Please tell us about the projects you worked on before making ‘The Craftsmen's Castle’. How did you start, and how did you learn to make films?
I started making films when I was fifteen years old. My early projects began in my school media studies class at Ao Tawhiti Unlimited Discovery, a special character school in Christchurch, New Zealand that focuses on student directed learning. I started making films under the guidance of my media studies teacher Marlene Te’evale-Hunt, learning the most important elements such as how to write scripts, doing storyboards, and what to tell visually in your film. She helped me really understand the core language of filmmaking too.
I then went on to University and did an Honors Degree in Cinema Studies and History. My passion for history really helps in my film making.
My most notable project before The Craftsmen’s Castle was the 2016 short film The Parcel. The film is semi-autobiographical about a young recluse who receives a parcel that is misdelivered to his home where he must journey outside and deliver it to its rightful owner. The film is based on my experiences with being on the autistic spectrum and coming to terms with how I live with it. The Parcel was part of my presentation about being on the autistic spectrum that I gave at the 12th Autism-Europe International Congress in 2019. The full film is available publically online and I always recommend giving it a watch. Being involved in projects around my home city, and being in roles in front of and behind the camera also taught me a lot about how I would make my own films too. Even in roles where I was an actor/extra in a project, I always observed how everything was set up and coordinated while waiting around for my scenes to be filmed. Through such observation, I gave myself a structure and schedule to work to when doing my own projects.
Tell us about ‘The Craftsmen's Castle’. How do you describe it?
The Craftsmen’s Castle is a film in the simplest sense, a film about the construction of Chapman Castle by husband and wife team Dennis and Debbie Chapman. Yet the beauty of this documentary is that the story is more than just a story about a home that looks like a castle.
My documentary encapsulates how everyone involved had a real passion for what they were creating and how they used their combined knowledge of decades of expertise to create something really wonderful that will stand the test of time. One of my favorite aspects about Chapman Castle is how the concrete was used as a form of insulation for Chapman Castle. It keeps Chapman Castle at a consistent temperature, never getting too hot or too cold. As I live in a nation with a housing crisis with many faulty homes, it baffles me why very few buildings in New Zealand aren’t using the innovation used in Chapman Castle. Even over the ten years since Chapman Castle’s completion, it’s still a very highly advanced house today.
In another sense, The Craftsmen’s Castle also talks about how we can have a strong personal connection to architecture and what we can learn from the story of Dennis and Debbie Chapman’s Chapman Castle from an architectural, environmental, and a social perspective.
While it may be easy to say they had lots of money to make Chapman Castle, the Chapman’s are the most down to earth people you’ll meet and they had a real hand in the overall construction process of Chapman Castle too.
Please tell us about your favorite filmmakers.
My top five influential filmmakers are David Lynch, Peter Greenaway, Akira Kurosawa, Wes Anderson, and lastly and most importantly Jacques Tati.
Wes Anderson’s 2009 film Fantastic Mr. Fox was a childhood favorite of mine, helping discover his later films such as Moonrise Kingdom (2012) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Those were two films that helped me broaden my ever increasing eclectic film preferences at the time.
Jacques Tati’s 1967 Playtime was the main film that really got me into filmmaking when I was fifteen years old. The way he showcases his cinematography and how wonderfully he combines slapstick humor and the surrounding world that Monsieur Hulot lives in always astounds me, I’m still seeing new gags every time I watch it. Lynch very much has a strong Tati influence in his films too, Twin Peaks is very much across the pond from ‘Tatiland’.
The Craftsmen’s Castle started off with a large inspiration from Peter Greenaway’s 1982 film The Draughtsman’s Contract in the realms of cinematography and music. I always appreciated how precise, choreographed, and visual his films are. As time went on, The Craftsmen’s Castle took on an identity of its own, in a way visually capturing and representing the identity of Chapman Castle as a whole.
I wouldn’t be into Greenaway if it wasn’t for Akira Kurosawa. The visual precision Kurosawa has is why I love Kurosawa’s films. While precise and visual, he has a raw and visceral nature where Greenaway is more refined. Throne of Blood (1957), Ran (1985), and Dreams (1990) are three of my personal favorite films by Akira Kurosawa.
If you were given a good budget, what would be your ideal project?
For me, my ideal project would something that is highly visual, character based, and to create a unique world within itself.
Making something in the realms of Fantasy and/or Sci-Fi would be the top two genres of my ideal project, with a little bit of urban fantasy and comedy mixed in too. Like David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks, I would want to do an ideal project that allows a great deal of world building to develop and grow.
Coming from a family with a strong theatrical background, I want to bring that feeling you have when watching a play into the world of film. That feeling of the world coming to life right in front of you. I would use a lot of practical effects to achieve such a feeling too.
Most importantly, I want to tell stories that uplift people through a unique visual setting. I would have the same approach in a documentary format too. Highlighting stories that show what the human spirit can achieve and what we the viewer can learn from it too.
Describe how you would ensure that production is on schedule. What steps would you take?
The first step is to make sure everyone involved knows the world we are trying to create and that they are equally as passionate as I am. I’m always keen to see other’s own passion in my own projects overall. My own personal philosophy when it comes to creative projects is that I want to do projects that I not only would enjoy doing, yet also working with others who I enjoy working with too, who also have the same level of passion as I do.
The second step is location planning. With some of my experiences with low budget filmmaking, finding locations tends to be one of the most difficult in a logistical sense. I want to make sure we have the right locations and a good amount of time to really use these locations to their advantage and help us build the world we are creating.
Then finally the third and most important step is to overall to be prepared for anything that goes wrong. Growing up in a city with two major earthquakes, I had to deal with change from where I least expected it. The advantage with filmmaking is you learn where the least expected might appear and learn to be prepared for it when it happens. Making The Craftsmen’s Castle really taught me how filmmaking is a team effort. I tend to be the type of director who is more like a manager than a tyrant. I want to bring the best out of everyone so that we can all succeed.
What was the hardest part of making ‘The Craftsmen's Castle’.
The overall hardest part for me when making The Craftsmen’s Castle was being both the director and the producer on the project.
When everyone starts out in filmmaking, we all have a tendency to make ourselves a bit of a one man band or being a jack of all trades. Yet with this film I found myself juggling two roles at the same time on some occasions which proved to be a bit challenging. Yet in that experience, the positive outcome is that it taught me not only how to plan for future projects as a director, yet to also help others as a producer on other projects. There are probably many great filmmakers who are stuck creatively and are looking for a good producer, I’m interested in being that producer.
If possible, tell us about your next work. What plans do you have for your future work?
For my next work, I would like to do something that is narrative based. I’m currently working on a short film/pilot for a series that in a way is Mr. Bean meets Twin Peaks. I’ve wanted to experiment with comic characters like that of Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot to see how such characters would interact in a more serious and threatening environment. Like someone who has become a stranger in their own world. If I was going to do another documentary, I would like to do another documentary on a particular building around my home city. Something older with a more mysterious history to it. I’ve already got a building in mind as a potential candidate for such a documentary, yet I would need plenty of time to absorb the overall scale of the building and how I would present such a building visually in documentary form.
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