Ten years ago, Morgana O’Reilly, whose Stories About My Body is described as intimate, hilarious and unexpectedly moving, lived in Queenstown’s Arthurs Point for two months.
Her husband Peter Salmon was producing and directing TV drama series Wanted, starring Rebecca Gibney, in which O’Reilly had a small part as a bartender.
"I felt guilty because I had travelled all around the world before I had properly come to Queenstown, Pete was working hard and our daughter was one and a-half, it was like a fairytale.
"My daughter happened to be an age where she was obsessed with the smallest, tiniest little pebbles.
"I’d be out somewhere looking out, going, ‘look at that’, and she’d pick up a tiny pebble and be, like, ‘look at that’.
"We had such a beautiful time, just rocking around."
A versatile actress who joined the celebrity ensemble of HBO’s The White Lotus, season 3, O’Reilly says of Stories About My Body, "the show in its live form was received so well and so profoundly, I felt a great duty to make sure it carried on".
"But I also couldn’t spend too much time away from my kids touring it, so I looked at my clever filmmaker husband and said, ‘wait a second, let’s make this into a beautiful piece of screen work, and then it can live on without me’."
Just under 70 minutes, the film had a sold-out premiere season at this year’s New Zealand International Comedy Festival, and this month’s she’s touring it around NZ — Queenstown’s the penultimate stop.
O’Reilly says of it, "there’s no bullshitting, I will tell you that much".
There’s even footage of her giving birth to her son in 2018, for example.
"One of the stories about my body is when I worked at foot fetish parties for a few months letting people suck my toes for money.
"I think one of the most beautiful human magic tricks is just to tell a story and tell it well."
And a bit of humour never goes astray, she believes — "laughing always opens you up to just feel the pathos more deeply".
After these special screenings, Stories About My Body is released nationwide on July 30.
"If somebody can’t go to [the Queenstown screening], just call their local cinema and ask if it’ll be playing —just hassle them."
• Screening of Stories About My Body and Q&A with filmmaker Morgana O’Reilly, Queenstown’s Silky Otter, July 26, 6.30pm
