Filming of Flight of the Albatross

These are the photos I took while I was on Great Barrier Island, New Zealand, for the three months of the shooting of Flight of the Albatross. It was January, February and March--high antipodean summer--the days warm and breezy, the sand blazing white and the southern Pacific every shade of blue from turquoise to indigo. It was 1995, fourteen years after I'd lived there as a newly-married twenty-five-year old. I was only an observer during the filming, and I spent most of the time sitting on the dunes with Rei Rakatau, the Maori kaumatua, or elder, who was the "spiritual minder" for the production. Rei made sure that any Maori content in the film was handled with the correct protocol and portrayed accurately. Sometimes I helped Donna, the second assistant director, or ran errands for the actors.Once I was directed to sit in the pub while a scene was being filmed, and somehow that scene survived the editing and there I am, for about two seconds, doing a "Hitchcock" in the film.