November 13th 1990 – While the date may not be as clear in everyone’s minds in New Zealand as September 11th the tragedy of the events are.

Dunedin people of the time will never forget this tragedy and most knew someone involved or affected by the events.

I personally like many were closely tuned to media reports as the events unfolded.

My interests through my training and tactical Close Quarters Battle instructing career were focused on how the situation would be handled.

This was something that had not been planned or trained for to any extensive degree in the general location.

I knew police involved in the operation and locals as well as friends of locals and emergency medical personnel that had to deal with this tragedy.

I can remember a friend from the hospital thinking when the call came in that this was the annual major exercise that they were expecting.

Then there were the after reports of bravery, tactical errors and the rumours and speculation as to why this had happened and what had triggered the event and who had blame and was responsible.

Everyone knew someone and opinions were ripe but also everyone felt saddened by what had happened and it truly affected the city of Dunedin.

Since that fateful day I have continued to travel extensively instructing close combat and have been present on several occasions when the subject topic has been mass murders and the Aramoana tragedy has been included in these operational post-mortems.

Being a local I was very interested in this particular subject matter and the opinions of international tactical operators and experts on this particular massacre.

I am a firm believer that history cannot be rewritten but accounts of events can be accurately recorded and can make everyone more aware and prepared and hopefully reduce the chances of the reoccurrence of such situations.

I hoped that the terrible events of Aramoana would not be swept under the carpet especially the tactic errors that occur in any high-risk unpredictable situation.

I also thought that there are many lessons that could be learnt on how average citizens could recognise signs of people around them that were suffering from mental Illness or were being victimised because of there appearance non main stream ways of life or unusual actions or reactions.

We have seen more people suffering from mental Illness released into the general population since the closure of psychiatric institutions such as Cherry Farm hospital not far from Dunedin and the effects on both the mentally Ill and the citizens.

I have seen the problems while training instructing and consulting worldwide with emotionally disturbed people and how in some situations the individuals themselves and the situation they are in as well as the way they are treated by people around them and the authorities are recipes for disaster.

I have a very close friend and colleague in the US that has written a textbook on high school siege prevention and intervention that I have discussed the Aramoana tragedy with as well as a UK colleague and I have taken them both to Aramoana to see first hand the environment where the tragic events took place.

I thought that even though in some peoples minds the events should not be made into a movie, they should as this is our history and the fact of the matter is it happened and the facts re the human bravery resourcefulness down right willingness to go to the assistance of others under extreme danger should be told.

I had previously watched another NZ movie on another South Island tragedy titled Bad Blood, which I highly rated for its rugged reality and hoped Out of the Blue, would be an as good if not better account of a real life story.

I knew to be accurate and do justice to the realities of the tragedy there would also have to be inclusion of human error.

When I heard that the movie was going to be made I thought more than enough time had passed and if this movie was done right it would truly outline a very real and tragic part of our history and lessons could be learnt and people truly would be more aware and informed by being privy to the experience.

I then heard from friends that later worked on the set and had roles in the movie of the fact that the movie would be a reality.

I later spoke to them of their opinions of the film and they said it was a very real and powerful accurate and well thought out depiction of a terrible and tragic time and events in NZ history.

I then emailed Out of the Blue Director and Co Writer Robert Sarkies and asked if I could interview him for fight times and he promptly replied and agreed but suggested I attend the media viewing of Out of the Blue before it was publicly released and before I interviewed him

I attended the media screening and the following is my personal opinion of the movie.

First impression of the people and location is how real and every day it was and nothing like many movies of mass destruction with their movie star looks and far from real sets and locations.

This was our place and our people just as they are and were back then in their seaside environment.

The look at individuals lives on the day including David Gray’s was very normal and very real and gave everyone an insight into the individuals and their way’s of life.

The build up to the initiation of the massacre was one of both tolerance and understanding of David Gray and on the other hand a lack of tolerance of his situation and state of mind.

