Toa Fraser's been busy. His latest film, The Dead Lands - a thunderous, gory revenge-action filmed entirely in te reo Māori - is currently playing in cinemas, and onstage at the Herald theatre is the sequel to one of the greatest plays in New Zealand history, Pure and Deep. Today he shares what inspired and influenced his latest play: from the mystical, to the physical, to a damn good short black.

Auckland West Coast

Piha, Karekare, Te Henga, Muriwai… The epic beaches keep drawing me back in new, mysterious ways.

I spent a few weeks at Piha four years ago, being taught how to surf by a local surf guru and recovering addict. It felt like an important, numinous time in a very powerful place. Three years later we shot The Dead Lands all around there. Early on in the shoot, we were driving down into Piha on a sunny December day. We got the news that Peter O’Toole had died overnight. I had made Dean Spanley with O’Toole and at the time he'd become a really kind and strong supporter to me. I’ll never forget the day he came up to me and said, “Are you alright, mate?” (He knew I wasn’t). “Anything you need mate, I’m on your side.”

The day he died we said a karakia for him on the beach, right up at the end of North Piha. The cast and crew were standing in a circle and I recalled how I had called O’Toole the 'Great Dane' at the London Film Festival. Almost immediately, out of nowhere, a Great Dane bounded up to the group and stood right at Lawrence Makaore’s side like he was saying “I’m on your side.”

Those beaches are inspiring in an awesome way. They make me feel awe. I don’t think I’d have the courage to live there.

See also: North Shore of Maui; Highlands of Scotland.

Auckland Cafes

"Why, this Satan's drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”

- Pope Clement VIII

Good One, Atomic, Alleluya, Welcome Eatery, Dizengoff, Goodness Gracious, Eightthirty. I’ve written in them all and drunk a lot of coffee doing it. There’s a passage in David Mamet’s book Writing in Restaurants where he says by all means write in cafes, but do it longhand, never on a laptop. Now everybody’s got their laptops out, me included. But I also write longhand in notebooks, and I enjoy it.

I went away to England and found I couldn’t write the show there at all - the voices around me were all wrong.

I wrote at least half of Pure and Deep in Good One. I hit it for a few days in April 2014 and soaked up the voices and inspirations around me. I like the white noise of writing in cafes and the volume is usually about right for me there, and the music is almost always to my taste. I went away to England and found I couldn’t write the show there at all - the voices around me were all wrong. I was back in Good One within days of my return.

See also: Lantana, London; Happy Bones, NYC; Anthony’s Coffee Co., Pa’ia.

Somewhere - Sofia Coppola

The first time I saw this movie it pissed me right off. I saw it at the Capitol in Balmoral, and yeah, it looked pretty, but I was like: why the hell does a filmmaker get to make a movie like that, about rich people doing nothing?

But it stayed with me and kind of haunted me all the way through writing Pure and Deep. I watched it again on the Sunday night after the play opened, and was kind of shocked to realise how much it had been an important influence. Even the first name of our respective movie star characters (Johnny) is the same.

I admire the ambition to make a movie that refuses to have a strong three-act narrative

I think a big part of it is the grain in Harry Savides’s images. I’m definitely not a celluloid snob. I think digital’s awesome. But there’s something very beautiful and atmospheric about the images in that movie and a big part of it is the grainy film images. And I love the aesthetic in general, Stephen Dorff’s bedraggled Bruce Weber inspired look. I love the setting. I guess most of all I admire the ambition to make a movie that refuses to have a strong three-act narrative, and Copolla’s desire to do something very simple - I guess on one level, Pure and Deep can be read as kind of an argument with Somewhere.

See also: Before Midnight - Richard Linklater; I’m Not There -Todd Haynes.

Bob Dylan

This guy has become more and more influential on me over the last few years. Really it started with Todd Haynes’s film, with its kaleidoscopic structure and great performances from the likes of Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger. There’s a moment in the director’s commentary when Haynes is talking about Dylan being inspired by Norman Raeben and the idea that art should be understood on multiple levels at once.

Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour series was a big influence on early drafts of Pure and Deep, and a character who didn’t make it to the final draft. The Last Waltz, in which he appears, was a big influence on my work on Giselle, a film I did with the Royal New Zealand Ballet. I was listening to his album Blood on the Tracks a lot when I was working on Giselle. As we got into the edit, we realised we were missing some crucial imagery - we needed stuff of the two leads in a contemporary rustic setting. We tried to organise a shoot on Waiheke, but in the end the only place we could shoot due to everybody’s availability was in New York. So we went to the Catskills. It was a surreal experience, driving up there past Saugerties (where Dylan and The Band recorded The Basement Tapes) and Woodstock, knowing that this was the territory in which Dylan had holed up after his motorbike accident in 1966. Again, it was a mystical, serendipitous, humbling moment of creativity.

We play 'One More Cup of Coffee' at the end of Pure and Deep and it is perfect.

See also: Sera Cahoone; Laura Cantrell; George Harrison.

Yoga

I’ve been practising yoga for about seven years. I started in Auckland with Bikram, carried that on in London, took a break from that and hit my stride with a whole different way of practicing in Hawai’i. I was there on a Fulbright-Creative New Zealand writing fellowship and was feeling frustrated in Honolulu that I couldn’t find any decent coffee. I found a book by the big wave surfer Laird Hamilton and in it he mentioned Pa’ia on the North Shore of Maui. There, there’s good coffee, and a great yoga instructor, Nadia Toraman. I got in touch with Nadia and she organised me some accommodation under her yoga studio. It was the healthiest time of my life: writing every day, practicing yoga every day, eating good food and drinking good coffee, running and swimming with turtles.

It kicked me into a more physical way of approaching my work, and my last three projects, Giselle, The Dead Lands and Pure and Deep are all directly inspired by this.

See also: Ballet (Ethan Stiefel, Gillian Murphy, Qi Huan), Mau Rākau (Jamus Webster).

Follow Toa on Twitter and Instagram *The Dead Lands is currently playing at Rialto and Event cinemas

while Pure and Deep plays at the Herald Theatre from 12-23 November 
Tickets available through Ticketmaster