Written and Directed by: Gaylene Preston



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Inspired by true events, first-hand accounts and employing actual newsreel footage, this drama follows the aftermath of the Earthquakes that befell New Zealand’s Christchurch between 2010 and 2011, telling a universal story of family, hope and triumph against the odds.


It’s the aftershocks that run the deepest, bringing to the surface the things that truly matter, the lies we tell ourselves, the compassion of the many and the selfishness of the few. Covering a cross-section of modern families, from the homeless pulling together to create a community, to the middle-class suburbanites whose world has been shaken to its foundations, Hope & Wire shows us at our most desperate and our most hopeful. Echoing true events with a candid and unflinching eye, see what emerges from the rubble.
Written and Directed by: Gaylene Preston

Produced by: Chris Hampson & Gaylene Preston

6 x 1 hour series

Gaylene Preston Productions



ABOUT THE SHOW - series description and synopsis
HOPE & WIRE is a gripping, emotional, character-based drama set in Christchurch after the devastating earthquakes of 2010-2011. Six one-hour episodes follow characters who continue to live amid the ruins, despite frequent disturbing aftershocks. Reflecting their fractured experiences, HOPE & WIRE circles around overlapping worlds and viewpoints. Fate and destiny collide in unpredictable ways as they all grapple with the “new normal”.
Inspired by true stories, HOPE & WIRE is named for the song by Adam McGrath of much-loved Lyttelton band The Eastern, who also feature in the series. This sometimes funny, often heart-wrenching drama is the brainchild of filmmaker Gaylene Preston (Home By Christmas). Preston wrote the scripts with Dave Armstrong (Billy) and directed the series. She produced it with Chris Hampson (White Lies), and associate producer Sue Rogers (Home By Christmas). The series is supported by the NZ On Air Platinum Fund and aired on TV3.
HOPE & WIRE stars an impressive cast, headed by Bernard Hill, best known to younger viewers as King Theoden in Lord of the Rings, and to those with long memories as Yosser Hughes in Boys From the Blackstuff. Rachel House (White Lies), Jarod Rawiri (Fantail), Miriama McDowell (This Is Not My Life), Luanne Gordon (Insider’s Guide to Happiness), Stephen Lovatt (Harry, Top of the Lake), Joel Tobeck (Seige, Sons of Anarchy), Logie award-winner Chelsie Preston Crayford (Underbelly: Razor), Anton Tennet (Romeo and Juliet: A Love Story) and Kip Chapman (Top of the Lake) form the core of the large ensemble cast.
As a result of open auditions held in Christchurch, Preston and her team discovered two exciting new young actors: Christchurch schoolgirl Lucy Wyma plays Hayley, Ginny and Jonty’s wayward daughter, and David Sutherland plays Tim, her head-injured brother.

Several Christchurch actors contributed colourful performances including Eilish Moran, who plays Deidre, Monee’s estranged mother, and many first-time performers joined the cast, including Simo Abbari, a Christchurch falafel bar owner who plays Youssef, a Christchurch falafel bar owner.


Loren Taylor (Eagle vs Shark) and Dame Kate Harcourt (Apron Strings) play cameo roles as Emma, Jonty’s devoted legal assistant and Dorothy, his 90-year-old aunt – who, like many elderly people, coped well during the emergencies but had difficulty once the quakes settled.
THE STORY

Joycie (Rachel House) and Len (Bernard Hill), live in a downstairs flat in a large mouldering wooden house just inside the Red Zone owned by local small-time property developer Greggo (Joel Tobeck). When their kitchen is munted (wrecked) and their telly falls over, Joycie and Len, self-confessed couch potatoes, move into the backyard where they begin to feed stray animals left abandoned by their ‘quake-runner’ owners. This generosity also extends to people. Among them Dwayne (Anton Tennet), a homeless boy, and Monee (Chelsie Preston Crayford), a feral girl with her dog on the run from her abusive boyfriend King (Kip Chapman). When their landlord Greggo tries to use new emergency powers to evict them, Len brings his somewhat rusty union-organiser skills to the fore, raises a Canterbury rugby jersey as a flag, and declares the “Free State Of Muntville”.


