5 minute read
SAFE AND SOUND
IT IS, QUITE FRANKLY, the stuff of nightmares: a school principal learns of the imminent arrival of an escaped convict who has a nasty habit of slipping into teenage girls rooms in the night, only to silently watch them sleep. That is, until last week, when the plot thickens... What follows is a creepy test of wills and relationships that threatens to tear a small town apart.
This twisting, character-driven plot might sound like the latest big budget Hollywood thriller, but in fact this is a film born and bred on the Kāpiti Coast, and shot entirely on location there by Kāpiti native Mason Cade Packer. Safe/Sound is Packer’s latest short film, though at 40 minutes it is more like a novella, and as an independent production he looked to his home town not just for locations but also for funding.
In what sounds like a movie in itself, Packer worked phones and contacts for weeks on end to secure half of the film’s $100,000 budget, reaching out to everyone from car dealers to the local funeral home. At Air Chathams we love that kind of Kiwi spirit, so we got onboard too, helping move cast and crew around the country; they say it takes a village, and in this case it took a village to make a scary movie.
“I’ve been making stuff here for years and want to keep coming back,” says Packer, who has done stints in Chicago and is currently Los Angeles-based. “This community has always given me help, which is really so generous. I think it’s because we really do have such a great artistic community here, so even plumbers and car dealers understand what it’s about.”
Packer even convinced his old school, Kāpiti College, to come to the party and let him shoot the movie on their grounds, which would probably have sent shivers down the spine of any visiting Ministry of Education staff. But then, this was the school that also produced Peter Jackson and James Ashcroft, director of Coming Home in the Dark, so they clearly like to do things a little different.
“Kāpiti College is pretty out there,” Packer laughs, “the head of drama, Siobhan Malley, is incredible and the school has always embraced weird, often kinda gory, productions. So there was absolutely no problem shooting a twisted thriller there!”
“The whole ethos of Safe/Sound was to showcase what we could do on such a small budget,” Packer says. “$100,000 sounds like a lot, but in the world of filmmaking that’s miniscule. The real power came in our fantastic crew, both in front of and behind the camera, and when you have that you can achieve greater things than money can buy.”
The DIY, almost guerrilla, approach to filmmaking used to be a hallmark of Kiwi cinema, but that has almost completely disappeared as production goes increasingly indoors and onto computer hard drives, but it is a necessity Packer - and his crew - embraced.
“Rain plays a huge part of this film, it’s very atmospheric, and we looked back over the last six years of weather statistics to see what eight day window was most likely to have rain in the region” he says.
“And then the whole week of shooting was perfectly sunny! But our production designer Dean Hudson put together a rain rig – pieces of wood and a hose from Mitre 10 – it worked a charm!”
What didn’t work quite so well was Packer taking the classic stage adage to ‘break a leg’ too literally on the night of the film’s local screening.
“We’d promised everyone who supported us that we would hold a premiere. Te Raukura Ki Kāpiti and Kāpiti College sponsored the event and hosted us for free, which was awesome. We went in to do test screenings earlier that day, I’m a perfectionist, so I wanted to make sure every seat had a clear view and the right audio levels... And when I went down to the front row I didn’t realise it dropped off into the orchestra pit - so basically just took a step into the dark, and straight down. So yeah, the drop was decent!”
The result was not a break but a snapped ligament (he notes the gnarly “pop” he heard when he hit the deck, which of course the horror director laughs at) so Packer was forced to attend the premiere in a wheelchair. Talk about making an entrance.
But you can’t keep a good man down and Packer is already looking to his next film, this time a full feature length outing.
“I’m kind of doubling down on the horror genre,” he says, “and also looking to come back to Kāpiti to shoot it. We’ve tested the local crews and atmosphere and ease of shooting here, so potentially it could come back. We wouldn’t be looking for money from the community again, but we know the resources are here, and after shooting for eight days straight in the middle of “winter”, what’s the difference in doing it two or three more times over?”
In the meantime, Safe/Sound could be coming to a screen near you, and you don’t want to miss this one.
