MONGREL Mob ex-presidents are not used to taking direction from short, blonde, white girls.
When filming started for Day Trip in Newtown, former mob boss Tuhoe Isaac didn’t know what to make of 26 year-old director Zoe McIntosh.
“Tuhoe grew up in a culture that had very little respect for women. Suddenly he was presented with this tiny blond white woman telling him what to do,” McIntosh says. “In the beginning he looked to the male crew for direction. So I took him out for a beer and said, ‘This is your first time acting and my first time directing a drama, so let’s do this together.’ From then on he was amazing to work with.”
The 10-minute long Day Trip features in the Digital Shorts section at this year’s NZ International Film Festival.
It was filmed in Wellington at a makeshift mob headquarters in Newtown.
“We turned this old derelict house into Mob headquarters and put up iron fences. People walking past thought a gang had moved into the neighborhood,” she laughs.
McIntosh wanted to create an authentic mob world without offending New Zealand’s most notorious gang.
The film mirrors the reality of Isaac leaving the Mob, recorded in his memoirs True Red.
Tuhoe ‘Bruno’ Isaac was the leader of the King Country Mongrel Mob chapter before some near-death experiences in 1989 forced him to shake the gang life.
Bruno is the name of the bull dog wearing a German helmet in the Mongrel Mob insignia.
“In the film Tuhoe takes off his shirt and is covered in mob tattoos, with a large bulldog on his back, so we had to use the original insignia on our costumes.”
Isaac redesigned the bulldog patch to look like a new mob chapter.
Nevertheless, McIntosh still had concerns.
“Isaac was adamant the film would be OK, but it was a little scary,” she says.
During filming at the Olympic Hotel bar in Naenae a group of gang members drove up and got out of the car...
“They pulled out Isaac’s book and asked him to sign it,” McIntosh laughs.
Day Trip only has one line of dialogue, which McIntosh says accentuates Isaac’s isolation from the “normal world”.
The story is about people reacting to Isaac in public when he decides to take a day-off gang life.
“[In the film] he’s a walking billboard of social alienation. The story is so close to Tuhoe’s own life that for him it was a natural thing to do,” says McIntosh.
In reality, it didn’t take Isaac a day trip to leave the mob.
Moving from lawlessness and anarchy to a “normal life” was a hard ask – it took years and much assistance from the church.
McIntosh says gang culture is a touchy subject in New Zealand and rarely is a gang member presented as a sympathetic character.
“Tuhoe had never acted before, but I felt he had the life experience and attitude to pull it off.  After the audition, nobody had any doubts he was the guy.”
For McIntosh, the real challenge came after casting him.
In one scene where a mob character barks loudly, McIntosh says Isaac was visibly uneasy.
“I wondered if we had gone over the line, Isaac was disturbed by being taken back to that environment.”
Day Trip was an ambitious project on such a small budget.
“The art department achieved small miracles; the gang house and the bar where the main character has a critical epiphany were created from scrap,” said McIntosh.
In 2008 McIntosh won the Screen Production and Development Association pitching award for her feature film idea, inspired by a hitch hiking adventure.
“I’m obsessed with going hitchhiking, it fuels my work – it’s so spontaneous and random, reality can be much stranger than fiction.”
While studying film at Canterbury University she made documentaries about pimps and mail order brides, and last year her documentary on non-conformist Rob Moodie, Lost in Wonderland, screened at NZ International Film Festival, and on SBS Australia Network and Sky documentary channel.
Day Trip, written by Bill Payne, premiered at the Tribeca International Film Festival in New York this month, and was one of 47 short films to screen, chosen from 2750 entries.
Day Trip, part of the Homegrown: Dramatic Digital Shorts, 22, 25 July.