A world away, amid the white middle-class homes of Merivale, Ginny (Luanne Gordon), a housewife and mother, discovers that none of her family were where they said they would be on that dreadful day of the devastating February 22 earthquake. Her husband Jonty (Stephen Lovatt), holds secrets of his own that force Ginny to become the family’s breadwinner, causing her to realise strengths she never knew she had.
Ryan (Jarod Rawiri), a construction worker, is living in his ute parked outside his dream home in Atlantis in the eastern suburbs since his wife Donna (Miriama McDowell), fled with their two little girls after falling into deep liquefaction at their back door in the wake of the 7.1 jolt that started it all in September 2010. As Donna thrives in Auckland, too terrified to return, Ryan becomes the unofficial caretaker of Sunset Close as all their neighbours gradually move out. Self-medicating, lonely, and at risk from the criminal elements roaming through the residential red zone, Ryan tries to fix what can’t be fixed and loses what he loves the most.
As the city rises again, resilience, tolerance and human kindness are pitted against greed and duplicity. Fate will always play a strong hand when in less than a minute everyone’s lives are changed forever.
The creator of HOPE & WIRE, Gaylene Preston says “The lethal earthquake of 2011 exposed stories of human resilience and courage in the face of dreadful loss. HOPE & WIRE is set amid the ruins, illuminating common experiences of living in the quake zone during the aftermath, surviving aftershocks, some of which shook the city to bits. I am grateful to the people of Christchurch who contributed in so many ways. HOPE & WIRE pays tribute to everyone near and far whose lives will never be the same.”

EDISODES – short summary
Episode 1

When Len and Joycie are jolted off their couch and into their backyard by a massive earthquake, they find their young neighbours unexpectedly helpful. But unsavoury elements are on the prowl and continuing aftershocks are shredding everyone’s nerves to breaking point.


Episode 2

Tuesday February 22, 2011 dawns peacefully enough but little does Ginny know that at 12.51pm a lethal earthquake will reveal fractures in her family that she cannot ignore. Joycie fears for Len in Lyttelton, but to Monee the earthquake means freedom.


Episode 3

In the post-earthquake ‘new normal’, Ryan is living in his ute outside his liquefied dream home. Joycie shines as camp mother to inner-city waifs and strays, while Jonty becomes ever more desperate to get to his office through the closed red zone cordon.


Episode 4

Quake runner Donna is frustrated when Ryan visits the family in Auckland and can’t get the shaky city out of his mind. Ginny confronts Jonty over his guilty secrets. Monee, on the run and squatting in the deserted suburb Atlantis, puts Ryan in danger.


Episode 5

Len and Joycie break the abuse cycle that has Monee in its grip, while dealing with the consequences of a TV interview in which Len has said too much. Dwayne shows he’s not so hopeless after all and Ryan realises the hard truth about his mate Greggo.


Episode 6

Joycie’s honesty costs her her job caring for Aunt Dorothy and Len tries to make amends by organising a party with The Eastern playing. Ginny does a vital deal with Monee and makes a bid for her own freedom, while Ryan’s isolation takes him to the brink.



FACT SHEET
Created by Gaylene Preston
Production Company: Gaylene Preston Productions

Funded by: NZ On Air Platinum Fund

Broadcaster: TV3
Director: Gaylene Preston

Screenplay: Gaylene Preston, Dave Armstrong

Producers: Chris Hampson, Gaylene Preston

Network Executive: Rachel Jean

Associate Producer: Sue Rogers
Director of Photography: Thomas Burstyn

Editor: Paul Sutorius

Production Designer: John Harding

Original Score: Emile de la Rey

Casting Director: Christina Asher

Costume: Lesley Burkes-Harding

2nd unit director/DOP: Alun Bollinger
CAST:

Bernard Hill Len

Rachel House Joycie

Jarod Rawiri Ryan

Miriama McDowell Donna

Luanne Gordon Ginny

Stephen Lovatt Jonty

Joel Tobeck Greggo

Chelsie Preston Crayford Monee

Anton Tennet Dwayne

Kip Chapman King

Lucy Wyma Hayley

David Sutherland Tim
Featuring music by The Eastern Family
Duration: series of 6 x one-hour episodes
THE MAKERS
Gaylene Preston - director, writer (with Dave Armstrong), producer (with Chris Hampson).
Gaylene Preston is a writer, producer, director. Her work reveals her commitment to telling New Zealand stories and includes feature films - Home by Christmas, Perfect Strangers, War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, Ruby and Rata and television series Bread and Roses, and Earthquake, a documentary for TV3 on the devastating 1931 Hawkes Bay earthquakes. The New Zealand Arts Foundation made her the first Filmmaker Laureate in 2001 and she is also a member of the NZ Order of Merit. She was born in Greymouth and spent time in Christchurch throughout her childhood. She lived there while attending Ilam Art School, before moving to England, where her interest in filmmaking arose from her work as an art therapist. Her films have screened in most leading film festivals including NZ, Venice, Sundance, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne and have won awards in Italy, Canada, Australia, Britain, USA, Spain, Portugal and Switzerland.

