Under the Mountain.

The year was 1979. I was nine years old. My father gave my brother and me a book. It was called Under the Mountain, and it was set in the city we lived in. We both read it - devoured it more like - and were transported to the mysterious and dangerous world beneath our own. It's the story of twins Rachel and Theo, and the enigmatic Mr Jones, who fight the slimy, creepy Wilberforces who sleep beneath Auckland's volcanoes and plan to take over the world. They must harness the power of their twin-ness to triumph.

I loved it. I yearned for an adventure to happen to me.


Then, shortly after, I was given the opportunity to audition for the part of Rachel in the TV series. My dream come true! Drama was my strong suit at school, and I longed to be on TV, convinced that child actors in NZ were terrible and I was just the girl to make it all better. I was sure to get the part, after all, I had the right name and everything! Alas, it was not to be. My brother Jonathan, three years older, also auditioned, and along with our friend Sarah, we had to come up with a mimed scenario to show off our acting talents. I had some vague idea about a kid being bullied on the way to school, but it was vetoed in favour of a gunfight. None of us got the parts, but Sarah later went on to star in another New Zealand children's TV classic, Children of the Dog Star. My brother went on to play Theo in the Radio New Zealand version. I went on to... write books instead.

Under the Mountain, the TV series, spooked a generation of NZ kids.

But that's not all my brother went on to do. He has now directed the feature film of Under the Mountain, which premieres this Saturday night in Auckland and which opens nationwide on Thursday the 10th. Go and see it in the opening weekend if you can, to ensure it gets a long screen-life. Go and see it if you have read the book, or seen the TV series, or go and see it just because you can. See volcanoes erupt! See slimy creatures and a creepy old house on Lake Pupuke! See a great homegrown supernatural adventure.

Spare a thought for a nine-year old girl whose dream didn't quite come true but who is very glad that her brother's did.

Ooooooooo #2.

A visitation.

I was out of action for a couple of days this week past, having and recovering from minor surgery. I took Friday off work to stay in bed, but did a bad job of it. It's not often I get to be at home alone (child at creche) without feeling I should be doing something, and what do you know, with no guilt in my brain a new idea floated in unannounced.

Now, normally I would be very suspicious of a new idea while I'm at this stage of writing my novel, and frankly, I'd be a little worried too, as it would make me think my novel was going badly to be letting this usurper come a-knocking. But the big surprise was that it was an idea for a film, not a novel. And as I was having a guilt-free day of doing nothing, my mind was open and it just kept coming and coming in that delicious way that my (infrequent) ideas seem to do. It's one of those ideas that is so simple and obvious that it's unbelievable that it hasn't been done before. I even jumped on the internet to do a bit of research and all my ideas were backed up by real, live, juicy facts.

No, I'm not about to turn away from my job as a novelist and become a screenwriter - I have never really had those kinds of ambitions. But I would like to moonlight for a wee while. Indulge myself in tutu-ing away on something that has no deadline or expectation. I think I'll write a treatment and pass it on to friends and family in the film business and see what they make of it. If they think it has possibility, I might take it up as a project once the novel is finished. Or I might not. It depends how loud it gets.

I know how annoying it is to me when people say "oh, I had an idea for a novel, I might just tippy-tap away and see what happens," so I will acknowledge that screen-writing is every bit as hard as writing a novel and I shouldn't be taking it so lightly. I much prefer novel-writing for the control it gives me over my material. Screenwriters I know are bound by producers, film commissions, and that's just at the script stage; then there's the fact that in order for it to be fully realised, someone has to come along with pots of money, whereas if you write a good novel it is relatively inexpensive for a publisher to produce.

So it is not without a bite of humble pie that I am taking on my new little project, and acknowledgment that it's not as simple as it sounds. 

Swings and Musical Roundabouts.

After moaning in my previous post about how I had lost it, the muse came back to me the following day. As I say in the title, it is very much a case of 'swings and roundabouts', an expression I love. I had two major breakthroughs this week. The first, although seemingly a minor fact about my protagonist, will actually shape the whole novel and made everything fall into place with a resounding 'click'. It has sent me off on another research tangent, but one which I am thoroughly enjoying, and being resident at a university is certainly helping.

The second breakthrough arrived unexpectedly. I didn't even know I was looking for it. I was walking home from the bus last night listening to the soundtrack of The Piano, music by Michael Nyman. It was one of those gorgeously still and very cold Christchurch evenings, with clear indigo skies lined with pink. I relish that walk. It's only ten minutes, but it is my last chance to be fully inside my head and to mull over what I have been working on during the day, before I arrive home to bright lights and cosy air, the chaos of the child's dinner, bath, bed routine. I always have my iPod on and have lately been listening to music that feeds the mood of the novel. I hadn't listened to The Piano for a long time - perhaps years - and it brought back many a melancholy moment I had drawn out by listening to it. Maybe it is a coincidence that, like The Piano, some of my novel is set in colonial New Zealand, but perhaps Nyman's music so perfectly evokes that time, he had sent me there without my realising it.

The breakthrough was the end of the novel. I had been working with a vague idea of a resolution, but hadn't thought about it too much as I trusted that writing my way towards it would make it clearer. So I was surprised when it arrived unannounced in my head apropos of nothing. And it had quite a kick. I was a bit stunned and when I got home had to fend off the family while I wrote it down. It is one of those endings (I hope), that is surprising (it surprised me, for a start), but utterly inevitable. I hope.

