The Ricky Baker birthday song<\/a> seems to have become a sort of informal national anthem, but it\u2019s only in the film because the traditional Happy Birthday song wasn\u2019t then in the public domain. The scene was all set up with Rima about to play the conventional version on her little keyboard when the producer came running in and said: \u201cWe can\u2019t use that, we don\u2019t have copyright!\u201d Rima, Taika and I had to write something new in 10 minutes, but it was mostly Rima. Sometimes, working under pressure produces the best things.<\/p>\nI didn\u2019t have the best relationship with the canine actor that played Hec\u2019s hunting dog, Zag. I\u2019m a dog guy, but he wasn\u2019t the pal you would expect a dog to be \u2013 he had other things on his mind. The wild boar that wounds Zag was realised on screen in a mixture of ways. But on location we were reacting to a couple of guys operating a kind of puppet pig! The finished scene is pretty full-on. A lot of people have to comfort their children after it.<\/p>\n
People often stop me and say it\u2019s their favourite film. They remember it with affection, and when something is taken to heart, that\u2019s a wonderful thing to have in your CV. The only thing that irritated me after its release was some people saying Julian stole the film from me. I don\u2019t think there was any theft involved \u2013 the film was always his in the first place.<\/p>\n
Sam Neill gave this interview in June, a month before his death on 13 July.<\/p>\n
Julian Dennison, played Ricky Baker<\/p>\n
I\u2019d worked with Taika before on an anti-drugs advert and didn\u2019t have to audition. Ricky is this broken kid stuck in a system of foster care that\u2019s failing him. I come from a community where that happens a lot with young people \u2013 I had cousins who acted like Ricky Baker, I had friends who dressed like him and my brother listened to Tupac.<\/p>\n
I knew Sam Neill was big and lots of people liked him, but I didn\u2019t really know who he was. Knowing there were going to be all these scenes of just him and me in the bush, I thought: \u201cMan, I hope he\u2019s not lame \u2026\u201d He turned out to be very young at heart, like an older cousin. I had the best time and loved hanging out with Sam \u2013 sometimes it felt like both of us were 12 years old.<\/p>\n
I grew up in a religious home and went to Sunday school, and I wasn\u2019t a big swearer like Ricky. When it came to lines like: \u201cShit just got real!\u201d I was like: \u201cAm I allowed to say this?\u201d<\/p>\n
double quotation markI said: \u2018Wouldn\u2019t it be funny if Sam opened the door and realised he hadn\u2019t dug the tunnel yet?\u2019<\/p>\n
Rachel House, who played the child welfare officer leading the hunt for Hec and Ricky, was also my acting coach. She taught me tricks like recording my lines and listening back to them the night before we shot a scene. I still do that today. The movie is full of pop-culture references from way before I was born which I didn\u2019t get while I was making it, but I see the bigger picture now.<\/p>\n
Taika was open to ideas, which often arrived while we were all practising our lines in a hot tub. In the scene where Ricky and Hec are trying to come up with an escape plan with Rhys Darby\u2019s character, Psycho Sam, there was a line in the script about an underground bunker. I said: \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be funny if Sam opened the door and realised he hadn\u2019t dug the tunnel yet?\u201d That ended up in the movie.<\/p>\n
The big car chase<\/a> at the end was shot on the ancestral land of the Ng\u0101ti Rangi tribe, who were really welcoming and helpful, as were the army, who use some of their territory as a training ground. We had to travel in a truck with army people when we went from the filming base to the location. I guess they\u2019d lost some of their mines or something \u2013 they\u2019d be like: \u201cIf you see metal things sticking out of the ground, just let us know.\u201d If anything was spotted, someone would come over with bright pink spray paint and draw a circle around it, like some people do to draw attention to dog poo.<\/p>\n The 10th anniversary release of Hunt for the Wilderpeople in 4k is in cinemas and on digital platforms now, with UHD and Blu-ray editions on 17 August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sam Neill, played Hector Faulkner Taika Waititi\u2019s film Boy is one of my favourites ever, so when I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589165,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-589164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}