Chris Hampson – producer

Chris Hampson has worked in the film and television industry for more than 30 years, and as a producer since the mid-1980s. He has produced numerous film and television projects, written for television, directed for theatre and acted on both stage and screen. Before turning to the screen, he started his career as a publishing editor, and after scripting stints in radio, television and at the New Zealand Film Commission, he produced the feature film Illustrious Energy. He is currently a member of the Board of the New Zealand Film Commission.


He was executive producer of television series Shortland Street for its first three years, before developing and executive producing the NZFC’s low-budget feature scheme, ScreenVisioNZ.  He later formed the production company ScreenWorks, launching with law drama Street Legal, whose four-season run proved highly successful.  He continues to produce and develop film and television projects.  He recently produced the acclaimed feature film White Lies, which was selected for the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival.

Sue Rogers – associate producer
Sue Rogers worked closely with her life partner Jim Booth, producer of Peter Jackson’s Meet The Feebles, Braindead and Heavenly Creatures, and she maintained the progress of his Midnight Films production slate following his death in 1994, producing Forgotten Silver, the mockumentary directed by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes. She also produced Heaven, from the novel by Chad Taylor and directed by Scott Reynolds, which won the Audience First Prize for Best International Feature at the Toronto Film Festival in 1997. She produced When Strangers Appear (aka Shearer’s Breakfast) also directed by Scott Reynolds; and Tongan Ninja, the debut feature by Jason Stutter, as well as his second feature Predicament. She was co-producer on Gaylene Preston’s Home by Christmas.

Dave Armstrong – writer (with Gaylene Preston)
Dave Armstrong’s recent television work includes TV one dramas Billy and Spies and Lies. He has also written for drama series Cover Story and The Strip. His television comedies are well-known: Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby and Spin Doctors, for which he won an Academy of Film and Television Award for best comedy script alongside with Roger Hall and James Griffin. He wrote episodes for the animated cult hit Bro Town (was also script editor), country comedy Willy Nilly and the ensemble Skitz which gave birth to The Semisis, written by Armstrong.
His hit play, Niu Sila, co-written with Oscar Kightley, won a Chapman Tripp Award for Best New Play and received the Arts Foundation Award for Patronage in 2006. After it was performed in the Auckland International Arts Festival, Niu Sila was performed at the 2007 Pasifika Styles Festival in Cambridge England. The Tutor won best new NZ Play at the 2005 Chapman Tripp Theatre Awards.

Thomas Burstyn – Director of photography
Canadian Kiwi Thomas Burstyn CSC, FRSA is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker with 30 years experience as a cinematographer. He trained at the National Film board of Canada as a documentary maker before moving into feature films. He directed the multi-award winning This Way of Life; One Man, One Cow, One Planet and Flash William among others. He was cinematographer on New Zealand features The Insatiable Moon, The Lost Tribe and Mr Wrong, which was directed by Gaylene Preston. He also worked with Preston on the drama segments of TV3’s documentary Strongman: The Tragedy. His recent work includes Universal Cable’s 11-episode sci fi series Defiance, shot in Toronto.
He was nominated for an Emmy Award for cinematography for The 4400 in 2005, won a Genie Award in Canada in 2002 for Magic in the Water and a CableAce Award for The Hitchhiker: True Believer.

John Harding – production designer
John Harding has a versatile and varied career as film production designer, art director, character and costume designer, as well as theatre and event designer, and design tutor. He was a costume designer on James Cameron’s epic Avatar. He worked for Weta Workshop for five years on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in many design, construction and art director roles. He also designed and developed miniature sets, native costumes and weapons for Weta Workshop for Peter Jackson’s King Kong.
His most recent film as production designer is Gaylene Preston’s Home By Christmas. Before that he did Jason Stutter’s Predicament. His work includes TVOne telemovies Rage, Tangiwai and Until Proven Innocent, as well as The Lost Children, a 13-episode television series set in 1860s New Zealand and the award-winning short film Fog. He won the New Zealand Film Awards best design award for his work in the short film The King Boys. His work as art director includes US telemovie Fatal Contact: Bird Flu In America, New Zealand television series Kidnapped (Robert Louis Stevenson), and Larry Parr’s feature film Fracture.

