Filming ‘sleeper comedy hit’ of the year in 10 days for $10k

Notes From a Fish described as “sleeper comedy hit” of the year is about an aspiring novelist on the verge of a publishing breakthrough who relies on a creative muse in the shape of a tropical fish called Kirby.

“When the fish goes missing, they freak out and they employ the help of a recently redundant fisheries officer, played by Romy Hooper, to help track it down and it becomes this kind of bizarre misfortune, misadventure thing where these two go across Auckland looking for this fish,” co-director Tom Levesque told RNZ’s Afternoons.

The maritime muse represents the external stimuli many artists seek, says co-director and co-star Romy Hopper.

“As creative people I think – and particularly in a country like ours, where there’s not often a lot of outlet to explore what you would like to creatively – the theme of I guess having something really bizarre and really out there to rely on to be able to get all of your creative juice from is not necessarily uncommon.”

The tight deadline and budget made the project a “hell of a lot of fun,” Levesque says.

“I mean that was the whole point of us doing it. It was literally because we wanted to recapture the joy of film making.”

They set the goal of shooting in a traditionally quiet time in the movie world, Hooper says.

“No one’s doing much let’s go ‘yo mates, do you want to get together and let’s just do something bonkers?’ and everyone just said ‘yes’.”

The shoestring budget meant no lighting crews, Levesque says.

“We needed to use natural light, which meant that we were subject to that sort of magic hour in the morning and the evening. So we either would be shooting for sort of six to eight hours from the beginning of the day and capturing morning light or the evening, so we weren’t even doing the standard like 10 three-quarter, 11-hour shoot days.”

It also meant many film-making hats were worn during the shoot, Hooper says.

“Tom was the co-director, the DOP [director of photography] so he was behind the camera, he was also editing, which meant when you’re shooting something in a 10-day period and then you jump straight into an edit of that, it’s really fresh in your memory. He remembered takes like ‘oh no, wait, we didn’t like that one. we liked the one after that’.”

Notes from a Fish had its world premiere at the New Zealand International Film festival in August and opens nationally in cinemas next week.