Geoff Murphy, who
has died aged 80, emerged as a pioneering director of the Kiwi film industry before
enjoying modest success as a purveyor of Hollywood genre fictions. Although he
cut a droll, somewhat weather-beaten figure in later years, this former
longhair retained a taste for the raucous, pedal-to-the-metal action showcased in
his breakthrough Goodbye Pork Pie
(1980). This leaning brought him to the attention of American producers looking
to deliver carefully budgeted spectacle, and in the US, Murphy became a sequel
specialist, overseeing Young Guns II
(1990), Under Siege 2 (1995) and Fortress 2 (2000) among others: projects
that sporadically yielded fond memories and multiple video rentals, if few critical
plaudits.
Geoffrey Peter
Murphy was born on October 12, 1938 in Wellington, where he attended St.
Vincent de Paul school and later St. Patrick’s College. After failing the Air
Force exam – dashing youthful hopes of becoming a fighter pilot – Murphy entered
teacher teaching, only to fall in with the Blerta collective, a rotating troupe
of actor-musicians (Murphy was a handy jazz trumpeter) organised around college
pal Bruno Lawrence. The group toured the islands in a bright red Leyland Tiger
bus, attempting to circumnavigate the strictures of a largely conservative
country, and pairing up between impromptu performances. By 1972, Murphy and first
wife Pat Robins – future production manager for Peter Jackson – were the
parents of five children.
That Murphy was a
late starter can be attributed both to this enthusiastic embrace of fatherhood
and the limited opportunities his industry then provided. His first credits came
with Lawrence-starring shorts, as a writer on Hurry Hurry Faster Faster (1965), then as director of comic heist
doodle Tank Busters (1970). Commercial
gigs paid some of the bills, and the idiosyncratic Lawrence’s growing notoriety
opened a few doors besides. The pair’s Percy
the Policeman shorts (1974) were shelved by nervy broadcasters fearful of
their anti-authoritarian bent, but Blerta’s first, Python-influenced sketch series aired in 1976, allowing Murphy to
scrap his way towards feature-length production with knockabout Western Wild Man (1977, again starring Lawrence).
By then, a new
wave of Antipodean directors had drawn eyes Down Under, and Goodbye Pork Pie, tailing two best buds
in a stolen yellow Mini, was the sort of runaway hit international distributors
couldn’t ignore. (It was also blamed for a localised spike in car crime.) Utu (1983), Murphy’s blood-soaked fable
about a vengeful Maori, received a cooler response domestically, though Pauline
Kael noted “the ferocity of these skirmishes and raids is played off against an
Arcadian beauty that makes your head swim”. He followed it with The Quiet Earth (1985), a clever, funny
midnight-movie staple in which a scientist (Lawrence) wakes up to find Auckland
voided of life. After a row in 1990, director and star never reconciled;
Lawrence died of cancer in 1995.
Murphy’s facility
with screen-filling action and spectacle eventually saw him America-bound, but
he started on the wrong foot, being dropped from Predator (1987) during development after repeatedly mocking a
disgruntled Arnold Schwarzenegger as “Conan the Librarian”. Having earned
respectable notices for HBO potboiler Red
King, White Knight (1989), Murphy’s subsequent US output rarely cleared critics’
“dumb but fun” bar, although there were two bona fide hits: none-more-1990
Western Young Guns II, with its Jon
Bon Jovi title song and blow-dried cowboys, then Under Siege 2, which survived producer-star Steven Seagal’s muscular
offscreen interventions to crack $100m.
Less felicitous
was Freejack (1992), which united Emilio
Estevez and Mick Jagger for a much-recut futuristic runaround described by
fourth-billed Anthony Hopkins as “terrible”. That high-profile flop relegated
Murphy to made-for-cable fare: thriller Blind
Side (1993) earned a UK video release thanks to its then-saleable combo of
Rutger Hauer and Rebecca De Mornay, as did The
Last Outlaw (1994), a return to Western stylings with the troubled Mickey
Rourke. This work wasn’t unprofitable – it helped Murphy meet a sizeable tax
bill from the Kiwi authorities – but by the millennium he was reduced to
second-unit directing, assisting Roger Donaldson and fellow Wellingtonian Peter
Jackson on Dante’s Peak (1997) and
the Lord of the Rings films (2001-3)
respectively.
Having travelled full
circle, Murphy received a Lifetime Achievement prize at the New Zealand Film
Awards in 2013 and the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2014; he wrote a memoir (A Life on Film) in 2015, and saw son
Matt direct Pork Pie (2017), a remake
of his own 1980 success. His death came mere days after a retrospective of his
work at the New Zealand audio-visual archive, and prompted PM Jacinda Ardern to
dub him “a trailblazer”, yet Murphy himself never quite abandoned his old
Blerta irreverence. Upon learning he was to receive an honorary doctorate from
Wellington’s Massey University in 2014, he commented: “It’ll be good when I’m
arguing with the city council.”
He is survived by
his third wife Diane, and six children: five (Linus, Matt, Miles, Paul and
Robin) by Pat Robins, and a son (filmmaker Heperi Mita) by his second wife, the
producer-director Merata Mita.
Geoff Murphy, born October 12,
1938, died December 3, 2018.
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