Lesley Burkes-Harding – costume designer
Lesley Burkes-Harding is an award-winning period costume specialist who won New Zealand Film Awards best costume design for her work on Her Majesty, a coming of age drama set in 1953, and was a finalist for Qantas Film & TV Awards best costume design for Out of the Blue. She designed costumes for The Locals, Jubilee and Predicament. Her most recent feature film is Gaylene Preston’s Home By Christmas.
She has designed costumes for many US television features and series filmed in New Zealand, including Spartacus Blood and Sand, Ike – Countdown to D-Day, Lucille Ball Life Story and Murder in Greenwich. She was a Qantas Film & TV awards finalist for her work on NZ television drama Until Proven Innocent. She was the NZ assistant costume designer for James Cameron’s epic Avatar and worked as a construction specialist for Weta SPFX on The Lord of the Rings trilogy. She was vfx costume designer for the Peter Jackson/Steven Spielberg collaboration Adventures of Tin Tin.

Paul Sutorius – supervising editor
Paul Sutorius has a long career spanning feature films, television drama, documentaries, comedy and current affairs. His feature films include four directed by Gaylene Preston – Home By Christmas, Ruby and Rata, Bread & Roses and War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us – as well as The Irrefutable Truth About Demons (director Glenn Standring), Chunuk Bair (Dale Bradley) and Kingi’s Story, KingPin and Mark II (Mike Walker).
He won best film editing at the NZ Film & TV awards for Ruby and Rata and best documentary editing for Getting to Our Place (which was produced and co-directed by Gaylene Preston with Anna Cottrell), and the same award in 2006 for the documentary Aspiring. His television drama editing dates back to the classic Pukemanu and includes The Longest Winter, The Governor, Mortimer’s Patch and more recently Insider’s Guide to Happiness, Until Proven Innocent and Tangiwai. His most recent feature is White Lies.

Alun Bollinger – 2nd Unit director/cinematographer
Alun Bollinger’s major credits as cinematographer include Goodbye Pork Pie, Vigil, Heavenly Creatures, Forgotten Silver, The Frighteners, Matariki, White Lies, Love Birds and River Queen which he also partly field directed. He shot War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, Bread and Roses, Perfect Strangers Home By Christmas and several documentaries (Learning Fast, Titless Wonders, Hone Tuwhare and Lovely Rita) with director Gaylene Preston.
He has won numerous New Zealand awards for his work and was nominated for an AFI award for his work on the Australian feature The Oyster Farmer. In 2005 he was awarded a New Zealand Arts Foundation Laureate for outstanding lifetime artistry in cinematography and was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. He was recently the subject of a documentary Barefoot Cinema: The Art and Life of Cinematographer Alun Bollinger by Gerard Smythe.

GAYLENE PRESTON INTERVIEW
Why did you want to make something about Christchurch?
We moved from Greymouth to Hawkes Bay when I was ten. In the following year there was a big cluster of earthquakes and a tsunami warning that closed the school. I was traumatised. Later, when I was an art student in Christchurch, I worked holidays in a resthome in Napier and it was full of old people who were survivors of the 1931 lethal quake. That got me interested in earthquake stories, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that I started videotaping oral histories from 1931. These eventually became an installation for the Hawkes Bay Art Gallery Trust and contributed to a documentary (Earthquake) for TV3 for the 75th anniversary.
In September 2010, I had friends and family in Christchurch, so I was paying attention to the Christchurch earthquakes, and when I pay attention, I’m a filmmaker.
What is the time span of the stories in HOPE & WIRE?
HOPE & WIRE is set from September 3, 2010 to the autumn of 2011. I started working on it in December 2011. It’s an intricate investigation into recent history, though I’ve had to predict certain outcomes so that HOPE & WIRE retains relevance.
And you’re not trying to cover everybody’s experience over the whole time span of the earthquakes, are you?
It is not about everybody’s earthquakes. I have steered clear of extremes and focussed on stories of common experience. HOPE & WIRE distils as many stories of common experience as possibly to present compelling, sometimes funny, sometimes searing drama.
It’s not really about earthquakes, it’s about people?
You find out a huge amount about the psychology of trauma in an earthquake zone. The first thing you notice is that everyone reacts differently. Everyone’s physical situation is different, but also everyone’s psychological situation is different. What causes one person to rise above and triumph could be another person’s absolute tragedy. In a large communal disaster where you’ve got a lot of psychological disruption, people are thrown together or pushed apart. There’s a psychological earthquake that follows the physical earthquake and it’s the psychological earthquake that I wanted to explore.
And you chose drama as the way to explore it?
HOPE & WIRE being a drama offered me a great opportunity to observe and research more like a novelist. You can tell a story without any living person having to own it. HOPE & WIRE is a social and psychological investigation - that makes it sound as though it’s going to be hard to watch - but it’s not. My job as a filmmaker is to illuminate through stories. I hear a story, I’m told a story, I read a story, then I take those stories and I apply them to the story families that I’ve created for the whole series.
Story families?
I’ve created story families in order to tell a larger tale. The central story family was inspired by a photo essay in The Press called ‘Camp Mother’s Big Adventure’, about a couple who were forced to live in their backyard and reported that they had become healthier and happier. That story gave me the inspiration for the “positive heart” of the series. Before I found that, I had been worried that the series could be too difficult to tell. Good storytelling needs the light to shine through the dark.
There’s a middle-class family who live in Merivale and a young kiwi family who live in suburban Atlantis, near Bexley. Those three character families gave me the ability to not only look at the quake reaction across different social groups, but also different age groups, from young children and teenagers right through to the elderly.

