Jemaine Clement in a ‘Predicament’
12 Aug 2010
Flight of the Conchords fans mourning the end of the Grammy Award-winning TV series will have something to celebrate on 26 August - when Predicament, starring one-half of Conchords duo Jemaine Clement, is released into New Zealand cinemas.
The crime comedy, based on a 1975 novel by iconic Kiwi author Ronald Hugh Morrieson, is set in Hawera, a small rural town in the North Island’s Taranaki region.
The movie tells the story of naïve yet likeable teenager Cedric Williamson, who decides to conspire with two misfits to photograph and blackmail wealthy, adulterous couples.
Predicament is the last of Morrieson’s books to be made into a film - he wrote four, all of which made it onto the silver screen - and Predicament was published three years after his death.
Star-studded cast
In a role far from his days as half of "formerly New Zealand’s fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo", Jemaine Clement stars as creepy oddball Spook in Predicament.
New Zealand actress Rose McIver, who rose to fame playing the sister to Susie Salmon, the main character in the Peter Jackson-directed Hollywood blockbuster The Lovely Bones, takes on the character of Maybelle, an object of lust.
Kiwi musician Tim Finn also makes his acting debut alongside Clement and Australian comedian Heath ‘Chopper’ Franklin.
Ronald Hugh Morrieson
New Zealand author Ronald Hugh Morrieson was a novelist and short story writer who was born, lived and died in the small New Zealand town of Hawera, in South Taranaki.
Morrieson had a variety of jobs before becoming an author, including working at the Patea Freezing Works and as a casual dance-band player. At the age of 37, Morrieson became a private music teacher in order to free his evenings to write.
Predicament director Jason Stutter told a New Zealand newspaper that while Morrieson’s "rabble rousing" ways were not always welcomed by Hawera conservatives at the time, they acknowledged that he was a very talented writer.
"This guy was not a trained writer, and he just sat at home and wrote these stories, and I think that every now and then you come across someone who is a genius - and I think he was. There is so much depth, and such an absolute understanding of human nature in his writing," said Stutter.
Morrieson wrote four books in his lifetime. His first novel, The Scarecrow, a tragicomic story of a sex killer in a small town not unlike Hawera, was published in 1963. It was followed by morality tale Came a Hot Friday in 1964, Predicament (1975) and Pallet on the Floor (1976) - the last two novels were published after his death in 1972.
Three of his novels were made into films in the 1980s: The Scarecrow (1981), Pallet on the Floor (1984) and Came a Hot Friday (1985).
Hawera: A special little town
Predicament was filmed in Morrieson’s hometown of Hawera.
Director Jason Stutter spent most of 2009 filming in Hawera and nearby Eltham, where the buildings still retain their 1930s charm.
The name Hawera comes from the Māori for ‘burnt place’ - which came about when a local tribe set fire to their enemy’s sleeping whare / house during a fight. Hawera also suffered fires in 1884, 1888 and 1912.
The Taranaki region is a major centre for dairy farming, and Hawera is home to the southern hemisphere’s biggest dairy complex of ‘Whareroa’, which is owned by Fonterra.
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