A bold adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s fabulously intricate novel, The Luminaries takes us to the 19th-century gold rush origins of modern New Zealand, a place of damp and dirt, discomfort and constant death. Despite the Victorian dresses and britches, we’re in among the noise and chaos with people who have arrived at the end of the world and frequently the end of their tethers. ‘Yes, it was a pretty tough way of life,’ says the show’s producer Lisa Chatfield, whose great-grandfather worked as a minister in those gold fields. ‘You get the impression they were starving at least 50 per cent of the time.’
It was also a period of great and rapid change, of hastily built camps and hotels amid unspoilt and unfarmed land, very little of which survives today. This made location shooting more difficult than originally expected, as Chatfield found while dealing with her British counterparts on this GB/NZ co-production. ‘Some of the team in the UK were a bit surprised that there weren’t parts of that English heritage that had been held onto,’ she says, ‘but, while the first arrivals emulated what was back home, they then wanted to build something new and fresh and that belonged to them.’
As a result, the production built the story’s two key settlements – Dunedin on the South Island’s south-east coast and Hokitika on the west – near Auckland, on the North Island, the centre of the country’s film industry. Competing for room with both Mulan and the Avatar sequels, they constructed the Wild West-style main street of Dunedin in the car park of a film studio, and next door created the key location of The House of Many Wishes, a mansion where the mysterious and manipulative Lydia Wells (Eva Green) holds court, gathering many characters around her, including the show’s heroine Anna Wetherell (Eve Hewson). ‘It was probably one of the largest interiors I’ve ever seen,’ says Chatfield. ‘A full Victorian two storeys.’
Tawharanui Peninsula
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They also used Auckland for some exteriors, such as Anna and Lydia’s meeting in episode one, filmed in one of the city’s parks, as well as the beaches to the north. The scene where new arrival Emery Staines (Himesh Patel) goes fishing with local man about town Francis Carver (Marton Csokas) was shot on the Tāwharanui Peninsula, where there’s no shortage of white sands. ‘That’s one of the things that’s quite distinct about New Zealand,’ says Chatfield, ‘the beaches on the east coast are predominately white sand and the beaches on the west coast are black sand. It’s a subtle thing but it really matters to all the New Zealanders. It also makes the visuals really distinctive.’
This meant that when filming scenes set in Hokitika, production moved again. The star here was Te Henga, aka Bethells Beach, a stretch of volcanic sand previously seen in Xena: Warrior Princess, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and music videos by Shania Twain and Taylor Swift. Here, the infamously rough tides give Emery’s waterlogged arrival in Hokitika a convincing touch, but the broad span also provided a backdrop for significant scenes between Anna and Crosbie Wells (Ewen Leslie) and, making great use of the beach’s natural rock arch, for two meetings between Lydia and Anna in episode four and six. For the latter, filming went to the wire, with the tide rushing in as the last lines were being spoken: ‘You can’t see but it was up to the bottom of their skirts,’ says Chatfield. ‘It was all magic hour, last light of the day, everybody going like the clappers and terrified we hadn’t got it.’
Bethells Beach
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Crosbie’s hillside cottage, seen in episode one and later, was also near Te Henga, though this time with the help of a little digital trickery. Supposedly overlooking the Arahura River, which meets the sea by Hokitika, it was in fact on the Waitakere Ranges, with VFX changing an estuary into a river bed. Anna’s arrival in Hokitika, meanwhile, was filmed just up the coast from Te Henga at Muriwai, also used for the scene where Chinese miner Quee Long (Gary Young) is beaten up by Europeans.
Hokitika itself was another Auckland build, this time at the rear of a farm that allowed the team to reproduce the nascent town’s proximity to the bush. ‘It was a homage to a lot of little gold towns up and down the West Coast which were pretty dirty, pretty grimy, very muddy,’ says Chatfield. ‘We were trying to capture a sense of how new that world was, everything rough-sawn and just growing, with sand in the streets.’ On the same farm, they also built the set for the Chinatown where Quee and others lived closer to the wilderness.
For certain scenes, only the South Island would do – though this proved harder than expected. ‘It was really important to film down south on the water in episode two when Te Rau Tauwhare (Richard Te Are) takes Emery back up the river to look for the highly valued pounamu, or greenstone,’ explains Chatfield, ‘as in the West Coast there are only five rivers where you can find it.’ The plan was to shoot on the Arahura, but the area was overtaken by severe flooding just before the team arrived, so they moved to another candidate further north, Crooked River, a peaceful stretch best known for its fly fishing.
Also removed from the schedule at the last minute was a shoot at Dorothy Falls, planned as the location for a late scene of Anna panning for gold, when the place became totally inaccessible. It was possible, however, to shoot her rowing into the middle of nearby Lake Kaniere to dispose of a mysterious bundle in episode six, conjuring up the stillness experienced by the 19th-century European settlers in the midst of one of the region’s most popular watersports and sightseeing venues.
A similar feat was pulled off for one of the series’ opening shots, of the arrival of Anna and Emery’s boat in New Zealand. For this, the production crew was back on the North Island at Whangaroa, about three and a half hours’ drive north of Auckland. Filming the scene involved building a small set on a barge and running it up and down the harbour, but the magic comes from an overhead shot of the ship moving between two stretches of land covered in virgin forest, achieved with only a little help from the digital-effects team. ‘It’s meant to be Dunedin, which at the time was covered in forest like that, soon converted into farm and grassland,’ explains Chatfield. ‘At Whangaroa you still have that sense of bush down to the waterline and we wanted that feeling of it being new and untouched.’
‘The Luminaries’ begins on BBC One on 21 June 2020 at 9pm, with the full series available on BBC iPlayer afterwards
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