making my own work to control that… to find some level of autonomy and have a voice inside of something - where you're often servicing other people's voices that you don't always get a choice about, that you don't always align with perfectly, most of the time you don't align with perfectly."

In New Zealand it's "really, really, really difficult" to be an independent filmmaker at the moment, Preston Crayford says.

After Covid-19, fewer people go to the cinema and streaming platforms have also impacted moviegoer numbers. To Kiwis keen to support our struggling screen industry her reminder is, if you can, see a movie in its first weekend.

"If a film doesn't get good numbers in its opening weekend, it won't stay in the cinema very long."

Chelsie Preston Crayford's playlist:

Herbie Hancock - 'Watermelon Man'

When she was 12, Preston Crayford did a two-week summer road trip around the South Island with her dad - a jazz musician then living in New York.

Before setting off in a van with a piano tied onto it with bungee cords, the pair picked up a bunch of cassette tapes at The Warehouse, including Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters.

"I've always loved that album."

Erykah Badu - 'Time's A Wastin'

Erykah Badu was Preston Crayford's "most beloved and listened-to artist" as a 10-year-old.

"My dad's girlfriend at the time would send me these beautiful packages and in one of the packages she sent me was the Erykah Baduu album On & On. It just blew my mind and became my favourite thing.

"This is probably my most listened-to Erykah Baduu song. I love it so much."

Christophe Chassol - 'Wersailles (Planeur)'

"I first heard the song in a film called The Worst Person in the World."

Writing Caterpillar for the last five years, Preston Crayford listened to a playlist of songs that had the right tone for the story or "some kind of juice that feels in the right world"

"I listened to a lot of songs over and over again and repeat. This is one of those songs I would have listened to it hundreds of times.

"Then last year I got engaged, and when my fiance Guy Montgomery proposed, he played the song … so it's a very special song to me."

Tame Impala - 'Elephant'

In the recent show Dark City: The Cleaner, Preston Crayford had fun playing the "dark and crazy" Melissa Flowers.

"I don't always do this for characters but for her I listened to music constantly. This was one of the songs that I listened to to sort of get me in the right zone.

"I would be all dressed up as Melissa… and then there would be a couple of hours to wait often. I would put in my headphones and I just remember stomping around Lyttelton kind of in the shadows… they don't let you go too far but just like stalking the streets at night, which is something that, as a woman, I never do… I hardly ever do that, and it was really liberating and fun.

"I associate the song was stalking the streets of Lyttelton in the middle of the night, being Melissa."

Bob James - 'Angela' (Theme From Taxi)

"I listen to this song all the time. I listen to the song more than I listen to any song.

"I have had times where I've been doing something particularly stressful and I will just play this song on repeat. I love it. I feel like it just lets us know everything's gonna be all right, you know? And that's a that's a precious feeling in this world."

Fatboy Slim - 'Praise You'

"This came out when I was still in primary school, maybe intermediate, and I distinctly remember it blew my tiny mind. I remember watching the music video for it… Somebody's dancing just with abandon.

"This was maybe my first introduction as a self-conscious 12-year-old girl [to silly dancing] which has been a really important part of my life. You're probably not going to look cool but you're going to have the best time of your life. You're going to really feel like you're living, you know?"