Filmmaking at the end of the world: The Quiet Earth

Is there a more convincing definition of Aotearoa New Zealand cinema than Geoff Murphy’s three-film directorial run of Goodbye Pork Pie (1981), Utu (1983), and The Quiet Earth (1985)? Films had always been made in New Zealand, but they were largely foreign productions, with a cast and crew of professionals brought into the country. At the start of the NZ cinema renaissance, films often brought in a big foreign star to the project, like Warren Oates (Sleeping Dogs (Roger Donaldson, 1977)), John Carradine (The Scarecrow (Sam Pillsbury, 1981)) Jack Thompson (Bad Blood (Mike Newell, 1982) or David Hemmings (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (John Laing, 1980)), as if attempting to cut through some of that cultural cringe of kiwis seeing themselves up on screen by putting them next to a legitimate movie actor. This appears to be something Geoff Murphy wasn’t concerned about. Murphy leaned into the cultural cringe. He made sure it was right up there on screen. So convinced that we should have more of New Zealand in cinema, his breakthrough film Goodbye Pork Pie is a road movie that deliberately covers the length of the country from Kaitaia to Invercargill. It was an enormous hit at home.

He followed it up with Utu, a western that delved into the country’s past, forcing audiences to deliberate on the New Zealand Wars while still delivering an explosively entertaining genre film. Nicholas Reid writing in 1986 states: “The production of Utu was distinguished by the heavy and committed involvement of many Māori groups. Geoff Murphy and his crew could take justifiable pride from the fact that a film with so many major character-roles did not have to employ any imported acting talent. It is, in production if not in concept, a wholly indigenous product.”¹ Even back then, there was an awareness that Murphy’s approach was notable when it came to creating uniquely New Zealand films. His investment in local cast and crew would pay off. Fellow director Gaylene Preston has called Utu “…probably the seminal New Zealand film.”² Its nearest competition might be Murphy’s next, his finest and weirdest film: The Quiet Earth.

Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend helped popularise two types of post-apocalyptic story. The first is where it’s the end of the world and one is all alone except for all the vampires/zombies/monsters that show up (see direct adaptations: Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow, 1964) and The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971) or Night of the Comet (Thom Eberhardt, 1984), or any George Romero zombie film). The second, more terrifying one is where the monsters don’t show up. This one is rarer and more difficult to create an engaging narrative as there’s no direct antagonists to bother our last man standing. Two of the best versions of this story are The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (Ranald MacDougall, 1959) and Craig Harrison’s 1954 novel The Quiet Earth.

Both of these texts have been cited as source material for Murphy’s The Quiet Earth; the novel most obviously, but usually with some sort of qualifier – “loosely adapted” says Bernard Beckett in his introduction to the 2013 edition.³ The movie adaptation keeps the core concept of a scientist named Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) finding the world devoid of all life and worrying that he may have had a hand in how it ended up that way, but has significant changes to the plot. In the book, Hobson first meets a Māori soldier named Api and they spend a lot of time together as the last two men on Earth, but a friendship never really develops on account of Hobson thinking so little of his companion (with racism, certainly a factor). They do meet a second survivor, who is a woman, but she spends her entire time with them unconscious. Not very cinematic.

To my knowledge, nobody involved with The Quiet Earth’s production has cited The World, The Flesh and The Devil as a direct source, but that hasn’t stopped everyone else from making the comparison. “Reworking”,⁴ “unofficial remake”,⁵ “echoes of”⁶ – one could be forgiven for thinking these were all euphemisms for what they really want to accuse it of. Do they have a point? Both films feature a male protagonist who slowly discovers he appears to be the last person on Earth, then just as all hope is lost, he meets a woman, then a second man comes along to complicate things. The imagery of empty streets, devoid even of corpses, also carries between the two, and a quasi-love triangle develops between the survivors. Written this way, The Quiet Earth does sound closer to this 1959 film than to the source novel, but I believe this is the nature of a successful adaptation – that the book needed to bend towards this structure in order to translate to the screen, to become more cinematic in form. Co-writer and producer Sam Pillsbury states it plainly: “I don’t think you can ever be faithful when going from a novel to a film. I tried to be faithful to the essence of the book, which is the best thing you can do. It’s a different medium.”⁷

The book, written in the first person, asks the reader to spend significant time with Hobson’s thoughts and memories (revealed to be unreliable as we progress), nonstop chatter that could only be replicated through voice-over narration (as Vincent Price does in The Last Man on Earth), which surely would have impacted the eerie silences of abandoned Hamilton streets. It also would have compromised Bruno Lawrence’s incredible performance. Previous films, especially Smash Palace (Roger Donaldson, 1981) had started to establish Lawrence as the epitome of the kiwi bloke – a regular guy who approaches every struggle with humour and a sense that it’ll work out somehow. He embodies that ethos in the first 30-odd minutes of the film, finding fun and hedonism in his circumstance, until the solitude gets under his skin and he starts losing his mind. Lawrence wandering around an empty rugby stadium in a woman’s negligee remains one of NZ cinema’s most defining images.

The year before The Quiet Earth’s release, NZ Prime Minister David Lange had banned nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed ships from entering the country’s waters. A significant milestone in NZ’s passionate anti-nuke identity, that came off the back of regular citizens heading out to blockade these US ships from entering Auckland Harbour. Sam Pillsbury himself took part in these blockades,⁸ and two months after The Quiet Earth premiered at Cannes, The Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship used to protest nuclear testing in the Pacific, was bombed and sunk by French terrorists. This action was condemned by the NZ public and government, and thus saw a final nail in the coffin for any proposed nuclear activity in the country. It’s easy to see how The Quiet Earth draws on this nuclear anxiety. The literal source isn’t nuclear, but the parallels are clear as Hobson and his fellow scientists were trying to create an energy source that resulted in widespread destruction of life.

Murphy would soon get scooped up by Hollywood and go on to direct the likes of Young Guns II (1990), Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995), and Fortress 2: Re-entry (2000), forgettable films that can’t replicate the joy and talent on display when he was working at home. Murphy’s 1981-85 three-film run could be defined as the reworking of genre standards through kiwi sensibilities. They’re also a lot of fun. The cackling anarchy of his road movie, the uncomfortable history brought forward in his western and especially the playful kiwi bloke versus existential nuclear dread of his literary adaptation, The Quiet Earth.

The Quiet Earth (1985 New Zealand 91 mins)

Prod: Sam Pillsbury, Don Reynolds Dir: Geoff Murphy Scr: Bill Baer, Bruno Lawrence, Sam Pillsbury Phot: James Bartle Ed: Michael J. Horton Mus: John Charles Prod Des: Josephine Ford Art Dir: Rick Kofoed Cos Des: Michael Kane

Cast: Bruno Lawrence, Alison Routledge, Pete Smith, Anzac Wallace, Norman Fletcher, Tom Hyde 

Endnotes