He was accepted by the community generally and certainly not recognised as an immediate threat.

He was not portrayed as a victim to a major extend but one could identify he was given some adverse attention whether it be in jest or anger.

The initial sense of the situation to me personally of David Gray leading up to the tragedy was that he was becoming more introverted and recluse and as such was less tolerant and less tolerated.

This movie did not have to go to great lengths prior to for you to get a real understanding of the people place and situation, as it was obvious and understandable.

When David Gray shot dead Gary Holden you were glued to the screen and your seat and the sound of the rifle fire was not that frightening unlike many shoot out movies.

It was likely with the clear lead up events and deteriating situation and when the first shots rang out they were not the big bangs that many may have expected.

The result was so life like and you could have heard a pin drop in the theatre and that was the tone for the entire movie.

The entire movie is very real and the cast could have been any locals in any beach settlement anywhere in New Zealand.

They were definitely not your super movie stars in appearance but were really your real life citizen’s and their actions were not like bid drama heroics.

These peoples story was told as it happened and that was very apparent and in my opinion done great justice to the truth of the matter.

There were some very sad and frightening moments before the movie ended and the human aspects were very real and believable.

I do not want to go into any further details of the movie, as you really need to see it for yourself.

I left the movie happy that the story had been well told and that the events done justice and the characters had been portrayed with realism and the individual performances were incredible.

This is a brilliant honest and careful record of tragedy under adversity.

Yes there is killing and yes the life and death scenes are very real but they have been extremely carefully depicted in a real life masterpiece.

A very quiet audience deep in thought and reflection left that theatre, there were none of your hyped movie goers that can be found leaving action or martial arts movies.

I can honestly say it is the most real movie I have ever seen depicting a real life tragedy of such a nature and it was with these impressions I conducted the following interview with Out of the Blue Director and Co writer Robert Sarkies.

Q) Where were you born?

A) I was born in Dunedin and went to Kaikorai valley high school.

Q) Did you come from a family involved in TV or Movies?

A) No I was the first to get involved with the movie industry and then my brother Duncan became involved when he co wrote Scarfies with me.

My dad was a telecom technician and my Mum worked at Cadburys.

Q) When did you get started making movies?

A) I begun making films when I was as young as eight and often entered them in children’s film competitions.

I made three short films when I was in my twenties and when I got into my thirties I thought it was time to start making features.

Q) Had you ever made films prior to out of the blue on real life subjects and situations?

A) No in fact the prior short films I had made were more fantasy and whimsical and violent films are something I have never found particularly attractive.

I’m certainly not interested in senseless violence type action films but what attracted me to this story was not really the action or the physical violence that was inherent in some scenes but the greater human aspects that happened to people and the stories of what they done.

I thought very carefully as a filmmaker of the inherent violence in some scenes as you walk a fine line when you make a film of this kind of subject matter between depicting and encouraging.

Q) So when and why did you decide to make this movie.

A) I was living in Dunedin at the time of the tragedy and thinking there was probably an amazing feature film that could be made but it probably never would be made as the subject matter just cut to close to the bone for people in Aramoana Port Chalmers and Dunedin.

Fifteen years on I was shown a book by the producers I subsequently worked with: Bill O’Brien’s book Aramoana 22 hours of terror.

I read it and was just amazed at the detail that I had no idea about.

It was an amazing story and I couldn’t help being intrigued about David Gray, not only what would lead some one to do this which to me wasn’t so interesting but how would someone feel once they had done it.

I was fascinated by the idea that it was a whole community that had to react to an extreme situation.

The film and the book contains frequent accounts of not major acts of heroism but what I call gentle heroism.

Heroism of ordinary people reacting to an extraordinary thing that was happening.

Reacting as human beings caring for each other or if there wasn’t time to care for each other just getting out of there.

Doing what they had to do in the situation that was developing that they didn’t have an over all comprehension of.

