STACK New Zealand December Issue 69

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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).
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
DVD&BD REVIEWS
17
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
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
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
New Zealand release because the
marketing people decided the
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…”
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BLOOD
We go to corners
of the galaxy, time
and space, that we
haven't done before...
Kiwi director Geoff Murphy on UTU REDUX, the beautifully
restored version of his 1983 classic. By John Ferguson