The Dark Horse

The Dark Horse

Mental illness is a notoriously difficult topic to present on film. As Cliff Curtis, who plays the bipolar sufferer and chess prodigy Genesis Potene in The Dark Horse, said in an interview with Radio New Zealand: "It's like if we're in the depressed state, not a lot happens there. Depression — stay in bed for three years, not an exciting movie."

So, the makers of The Dark Horse — writer/director James Napier Robertson and producer Tom Hern — chose to introduce Potini’s fragile mental state by showing him in a manic mode. The opening of their film shows a muttering and unpredictable Potini walking through downtown Gisborne, unsettling bystanders, and then finding a quiet antique store with a chess set that he can focus on.

The audience quickly learns that he is no danger to anyone — unless awkwardness is a threat — but an ambulance turns up regardless and Potini is returned to the local mental health facility once again.

It is a startling sequence. Potini — should we call him Genesis from now on? The film demands that kind of familiarity — is being rained on, and the late afternoon sun is highlighting the raindrops so they glimmer and almost glow. It’s magical, and we sense there is something special about Genesis, only to be confirmed as he sets up the pieces on the antique shop chessboard and starts running through the possible openings.

The real Genesis Potene was a gentle giant. In the documentary that inspired The Dark Horse, Jim Marbrook's Dark Horse (2003). Genesis talks at a rate of knots, but not as fast as he plays chess. He was a champion speed-chess player (and shit-talker at the board), never missing an opportunity to school whoever he was playing.

Curtis’ interpretation is quieter, much more vulnerable. That’s a function of the compressed story that Robertson has to tell. All the chapters of Gen’s life need to happen in movie time, which — by necessity — means concision and excision. In the feature film version, Genesis is not married and has no children. When he is released from the psychiatric facility, it is to the care of a fictional brother (Ariki, played by Wayne Hapi) and to the gang hangout of the Vagrants and the bedroom occupied by (semi-fictionalised) teenage nephew Mana (James Rolleston).

Genesis sees the lifestyle that Mana is destined for, along with so many others, and decides he can offer an alternative. There’s a local chess club hangout — the Eastern Knights — and he can coach them to the national championships. Nobody else thinks that he can do it but, one thing the character does draw wholeheartedly from the Genesis in Marbrook’s documentary is self-belief.

In 2009, Hern and Robertson had released their indie feature I’m Not Harry Jenson, and were looking for their next project. Hern saw Marbrook’s 2003 documentary on Māori Television "while channel-surfing", and called Robertson (who was in Los Angeles looking for acting work).

"I just started watching this story, and 20 minutes later I'm bawling my eyes out on the couch," Hern told The NZ Herald. "I was just so affected by this man’s story, and I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard of him, or seen the documentary before, and neither had anybody else I’d talked to."

Robertson rushed back to New Zealand and the pair headed to Tūranganui-a-Kiwa (Gisborne) to meet with Genesis and persuade him that they should tell his story. Marbrook came on as associate producer to help.

In an interview with website The Moveable Feast, Robertson spoke about how he won Genesis’ trust. Of course, it was through chess: "I ended up sitting down across from [Genesis] over a chessboard, and we played a game," he said. "I lost, but I managed to hang in there long enough to earn his respect."

Genesis passed away suddenly from a heart attack in 2011, before the film went into production — before there was even a finished script.

"When I wasn’t with him in Gisborne, I would be writing in Auckland. He would call me, and I would always want to tell him what I was writing because I wanted his approval, but he never wanted to hear it because he put his trust in me. Instead, he would sing to me on the phone. He would sing, just to give me support when he knew I was going through a challenging period writing the script. That was an amazing thing, to have that. When we lost him, I found it really challenging to carry on. For a period there, I actually just couldn’t face the script."

Once the script was finalised there were two significant problems to overcome before it could go into production.

Firstly, persuading funders that audiences would watch a chess movie. "When we were trying to get the film up, and people would say 'Chess is not cinematic', and we'd be going, 'Well it's not about the chess. You’re not dealing with a board and some pieces, it’s about the life lessons that he learned and that he taught, and the community.'"

Secondly, which actor could fill the role of the mercurial central character? Cliff Curtis was not first on the list, mainly because of his lack of physical resemblance to Genesis. Curtis himself was not that keen.

"Well actually, it was a bit of a journey because I wasn't attracted to the project at all," Curtis told the Rancho Notorious podcast. "I’d heard about it, and I read the script, and I was like, 'Oh, this is a weird role. I don’t even know what to do about this.' I'd be miscast. Let somebody else have a crack at it because I wouldn't know where to start. But then, you know, they persisted as a good team does."

Robertson had his own demands of Curtis for the role. He had to put on enough weight to convince as the larger-than-life chess player. And Robertson wanted Curtis to 'method act' his way through the shoot – staying in character 24 hours a day. Curtis had experimented with the process in the past but never committed for weeks at a time as he was being asked to on The Dark Horse.

Talking to RNZ he said, "I mean, I’d finish work and I’d be in a sort of a manic run. I’d start sending out these huge emails to James and to Tom, talking about the workday. I don’t know what I was doing. But yeah, no, I was in full flight mania. It was a bit scary, I think, for people in my life watching me go through that. I stayed in costume, walked, talked, ate, drank, like my version of Gen."

"Even with your own family?"

"Yes, with everybody."

The relationship between Genesis and Ariki, his brother and leader in the Vagrants gang, is a critical element in elevating the film above the run-of-the-mill overcoming-the-odds sports film that it could have become — and does for a while, during the National Chess Championships sequences. The discovery of first-time actor Wayne Hapi was a masterstroke by casting director Yvette Reid.

Following in the line of other scene-stealing first-time Māori actors like Anzac Wallace (Utu) and Lawrence Makoare (Lord of the Rings), Hapi was discovered at the local WINZ office looking for a job.

There’s an intensity and dignity to Hapi’s performance that turns what might easily have fallen into cliché into the second beating heart of the film. Robertson shoots the scenes of Curtis and Hapi together with them both in frame throughout, even while still using a classic shot-reverse-shot structure. Whenever the focus is on one brother, the other always remains present in the frame, emphasising their relationship even as the drama of the scene threatens it.

A final observation about the finished film is how influenced it is by tikanga Māori. For example, the scene where Gen first arrives at the Eastern Knights clubroom, the super-power introductions are structured like pepeha — who are you, and what is something about you that everyone else should know?

The film arrived just as the debate about what constitutes "a Māori film" began to take flight in earnest. Taika Waititi  was quoted as saying that, regardless of subject matter, his films are Māori films because he is a Māori. Productions like The Dead Lands were starting to incorporate fundamentals of tea o Māori — karakia for example — into their daily schedules. The next time that Robertson, a Pākehā, would direct a film with Māori subject matter, Whina in 2022, it would be with a Māori co-director (Paula Whetu Jones).

The Dark Horse was a great success, especially at the 2014 Rialto Channel NZ Film Awards where it won six prizes — amid stiff competition from What We Do in the Shadows, The Dead Lands and Housebound. It took away Best Film, Robertson won best Director and Screenplay, and Cliff Curtis won for Best Actor. 

The film went on to have an international life, with theatrical releases in the USA, Canada and several European territories, plus well-received festival screenings. The United States run was launched on 1 April 2016 with a special event in Los Angeles, hosted by James Cameron.

- Film critic Dan Slevin is a regular contributor to Radio New Zealand. He has managed cinemas, edited magazine OnFilm, and writes about the screen via his substack platform Funerals & Snakes.