"From Barbarian to Domestication" - Maddie Dai & The Screenplay Behind We Were Dangerous

ENTERTAINMENT | INTERVIEW | GAMES

Written by Thomas Giblin (he/him) | @thegreengiblin | Entertainment Editor

It's a rainy day in London, and Maddie Dai has just got home from a social football kickaround. She's an avid fan of the sport. The grey overcast mirrors the mood of a nation whose men's football team have left another tournament trophyless. But Dai is upbeat. We're here to celebrate and discuss We Were Dangerous, her feature film screenwriting debut. The film is a heartwarming tale of rebellion. On Ōtamahua (Quail Island), three young girls, Nellie, Daisy, and Lou, attend an institution for delinquent girls in 1950s Aotearoa. The film traces the trio "rally-ing against the system, but finding strength, friendship" and the "irrepressible spirit" that they all share.

This synopsis and the film are a lot lighter than what the logline for We Were Dangerous makes it seem. Despite the darkness in the film, as it delves into eugenic sterilisation, institutional Christianisation and religious colonisation, there is hope. In We Were Dangerous, Dai explores how humour is "a form of resistance and a binding agent." In the black of night, the film seeks out the light.

Dai's journey from Aotearoa to London, where she now resides, wasn't the most direct. Dai left these shores as a teenager because she received a scholarship to United World Colleges, an international network of educational institutions. The hustle and bustle of the neon-soaked streets of Hong Kong was a far cry from the Pōneke suburb of Kilbirnie, where Dai studied at St Catherine's College. Dai did "two years of high school in Hong Kong, with 250 kids from 80 or 90 countries."

This formative experience was what "shot her off into the world,” and she's never looked back since. Everyone at Dai's high school was applying to schools in America and Europe. She followed suit. Why? "I can't tell you I had a good reason, except that everyone else was doing it. And all of a sudden, I was sitting the SATs." Neither of us knows what the SATs stand for, but Dai got a scholarship to a university in Vermont. “There was nothing to do in Vermont aside from being a lesbian sheep farmer,”so she made the move to New York. Ultimately, the Big Apple and America weren't for Dai, so she jumped across the Atlantic. The self-described former "art director slash bad graphic designer" turned cartoonist turned screenwriter is now at home in lugubrious London.

While in New York, Dai got the bug for cartooning, taking a night class taught by The New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake. "Every little career move I've made, I've done via a night class. It's retired science teachers and other, you know, struggling 20-somethings." She describes finding this outlet for her ideas as a "drug". It gave her the freedom that being an art director at a creative agency didn't provide—Dai wasn't responding to other people's briefs or churning out creative content that she didn't feel enthusiastic about.

“Every little career move I’ve made, I’ve done via a night class. It’s retired science teachers and other, you know, struggling 20-somethings.”

Since 2017, Dai has contributed more than 70 cartoons to The New Yorker, many of which you may have seen, but she has now pivoted away from her day job. Just in time, it seems. Dai says that if "there was ever a person whose job was threatened by AI, it was fully me. I was bad at my job."

She still contributes to The New Yorker. Her most recent cartoon is about how Photoshop is an essential skill for a mediaeval princess, alongside dancing and embroidery. But now, screenwriting is her profession, having started working on scripts during the pandemic. One day, there was an email in her inbox. It was from Piki—the Aotearoa production com-pany founded by Taika Waititi and Carthew Neal. Dai had only told a few friends she was trying out screenwriting, and one of them, who works with Piki, had passed on the word. They're a big deal. They're responsible for producing such hits as Hunt for the Wilderpeople, the Oscar-winning Jojo Rabbit, and The Breaker Upperers. The email came out of the blue and shocked Dai. "We hear you're trying screenwriting. I was like, what? This is crazy. Because not only was that true, but I also was trying to write this film [We Were Dangerous] for them."

Dai is conscious that her trajectory as a screenwriter is “unusual”, but she’s “grateful to all the powers that be.