Please talk about each group, starting with Muntville?
Muntville is an old inner city house with a few flats in it. Upstairs live the white power boys with Monee and their dog. In the front are University students and down in the bottom flat are Len and Joycie, welfare beneficiaries - but Joycie has a little job once a week looking after an elderly woman. Len is a retired seaman from Liverpool. He’s a unionist who has an opinion on everything. When the first earthquake strikes, their kitchen is wrecked so they start cooking outside and looking after stray animals who have been deserted by their quake runner owners. It’s a small step for them to start looking after stray people.
Their landlord Greggo is a small-time developer. He drives naked through the dark streets in September, checking his properties. Greggo has a loose business arrangement with his mate Ryan, a digger driver. Ryan, his wife Donna and their two little girls live near Bexley in their dream home in a cul-de-sac in Atlantis. They’re mortgaged to the max so when the earthquakes happen and Ryan finds his skills in demand, he’s making money and doesn’t take seriously that Donna is totally traumatised. The tragedy of that couple is that one reacts with “flight” and the other with “fight” and it’s almost irreconcilable.
Meanwhile in Merivale lives Ginny, the perfect middle-class wife, with her adored lawyer husband Jonty, and their two teenage children. Ginny sings in her church choir and is family focussed but when the earthquakes reveal secrets, she is forced to turn and focus on a much wider world. The earthquakes cause her to discover strengths she didn’t know she had, and she embraces an entirely new direction in life. She discovers compassion.
There’s a theme about caring for one another that runs across the whole series. This includes Ryan, the good neighbour who gets left with everybody’s keys when they all leave. When he loses people to look after as the suburb empties, he implodes because his internal world is bereaved. He’s a fix-it guy with no-one to fix it for, and he can’t fix it for himself.
I’m interested in contrasting the characters. For example – look at what happens to Jonty. He owns a holiday house in Wanaka and the family home in the city and has a good relationship with his bank manager. He might actually be more heavily mortgaged than Ryan and Donna over in Atlantis, but he has a lot more choices. There are people who, no matter what happens to them, they’ve got choices. Like Greggo, the opportunist, fast-talking guy on the move. He tells us “I’m a glass half-full kind of guy”. No matter what happens, he’ll never tell you he’s in trouble. He might be up to his ears in it but he’s never going to say. And then you have Joycie and Len, who have been doing disaster management for years. They take each day as it comes because every day is a bit of a crisis one way or another for them. They are therefore used to only dealing with today’s difficulties, and not worrying about tomorrow. They cope the best. They’re used to it. They have nothing, so they have nothing to lose.
There is a possibility that people will refer to HOPE & WIRE as “New Zealand’s Treme”, how do you address that?
If Treme hadn’t been made, I don’t think HOPE & WIRE would have happened. Treme led the way in telling an entertaining story set in a wrecked city. There are similarities – for example the music - threading The Eastern through HOPE & WIRE. But the difference with HOPE & WIRE is that the earthquakes provide every inciting incident of the drama in the characters’ lives. You can look at anything any character does and see that they would not have done that if it weren’t for the earthquakes.
Wouldn’t some of those things have happened anyway: like Hayley being just a typical teenager, Tim longing to get away from home?
In the case of Hayley and her friends, their development is accelerated because of the trauma of the earthquake. Without it, they may have slowed down a bit, they might have gone to school a bit more. Monee’s an abused young woman in an abusive relationship and if that abusive relationship hadn’t been forced out into the backyard of Muntville, it could have gone on for some time. It’s an earthquake story about things being thrust out into the light because the walls have fallen down. I was told about similar circumstances occurring in Napier in 1931.
Donna talks about the taniwha under Christchurch. Where does that come from?
I was sent a drawing of ‘the monster under Christchurch’ by a child who was a quake refugee, and I heard that among some Maori, there was a belief that taniwha had been disturbed because Christchurch was bult in the wrong place. Back when I was researching the Napier earthquakes, I was told first-hand stories of the taniwha in Napier - of the flesh-coloured shark being in the Ahuriri lagoon that day.
How did it come about that you cast Bernard Hill in the role of Len?
I met him when he was in New Zealand working on The Lord of the Rings and we immediately clicked. He is a good person to talk to about script and story and we always thought we would do something together one day. He kept coming back to New Zealand and on one of his trips I gave him the outline of HOPE & WIRE because I thought he would be perfect for Len, the unionist couch potato partner of Joycie. I offered him the part, but I never really thought he would be available to do it.
Alongside the large cast of exceptional actors, including Rachel House, Chelsie Preston Crayford, Luanne Gordon and Stephen Lovatt, you cast several Christchurch actors?

