We Were Dangerous Filmmakers On Their Hilarious Yet Tense New Zealand Period Drama – Screen Rant

Summary

We Were Dangerous is a hilarious yet tense drama that explores themes of colonization and body autonomy in 1954 New Zealand. The story centers around misfit teenage girls Nellie (Erana James), Daisy (Manaia Hall), and Louisa (Nathalie Morris) who are labeled delinquents and sent to live on a remote island under the guard of a strict and uncompromising Matron (Rima Te Wiata). The movie debuted at South by Southwest, it was praised for sharp writing, strong performances, and snappy direction.

While the movie was executive produced by hit filmmaker Taika Waititi, it is the work of people like director Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu, writer Maddie Dai, and producer Morgan Waru that shines the most. We Were Dangerous is the feature debut of both Te Whiu and Dai, though Dai was a writer on Our Flag Means Death season 2. Waru is a producer at Piki Films whose previous work includes Red, White & Brass and Baby Done.

Screen Rant interviewed Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu, Maddie Dai, and Morgan Waru about We Were Dangerous. The filmmakers discussed their interest in telling this story and its real-life inspiration, discussed casting and working with the lead actors, and more.

Screen Rant: Maddie, this is your first feature, and Josephine, it is yours as well. How did the three of you find each other?

Maddie Dai: I was very new to screenwriting. I had downloaded Final Draftnot even. I downloaded some free softwareand told, like, three people. Somehow that news made its way back to New Zealand, and Piki contacted me and were like, We hear you're a Kiwi trying to start screenwriting. They've got a huge book, and they keep tabs. I was like, I am, and I'm writing a script for you, so just wait there. They waited, I sent it, and then they immediately were like, We want to make it, and we have a director in mind.

Cue Jo, who came in at the next meeting. I really love Piki Films and it just felt so unbelievable. It was the first feature I wrote, and it was too easy. I'm ready for everything to get [way worse]. Then the four of usme, Morgan, [Carty], Josort of cracked away at it for a while, and then off we went.

Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: I was doing some work with Piki on something else, another project, and they sent me the script. I was like, This is amazing. I want to make this film straight away. The girls, these amazing characters that Maddie had created, they just jumped off the page. Even though it was [in the] early draft stage, it had so much potential.

Maddie, this felt topical to me in America with what's been going on in the US the last couple of years, like with the Supreme Court, but what was the spark for you that made you want to write this?

Maddie Dai: I had a great-great-grandfather imprisoned on an island in the harbor in the middle of my city. I read a book about that, Live Bodies by Maurice Gee, a New Zealand writer, and just became super interested, especially when I found out that there was this guy, a Chinese leper, who was also on an island and isolated from everyone else. [I was] just thinking about these ways in which people are pushed to the fringes when they're vulnerable because they're considered dangerous. [It] just felt like something that just continues, as you say, to this day. I think everyone can resonate with that on some level.

The more I got digging into New Zealand history, I also found out that The Fertility of the Unfit was a real document written by a New Zealand politician, and eugenics had some popular support [there] at the early part of the 20th century, as it did in lots of different parts of the British Empire. Then, the Mazengarb Report, which is also referenced, was this book that was sent out to every household in New Zealand, and there was a real moral hysteria panic about how dangerous young women were now that there were working mothers and contraception and women feeling entitled to actively pursue sex with men. That happened the year before the film is set. Those big whirling historical things and New Zealand's inquiry into state care inform the story, even though it's fictional.

Josephine and Morgan, was there a specific personal inroad that made you both want to be involved?

Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: My dad was raised in those state care schools. He was a warden of the state and he was raised in boys' homes that were run by the government, so that was my personal injust having heard what my dad had gone through, talking to him a lot about it, and feeling the repercussions of that through my family. And when we were in pre-production, the abortion law was overturned in the States, and that really lit a fire in me to tell this story. Even though it's period, I was like, The same thing is happening over and over and over again. People are trying to control our bodies. I felt very motivated when that happened. I was like, Right, we're f***ing doing this, and it's going to be amazing.

