Starlight Hotel

Starlight Hotel is pure enchantment, a perfect blending of cast, setting and story that brings to mind the visual impact of Days of Heaven

Starlight Hotel, New Zealand, 1988

Mirage Films
Director: Sam Pillsbury
Producers: Larry Parr, Finola Dwyer
Writer: Grant Hinden Miller, from his novel The Dream Mongers
Director of photography: Warrick Attewell
Editor: Mike Horton
1st assistant director: Chris Graves
Production designer: Mike Becroft
Costume designer: Barbara Darragh
Production manager: Hammond Peak
Production accountant: Keith McKenzie
Production secretary: Margaret Meyer
Location manager: Kate White
Unit manager: Podge Preston
2nd assistant director: Victoria Hardy
Continuity: Sally Tagg
Focus puller: James Cowley
Clapper loader: Cameron McLean
Sound recordist: Mike Westgate
Boom operator: Stephen Buckland
Stills photographer: Derek Henderson
Art director: Roger Guise
Standby props: Fiona Gunter
Construction manager: Nigel Tweed
Makeup: Viv Mepham
Gaffer: Steve Latty
Best boy: Ian Beale
Key grip: Andy Reid
2nd grip Terry: Williams
Editing assistant: Chris Todd
Chaperone: Alison Routledge
Lighting trainee: Alistair Broughton
Runner: Michael Hill
Art department trainee: Wendy Preston

With: Greer Robson (Kate), Peter (Phelps Patrick), Marshall Napier (Detective Wallace), The Wizard (Spooner), Alice Fraser (Aunt), Patrick Smyth (Uncle), Bruce Phillips (Dave Marshall), Elrich Hooper (Principal), John Watson (Mr Curtis), Mervyn (Glue Skip), Shirley Kelly (Mrs Skip), Bill Walker (John Repo-man), John Waite (Jack Repo-man), Donogh Rees (Helen) Timothy (Lee Maxwell), Peter Dennet (Des), Teresa Bonney (Melissa), Duncan Anderson (Railway Clerk), Russell Gibson (Railway Worker), Gary McCormick (Constable Murphy), Lex Matheson (Constable Willis), Norm Forsey (Farmer), Craig Stewart (Farmhand), Craig Halkett (Farmer’s Son), Geoffrey Wearing (Mr Jamieson), Sherril Cooper (Flora Peters), Louise Petherbridge (Chairwoman), David Telford (Guard), Patrick Pointer (Station Master), Glennis Woods (Tea Lady)

35mm, PG–coarse language, 95 minutes

Premiered in Oamaru, 17 March 1988

“Starlight Hotel is pure enchantment, a perfect blending of cast, setting and story that brings to mind the visual impact of Days of Heaven. It’s one of the finest New Zealand films to date… It is one of those pictures that sneaks up on you unannounced and steals your heart.” — Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times, 13/8/1988

“... Starlight Hotel is a picaresque tale that charts the unlikely relationship that grows between a 13 year-old tearaway trying to find her father and a psychologically scarred survivor of World War I. For Pillsbury that relationship was the kernel of the film. ‘I wanted to show how two selfish people lose self- interest and begin to care. That’s a very small thing to make a movie about, but I wanted to see if I could make it work,.” — Brent Lewis, “A moving road movie”, New Zealand Listener, April 2, 1988

“A road movie centering on the friendship between a man on the run from the law and a 13 year-old girl looking for her father may not sound original, but this Kiwi offering is likely to be a winner. Setting is the Central South Island in 1930, with farmers forced to leave their land as the Depression bites. Kate, whose mother is dead, hates living with an aunt and uncle and runs away to try to find her father, who’s looking for work in Wellington on the North Island. She soon encounters Patrick, a man whose life was shattered by his experiences in the world war and later when his wife left him. He's wanted by the police for beating a repo man who was taking advantage during the Depression, and is trying to get to a port and then passage to Australia. All the classic elements of this kind of film are here: jumping on trains, hiding out in barns, making friends and enemies along the way. Aboveall there’s the relationship between the lonely child and the taciturn outlaw, and the film benefits enormously from the charismatic performances in the leads. Peter Phelps is an Aussie actor whose cinema career to date hasn’t been significant: his rugged, charming performance as Patrick looks likely to set him on the road to international stardom. Greer Robson, remembered as the little girl in Smash Palace, is growing up to be a real beauty, and has the required toughness and sensitivity for this role. Sam Pillsbury has put together all the elements with style. Warrick Attewell’s camerawork of magnificent New Zealand scenery is tops, with the little farms and small towns forming an integral element in the drama.” — David Stratton, Variety

