By Garry Maddox
Sometimes shooting a film can give an actor a real insight into a foreign city.
For Australian actor Ed Oxenbould, making the sweet coming-of-age film Head South in Christchurch, New Zealand, revealed how much its people are still dealing with the devastating tragedies of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes and 2019 mosque shootings.
Ed Oxenbould and Stella Bennett, better known as singer-songwriter Benee, who star in Head South.Credit: Sam Mooy
“Any time you talk to anybody, it’s always ‘where were you during the earthquake?’, ‘where were you during the shooting?’,” he says. “It’s a big part of their culture, but they’re a good, proud people and it’s a beautiful, beautiful city.”
Oxenbould, best known as the child star of the Hollywood comedy Alexander And The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and the hit Australian film Paper Planes, is now an accomplished 23-year-old who could still pass for a teenager on screen when he shot Head South two years ago.
He plays Angus, a long-haired, try-hard 17-year-old growing up in Christchurch in 1979. It was a pre-internet time when Kiwi teenagers had to wait weeks for records, music magazines and trends to arrive from England.
Everything changes for Angus when he hears his first post-punk music – Public Image Ltd – and meets uber-cool Londoner Holly (Roxie Mohebbi).
He gets a spiky haircut, staples his school flares into stovepipe trousers, borrows a bass guitar and, with prickly pharmacy assistant Kirsten (Stella Bennett, better known as singer-songwriter Benee), bumbles his way to forming a band.
Then he wonders whether it sounds edgier if they are called “the Daleks” or just “Daleks”.
The centre of this teenage revolution is a shop called Middle Earth Records where Angus is intimidated by the snarling lead singer (Demos Murphy) of a band called The Cursed.
The film is a lo-fi charmer about teenage yearning amid family disintegration, as Angus’s world-weary father (Marton Csokas) struggles with his newly single status.
Australian-based writer-director Jonathan Ogilvie (The Tender Hook, Lone Wolf) based Head South on his experience growing up when Christchurch was a thriving centre of underground music and creative energy. Its most famous product from around that time is Flying Nun Records, which recruited such celebrated bands as Straitjacket Fits, The Chills and The Bats.
Ed Oxenbould in Head South.Credit: Forum
“Making the film was very much what Freud would call the eternal return,” Ogilvie says. “Everything that’s in the film happened and most of it happened to me.”
While “the powers that be” thought it would be impossible to recreate the city’s look because of the earthquake damage, Ogilvie found enough good locations to tell the story.
“It’s true that if I’d angled the camera too far off, I would have been shooting into the still-quite-a-few empty spaces in the cityscape,” he says. “But it’s really building up to be a centre for filming in New Zealand.”
While director Peter Jackson is based in Wellington on the North Island, much of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films were shot on the South Island because of the spectacular landscapes.
Ogilvie thinks the energy around the rebuilding has made Christchurch the most interesting city in the country.
“There’s a lot of stuff happening there, film being part of it,” he says. “But there was always stuff under the surface going on.”
Stella Bennett, aka Benee, and Ed Oxenbould star in Head South.Credit: Sam Mooy
The biggest challenge for Oxenbould was getting the New Zealand accent right.
“It’s a very tough accent,” he says in a Sydney pub. “It’s very particular and it’s such a good accent that you want to do it justice. It helped being surrounded by Kiwis.”
Bennett, seated beside him, became such an internet sensation during COVID that the music video for her hit Supalonely has been watched 326 million times on YouTube.
She knew nothing about Christchurch’s musical heritage before being cast.
“I’m from Grey Lynn in Auckland,” Bennett, 25, says. “It was really cool to learn about what was going on down there and how influential it was on the whole music scene in New Zealand.”
Having only acted before in commercials and music videos, she enjoyed shooting her first film.
“Music is my passion, but I love performing and I feel like they go hand in hand,” she says. “You play instruments and you act – a lot of people do both – and it’s pretty fun.”
Did she ever wonder why an Australian had been cast as a Kiwi? Doesn’t New Zealand have enough of their own actors?
“Yes, there are a lot of really great Kiwi actors, but he really carried the whole film,” Bennett says. “He’s obviously an incredible actor, and he just fit the role.”
Head South opens in cinemas on April 3.