I was definitely interested in the police element of the story and in the case of the first response officers they were essentially locals.

Stu Guthrie had a crib in Aramoana and Nick Harvey new a lot of the people that were involved and other officers who had direct connections into that community.

The appeal of the police in the story to me was being able to tell a story that was not your usual Cop type story.

What interested me about the police story was the humanity of the police, what would it be like to be a local cop in a small town to be faced with not only the horrendous situation but people you know and care for to be actually dieing in front of you.

It would be an interesting dilemma because you are trained to be the police officer but you would be feeling emotions because you actually know these people.

I’m not a soldier and I would like to ask soldiers if it is easier to do what you are trained to do in a foreign land where you can just focus on your job and be a soldier.

With these police officers they did have some training being on the armed offenders squad but it was hard to do their job dispassionately because they knew so many of the victims were involved.

Q) After reading Bill O’Brien’s book and doing your research do you think his book was accurate.

A) I thought Bills book was mostly accurate but somewhat protective of the police story.

The police were criticised at the time as to why it took twenty hours to bring this situation under control and I think Bill makes a pretty reasonable argument in his book that this wasn’t an ordinary situation for these officers.

For one you have a killer on the loose that has shown he was completely with out mercy and he was better armed than all of the first response officers put together.

They had a set of firing orders and very stringent rules with those firing orders that prevented them from easily bringing him down.

I cant imagine what it would be like to be in a situation where you have to call for someone to put their weapon down knowing very well that by calling out that David could shoot how ever many bullets from his semi auto norinco while they would have a single shot.

I do feel Bill was being somewhat protective of the police in the book, telling the police side of the story was a big part of his motivation in writing the book which is after all sub titled “the police inside story”. I think Bill acutely represented what happened at Aramoana, however may have put a somewhat more positive spin on some things that happened.

Bill knew what it was like to be a cop and I tried to put myself into the shoes of those guys that were in the field at Aramoana and depict what it would have been like for them.  I know some of those guys were shit scared.

I mean they had inadequate training, inadequate weapons and inadequate radios and under those circumstances I think they did pretty well.

Yes there were some mistakes made and undoubtedly in my mind the death of Stu Guthrie was avoidable.

He may have pushed in a little too quickly but his reasons for doing so were the most honourable in the world.

He was there to protect his community and he had time pressure on him with the fading light forcing him to act quickly.

I know that Aramoana has certainly changed the way some aspects of police procedures are handled by talking to these guys and the Aramoana tragedy is used as part of their training.

I believe the fundamentals of police discharging their firearms has changed post Aramoana.

In the fifteen years since Aramoana there have been incidents of police being more proactive with the use of firearms and this has been since the death and as a result of one of their own officers being gunned down at Aramoana.

Q) Once you decided to make the movie what stages did you have to take?

A) We treaded pretty carefully initially and the first stage was to read the book and see what a filmic story could be made from the book.

My instincts from reading the book was that this was a story of a community I didn’t want to see a cop story or a David Gray story, however those were elements of a wider story of how a community acted under crisis.

The next and important thing was myself and the writer Graeme Tetley renting a crib at Aramoana and speaking to as many people as we could about their experiences.

Bill was a major help with this as he had kept in touch with many of the people he had interviewed fifteen years earlier.

So we spoke to most of the people that are depicted in detail who were still alive but could not interview everyone, there were hundreds of people involved in this event so we had to decide who were the most important people to talk to. Whose stories we were most interested in and who was prepared to talk with us. It was very interesting because all these people had done interviews with the police and Bill fifteen years earlier and fifteen years on we were getting a slightly different version of the story.

A version that was more reflective and some times more truthful and other times may be not.

Sometimes fifteen years on people decide what their story is and they stick with it.

But what often happened fifteen years on was that people recalled details that were perhaps too painful for them to recall at the time.

It was not the big events that we were looking for it was the smaller human details that could make this film feel experiential.

