‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘Oh, they are gypsies,’ William answered. ‘They come to the French Riviera every year to sell their wares, tell fortunes and …’ he paused and, knowing my penchant for drama, added, ‘… steal babies … and maybe torture grumpy Maoris like you.’
Instantly the clouds dispersed and I knew my troubles were over.
My memory went back to the times when I had been a young boy in the 1950s. My family was part of an extended Maori clan that depended on shearing sheep for our livelihood. The head of our family was my formidable grandfather Pera Punahamoa, and he ran three shearing gangs, and my Dad was the padrone of one of them.
One night, as we were driving from one shearing contract to the next, we picked up a gypsy boy from Romania. He came to work with us and stayed for the season.
What had he called Grandad?
Bulibasha, the Romany title for the King of the Gypsies.
I wrote Bulibasha, King of the Gypsies in six months in France. As soon as I started, the story or, rather, stories of the ‘gypsy’ Smiler family, our shearing history, sporting and cultural kapa haka group came up and out of me without hitting the sides.
More to the point, they did, the colourful members of my huge, rambunctious, larger-than-life clan. Among them was my grandad, Pera Punahamoa, like an Italian Godfather, and my grandmother, Teria, his beautiful and refined donna. And of course my carelessly muscled father, Tom, and my mother, Julia.
While I was relieved that I would be able to show something from my Menton sojourn, the situation as a writer is this: once you start writing a book, the characters sneak up on you, look over your shoulder, jostling you as you are doing some shopping in the market or, ‘Kia ora, nephew,’ putting a towel and flax kete beside you as you sun yourself on the nude beach.
They never leave you ay-lone.
I had no option but to live again with the family who had once taken over my life and were now crowding my personal space. Like my hockey-playing aunties or dashing haka-boogie uncles, they began bossing me around and taking over my ambition to be, well, a literary writer of fine quality fiction. Even so, I hoped that I might maintain some standards, and so I tried to emulate if not Mansfield at least Marcel Pagnol, whose books Fanny, Jean de Florette, Manon des Sources and especially La Gloire de mon père and Le Château de ma mère were among a number of family-oriented sagas that inspired my attempts at writing a Maori family into existence in New Zealand fiction. Being a Maori Marcel Pagnol had a comforting ring to it.
Nice try, Witi.
Even worse, Dad’s and my uncles’ (and, okay, I will admit it my) love of illustrated comics and 1950s movies began to infiltrate any attempts to aim for a higher literary purpose. Instead of Pagnol, Bulibasha decided to model itself on films like Shane, The Eagle and the Hawk, High Noon, Bullwhip, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral and River of No Return. The race to the church comes straight out of the film Friendly Persuasion.
‘This is all your fault,’ I said to Dad during one of our phone calls. ‘I’m in France to write something that will lend lustre to the Fellowship and instead I find myself writing a … a … puha Western.’
‘At least that’s something of yours I might read,’ he answered.
I gave up and let myself be run over by a convoy of shearers on their way to a shearing shed. As a consequence the words gushed out of me, surprising me with their uninhibited zest for life. They made me rediscover the joy of spontaneous creative energy and, ever since, I have always tried to write without really thinking. I imagine myself drinking clear water from a virgin spring that comes from high in the mountains.
I now trust that spring.
By winter, when the swallows were skimming across the Mediterranean to warmer climes, I had completed the book. There was no better place to do it than in the south, close to Italy, where the temperament, passion, pain and laughter were so much akin to the Waituhi Valley’s own passionate involvement in life, death and history. As I returned to Aotearoa, I paid tribute to the sun, mountains and peoples bordering the great Mediterranean Sea.
Bulibasha, King of the Gypsies was published the next year, 1994. I dedicated it to my grandfather, Dad and the great Smiler shearing gang of hard cases, studs, roustabouts, fleecos and sheepos.
By that time, however, I had left the smell of wool, sheep dip and dags way behind. I was already at work on my next — literary — novel, Nights in the Gardens of Spain. I wasn’t really paying attention when Bulibasha became a finalist in the Montana Book Awards in 1995. On the night of the awards, I turned up late at the Langham with Jenny Te Paa, thinking the formal ceremonies would be over and we could boogie away the rest of the night. Geoff Walker said to me, ‘Where have you been?!’ I didn’t even have time to reply because I heard my name being read out and Bulibasha being crowned the winner.
How had that happened?
I blundered my way through an acceptance speech. And then I began to laugh: ‘Dad, this one’s for you.’
Twenty-one years after I published the book, it has become Mahana, the fourth film adaptation to be made from my work.
Luckily it didn’t take as long to bring to the screen as Whale Rider. That film took twelve years; Mahana took around seven. I have to thank my dear friend and trusted colleague Robin Scholes, who picked the project up when it fell off the sheep truck and took it into production.
Robin was the producer of, among other films, Once Were Warriors (1994) and it was her inspired idea to bring Lee Tamahori, the director of Warriors, back home to make his first New Zealand movie in twenty-one years. Not only that, Robin and Lee decided to cast the magnificent Temuera Morrison, who had been Jake in Warriors, as Tamihana Mahana, the patriarch in Mahana. No wonder that some people like to call the film Warriors Meets Whale Rider.
I have to say that my experience with Mahana, not just as the writer of the book but also associate producer of the film, has made me realise that every movie made in Aotearoa is an achievement of considerable tenacity.
Robin brought on board a small team to spearhead the production, including Janine Dickens as co-producer. Robin had previous experience with international scriptwriter John Collee, who scripted Happy Feet, Master and Commander and other important films, and she managed to secure him to write a new script of Bulibasha, which underwent a change of name to The Patriarch.
While the team was being sorted, the money began to be raised in tandem. Film funding, even with ‘star’ participants, is difficult to secure in a competitive international market. Being a Gizzy boy, I had hoped that we would be able to film in Poverty Bay; the beautiful Kaipara Harbour and Helensville were among the twelve Auckland locations that stood in for the East Coast. The budget came from multiple sources: the New Zealand Film Commission, New Zealand on Air, Maori Television, Hopscotch/eOne, Wild Bunch, private equity investors and, in a final scramble, two hundred individuals via the Snowball funding platform.