Kai Hawkins

Kai Hawkins’ first ambition was to become an architect. In early 1961, straight out of Cashmere High School, he got a job as an office boy with the prestigious Christchurch architecture firm of Warren and Mahoney. However attempts to get into architecture were not successful — "Physics was not my thing". Instead Hawkins focused his drawing skills on graphic design at the Canterbury University School of Fine Art.  

That change of focus might have been architecture’s loss, but it was eventually to become the New Zealand film industry’s gain as Hawkins went on to become the production designer (or art director) on many of our most notable films, including Goodbye Pork Pie, Beyond Reasonable Doubt and Vigil (see photos), for which he won a GOFTA Award. Hawkins says in those early days New Zealand films "we didn't use the credit 'production designer' — at that point art director was the term used." 

At art school, Hawkins was always drawn to working in three dimensions. The sculpture department attracted him: "I didn’t paint on canvas," he says, "I built things."

While at art school, Hawkins got a job at CHTV-3, the Christchurch operation of the NZ Broadcasting Corporation. There he worked on vital things like weather graphics, and got a grounding in the fledgling world of TV production. On graduation in 1966, he crossed the ditch to work as a designer for Channel 9 in Australia.

One of the biggest programmes in Australia in that era was a variety show called In Melbourne Tonight, which ran from 1957 to 1970 and made a huge star out of Graham Kennedy. Hawkins would design and build sets for the show’s skits and sketches, as well as backdrops for the musical artists that appeared.

His interest in abstract art was indulged by his colleagues. He tells a story about sending a taxi truck driver to the Melbourne Cricket Ground to collect 10 sacks of empty beer cans.

"I spent a weekend inside one of the prop sheds, putting double-sided tape on the bottom of the cans and pressing them to a big panel in an abstract pattern," Hawkins recalls. "Then we sprayed them fluorescent orange — which in black and white really jumped — and when they lit it, it just looked amazing. It was just a piece that sat behind the singer, but it was a powerful piece of abstraction."

In Melbourne Tonight was live television. Hawkins remembers Kennedy stopping the show to bring the cameras in and comment on the design. 

In his mid-20s, Hawkins felt the call of Christchurch once again. He returned to teach in the design school at Canterbury University, although he felt concern at the skills of some of his students: "A lot of these kids could not actually use a pen and draw very well. I felt that something was missing in their earlier schooling — that they hadn't been taught basic drawing skills."

It’s the ability to draw that Hawkins feels has served him best in his career — he is still grateful to the teachers at Cashmere High School who encouraged that skill — enabling him "to be able to communicate … get the idea across, so you can actually sell".

In the early 1970s, Hawkins got married and headed north to Auckland to work in the growing advertising industry. He describes his eventual transition to the film business as "almost accidental".

In those days of advertising, budgets were small and there wasn’t much room for creativity, but he made connections with ambitious filmmakers like Roger Donaldson who was preparing a family-friendly follow-up to his 1977 hit Sleeping Dogs. Nutcase involved a who’s who of the New Zealand filmmaking community who were about to get very busy indeed — including producer John Barnett, cinematographer Graeme Cowley and special effects man Geoff Murphy. "That show was full of 'Murphy-isms'," says Hawkins fondly.

Soon after Nutcase, Murphy asked Hawkins to design his own debut feature Goodbye Pork Pie. He also found himself building fantastical sets for a Star Wars-style Crunchie commercial; Hawkins can be spotted battling the weather in the second clip of this making of documentary.  

Hawkins remembers being asked by TV One to prepare for a big budget follow-up to the successful TV drama, The Governor. Coal Flat was to be about the rise of the Labour Party and the West Coast mining town of Blackball. That involved travelling extensively around the region, looking at locations, but eventually the government of the day decided that the production was too expensive and stepped in to cancel it.