“Starlight Hotel is a simply told odd-couple road movie which makes use of the dramatic potential of the Depression era setting while spinning a good yarn, exploring the possibility a hardened, inarticulate man can learn about life and love from a child. In the public realm the thuggery of the profiteers feeding off other people’s misfortune exemplifies selfishness, while the swaggie acts as a knowing mouthpiece for the oppressed poor. The story has an air of fairytale and at times coincidence and chance stretch credibility, particularly with the number and nature of the runaway’s escapes... In spite of the leisurely pace, dramatic tension is maintained, largely by the quality of the performances of Greer Robson and Peter Phelps, but also by their encounters with many colourful characters on the way. There is a painterly quality to the light and the images of land and sky that at times look surreal. The environment, vast and beautiful, is a perfect motif signalling freedom to the travelling pair. Action scenes are equally well realised, as in the riot by the unemployed in Oamaru which, although quite brief, provides a vivid instance of Depression politics. The source novella is pitched at readers in the 11 to 13 age group and Hinden Miller has adapted his story for a wider audience. The casting, too, has changed the complexion of the source story where the characters are aged 9 and 40. With Patrick twenty-something and Kate 13, as their journey progresses so too does an undercurrent of sexual tension. In keeping with the film’s ‘family’ target audience, this is, however, never more than hinted at, although a single kiss at the end of the film was believed to have dissuaded the Disney organisation from buying Starlight Hotel.” — Helen Martin, New Zealand Film 1912-1996

“Starlight Hotel will unquestionably help to persuade anyone who hasn’t been to New Zealand to decide to do so as soon as possible. The country looks glorious in Sam Pillsbury’s tale of a 12-year-old girl’s trek from the countryside to the town to find her father. But the film is happily not one of those beautifully shot nonentities likely to give the tourist board intense pleasure. This is New Zealand in the Depression, and the girl has been billeted with relatives because her father has had to look for work. And when she runs away, she hooks up with a young war veteran on the run with whom she develops a kind of puppy love. Greer Robson is splendid in the central role of what is a slightly lightweight but nevertheless very sympathetic odyssey and Peter Phelps is good too as the former soldier. There are also several cherishable scenes when the unorthodox pair meet up with locals who made a kind of Little England in a foreign land. But its chief glories are visual, and that’s a very good reason to see it.” — Derek Malcolm, The Guardian, 17/7/1988

“From New Zealand comes a Depression-era movie so pleasantly toned and told that even the ordinarily cynical American audience will be swept up with the sincerity of its old-fashioned formula. The story revolves around a pair of runaways: a young girl searching for the father forced to abandon her when he lost his job and his wife, and a former soldier unable to come to terms with a civilian society that deliberately neglects its citizens’ basic needs during a national economic crisis. As these two wander the backroads of the beautiful South Island the film fully takes hold of the opportunities it offers itself. The child and the man teach and are taught by one another and the appropriately timid, confused or villainous characters they encounter. Make no mistake: there is nothing great or new in Starlight Hotel. But director Sam Pillsbury and writer Grant Hinden Miller do manage to display a genuine talent for and successful execution of the gracious and touching intention. That attitude lifts their efforts above the empty professionalism to which the majority of Hollywood movies have become hopelessly addicted.” — LA Weekly, 12/8/1988

“Whatever its failings – and the chief one is a slight storyline which shows some contempt for credibility – Starlight Hotel confirms the pedigree of its director, Sam Pillsbury, as a visual storyteller of considerable skill. For this is a film which looks magnificent in every frame and elevates the Central Otago and South Canterbury landscape, where it was filmed, to the star status it deserves. The story is simple and traditional, which is no cause for criticism. In fact it is likely to gain the film the commercial success in big overseas markets which so often eludes New Zealand features. Kate is an 11-year-old left with relatives, while her jobless widower father seeks scarce work in Depression-racked Wellington. Lonely and longing for dad, she runs away and joins forces with Patrick, a fugitive wanted for manslaughter. The ‘hotel’ of the title is the great outdoors where these two make their way through a diverting series of episodes as a reluctant alliance blossoms into a loving friendship. The two have a lot in common and it is their shared insecurity and isolation which draws them together. For most of the film, the runaways are tiny figures in the parched landscape over which tower impossibly blue skies piled with cloud formations composed on an artist’s palette. Pillsbury and his director of photography Warwick Attewell allow the locations to tell a good deal of the story rather than simply making a backdrop for the action. But this is no scenic travelogue. The economical narrative – occasionally too elliptical for its own good – has some wry and laconic touches. At one point Patrick explains the background to his ‘problem’, by saying that he tried ‘to explain my point of view’ to a repossession agent with whom he had fallen out. As he speaks we see him, in flashback, tying a tractor’s cable on to a veranda post and driving away. Pillsbury is accomplished, too, in capturing the child’s perspective of events. Kate’s first meeting with Patrick recalls Pip’s encounter with Magwitch in David Lean’s film of Great Expectations in its sudden and terrifying impact. Starlight Hotel may not be a masterpiece, but is proof as powerful as we need that New Zealanders can tell good stories on film. The fact that Pillsbury now lives and works in Hollywood is a sad comment on our unwillingness to foster our own talent rather than gobble up the product from overseas studios.” — Peter Calder, NZ Herald, 31/3/1988

Screenings: Starlight Hotel screened on 13 February 2008 as part of the Big Sky: Empty Land series.