Calvin Tuteao takes the lead role in the film adaptation A significantly reworked film version of Witi Ihimaera's coming out tale Nights in the Gardens of Spain will debut on the small screen this month. The drama has been adapted from the novel by screenwriter Kate McDermott, who has made the main character Māori, set the story in 2010 and focused it more on the wider community than the personal impact of coming out. Directed by Katie Wolfe, Nights in the Gardens of Spain stars Shortland's St's Calvin Tuteao as Kawa, a corporate high-flyer, with a wife and two children – as well as a male lover. The film is the result of a creative collaboration between two production companies owned by Māori women - Nicole Hoey's Cinco Cine Films and Christina Milligan's Conbrio Media. Hoey says they initially met with Ihimaera to talk about how they might do it for television. "One of the things we talked about was taking it away from the gay coming out story set in the context of AIDS and set it in 2010. We also wanted to make it more about the husband and wife and to give it a Māori base, because the book is not set in the Māori world," she says." "And once you do that, you change his whole environment. He might be working in a corporate environment in the city, but when you change everything about his nature, you change everything about who the other characters in the drama are going to be. His whānau and his place within that become very important." Hoey says placing it in the wider context of Kawa's family also enabled the story to bring another pressure to bear on Kawa - his anticipation of their reaction to his coming out in terms of their expectation for him to become the tribal leader. "Inside Māoridom there is a sense of ownership by aunties, uncles, grandparents over a person, and with Kawa it was decided very young that he would be given the mantle of leadership for the whānau. That's why changing the central character made it so much more difficult for him to make the move because he didn't have ownership of himself. The iwi, the hapū, the rūnanga, his whānau all had a stake in his future because his future was their future." Director Katie Wolfe says that while similar situations do arise, many Māori families do not have such an issue with gay family members. "I'm very clear that we're not making a blanket statement about Māori attitudes to homosexuality. It's specific to this family." Ihimaera says the re-imagining of the lead character as a Māori man, Kawa, was for him a double-edged opportunity. "The most exciting thing for me was that in the book the main character is European and he is supposed to be an 'everyman' character, but with this particular treatment, because it was to be made by Māori creatives, I had to completely turn my head around and to actually recognise for myself that unfortunately I was going to have to come out twice. Once in the guise of a Pākehā character and then turn that character around and make him into the Māori character that he was supposed to be in the very beginning," he says. "So that was quite a shock to me because I had always tried to hide, to say 'this is a book that could be about 'everyman', this is not a specific story'. So it is now actually nearer to the truth than I would like to admit. Ihimaera says rather than being a gay coming out story, or a gay love story, it's become a very strong story about a whole group of people who are encountering a particular issue – "one man doesn't realise what is going to happen when he decides to turn his life around and become somebody else. And by him becoming somebody else, everybody close to him cops the fallout." He is reminded of some of the reaction he received from readers of the novel: "In the early days most of the letters I was getting about the book were mainly from young women whose husbands had come out. They were saying 'thank you very much for writing it because now I can understand why he was driven to leave'. They now knew that there was this compulsion in their husbands that wasn't any of their fault." The film features Nathalie Boltt (Bloodlines, District 9) as Kawa's wife Annabelle, George Henare (One Were Warriors) as his father Hamiora and Vicky Haughton (Whale Rider) as his mother Grace. His lover Chris is played by Dean O'Gorman (McLeod's Daughters). Nights in the Gardens of Spain will be shown on TV One's Sunday Theatre at 8.30pm on January 23. Watch the trailer below:
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Monday, 10th January 2011 - 2:25pm