STACK NZ Dec #69

REVIEWS

DVD & BD

BLOOD FOR BLOOD Kiwi director Geoff Murphy on UTU REDUX , the beautifully restored version of his 1983 classic. By John Ferguson

U tu remains a key film in the development of modern New Zealand cinema. Directed by Geoff Murphy, whose 1981 road movie Goodbye Pork Pie had shown that New Zealand films could be mainstream box office hits, it is not only one of the biggest budget films of the era, it is

manner, but in the recut version we’ve got flash forwards and flashbacks. The changes were quite slight, we thought. But it seemed to make a huge difference to the way the film plays.” Although Utu is widely perceived to have been better received overseas than it was here, Murphy points out that's more about the critical reaction than the paying public. “It did pretty good business,” he says. ”On its first release, over 300,000 people went to see it. There was an indication that the Maori population supported it a bit more than the white population, because the attendance fell off as you headed south. Overseas, I don’t know if it played that well in foreign markets, but it did well with the critics. They loved it.” Utu certainly opened the door to Hollywood for Murphy, who went on to enjoy some success, helming the sequels to Young Guns and Under Siege. He’s ambivalent about this Hollywood experiences – “yeah, well it was good money” – and these days would rather concentrate on writing (he’s just published his autobiography) than return to the movie business. That said, he would be interested in revisiting one of his earlier movies in a similar way to Utu Redux . “ Goodbye Pork Pie was edited after its

order and had a look at it and I said ‘I think we can clean this up a bit’, so we had a second pass at cutting it

and we shortened it a bit.” He admits he was initially sceptical about whether they would be able to raise the necessary funds to restore Utu . Not only was it a 30 year old movie but also it had to be reassembled from scratch because the original negative had been chopped up (“Graeme referred to it as cultural vandalism,” notes Murphy).

also one of the few movies that addresses the still sensitive subject of the Maori Land Wars. Set in the 1870s in and around the rugged landscape of the North Island’s volcanic plateau, Utu tells the story of Te Wheke (Anzac Wallace), a one-time ally of the British colonial forces who embarks on a bloody mission of revenge when soldiers murder his family. The film has been available before on video and DVD but previous versions were taken from the international cut of the movie. Unhappy with the state it had fallen into, cinematographer Graeme Cowley teamed up with Murphy and editor Mike Horton to set about restoring the movie to its former glory. The result is Utu Redux , a beautifully reconstructed version of the movie that is easily the best ever version of Utu that has ever existed for home viewing. And, unusually for these sorts of restoration projects, the new version is actually slightly shorter than the original. “It was a strange process,” recalls the veteran Kiwi director over the phone to STACK from his home in Wellington. “We put it back in

We go to corners of the galaxy, time and space, that we haven't done before...

New Zealand release because the marketing people decided they could sell it to more countries if it went faster, so we cut out some scenes,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind another go at Pork Pie …”

So what’s different about this version and the original? “There are no new scenes, but there were a few scenes dropped,” explains Murphy. “There was a certain amount of re-ordering, basically putting it back to how it was. In the original, we told the story in a reasonably linear

• Utu Redux is out on DVD and Blu-ray Dec 4

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