Morgan Waru: And like Maddie said, we [at Piki Films} just responded to the script straight away. For me, I was just so drawn to these young women. I felt like we don't really get to see teenage girls in this way all the time, especially in this period. They're just trying to be normal young women and have friendships and be slightly disinterested in this ideology that's being exacted upon them. It was just so hilarious and it just felt so true to the experience of being a teenage girl, set in this context that Maddie had woven around [the idea that] young women are dangerous and should be controlled. That felt like a message that resonates today.

I love how you start by painting how ridiculous this whole thing is, the control aspect and the religious aspect, and then you kind of flip a switch and it becomes so scary to see what's in store for these girls. Can you talk about how you chose to structure the tone of the film that way?

Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: It was challenging, I'll admit that. From a directorial point of view, it was really hard navigating the humor, but then the seriousness of what's happening to them, because there's only so far I feel that you can joke about that. I had to be really careful with where the humor was placed because we needed humor in the film. We need humor to invite people in and make the film feel accessible, but there's also this really heavy stuff that's happening, and I don't feel like you can be too laissez-faire with that subject matter. Not at this point in time and where we're at in history.

It [took] a lot of talking with the actors, and I think one of the ways we navigated that with the comedy was that the characters couldn't ever know they were funny. If the actor was going for the joke, then it didn't work and it didn't sell, and it either ended up on the cutting room floor or we would change it in rehearsal or on the day of shoot. The humor always had to come from the characterfrom a really true and authentic placeto balance those two tonal worlds and try and make sure that when we did shift gears, it wasn't too much of a whiplash situation.

Maddie Dai: And I think that there are just some funny or strange things about the ideology. Like, the idea of men having this power to ruin their lives, but also, our main plan is to get married. Theyre like, What is going on? Them balancing all these ideas that feel really foreign to them was definitely my experience of growing up going to Catholic schools. Sometimes I was like, Have they not updated the source material? I'm not relating to this fella.

I want to ask about the character of the Matron in general. She starts off seeming like a clear villain. By the end, I saw her as almost one of the worst possible futures for the main charactersto become someone like her. Its a tragic story. Was that always the approach with that character or was that something that you found as you all were making it?

Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: One hundred percent, that was always there, and it was really important that it stayed there. It was important that we were able to have compassion for her, too, and find her funny, because otherwise she just becomes quite flat and one note and shes always doing the same thing or yelling over and over again. We also wanted to find little moments of joy for her, like when she makes the class laugh and she doesn't tell them off. She just kind of sits in that little moment of power. But that's all she does, really. She sits in different moments of power, but the tragedy is she doesn't have any, and she never has had any power. She's been puppeted by these other characters.

Maddie Dai: The film's set more than 100 years after New Zealand was first colonized. [Its] not a period that I felt like I learned huge amounts about, but it's a point where a lot of the ideology that the Brits had brought over was completely embedded [not just] in the institutions and the landscape and the law, but also in the people. She is institutionalized and then she is both a victim and a perpetrator. I think [it] is interesting for us to think about things in more complicated terms, now that we all have varying degrees of power and privilege and [are] implicit in certain ways and allies in others.

How did you all find these leads? The Matron is incredible, and the three main girls are amazing.

Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: Erana James was kind of an obvious choice for me after watching The Wilds. She had some scenes and some moments in it where it felt like all the performance had fallen away and she was just fully embodying this character and really playing. You can see when an actor's having fun on set because magic starts to happen, and I noticed that a lot with her.

Nathalie, who plays Lou, she's Australian. We auditioned her a number of times, actually. What got her over the line for me was [that] I got her to improv coming out to her parents, and she made it really funny and quite kooky and I thought that's a perfect quality for her character.

[With] Manaia Hall, who plays Daisy, we auditioned across the countryit took a very long timeand she self-taped without telling her parents. Then, she recalled without telling her parents. She did it all online. She was 13. In the end, we were like, We want you to come to Auckland and meet us and do your final audition, and she had to finally tell her parents that she'd been auditioning for a film and there were people in Auckland that wanted to meet her. [It] sounded probably quite dodgy, but as it turned out, we were fine.