Of course, in this crazy writing playground, the swings and roundabouts could just as easily come back sometime in the future and knock my wee ending out of the park.

Romance and growing older.

This is another post about a film, this time the film of a book that I loved when I read it in my early 20s - Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I came to Marquez through a stage 3 university paper, Post-colonial Lit at Auckland Univeristy in the early 90s. One Hundred Years of Solitude was taught by Sebastian Black, he of the tightly-buttoned paisley shirts and the bushy grey beard, which he often stroked as he pondered his own words. His enthusiasm for the work was infectious and I experienced the joy of loving a book because I not only read it but discussed the ideas it threw up. A boy I fancied sat in front of me and I gazed at the back of his head and nodded at his intelligent questions. Our lectures finished at 6pm, so as the days got shorter we would walk out together in the melancholy light and I would try and make him mine.

I read Love in the Time of Cholera after that, which was a much more straight-forward love story if I remember rightly. It appealed to my early 20s romanticism and idealism, when I was still falling in and out of love regularly and believed in all comsuming passion. On reflection, the boys that I fell in love with, especially those who spoke the language of love, were always the ones who ended up getting bored and moving on once the first spurt of romance (all midnight swims, drinking wine, sitting up all night talking) started to wane. They were in love with being in love (as I was, I guess). Still, exciting at the time and an essential part of growing up, but having now experienced more lasting love I can see that those affairs were nothing more than games really. Fun games, but games I'm happy to banish to my past.

So when I read Love in the Time of Cholera, with its great love that spans more than 50 years, I swooned over it in a way that I never would have over a Mills and Boon. After all, this wasn't just high romance, this was literature!

After seeing the film, I'm not quite so sure. I just wanted to give Florentino a slap, and Fermina for that matter, for falling in love before they've even spoken to each other, and believing they will die without each other. At least Fermina had the sense early on to see what it was: an illusion, with no grounding in real life. After Fermina rejects him, Florentino mends his broken heart by patiently waiting for Fermina's husband (a much more likeable character in the film) to die and by screwing more than 600 women. Oh the romance!

It's been so long since I read the book that I don't know whether the film was doing the book justice or whether it was just a bad film. I'd be interested to hear what others thought. The most interesting part for me was the relationship between Fermina and her doctor husband, but the film was marred by achingly bad make-up. The film-makers for some reason felt the need to give a young man a prosthetic face to make him look like a young Javier Bardem and it just looked awful. It was so distracting, as was the make-up of Giavanna Mezzogiorno as a young girl and as an old woman. It just looked like she had too much foundation on (one exception being her naked torso as a 70+ year old woman - now that looked realistic). For a review that sums up how I felt about the film, go here.

I'm going to have to read the book again to try and distinguish my feelings for it from the film, and to see if my jaded-but-content-in-love 37-year-old self still relates to it the way my wide-eyed 21-year-old self did. But I read Marquez's latest, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, about an old man in love with a young virgin, and to be honest, it left me cold and bit creeped out. I also think that the magical realism that I loved as a youngster (and tried to badly imitate in my own writing) is something that I've just grown out of.

My final thought on the book/film is that just like those young men that I had intense but short-lived affairs with in my youth (yes, including the boy from the lecture theatre), if Florentino had scored Fermina when they were young, he would have lost interest in her almost immediately and still ended up sleeping with 600 women. At least Fermina's husband gave up his mistress when she asked him to. I doubt Florentino would have done the same.

Truly, Madly, Deeply.

I found out over the weekend that Anthony Minghella has died of surgery complications following an operation for cancer. Minghella directed many films based on great books - The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley and Cold Mountain, and one of his next projects was The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen, a book I have been meaning to read.

But it is his first film that I will remember the most. I first saw Truly, Madly, Deeply at the Auckland International Film Festival in 1990 and I have seen it countless times since - one of the few films I have ever seen that I can watch again and again. I guess that makes it my favourite film of all time. Juliet Stevenson is superb in it as Nina - a scene early on in the film sees her crying to her therapist about the death of her partner Jamie, played by Alan Rickman before Hollywood found him. She bursts into angry, shouting, snotty tears about him leaving her. She is spellbinding.

She misses him so much that he comes back to her. While she plays the piano for a Bach piece and hums the cello part that accompanies it, he reappears, playing. He hangs out with her. More tears, more snot, but also great joy and silliness of a couple just hanging out. But things start to fall apart. He is perpetually cold. He invites his dead mates over and they watch videos. Eventually Nina realises that it's not going to work and she moves on, and Jamie lets her.

The film is a real tear jerker but it's also funny and so real that you have no trouble suspending disbelief. It is so unsentimental that it's hard to believe the same director went on to direct the schmaltz of Cold Mountain. But because of Truly Madly Deeply, I would forgive Minghella anything.

Because of that film I love Juliet Stevenson, I love Alan Rickman (who else can make a moustache look so sexy?), I love Bach's Cello Sonata in G Minor and always feel this odd mix of longing and contentment when I hear it (also this great rendition of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore"). And because of all these things, I guess you could say that I love Anthony Minghella. Wish he'd made a film of my book. He would have been perfect.