Small town drama is a gas

Mark Hadlow (left) and David McPhail fail to see eye to eye in No Petrol! No Diesel!. Photo by NZFF.
Mark Hadlow (left) and David McPhail fail to see eye to eye in No Petrol! No Diesel!. Photo by NZFF.
Stefen Harris loves telling stories, and when not a policeman on the beat in Christchurch, he writes novels and film scripts and makes films.

No Petrol! No Diesel!, his second feature film, screens at the Rialto as part of the International Film Festival, on Wednesday.

It uses the same core cast - Jim Moriarty, Bruno Lawrence and Mark Hadlow - as his debut, award-winning feature The Waimate Conspiracy (2006), a comedy about a fictional land claim set in Waimate.

This new film, about a multinational oil company desperate to take over a small-town gas station, also addresses political issues with a comedy twist, he says.

"I guess what I'm trying to do is make comments about serious issues in a humorous way to make it accessible," he said in a telephone interview.

The film is set in Temuka.

Harris was looking for a small town with a single gas station, but ended up having to use one that had closed down.

It had to be done up to look operational.

"Bruno Lawrence plays [the] part of Rex Devlin who dies in a car accident, and his adopted son, Jim Moriarty playing Oscar Devlin, comes back to town from Los Angeles to take care of the family business, the only gas station in town.

"No sooner does he arrive than there is a mysterious fellow, Mr Bligh (Mark Hadlow), who represents a multinational oil company which is desperate to buy the gas station; which is a mystery to Oscar Devlin because it doesn't seem like a very important business for the likes of them.

"He's quite determined, so the film becomes a standoff between the two of them because Oscar doesn't want to sell; and eventually we come to realise this is all about a water-powered car which Rex Devlin had created in secret and that's what this guy's after."

This film is the outcome of an Air New Zealand Inspiring New Zealanders scholarship in film, which Harris received for a year's mentoring with New Zealand-born Hollywood director Martin Campbell, whose work includes Casino Royale and GoldenEye.

Harris spent last September with Campbell on the set of Edge of Darkness in Boston.

He returned to the US in February to do post-production and will go back to show Campbell No Petrol! No Diesel!, which is his scholarship project.

"One of the interesting things is Martin's film Edge of Darkness was a $US80 million feature, and mine was $30,000, but I learnt that as far as craft goes, there is nothing we did over there that I couldn't bring back and use.

"It was all just filmcraft - the bare bones of how you shoot a thing; how you cover it with the camera; how you seek the performance you want from an actor. All of those things were portable and I was able to take with me."

Harris' interest in film stems from the late 1970s when he entered the Spot On film competition as a Takapuna High School pupil.

He was beaten by another young would-be film-maker, Peter Jackson! After spending time in Africa as a tour guide, he returned home and joined the police, but even after 20 years in the force the story-telling desire never left him.

He wrote five novels before getting anything published, and then, in 1999, wrote a film script.

"It was for a film commission short film, a 15-minute crime story, A Quiet Night. Somebody else produced and directed it through the New Zealand Film Commission, but as a result of that I thought would like to have a crack at doing it myself."

He turned his first published novel into a film script for The Waimate Conspiracy, and shot it over six days as a pseudo-documentary.

"I used an unsophisticated camera technique to shoot it documentary-style, but [No Petrol! No Diesel!] is shot more cinematically. I hope people will go and see it - it's a comedy, and quite uplifting."

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