Playing as part of Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival 2023, two brothers try to save their farm by butchering humans in darkly comic homegrown thriller Home Kills. Director Haydn Butler tells us more…
BUY TIX VIA NZIFFDescribe your movie in exactly eight words.
Rollercoaster ride though the backblocks of rural NZ.
Before you made this film, what was the first thing you thought of when you saw the words “home kill”?
I was with my dad in my late teens driving through the back-blocks in the Bay of Plenty. I’d just kind of discovered proper, more grown up movies at the video store—Jaws, Taxi Driver etc.—so I was really into movies and ideas for movies at the time.
Gazing out the window I saw the words ‘Home Kills’ roughly painted to a board and nailed to a fence in some paddock. It was two words that you don’t really see together anywhere, so they stuck in my brain. Dad told me what the words meant. It was an ad for local butchers, usually farmers themselves who come to your farm and process your animals, a more humane way of butchery—saving the need to send the animals all crammed in together on the back of a truck to a factory…
My teenage brain ran wild with possibilities, what if these Home Kills butchers started processing people to pay the bills?
How did you cast your leads – and what stood out about the actors you settled on?
It’s tough to cast when you’re making an indie feature. You aren’t a talent agent’s priority because you aren’t offering bags of money, so you never know whether they’ll send the script through to the talent or not.
I saw Mr Josh McKenzie in big budget American TV show La Brea, where he plays a bit of a scallywag. I thought—that American guy has the perfect tone for my film, he would be great! But I discounted him thinking he might struggle with the Kiwi accent. I also thought, why would he do this project? When I discovered La Brea was shot in Australia and that Josh was actually a Kiwi I got super-excited. Just maybe there’s a sliver of a chance. His agent sent him the script and we set up a call.
Josh, or as I call him ’The wind beneath my wings’ helped bring the other lead actors on board also, The phenomenal Cameron Jones and Mavournee Hazel. Both amazing actors I was lucky to have read the script. Cam and Josh were mates and knew each other well, which appealed because they would be playing brothers, so they had a short-hand in the way they worked with each other that was hard to pass up, they horsed around and gave each other crap all day long so it was funny to see. Mavrounee is just a powerhouse of an actor, her audition was superb and nuanced in a way I hadn’t seen before so she was an immediate yes.
What was it like to set, and film, a feature in rural Aotearoa?
The locals were absolutely amazing and without them coming on board and investing in the idea we wouldn’t of had a hope in hell of achieving what we have on screen in the movie we shot in small towns like Putararu and Te Puna, the locals were so welcoming and helpful in every way. We also filmed loads in and around Maungatautari which is just outside of Cambridge, it’s beautiful with endless rolling farmland so was perfect for our films aesthetic.
Though, we were trying to make our film look the opposite of the way the Kiwi countryside looks in shows like Country Calendar. So with such beauty on display, we had to choose our time of day and weather carefully, to make the countryside look more rough n ready and dangerous than it normally looks… also we had an amazing cinematographer Alexander Jenkins, so that helps too.
During production, what was the biggest hurdle you had to overcome?
The budget was always tricky, it’s tough to make films for the amount of money we made this for, I don’t recommend it. A big problem for us was finding accommodation for the cast and crew. The Hamilton Field Days were on, and they had booked out all the accommodation. So there was a bit of lateral thinking to overcome that particular hurdle. Stefan Dennis (Neighbours royalty) stayed down the road from my mums house and I had to go pick him up in her car.
What was the hardest cut you had to make in the editing room?
Always the lines, I probably cut lines from most scenes in the movie. It never gets easy. There are amazing performances all the way though the film and to cut any of those performances is always really tough, especially if the character says something funny—those lines are always the toughest to cut and the first to go.
For you, what was the most memorable part of this whole experience?
Seeing it on the big screen for the first time was amazing. I saw it yesterday in a test screening at a cinema, where we were testing the audio levels and getting the pictures and effects to look just right. That was an emotional moment for sure. When you start out making an independent feature like this you never know wether your film will see the light of day. I could end watching it with my two cats Bronte and Bear in my bedroom and that’s all who ever see it. So I was over the moon to hear it got in to the NZIFF.
What was the last great film you saw?
I really enjoyed TÁR by Todd Field. I love his films, especially In the Bedroom and Little Children. He’s been quiet for a while not making anything but TÁR was awesome.
