Motueka police officer Stefen Harris has been a uniformed front-line responder for 30-plus years, seeing people at their best, worst and most vulnerable. That would be a big enough job for most people, but Harris has also carved out a side hustle career as an author and film director.
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Crime is his preferred genre, but it’s not a case of art imitating life, he told Kathryn Ryan.
“Nothing I write is real, but everything’s true,” Harris says.
“I guess you have a ringside seat to humanity. But it wouldn't be right to put any real events into a story. I feel there’s an authenticity there. When you’re writing about crime and you’ve met these sorts of people, it certainly contributes to verisimilitude.”
Harris has been writing since he was a teenager. His first novel, The Waikikamukau Conspiracy was published in 1999.
“I’d written five novels in 12 years before that one in order to write something worthy of being published,” he says. “It was one of the easiest to write because it was quite tongue-in-cheek, quite comedic.”
In 2006, the book was made into an award-winning feature-length film, The Waimate Conspiracy, that Harris wrote, produced and directed.
“I rented the Scout den in Waimate and invited everyone to come down and make this film in a week,” he says. “I don’t think anyone took me seriously, but we did.”
A couple of years later, Harris won a scholarship to study with New Zealander Martin Campbell, who was then directing Mel Gibson in the 2010 film Edge of Darkness.
“I was with Mel every day, it was a great experience. He’s a regular guy, he had a trailer but didn’t use it, he’d hang out with the film crew all day.
“On one occasion, villains were going to run him over in a car and Mel had to shoot the windscreen out and take out these guys. And I tried to explain to him that he should be holding the pistol two-handed, like we learned in Police College. Mel just looked at me and said, ‘Stef, this here is a movie’.
“What he was saying to me was that the heightened reality of film is not is not the same as real life.”
While it was great fun hanging out with Gibson and the rest of the film’s stars, Harris was also soaking up lessons in movie-making.
“The key takeaway was I learned to be ruthless in getting to make the film you want to make,” he says.
He applied those lessons – and a few more – a couple of years later when he made his 2018 short film Blue Moon.
The film, which stars Mark Hadlow and Jed Brophy, was shot entirely on an iPhone 7 over six nights in a Motueka petrol station that was only closed between the hours of midnight and 5am.
“I pushed the crew very, very hard to get to get that film in the can in 30 hours,” he says.
“But a lot of that tension translates onto the screen so I'm happy with it. Basically, the poor actors barely got chance to draw breath in between scenes. But we got there.”
Harris’ new novel is another crime drama, this time set in Boston. The setting was partly for pragmatic reasons - “I was going to write a crime novel and I wanted to seek a wide audience, so I set it in the States” and partly thanks to his experiences there during the Edge of Darkness shoot.
Frank Winter, the key character, is a retired Boston detective seeking justice 20 years after his daughter’s killer is released on parole.
“The genesis of the story was ‘what would happen if somebody would not accept that justice had been done?’ And if that person was a broken, angry man who’d lost his marriage, lost his daughter, and was determined to take the law into his own hands.”
When Harris wrote the book he imagined Mel Gibson as Frank Winter.
“I pretty much wrote in a very visual way, writing short chapters as if they were scenes in a film. I’d put Mel in that lead role and see what he'd do, which worked really well.
“When I’m writing, I’m hell-bent on getting the story down, all the visceral details, the emotion, before self-doubt can creep in and you ask yourself, ‘who cares if a stranger comes to town?’. You’ve got to get the words on paper. Once I’ve done that, I'll go back and check it for my mistakes.”
Harris says there’s more to Frank Winter as a character – “this is a crime story, but if I’ve done my job right, readers will remember Frank long after they’ve forgotten the details of the story” – and there will be a follow-up book. He’s also written a love story and has another film gestating, but policing remains his full-time focus.
“When we started at Police College, they lined us all up and we all had to give a five-minute speech on why we were there. Every single one of us said we were there to help people. That hasn't changed. I still get a buzz out of when someone's having a terrible day, being the first one to turn up and sort it out.”