The experience still proved worthwhile; Hawkins’ next gig was on British movie Bad Blood, based on the 1941 murders by West Coaster Stanley Graham. Starring were Jack Thompson and Carol Burns ("They were two Australians, but they were very good".) Hawkins found a location only one kilometre from where the original tragedy had occurred, and bought some old houses and a church to move them on to the site: "If we wanted to build this it would cost us too much money, but we were dealing in authenticity. It became a big operation."

Another big operation — arguably, a project Hawkins should be famous for — was designing the magnificent truck and trailer unit for 1982 post-apocalyptic movie Battletruck (aka Warlords of the 21st Century). "I had no real preconceived ideas. The script asked for an armoured truck. Harley Cokeliss was the director and Harley didn’t have any pictures or anything like that to use. I didn’t really have anything to guide me."

Hawkins bought a model toy of a modern Mack truck and began working with that, but the eventual vehicle turned out to be quite different: "It was a truck called a Pacific with a monstrous Cummins diesel in it — an ex-logging truck. It had very low gear ratios and top speed of only 45 miles an hour. It used to tow 120 tonnes of logs. We bought it for $15,000!"

The main conversion work on the truck was done in Auckland but the shoot was in Central Otago ("around Alexandra"). Hawkins drove the truck from Auckland to the location — "it took so long to get to Wellington at 45 miles an hour" — and coach builders in Ashburton were contracted to build the trailer unit. The futuristic panels were made of steel — "I said, you wanted to drive through buildings, didn’t you?" — and the bumper was a steel beam weighing four-and-a-half tonnes.

"That bumper went straight through everything! It protected the lights and everything else, so the truck could keep going all the time during filming. Imagine if you’d actually destroyed the truck halfway thorough the film." Hawkins did three quarters of the driving himself — he maintains his heavy vehicle licence to this day, as he drives tour coaches and school buses around the Marlborough region where he now lives.

In 1987, Hawkins reunited with Roger Donaldson for a scene of Kevin Costner thriller No Way Out (see photos). "That was a special effects sequence that Roger decided to give us instead of to Hollywood." In the Winstone quarry in Mount Wellington, Auckland, Hawkins and his team built the foredeck of an American destroyer on a gimbal so that it could be tossed around on the raging 'sea' — courtesy of large dump tanks filled with water.

"We did that whole sequence for about $500,000; it would have cost millions in Hollywood. We probably did the whole thing, set it up and did it all, in about four weeks. It’s about coming back to the right people, the people you know and can trust, who can put it together. And we did."

Hawkins continued to design commercials and movies — notably Leon Narbey's The Footstep Man (1992) and Sam Pillsbury’s Crooked Earth (2001). The Footstep Man proved especially challenging. This 'film-within-the-film' revolved around a man doing sound effects for a movie set in 19th century Paris. "We had to shoot it in two sections. The period segment was shot first, then the camera crew moved on while we prepared new sets for the modern day scenes." Hawkins also fondly recalls an ambitious, extended Steadicam shot, for which hurried changes made behind the camera revealed a completely different set, once the camera had returned to its original position. Only a section of this shot was used in the finished movie. 

During the 90s Hawkins began exploring other forms of design: "I was quite heavily involved with Rodney Wilson at the National Maritime Museum on Hobson Wharf, then up the hill at the Auckland Museum. The skill sets we developed in film were very attractive to those who wanted to build authenticity into exhibitions." He also branched out into retail design, designing the signature interior look for men’s outfitter Rodd & Gunn in Australasia and Japan, and the Australian start-up of childrenswear retailer Pumpkin Patch. 

Nowadays, he keeps busy making and selling rustic light fittings made from old wine barrels, creating graphics for the regional tourism industry, designing local bus stops and — of course — still driving.

"I’m not content to sit around; I need to be occupied. Somebody paid me a great compliment not that long ago. He said, 'Oh, this other guy has just pulled out of a driving job. He's an old 80-year-old — but you're a very young one!' "

Profile written by Dan Slevin: published on 21 September 2024  

Sources include
Kai Hawkins
Barbara Cairns and Helen Martin, Shadows on the Wall - A Study of Seven New Zealand Feature Films (Auckland: Longman Paul, 1994)