With a strong ensemble core cast on board, it was a great opportunity to use, not only extras and small speaking parts from Canterbury, but also to cast up-and-coming talented young local actors. The teenage stories are full of Christchurch actors. We were given the Ilam School of Fine Arts film school facilities over the Christmas holidays where our casting director, Christina Asher, ran open auditions. We found Lucy Wyma who plays Hayley, and David Sutherland, who plays her brother Tim. Eilish Moran, a respected Canterbury theatre actress, plays Monee’s mother Deirdre.


You also cast some Christchurch non-actors?
Simo (Mohamed Abbari) is a chef. I saw him in one of Paua Productions’ Aftermath earthquake documentaries. They followed his story of losing his restaurant in the September earthquake, getting another one that was destroyed in December and having his next one locked behind the cordon after February 22nd. A remarkable man. Of course by the time we had him acting in the movie, he’d already set up a falafel cart and a new restaurant out at Riccarton that we then used as a location.
Why did you choose Dave Armstrong to write the scripts with you?
Sadly, Graeme Tetley, my writing partner for most of my career, died in 2011. He survived being in Lyttelton during the February 22 earthquake but died of a heart attack after watching TV reports of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. I believe he is an earthquake victim. The line Len says about being in Lyttelton: “If you want to know where the earthquake was, it was right under my pink bum” is Graeme’s line about his experience.
I knew I needed to work with someone who was used to translating true stories into drama. I'm a great admirer of Dave Armstrong’s theatre work. He’s also an experienced TV series writer and is stronger than I am on story - whereas I work from character and internal disharmony - so we make a useful team. I’m always looking for inciting incidents that are going to impact internally on the characters, but he would always push for more external story. It was a hard process because we hadn’t worked together before, but ultimately very rewarding.
Because of the short interval between writing your first draft, getting funding and shooting the series, you have said the whole process was invigorating. How so?
It felt so fresh. The usual process is: you have the idea, write the script and then spend five, 10 or 20 years getting the funding, by which time you’re sometimes asking yourself “what was I trying to say here?”
The incredible thing about HOPE & WIRE for me as a filmmaker is that I finished writing the shooting draft of the scripts just two weeks before we started shooting. That’s brilliant because I was physically in the place of the story while being deeply immersed in the script writing. I was in two places at once – I was in Christchurch writing it in 2013 with my head in Christchurch in 2010-11. It was demanding for the production, but the up side was that I had a film crew there doing pre-production while I was writing. It’s easy to think of the film crew as a whole lot of technicians who run the gear, but actually a film crew is a whole lot of people who go out at night and meet people. They would come back from the pub and tell me about things they’d heard, so the last draft of the scripts got coloured and kept changing as I learned more everyday details.
Who do you see as the audience for HOPE & WIRE?
I hope HOPE & WIRE is a relevant, truthful and entertaining drama series with an emotional impact that is a fitting reflection of that time in that place. Ultimately, HOPE & WIRE is about what happens when the social crucible cracks and the light shines in.


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