Piki had a director in mind to helm the script: Josephine Stew-art-Te Whiu (Ngāpuhi/Te Rarawa). She co-wrote and acted in Waru, the anthology drama about the tangi of a small boy. Her short film Ani premiered at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival in 2019, but We Were Dangerous would be the first feature for both Dai and Stewart-Te Whiu. Dai is conscious that her trajec-tory as a screenwriter is "unusual", but she's "grateful to all the powers that be."

Piki, Dai and Stewart-Te Whiu hit the ground running, and for a year and a half, they "cracked on with the script" until it was ready for the New Zealand Film Commission. During this period, to Dai, "every day was like film school." She applied a studious rigour, learning all she could, and it paid off big time. We Were Dangerous had its world premiere at SXSW 2024 and was awarded the Special Jury Award for Filmmaking in the Narrative Feature Competition.

We Were Dangerous had its world premiere at SXSW 2024 and was awarded the Special Jury Award for Filmmaking in the Narrative Feature Competition.

As described by the jury at SXSW, We Were Dangerous “con-fronts a sobering and all-too-relevant history with a sly sense of absurdity and the camaraderie of its three young leads." But how did Dai approach writing the screenplay? It started with her interest in a story where it was unlikely to have three teenage girls as the protagonist. Only recently, in films such as Whina, Cousins and Kāinga, the female voice has come to the forefront of cinema in Aotearoa.

Dai wanted the film's protagonists to "feel opinionated, spirited, rebellious, loud, idiosyncratic, and silly." They all are, and then some. In We Were Dangerous, despite the wicked matron and the horror of eugenic sterilisation, the fierce trio stick up their middle finger. For Dai, "It's almost impossible to feel close to characters who you can't laugh with." In one scene, the matron exclaims to a classroom that "Jesus wasn't friends with sex delinquents". "I think you'll find he was", Nellie replies.

Dai wanted the film’s protagonists to “feel opinionated, spirited, rebellious, loud, idiosyncratic, and silly.”

Alongside humour, at the backbone of cartooning, the medium explores something "unjust" and then tries "to create a point of view where you're in opposition to it." So Dai, in We Were Dangerous, uses humour to rebuke the document The Fertility of the Unfit, which is explicitly seen in the film. The matron is encouraged by a government official not to think of "the girls as wives and mothers" as that "may well be beyond them." One by one, in the dead of night, Nellie, Daisy, and Lou's fellow 'delin-quents' are taken to a wooden cabin and forcibly sterilised.

Published in 1903 by W. A. Chapple, the Fertility of the Unfit sought to reduce the numbers of the 'unfit' by sterilising the wives of 'degenerate' men. The 'unfit' was an encompassing term of othering used to label criminals, prostitutes, 'illegitimate' children (and their mothers), the 'unemployable', homosexuals, minorities and those with physical or intellectual disabilities. Dai also cites the Mazengarb report, which she read "cover to cov-er". The report, which was sent to every household in Aotearoa in 1954, blamed 'juvenile delinquency' and the perceived prom-iscuity on working mothers, the ready availability of contracep-tives, and young women enticing men to have sex. It advocated for a return to Christian and traditional values.

This dark and unknown history of eugenic sterilisation in Aotearoa is part of what makes We Were Dangerous essential viewing. The film is a joyous story of female rebellion, but its truths are disturbingly relevant. Just look at the United States. Or look closer to home. Chris Luxon believes that abortion is tantamount to murder. The brilliance of Dai and the screenplay for We Were Dangerous shines through. Although grounded in a specific context, its themes are universal. It's easy to imagine audiences from Kerikeri to Kansas relating to Nellie, Daisy, and Lou as they fight for control over their bodies and lives. Dai hopes audiences will "find a lot of joy" despite the darkness. With a snappy runtime, you "could do worse things with an hour and a half,” she says.

We Were Dangerous will open the Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival in Tāmaki Makaurau on the 7th of August. Tickets are on sale now, with a 5-trip student pass available to purchase online until the 11th of July.