ALISTAIR BONE
The Knight Warrior on his way to patrol the city of Manchester.
From London, Felicity Monk is talking down her film again. She doesn't like the voice-over style so much and can see all the bits that look rough.
Another festival has picked up the documentary in the past few days.
She's not allowed to name the festival yet, but it's a Bafta qualifier - meaning its selections hold so much weight they can afterward be entered in the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards.
"It doesn't mean we'll win, though," she adds, very quickly.
The 10-minute piece is the Hamilton Girls'/University of Waikato graduate's first film, made with a fellow Kiwi, director and camera operator Cathy MacDonald.
It was finished in December and the latest festival - in company with the Cannes short-film corner - makes four that want to screen it.
The streets of Europe are awash with film-makers who would dine out on this for years. Instead, Monk's just surprised. "Oh! Did you like it?" she chirps breathless, sounding delighted.
It's called Roger the Real Life Superhero. The documentary opens with Roger Hayhurst who lives in Manchester, a dead man walking.
He's 19, a likeable, weedy nerd lacking social skills. He bills himself the Knight Warrior and insists on dressing up in a cheap cape and mask and patrolling a squalid part of violent Manchester, fighting crime.
He is ridiculous and clearly no threat to any man, woman or beast. The film is clearly an early obituary. It must (it must) end with him stabbed to death.
It's a little gem. Curving an arc with end to end tension and drama somehow perfectly framed in 10 tight minutes.
Much of its coherence is down to MacDonald's years working in small spaces as a promo director for the BBC. It's the sort of easy-looking thing that inevitably comes from grinding hard work.
At least Monk admits to that. She discovered the phenomenon of real-life superheroes while reading an obscure magazine.
The article explained how ordinary people would dress up in costumes and go out in the streets to do good. A journalist by trade, she found four and, with MacDonald, traipsed around the UK interviewing them.
"We made it on our own money on an absolute shoestring and the hotels we were staying at were just awful.
"I hadn't done it before and I'd do things like twizzle the fuzzy mike, not knowing how sensitive it was. I'd wave it around and bang it on my leg. There was a lot of learning on the job for me."
Hayhurst was the last person they talked to. They decided to drop the others and concentrate on him.
"He was so different to the others and had this incredible relationship with his mother. He was so authentic. His motives were a lot more pure."
Hayhurst had been doing his thing for a year when they met him in June 2011. He is a slow-talking Mancunian who was very badly bullied at school and has a strong side-interest in gnomes.
"I think his mental health is sound and he knows what he's doing, to an extent. I think he is naive about the danger that he is putting himself in. Salford is pretty rough. I said: You could die doing this. And he said: I know. That's the way it is."
Hayhurst would stay out to 2 or 3 in the morning. Most of the people he met appeared drunk.
He lives on a council estate and when his mum can afford it, he'll take out food parcels for people even worse off.
The film doesn't show his getting in any fights, but they seem inevitable. It's like watching a kitten cross a motorway.
"The police had seen him stalking around in his cobalt blue, one-piece Lycra outfit and his cape and his mask. He told them he was a real life superhero and keeping the streets safe."
The authorities arranged for him to have a mental health assessment. He passed and the police instead gave him a number to call before he went out on the streets so they could look out for him.
"He says they often stop and jump out and get pictures."
Monk and MacDonald had a few conversations about the ethics of what they were doing.
They cut out shots of Hayhurst's home - where he lives with his mum and two disabled brothers - because it was in such bad shape.
"They're just getting by and then these two foreign girls breezed up from London and they didn't know what to make of us.
"They had never had a camera in their home before and they would have done anything for us. But the story is about Roger and his mum and we were in their home. We didn't want to exploit that."
The other conundrum involved encouraging his behaviour.
"We didn't want to come across as saying this was a really great thing to do and lots of teenagers should be doing this.
"And we didn't want to raise his profile and have him out on the street one night and have some kid saying, You were in that documentary, and targeting him."
But, by another route, that's exactly what happened. The pair have not put their movie on general release.
Trading under the name Earnest Productions, they intended their first effort as a calling card and it's a condition of many festivals that it can't be released before they screen it.
Instead, the multimedia units of newspapers have mimicked the documentary.
There are YouTube clips of Hayhurst, the most popular ticking over 150,000 views and more than 800 comments.
The majority of these lack basic grammar, syntax, spelling, reasoning, decency and wit. Many people weighing in are clearly and seriously disturbed, threatening rape and dismemberment.
"He has a Knight Warrior Facebook profile," says Monk.
"At least two people in his hometown call themselves real-life supervillans. They want to meet him in a dodgy part of town and have a showdown. He said they were all talk. He seemed remarkably unfazed."
Midway through shooting, the pair pretended to be journalists and snuck into a film festival for free.
Posing as a photographer, MacDonald was so nervous about being sprung she dropped her camera. But they brazened it out and got some tips and inspiration. It remains about the extent of their networking.
"It was such a new thing and all the way along we were thinking: Will we pull it off?
"I was so focused on getting it finished and seeing the end product and whether we felt proud of it. I wasn't thinking about the business side, which is half the job."
The pair have done a five-minute interview, tacked on to one with another pair of film makers. Tousle-haired men in scarves and round spectacles dominate. The Kiwis look nervous.
"In terms of the industry here [Europe], I'm really not in it in any way.
"It is pretty massive and pretty clicky. You really have to throw yourself in there.
"There are people who live it and breathe it and probably go to see each other's short films in tiny little theatres every week. But I guess I'm not one of those people."
Monk makes money freelancing for New Zealand publications. While her movie was being finished, she interviewed Regan Hall, a young Kiwi film-maker on the fast track to big things in London. She didn't say a word about her own film.
"I wasn't the subject," she says indignantly.
Roger Hayhurst, by contrast, is riding it. After seeing him first in June, the pair went back in December to shoot the second half of the film.
"Between our first interview and our second, his popularity exploded. He got an agent and was on two big breakfast shows. Newspapers and student film-makers are doing pieces on him."
The Lycra suit has gained plastic body armour and looks more intimidating. Roger has stubble, a stylish haircut and a pin-up on the wall.
"The first time he was shy and wouldn't hold your eye contact. Most of his teeth were completely rotted. When we got back, he'd had his teeth done and had his little Justin Beiber haircut. His whole demeanour was so different. It was quite a remarkable transformation."
He has a girl and a network of friends. He's going to parties for the first time.
"So this whole new world is opening up and I'm really curious as to what is going to happen: whether he is going to keep his Knight Warrior alter ego going."
The movie has been submitted to another 15 festivals. Commissioning houses are having a good look. The plaudits are starting to rain, but Monk is still goofy, maddening, steering by some other light.
"When I watch it I kind of oscillate between going Yeah! and Oh!"
They aren't obsessive about capitalising on it. MacDonald is already back in New Zealand. Monk and her husband will join her by the end of the year, following the plan they've always had, returning home.
They have ideas and will seek funding here, but the London coup already seems to be something they just flicked off on their OE.
Not real life at all.
- © Fairfax NZ News