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“Keisha was a needle in a haystack,” Whale Rider writer-director Niki Caro says of 13-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes (pictured). “I knew the character of Pikea wouldn’t come out of a casting agent’s book. But I was equally convinced that she was out there."

“I’ve always believed that the Maori culture has a great deal to offer the world. Our stories, traditional and contemporary, can speak to the world.”
  When actor Rawiri Paratene talks about the universal appeal of storytelling at the Sundance Film Festival, he has a great deal invested in it. Particularly because the new film in which he stars, Whale Rider, requires an American audience to relate to a world far away from its usual cinema.

  Whale Rider, written and directed by Nikki Caro, comes from the popular New Zealand novel of the same name by Witi Ihimaera. And while its producers have held the rights for 10 years, they are only now ready to release the movie to the world. The film is scheduled to open in New Orleans this weekend at Canal Place.

  “It had gone through many scripts, and the film had to be made,” Caro says. “(Producer) Frank Hubner approached me to see if I wanted to direct any of these enormous piles of scripts. But I suggested I go back to the book and do an adaptation.”

  What Caro returned with was a script that had everybody excited.
  “I read the book and the script in the same day,” says Paratene, who plays Koro, the chief of a small Maori village. “When I put the book down, I cried. And when I read the script, I rung my agent and told him I was hungry for the role. I believed then that what is happening now was possible with that script.”

  What is happening now is the most anticipated film in New Zealand’s history. Unlike the social-realist Once Were Warriors, this film comes from an extremely popular book from the native country. The islanders had the same anticipation for Whale Rider as a New Orleanian would have for a filmed version of A Confederacy of Dunces.

  Ever since the film’s debut at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival (winning the AGF People’s Choice Award) and World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance, anticipation has grown to Bend It Like Beckham proportions.
  Caro was intimidated by it all.

  “In New Zealand, it’s hard for us to be confident in ourselves,” she says. “At home, we don’t have the hype that you have here [in America], and I think we’re about to experience just that when we get home.”

  But she believes now is the time for the movie and its message to reach New Zealand’s shores: “We’ve got a story about the strength of women that comes from a country whose three highest positions (governor general, prime minister and chief justice) are women. The country’s never been in better shape.”

  This moving story steeped in mythology and magical realism concerns a young Maori girl named Pikea (Keisha Castle-Hughes) in a small New Zealand town. Her father, the first son of the town chief, abandoned his home for a successful art career. Young Pikea (who was named after the mythical founder of the Maori people) is left with her grandparents, and the young girl struggles to win the affection of the distant chief. Because her twin brother died at birth, however, the chief sees her as a disappointment.

  Because Pikea’s father has abandoned the old ways, there is no successor to the chief. To remedy the situation, the chief gathers all the first-born sons to train with him in the traditional ways so that one of them may one day lead. But Pikea, who has a deep understanding of tradition and wants to be part of the school, is kept out and eventually has to face her grandfather’s wrath.
  Finding the appropriate young female actress to play such an integral character presented a unique casting challenge.

  “Keisha was a needle in a haystack,” says Caro, who also directed 1997’s Memory and Desire. “I knew the character of Pikea wouldn’t come out of a casting agent’s book. But I was equally convinced that she was out there. [Casting director Dana Rowen] trawled all the schools of Aukland looking for Keisha. We started with maybe 100 kids, work-shopping them until they were auditioning for me.”

  Keisha Castle-Hughes didn’t know what was in store for her when the agent came to her school one day.

  “She came to my school and I was being naughty in class,” the 13-year-old giggles. “We didn’t know why [Rowan] was there, so she asked me and my friends to go to the office. She asked us if we were Maori, could swim and could ride a bike. I couldn’t swim, but she told me about Whale Rider and asked me if I wanted to audition and I said yes.”

  But the thrill of participating in these workshops almost kept Castle-Hughes from succeeding: “They said to act sick and I couldn’t because I had a big smile on my face. We had to run from one side of the room to the other, and in the middle we had to jump and yell, ‘Fire!’ Dana Rowen said however loud we yelled it was how much we wanted it. I jumped really high, and I yelled really loud, but I was embarrassed.”

  As for Castle-Hughes, she has the unenviable task of starting high school on the date of the film release: “It’s weird. I’m not going to meet people as me, but as that girl in the movie. I hope they like me for me.”


Whale Rider is tentatively scheduled to open Friday, June 27, at Canal Place.

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