Dame Gaylene Preston shares her devastating injury

Dame Gaylene Preston, 75, is a writer, director and producer, who is a major driving force behind more than 14 feature films and documentaries, such as Ruby and Rata, Bread and Roses, Home By Christmas, Mr Wrong and My Year with Helen. She began working in the industry in the 1970s and has recently released her first book, a memoir, Gaylene’s Take – Her Life in New Zealand Film.

You have been described by filmmaker Jane Campion as “part liar, part cowgirl, mouthy and determined”. Does this sum you up adequately?

Pretty much. I’ve been making up stories since I was very little. I began as soon as I could string a few words together selling them to the neighbours as true – maintaining I had met characters from the radio, for example. Stories are all little lies, aren’t they? I don’t ride horses though.

Women and their stories are major themes of your films and your book. Why is this?

I read Germaine Greer’s iconic book The Female Eunuch when I was 22, and it shone a light on how I was feeling about the world and how I was at odds with it. It pointed a path forward that I have found sustaining. The first thing I noticed was how many men clutter our screens and how few women. It’s still the same. (Refer to the news on any night.) So now I have an in-built gender meter that I can’t turn off. What a real pleasure it was to watch the women’s rugby. Joy!

With then Governor-General Dame Patsy Reddy after being made a Dame in 2019.

What is the best thing about your life at the moment?

I’m the boss of it.

Who is the person who most influenced you?

Probably Joni Mitchell – her Hissing of Summer Lawns album keeps on speaking to me – then Agnès Varda. I saw Daguerréotypes when it was made and saw a kind of filmmaking that obeys no filmmaking rules. She throws drama and documentary and anything else she feels like into one film. I find that inspiring. Since then, I have approached a film story as just that and used every form that fits, bending the rules that are just marketing constructs anyway.

What do you owe your parents?

Constancy and kindness, even when I was a puzzle to myself as well as to them.

You finish the book with your mother Tui’s sausage roll recipe. Why is this so special to you?

Tui’s sausage rolls, like many of the old recipes that are passed down through generations, survive because they are delicious. It’s also designed to go a long way because it’s a Depression-era recipe. Who knows? It might have originated in the Woman’s Weekly. If you can’t afford a lot of meat, you put potato in. If not the Weekly, it could actually date back to my Irish foremothers for all I know and I associate them with impromptu good times. My parents had a fish and chip shop, and would sometimes cook hundreds of whitebait patties for West Coast dos. I grew up in a family that knew how to feed the hordes without much notice.

What single thing would improve the quality of your life?

My head injury disappearing completely. On January 12, 2019 I was at the local playground on Mount Victoria. Mountain bikes are allowed on the mountain and they have designated paths that are shared paths. The boy on the bike was apparently 15. I’ve never gone out of my way to find him. Look, he probably hasn’t even told his mother. He came down the hill on a vertical fall. I was standing by the basketball court. The little girl I was with ran off to the swings and the next millisecond, there was a screech of brakes behind me and this big form comes from behind and hits me on the head with what I think was his shoulder. (I notice that’s the very thing they are giving out red cards for in the women’s rugby. They’re very strict about that particular boof.) He was big. He hit the ground like a stone and all his energy must have been transferred to me. I took off like a little pinball, flew a couple of metres through the air and landed on the top of my head on a stone path. I also chipped my hip. It was a beautiful blue-sky day and I had just come back from Bogota, Columbia, where we’d been having event screenings of My Year with Helen, and next minute, boof! It’s in the book.

What is your prognosis going forward?

Well, everybody’s head is different. If anyone tells you the brain is a muscle, they are so wrong in my opinion. I’ve got a head injury, not a brain injury, which means the brain got sloshed about and forced two ways against my skull, what’s called a complex force. Apart from all the obvious treatments of exercise and sleep, I’ve been lucky. People get brain injuries where they can’t sleep and they never really sleep again. The only thing that’s really worked for me is cranial osteopathy. I can’t have too much of that. I’ve had to take time and I think I am coming right. I managed to finish the book. It’s all right.

Do you have a new project on the go?

I’m starting to gently explore spiritually rewarding spaces. Gently being the operative word. The work of the artist Dame Robin White and the collective of Pasifika women who work with her I find inspiring. I think I am coming right, so if I can make another film, I’d like to make a film with Dame Robin.

Last year, you celebrated 50 years since you made your first short film. How does that feel?

Daunting. When the artist Vanessa Bell as a very old woman was taken through her retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London, she walked from one painting to the next in silence. In the end, when they asked her what she thought, she said that she didn’t think she had extraordinary talent, but was amazed at “what one could accomplish between the hours of nine until one every day”. I’m with her.

I’ve been so busy doing the work, it’s surprising how it adds up over 50 years. As I flew through the air at the playground on January 12th 2019, I thought that was it, I could die, and I thought what a mess my work was in, strewn all over the place between various archives, my home office and the garage. I thought, “Poor Chelsie” (my daughter). One child born to sort all that out. I thought all this before I hit the ground. It is said your life goes before you when you die, and I believe that now. Fortunately, I have lived to tell the tale.

Audio-visual mediums are fragile. I’ve been surprised at how films I made have been lost or degraded. Sound furry, picture fuzzy. Some minor pieces had disappeared without trace, believe it or not. So I’ve been working with Nga Taonga Sound and Vision to create a legacy archive of all my work. With financial support from Balanced Investments and the Scientifica Trust, we trained up a rather brilliant writer. It is essentially a database. Every little thing is on there, including the home movies. In parallel, NZ On Screen has posted a Gaylene Preston Collection that includes most of my films that can now be seen for free. I’m so grateful to them. I can die happy. I believe I won’t be thinking of the contents of my garage as I am going!

Actress daughter Chelsie with her dad Jonathan Crayford at the New Zealand Television Awards last year.

As a woman filmmaker, you came across a lot of discrimination, which you talk about in your book. How did you handle that?

Outrage is more effective than rage. A decent sense of outrage will get you everywhere. The “they” only have as much power as you give them. I know that’s not right in extreme circumstances, but it is certainly true psychologically. When I was working with Helen Clark for My Year with Helen, at the Q&A sessions after the screenings, Helen would say, “Don’t get mad, get even.” For me, the best way of getting even has been to make the film. Somehow. And that’s very humbling because you get a lot of declines and usually make it for two-thirds of the money it needs.

What’s the nicest thing you’ve ever bought or done for yourself?

I bought myself the house I have lived in for 30 years. It has sheltered not just me but those I love over all that time. We had never heard of the housing ladder or getting ‘a foot’ in the housing market. We just thought about having a home. It’s my haven. We have made a big error thinking that houses are commodities. Everyone needs a home.