Q) Did the locals know when you rented a crib in 2004 at Aramoana that you were going to make the movie?

A) We told everyone that we met that we were there to research the movie.

We really didn’t know at this stage in July 2004 if the movie would actually be made as movies cost millions of dollars to make.

Q) Did you meet with much resistance while living at Aramoana and researching the movie?

A) No as Bill was guiding us and had met with the people and informed them of what we were doing prior to us meeting them.

Some of them I think may have been initially suspicious about meeting us but when they did meet us they became relaxed once they trusted that we were not there to distort their stories.

We were trying to find a certain truth in the overall story and truth is a funny word as everyone has his or her own version of the truth.

Our research involved listening to over twenty peoples truths and they all had different perspectives and just try and figure out with out imposing our own ideas.

Q) Did you have to meet with friends or family members of the deceased to get their stories?

A) We did meet with some and there were others we did not need to meet with or they did not want to meet with us. Bills book and the research that went into his book as well as our research provided much of what we needed to know.

In some cases like with David Gray there was no need to interview family members, as there was enough information from interviews done fifteen years earlier.

However I did meet with a woman who was a friend of David Grays and someone that was concerned a film might be made that just demonised him.

She was someone who saw him as a real person, which of course he was, not some generic monster.

It was very important to her that we portrayed his character in a way that reflected something of the truth of that man.

We cant forget we don’t know David Gray we can only look at clues from how he lived and what he read and perhaps what his medial problems were that led to him getting to that stage.

We tried to with David Gray and all the characters portray them truthfully and with out an agenda.

Q) Were the general police helpful with information and assistance?

A) Yes the police were fantastic and again it probably helped that we were working through Bill as the police trusted Bill and he trusted us and therefore the police trusted us to.

The policed showed us a lot of material as well as telling us their stories and by providing period props.

It was an extraordinary film to shoot as we often had police and victims that were actually there on the day would on set as we filmed scenes.

This helped make it one of the most real films you would see and I can’t take all the credit for that and wouldn’t want to.

I feel the credit for that goes to the fact that it’s a real story and the fact the people that were in that real story were often with us onset.

I could turn to a policeman and say was it like that and get a reply yep pretty close.

Q) The decision to film much of the movie at Long Beach was that solely out of respect to the residents.

A) That was only part of the reason but logistically it just made sense not to do most of the filming at Aramoana.

The most obvious reason was that the whole area around David Grays crib site had changed in the last sixteen years and there was now an adobe cottage on the site of David Grays crib and another quite grand wooden house on the site of the Holden house.

The roads were now paved and the area was a bit more gentrified but just a few bays along was Long Beach which I think is now quite similar to what Aramoana was then.

We found a cul-de-sac sack at the end of Beach road Long Beach and extended the road past the cul-de-sac, making sure that every detail of what we built along that road including the houses, the trees, even the angle of the road itself matched the reality of Aramoana at that time.

I know from the reaction I got when members of the police visited that set that was one of being very spooky because David Grays crib and the area around it were practically identical because we matched it from plans and scene photographs and from talking to the police that were actually there.

Q) How did you decide on your crew to make this film?

A) I wanted to get people involved that were interested in the story and that were passionate about telling it accurately.

People that wanted to push the boundaries of film making a little bit.

We certainly didn’t want to make anything that was arty or wanky or a straight doco drama.

It needed to have artfulness to it and indeed a beauty to offset the ugliness.

My director of photography was decided after chatting to a few other directors and this guy Greig Fraser was suggested and I looked up his web site and saw some of the most beautiful photography I had ever seen.

I emailed him in Australia told him who I was and that I had this project and then sent him the script and he couldn’t believe this story was true.

Within a week I was in Sydney and he was signed.

Phil Ivey was our production designer and he is a fabulous production designer and it was he and his attention to detail that ensured Gunner and Bomber were hired to handle the weapons and special effects.

