Disney’s Pete’s Dragon arrives on screens September 15th, and brings with it what is likely to be both an emotive as well as financial investment by New Zealanders. Shot on location here under the NZ Screen Production Grant (more info here), when the film’s not playing havoc with your feelings, it serves as the biggest beneficiary of New Zealand scenery and on-set skill since The Hobbit.
In a long chat with director David Lowery we covered a ton of ground, which we’re going to run in a series of excerpts over the coming week. As the headline that brought you here observes, in today’s chat we talk about New Zealand in a conversation that skips the familiar subject matter of how goddamn beautiful our mountains are (even though Lowery’s film does capture just how goddamn beautiful our mountains are).
FLICKS: Although you’re here with your film ahead of release, this isn’t your typical premiere junket, is it?
DAVID LOWERY: I guess you could say that. For me, it’s always about the audience. So, even if it’s the crew that worked on the movie, I want them to see it. And the communities that helped us make it, I want them to see it. It’s really exciting for me to get to take it to Tapanui tomorrow and show that town because such a wonderful part of the whole production was just involving that entire little community in the movie. I feel like half the residents show up in the film, so it’ll be great to show it to them.
Yeah, I bet. How are you doing the screening there?
There’s this community centre that has a screening room and we had a wrap party there. So, we’re back on familiar ground. We ate lunch there every single day and so we’re doing it there. I think we have to show up twice so that everybody has a chance to see it, because there’s not enough seats for the entire town to come in.
I went down to the set of ‘Slow West’ when that shot here, a while back.
I love that movie.
Obviously, its a very different scenario to your film in terms of scale. I predominantly did it just to see what a location shoot in New Zealand was like for everybody.
And, of course, the experience will vary from production to production, but what really struck me on that trip was that it seemed like the environment people were shooting in would really bleed into the way that they were working.
They went to one of the same couple of restaurants for dinner every night, knew the locals and there was just a really nice feeling to the production.
I love that. I love that. It brings that familial feel to a production and makes it bigger than normal, because you’re involving not just you and the close-knit crew of collaborators that you’ve banded together with, but everyone in the location where you’re shooting and all of the townsfolk that might come and participate or help out or just serve as bystanders. It feels like everyone’s doing it together and it gives you this sense of belonging that’s quite nice when you’re so far away from home.
And, where relevant, you kind of want to get these family bonds working as well as possible, right? On and off screen.
You need that, too.
And you’ve got a crew that needs to get along and so they need downtime to get on with each other as human beings. And then, it just kind of ripples out to the wider community.
Completely. I always feel like making movies is ridiculously hard, considering that you’re ‘just’ making entertainment. It’s incredibly hard, and so the best way to offset that difficulty is to work with people you’d enjoy hanging out with when you’re done working at the end of the day. I always endeavour to do that, definitely managed to do that with Pete’s Dragon and, as a result, we all did hang out at the end of the day. We would often all go get dinner, go just hang out, the whole crew would go to that bar and increase their annual profits by 200 percent or whatever. It really did feel like a big familial event.
Watch ‘Pete’s Dragon: Experiencing New Zealand’
There’s something that’s inescapable when a film’s shot in your country, and your backyard is doubling for a foreign location. It’s kind of like, “Okay, what have they got wrong?” And those few moments where I did have the emotional attention spare to look away from the primary focus and around the frame, I found myself wondering “what’s been going on in the background there?”
We didn’t do too much to make New Zealand feel more American. There’s a lot of American flags. That was kind of the main thing we did. And we parked the cars on the opposite side of the street. But even the road signs, we discussed should we change the road signs to reflect the U.S. road signs? And I was like, “Man, let’s just leave them. They’re great. No one’s going to care.” I didn’t want to go too crazy with that type of thing. We certainly could have.
That way lies madness, right? And an art department going “Oh, I’ve got to make another bloody sign”.
Yeah, we could’ve kept going. But really there’s not a lot of augmentation to the surroundings. Every now and then we had to paint out a rooftop that was in the background. But by and large, the landscapes themselves have been untouched.
When you came aboard ‘Pete’s Dragon’, was the intention for the production to be here or were you involved in those decisions?
I got hired with my co-writer Toby to write the script. And we spent a year working on the script, without ever thinking about the possibility of making it ourselves. Directing it was something I had just assumed would never happen. Once they offered it to me to direct, things happened very, very quickly and within two months, we were down here.
It was a process in which I went in, discussed what my approach would be, and the next day they called me and said I had the job. That was a Monday, I think. And by Tuesday, we were talking about where we could shoot it. And within a couple weeks, we realized we’re not shooting in the US, for various reasons. And New Zealand presented itself as an option very, very quickly, that made a lot of sense for a lot of different reasons. And as a huge fan of all Peter Jackson’s movies, I knew we could find the locations we needed and quickly said “Yes, let’s do it”. We got on a plane, headed down here, scouted and then said ‘yes’.
Sneaks of Pete’s Dragon play this weekend; general release Sept 15. Click for movie times and more info.
Watch the ‘Pete’s Dragon’ trailer