And Rima Te Wiata is an icon here, so [she was] just an obvious choice, really. The rest of the girls were all local kids. They had never acted before. They were just teenagers from Christchurch where we were shooting.

When it came to Nellie, Daisy, and Louisa, how much work did it take to get their dynamic as solid as it ended up being in the film? They play off of one another so beautifully throughout the entire thing.

Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: I'm so happy to hear that. We didn't have a long rehearsal process at all, which was actually quite terrifying to me. I knew I had to get them to seem like they'd known each other most of their lives in a very short amount of time. We were always rehearsing together off-set or out of the job. I would encourage them to go out together. Particularly [with] Lou and Nellie, I would tell them, Your homework tonight is to go and have dinner together and have a couple of glasses of wine. They're obviously older than they are in the film. I was like, Just get to know each other. You have to hang out and chat, and it sort of naturally started happening.

We played a lot of games together--trust games, reallyand I got them really involved in their characters and how they would relate to each other. We did a lot of improvisation around the scenes for rehearsal, and we never actually rehearsed the scenes that were in the script. I'm not a huge fan of that, because I get worried it's going to get mechanical or robotic in terms of performance. We did a lot of improv, and it was all the stuff that is in between the scenes in the script. The things we don't seewe would imagine and improvise those scenes.

I also have a little trick that I do sometimes where I get them to write each other letters as their characters, and I give them all $20 and I say, Go to a shop as your character and buy a gift for that other character as your character. For one of our rehearsals, they just read the letters to each other as their characters and exchanged gifts.

Congratulations on getting to South by Southwest. That seems like such an accomplishment for both of your first features. As someone who selfishly wants to see this in theaters here, what are your hopes for the journey that this film will take after the festival?

Maddie Dai: As many people seeing it [as possible] would be great. I guess it feels like in many ways its for young women, but I hope that a real range of people see it. Ive watched so much stuff about men and loved lots of it, and that would be really fun.

Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: I'm agreeing with everything you're saying, actually, especially [with] the men. I hope they withhold their judgment or [that they] don't think that it's for them, because it's actually for everyone. It's a story about outsiders and people on the fringes, and that still stands regardless of your gender. That's something that I'm really hoping--that people can look past the binary of male and female and just come and watch a really cool story about friendship and f*** the system, basically.

Morgan Waru: I think that there is an audience for this film, and I think you sort of touched on it that there's a level of absurdity in this film, which is hilarious, but some ideas seem absurd until they're dangerous. That feels quite timely.

Maddie you were in the room on Our Flag Means Death season two.I was so to see that it didn't get picked up. Did you have any sense or hopes of what the next season might be that you can talk about?

Maddie Dai: I had lots of hopes, and we did have senses in the room for sure. Big plans. I mean, huge plans. Thats the crazy thing about a pirate show. Youre like, Let's take it to every corner of the Seven Seas. I'm blanking on specifics except the very ending, which I feel like is not really mine to give away.

That room was so fun. You just literally get to sit around talking about pirates kiss[ing]. It was a really queer, non-binary, [and] trans room, and what a hoot. I just did 10 weeks, but they were a blast. I'm sad, like many, that it didn't get renewed, but so it goes. Its a tough industry. You can't take anything for granted, really.

We Were Dangerous follows a misfit trio determined to rally against the system in 1950s New Zealand. This story reminds us that the sovereignty over womens bodies has long been threatened, but in many cases won, through the power of female solidarity.

Check back for our interview with We Were Dangerous cast members Erana James and Rima Te Wiata.

We Were Dangerous premiered at South by Southwest as part of the festivals Narrative Feature Competition.

We Were Dangerous is a drama film about two girls who escape a delinquent center for girls in New Zealand only to be captured and sent to a remote island to continue their punishment. When the two meet a third girl, they develop a rebellious friendship as they face off with a woman whose faith may lead to a troubling outcome.

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We Were Dangerous Filmmakers On Their Hilarious Yet Tense New Zealand Period Drama - Screen Rant