I think Phil waited to see if Gunner was available before he signed on himself.

It wasn’t a matter of will Gunner be alright for this it was a matter of fact that he is the best in NZ and I would argue the world, those guys were really amazing.

It was very important to me that we did our best to get all the details right and the easy part of that was the armoury right by matching the weapons.

The harder part is getting the actions right of the people that use those weapons up to speed.

Sometimes you are dealing with people that have never even handled a firearm before unlike Bomber with a military background.

We did an amazing exercise with actors portraying cops that were taken out with police special tactics group who walked and talked us through all the weapons that they would have had at the time.

They showed us the difficulties of using them and gave us a full mornings training that ended with a tactical exercise where our actors had to basically pretend they were being stalked.

It put the actors immediately in the mindset of what it would be like to be the hunter and the hunted and it was incredibly generous of these guys to do this for us.

Q) Tell us about the gunshots and the sound of gunfire in the film.

A) With the gunshots it was really important to me that these weren’t Hollywood sounding guns.

There was lots of balance to be found here, as the sound of a rifle firing especially if it’s a little distant isn’t that impressive.

In reality one of the reasons some people got shot was simply that they didn’t know that there was shooting going on at Aramoana.

The event happened just after Guy Fawkes and the sounds could easily be mistaken for fireworks.

I wanted to reflect something of the reality of guns in the way we handled the sound of them.

We used actual recordings of the weapons firing but sometimes augmented that with additional sounds (other gun shots or explosions) and reverberation effects to mimic the sound those gunshots would make in that location. What I wanted to avoid with the sound was the Hollywood gunshot, like you said before the big boom that makes you jump out of your seat.

Q) You obviously put considerable attention to detail into the building of the set.

A) Yes with Gary Holden’s house, which is the house that burns, Phil Ivey the production designer got the plans from the council for the house and combined with scene photographs figured out where Gary had deviated from the plans and mimicked that.

We had incredible moments in the production of the film like when Chiquita Holden one of the children that survived the tragedy came and looked through the set.

She found herself now in her twenties looking through an exact replica of her child hood home that had been burnt to the ground when she was nine.

She came and saw it and felt it was like going back there and very spooky but she helped us chose the furniture so it matched with what was there at the time.

So partly because of Phil and his team and partly because of the assistance received from people that had been there the reality was achieved.

Chiquita Holden not only assisted by advising on the furnishing of the home but also by telling Georgia Fabish who played her in the movie details of her Dad and sister and how they got along and of other characters.

Chiquita had very little to gain from helping us and the only reason that she helped us was because she wanted the memory of her father and her family to be accurate when her children or grandchildren saw the film.

No one was openly over joyed that we were making this movie and I can understand that as its bringing up a painful time in their lives again but almost everyone that agreed to help us did so because they thought we should be reflecting the truth.

Q) The appearance of the Characters especially David Gray both when he was alive and after he had been shot was very realistic could you tell us how this was achieved.

A) The make up particularly for David Gray was done by Weta workshop from Wellington who are well known for their work in Lord of the Rings and many other films.

In general I didn’t want to depict wounds in a graphic way and I wanted to be quite restrained in the way we depicted some of the murders themselves particularly of children for obvious reasons.

But with the killing of David Gray I thought it important to both be accurate and also to be quite visual.

This is the most graphic death depicted in the film and it needed to be as the spirit of David Gray need to be purged at the end.  I felt his actions needed to have consequences that were both painful and painfully real.

That whole scene kind of spooked us all because the actor that played David Gray Matthew Sunderland was like he was kind of possessed doing that scene.

He totally through himself into his role and I think it was pretty amazing, a stunning performance.

We worked together but I must give him full credit for creating some thing amazing.

He’s really the type of actor that immerses himself in a role like with the scene where you saw him die.

I had to do a second take but I didn’t want to do a third because it almost felt dangerous.

