Māori spirituality is part of family life in new TV show
A Māori family returns to a small North Island town after living in London in the bilingual and slightly supernatural TV show Dead Ahead.
Writer and co-creator Scotty Cotter (Tainui, Fiji, Scottish) hopes the show will deliver plenty of laughs and also some insight into the Māori belief that our tūpuna (ancestors) walk "right next to us".
"It's not seeing them, but having a sense of them there - that is what I really wanted to touch on - keeping them near us and keeping us connected with them," he tells Saturday Morning.
Scotty Cotter as school principal Matua Kare in the new TVNZ+ series Dead Ahead. (Source: Supplied)
Dead Ahead - launched on TVNZ+ - centres on the Wharekoa family; high-powered lawyer Kiri (Miriama Smith), her husband Matiu (Xavier Horan) and their kids Amiria (Mia Van Oyen) and Nate (Elijah Tamati).
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Cotter says he thought it would be hard finding a Māori boy with an English accent, but then Elijah Tamati - whose whanau also lived in London- walked into the room and nailed his audition.
"[The kids in Dead Ahead] are just stunning. The future is bright with these two."
Elijah Tamati as Nate in the TVNZ+ series Dead Ahead. (Source: Supplied)
While it's a scary thing to write a TV show, Cotter says it was also really exciting to create a set of Māori characters with "all our flaws and our beauty and our crack-up-isms".
"I wanted to create Māori characters who break the stereotypical mould, but also have authenticity."
Starting out as a teen actor, Cotter's first introduction to New Zealand television was on the Māori learning programme Whānau, where he found a Māori woman "running the show".
That was the late actor and director Nancy Brunning who became Cotter's friend and mentor.
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"I really felt her in the writing of [Dead Ahead], and I really felt her pushing me and guiding us."
Nancy Brunning at the 66th Berlinale International Film Festival Berlin in 2016 (Source: AFP)
Performing in te reo Māori plays with Brunning as a younger man, Cotter says he discovered the wairua (spirit) of words.
"There's wairua in kupu (Māori words) - how we say it, how we feel it. It's not just blurting words out. You've got to put it in, feel it, hold it."
Still on "that hikoi journey" of learning te reo, Cotter now studies online via Te Wānanga o Aotearoa.
He hopes Dead Ahead will "gently introduce" te reo words and phrases to viewers who may not know them.
"By the end of the season, hopefully they can understand and use kupu and te reo Māori in their everyday life."
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In the show, he attempts to show a "less Disneyfied" picture of Māori spirituality, including the role of kēhua (ghosts), which he sensed after his grandmother died.
"The sense of not seeing tūpuna but having a sense of them there is what I really wanted to touch on.
"It's my gentle way of showing people how we whakanoa [remove tapu from] ourselves."
Fun fact: Saturday Morning presenter Mihi Forbes was Scotty Cotter's inspiration for the Dead Ahead character Meremereana (Kura Forrester) - an award-winning journalist who "just knows what's up".
Dead Ahead was made with the support of NZ On Air and Te Māngai Pāho.
Watch it on TVNZ+
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