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"Our people once were warriors," proclaims working-class wife Beth Heke
in what amounts to her declaration of independence. Rena Owen plays Beth,
and the people she's referring to are New Zealand's natives, the Maori.
Related to Hawaiians and Tahitians, the Maori were indeed formidable
fighters. And judging by the film in which Owen stars, Once Were Warriors,
they still are, turning it on themselves via domestic violence, bar brawling, and
other self-destructive activities. The long-suffering Beth is beaten by her
bulletheaded brute of a husband, Jake (Temuera Morrison).
Once Were Warriors, by first-time director Lee Tamahori, is the latest
in a list of daring NZ features including Heavenly Creatures and the
unjustly neglected Desperate Remedies. Despite its disturbing subject
matter, Warriors outgrossed The Piano and even Jurassic Park
at the Kiwi box office. More significantly, Owen stresses, it's spurred calls to
domestic violence hot lines and even entered the national vocabulary. "I'm getting
bags of mail from women saying, 'I've got a Warriors problem.'
And from men saying, 'I'm a Jake, but I want to change.'
"I can remember," she continues, "telling Lee in a bar one night during the shoot,
'We're making something really special and important here, one for the history books.'
And he said, 'Oh, stop talking a lot of bullshit.' But I just knew it had all the
ingredients. It had Tem, who's a soap star a large following of female fans;
it was the first entirely Maori film; and it had Lee's very trendy, hip-hop eye,
which would add the music, the leather, and all the elements that would appeal to
young people." These things "couldn't guarantee a success," she says, but the
combination would create "an emotion, a spirit that people craved."
As a child, Owen, who is half English, half Maori, performed as part of an aboriginal
organization, entertaining tourists with traditional chanting and dancing; she later
played Bloody Mary in a production of South Pacific. In her late teens, she
earned a nursing degree ("Acting wasn't considered a career; women had the choice of
secretary, teacher, or nurse"), before a fateful period of high-impact clubbing
in early-'80s London. "Chasing the dragon" (smoking heroin off tinfoil) led to
what she describes as "a raging smack habit" within a year.
And also to a stint in a U.K. hoosegow for wayward girls after getting busted for
possession of heroin. The experience, she feels, helped prepare her for Warriors:
"On an intellectual level, Beth knows Jake's no bloody good. Yet on a deeper,
emotional level she can't let go of him. It takes a tragedy or trauma; for me, the
trauma was prison. Drugs, relationships, gambling, chocolate - it's the same
principle of addiction. But," she says, "I'm bloody living proof that 'Once a junkie,
always a junkie' is not true!"
After springtime commitments on the Auckland stage and in a campy sci-fi movie
directed by Desperate Remedies's Stewart Wells, Owen would like to return to
the U.S. - despite having appeared in last fall's Easter Island bomb, Rapa Nui.
"It wasn't very good," Owen admits, "but I haven't been put off" the idea of being
on the American screen. That is, if the American screen is willing to put her on. |