Q) Could you tell us about the other lead actors?

A) I think that Karl Urban done a great job and it was one of his best performances, probably because it was so real.

The Challenge for Karl was to not play the action hero in fact the character that he played was a flawed hero.

He makes some big mistakes in the film and suffers the consequences really feeling a certain amount of guilt.

The thing that was inspiring for Karl was meeting the real life Nick Harvey and being shown all around the set by him.

Nick showed Karl and the other first response cops where things actually would have happened and he couldn’t believe just how real and accurate the set was and he too found it very spooky.

Sometimes Nick was on set when Karl was doing his performance and I know those times were the most nerve racking for Karl having the real guy watching him.

Lois Lawn as Helen Dickson had a major role and was pretty amazing as she relived the real life heroism that Helen Dickson had shown under extreme danger and difficulty.

Georgina Fabish is just a stunning actor that I didn’t have to treat like a kid, who much like the adult actors you could talk to about the themes of the story and her characterisation in very adult terms. She got to meet and hang out with Chiquita Holden and she felt a weight of responsibility depicting this real person.

But for an eleven year old to allow herself to again just go there and to pretend to experience that kind of event was incredibly scary.

Her mum was always there on set and I think of any actor child or adult they get into it because they like to role-play.

You make this sort of material palatable especially when kids are involved by keeping it in the realm of play.

They are aware that it’s a real event but when the cameras are rolling they are pretending and kids love to pretend.

Q) Could you tell us if there are any scenes or details that you did not include that you would have liked to include?

A) There were elements of heroism in the police story that could have been included in more detail like the whole story around the rescue of Chris Cole and the two officers who rescued him. This was a moment of extraordinary heroism that had to be brushed over in the film in order to keep it in around a hundred minutes.

It was done because we had to keep progressing the narrative of the film but what those guys did was pretty amazing.

It was two guys that put themselves at risk not once but twice to rescue Chris Cole then to help rescue Stacey Percy.

I think a film by its nature has to have a focus and some of the great things that did happen that night did fall by the way side in making the film.

I don’t regret that but I hope when those concerned see the film they know that their actions were just as heroic as others.

Q) Did you think any of the support actors stood out and may have futures in the industry?

A) I think all the kids were pretty stunning and Tandy Wright as Julie Anne Bryson gave a gut wrenchingly truthful performance that any mother will relate to.

I met Julie Anne Bryson and she is probably the most inspiring and most positive person I have ever met.

The involvement of the real people was the incredible part of telling this story and put a huge weight of responsibility on my shoulders.

I wasn’t only a director that had to make sure I was making a film that was palatable for audiences but also had to ensure it was truthful to the facts of the story and I had a special responsibility to those who shared their stories with us.

It made it very obvious to me at an early stage that the way to satisfy all those responsibilities was to make the film as real as it could possibly be.

Q) I have heard you were very respectful of people and business that did not want to be identified in the film.

A) Yes you have to be respectful of people and what they want.

It will be interesting to see how the gun lobby people perceive this film.

I again didn’t come at the material with any agenda, we certainly didn’t decide to write an anti gun film.

I’m sure the gun lobby would agree you don’t want the Davis Grays of the world armed with the type of semi automatic he possessed.

By staying to true to the facts of the story and not embellishing it too much inevitably most people will judge David Gray and not his weapons.

However I feel if people like that have access to these types of weapons that are purely designed for killing people then as society we are only looking for trouble.

Q) What kind of effect did making this movie have on your self and the cast and crew?

A) It was exhausting and everyday on set we seemed to be doing massive emotional scenes and it was especially for the cast a very exhausting film to shoot because they had to go there emotionally take after take.

For me as director I had to be a little more distant as I had to turn this real event into a constructive story.

I didn’t always have to immerse myself in the emotions and if I had to have I would just be a wreck right now, it’s been a long journey.

Q) How long did it take to make this film?

