The Making of Smash Palace

I think it's really significant actually, because I think we seem to struggle to do contemporary drama, we hide behind the caper genre, which we seem to have done to death. In fact we've almost reinvented it ourselves. We hide behind all kinds of things as a film industry and I think that's maybe to do with how old we are. But I think Smash Palace is a bit of a blimp, a bit of an odd aberration.

– Production Manager Dorthe Scheffmann on the place of Smash Palace in New Zealand film history

One of the things that I felt about a car wrecking yard as being sort of symbolic of the sort of the pain of this story, is that every one of these cars wrecked by the side of the road is somebody's dream that has come to an end; you know somebody's got hurt in these cars, or somebody's life savings have gone down the drain. If you're looking for a symbol of relationships under crisis and a story that had a lot of tension to it then you couldn't set it in a better place than somewhere like this.

– Director Roger Donaldson on the Horopito Motors car yard, the setting for Smash Palace

It seems to me marriage is some kind of lottery, anyway. You buy your ticket.

– Al Shaw (Bruno Lawrence) opens up to his mate Ray (Keith Aberdein)

I like Keith's laconic sort of style, you know. Everything he says has a sort of wry smile about it. He has a sort of great cynicism about him that came through in the character.

– Roger Donaldon on picking writer and actor Keith Aberdein for the role of Ray

You can't read a Roger Donaldson script and say "this isn't gonna work". You can say this script's gonna be bloody hard to pull off, but I can see by the team he's gonna pull it together and if anyone's gonna pull it off, these guys are.

– Director Geoff Murphy

He hired me as the second assistant director, but my role changed abruptly ... on the second day the continuity person didn't turn up on the set, so I was dispatched as second assistant to go and get them. And I went down to this caravan and there was a note on the door, saying "I can't do this, it's too much for me". So I obediently came back with the note and handed it to Roger, and he said "well you do it then".

– Suzy Pointon remembers the start of the Smash Palace shoot

When I found Greer, Greer became Georgie, and the rest is history.

– Roger Donaldson on casting child actor Greer Robson as Georgie

It's still getting mentioned and we still refer back to that time even in our present day trading as a wrecking yard. When we go to our vintage swap meets people say "where the hell are you, where's Horopito?" and we say "the middle of the North Island" and they say "where's that?" and we say "remember the movie Smash Palace?" and that puts it into perspective.

– Colin Frederickson, owner of car yard Horopito Motors, where much of Smash Palace was filmed

He often didn't know what he wanted till he saw it, but he did know when he saw it and by god that's a useful thing to know.

– Actor Keith Aberdein on Roger Donaldson's approach as a director

Bruno's performance was always incredibly relaxed. I think the greatest skill he has was he could relax.

– Editor Michael Horton on lead actor Bruno Lawrence

He developed such a relationship with me and treated me like one of his own children, and I needed that so much at that age because my own father had left. He was so genuine ... there aren't many people around who are that genuine.

– Greer Robson on the relationship she formed with Bruno Lawrence during the making of Smash Palace

Jack Nicholson said Bruno was his favourite actor. Now I guarantee one of the reasons was the nude scene in Smash Palace where Bruno's arguing with the cop and he's standing there with his d**k hanging out. Now Nicholson and those Hollywood guys, their thing is "go all out and be real" but they would never, ever have the courage to do that.

– Writer and performer Arthur Baysting on one of Bruno Lawrence's fans

I always say I associate Roger with the smell of high octane fuel because everything I've worked on with Roger was about the technology and machinery and his absolute love of it.

– Suzy Pointon on a constant theme in Roger Donaldson's work

I guess that's always been my theory with any movie I've ever liked, there's always stuff in it that you feel you'd love to tell someone else, but you think if 'I tell them that, I'll wreck the movie for them'. In great movies, there are always hooks that take it to another place and I think Smash Palace had some real hooks. That's why we're talking about it 30 years later.

– Director Roger Donaldson looks back on film Smash Palace, The NZ Herald, 20 May, 2011

It was almost like a mining camp. You're in the middle of nowhere and the social life is the people you are there with. We definitely partied a lot and had a good time, ate communally. There was dinner at the Ohakune Lodge every night. And often the night would wind down with people standing in the hotel kitchen having a whiskey or a glass of wine. I climbed Mount Ngauruhoe one Sunday afternoon. That was what you did with your day off.

– Smash Palace gaffer Stuart Dryburgh recalls the making of the film, The NZ Herald, 20 May, 2011

I knew Bruno well enough to tell him this: that I thought when he tried to act, he wasn't very good. But his instincts were superb. You kind of worked on the edge with Bruno and that was a very good place. The acting establishment hated him, of course, because he wasn't one of them ... he was a larrikin drummer for f***s sake. He made people nervous — and quite rightly so — because he had an instinct for starting trouble.

– Writer/actor Keith Aberdein on watching Bruno Lawrence blossom as an actor, The NZ Herald, 20 May 2011