A) We filmed it February March taking seven weeks and we cut it in April May and we did the sound in June July and August and it was finished August 31st this year.

Q) What is your future plans and what type of films would you like to make?

A) Right at this point what I would like to do is this big children’s fantasy film

that I have been writing with my brother over the past few years.

Probably want to do that because it is about as far away from the Aramoana story as you can get.

The sorts of films I hope to make are films with good stories.

Q) Do you ever think you will make another film like Out of the Blue?

A) I doubt I will ever make another film like this, I don’t know its hard to know isn’t it.

This has been an incredible experience and the fact that this is a real event has made me see it as all that more intense and I think that intensity was seen on film.

I wouldn’t do another massacre movie but I certainly would do another film based on a real life event, as often the truth is stranger than fiction.

Q) Did you have difficulty in getting finance and investors to make this film?

A) Surprisingly not. The investors were Government agencies such as the New Zealand Film Commission and New Zealand on Air who have a mandate to reflect New Zealand culture and history in the work they fund.

They took the risk seeing it could be controversial but after they had seen what we had written they could see that this was an important story to tell and that it was not a totally negative story either.

The journey from reading the book to attending the premier tomorrow has been under two years.

Q) Tell us about Toronto.

A) It’s a nice place and the reality is it’s a big film festival with over 350 films competing for attention.

It is very difficult to get much attention for a smaller film like this and I think the film did surprisingly well there and the audience thought it was very good and emotional.

We have had some US offers they’re for the movie and it is likely it will be shown in US cinemas or at very least on DVD.

I hope this film can be widely seen after all as a filmmaker you make films because you want people to see them.

I think this story is relevant to other countries as well, as these sorts of events don’t just happen in New Zealand.

They usually don’t happen in New Zealand, which is what makes this story so incongruous.  The themes of the film are universal and I hope that the film can be widely seen all over the world.

Q) Will it be released in Australia?

A) I don’t know I don’t have much say in that matter but we do have an Australian distributor and they will probably wait and see how it goes here first.

I thin k if it goes gang busters here they might release it in Australia and I think they should because Australia has had is Port Arthur massacre and other tragedies and there is as much for them to learn from the film as us.

It should be released on DVD in NZ middle of next year.

Q) How would you describe the experience of watching this film?

A) I know its going to knock some people about as its pretty intense and I have had more than one person write to me and say after they have seen it and these are cynical journalist types that have said cant say I like it but it made me want to go home and hug my children.

Q) Tell us about the special effects people that done such a realistic job.

A) We could not have made this film with out Gunner and Bomber.

We could not have made this film on the budget we did with out those guys.

We had a special affects team of two people Gunner and Bomber.

We were repeatedly setting a house on fire dousing it setting it on fire and re-dousing it for each take.

This is some thing you would have a crew of fifteen for in the US.

Almost everything you see in the film was filmed live with a camera.

When there was a fire in the film except for one wide shot of Aramoana where there was a small fire in the film that was computer generated was filmed live with a camera.

Usually we had about 30 seconds to get our shot before they had to douse it so the whole set did not go up inflames.

Gunner and Bomber were amazing with there knowledge of weapons and there use as well as special effects and Bombers role as a armed offenders officer that brought Gray down in the end was very convincing.

Q) Have you been to film school or are you self-taught.

A) Yes I’m self-taught; filmmaking is a very practical business. Yes you can go to film school but the very best people at film school would have made films regardless of if they had gone there or not.

You need to be in an environment to practise your craft.

I grew up at a time when we really didn’t have film schools in this country and I don’t regret that at all.

It just means I was forced to follow my own instincts rather than be influenced by a tutor and learn by doing, the best way.

I thank you sincerely Mr Sarkies for making an amazing film and for giving me this honest and informative interview.

I recommend everyone that wants to witness the most realistic movie depicting real people and their stories in a real life tragedy should make sure they see Out of the Blue.