Mm.

The long version is COVID hits, uh, I just go nuts.

All of a sudden I have people wanting to make what I wanna make, I have offers on the table for giant movies, and I just write like crazy.

And in four months it goes from being 110 pages to 360 pages, and kind of chaptered.

Um, and, and I say that because it was sort of... that it was more of a novelistic approach to a screenplay.

Then that only survived for about four or five months.

Um, I was writing other things at the time.

Mm-hmm.

Mark Wahlberg.

Hey, how are you?

How different was that vision from page one to that final edit? Or were you able to kind of be able to execute exactly what you wanted?

Um, I was able to execute what I wanted.

It took, it took some doing.

Uh, but, uh, absolutely it's my vision.

The only thing I could say maybe every now and then a line might get flopped.

You might have somebody say something a little earlier in a scene than they might have said otherwise.

Yeah

... where I was in 2018, okay? Let me be very clear.

This is like I'm sitting around trying to get Vast of Night into festivals, and I'm going, "All right, well, if that's not gonna happen, what can I do with just the resources I have? If I could just go, you know, burn the very last bit of money I have and put some things on credit cards and go out and kill myself, die making a movie, what would it be? Oh, I can get...

I can do this," and I had a few friends that, that would willing, were willing to come out and crew for me and so on.

I wrote this script in February, March, April of 2018 with, with no connection [laughs] to anybody that would've ever been even in the room with a Matthew McConaughey.

And then i- over a few years I wrote some other things, ended up revising this.

It got bigger.

Yep.

Do you have to be qualified? Are you going to have a PhD in rearing a child or are you just a really experienced and caring person?

Yeah, it's a good question.

Family daycare operates in many ways like your childcare centre down the road.

It operates under the same regulatory and quality framework.

The big difference is you have a qualified early education care professional working in their own natural home learning environment.

with very small groups of children, four children under school age.

So yes, educators are qualified.

But you're saying you want to have somebody who understands the theory but also able to practice in small groups, in that home environment, makes it easier for kids, if you like, to transition onto the next stage of schooling and so forth, I would imagine.

Do you have to be qualified? Are you going to have a PhD in rearing a child or are you just a really experienced and caring person?

Yeah, it's a good question.

Family daycare operates in many ways like your childcare centre down the road.

It operates under the same regulatory and quality framework.

The big difference is you have a qualified early education care professional working in their own natural home learning environment.

with very small groups of children, four children under school age.

So yes, educators are qualified.

But you're saying you want to have somebody who understands the theory but also able to practice in small groups, in that home environment, makes it easier for kids, if you like, to transition onto the next stage of schooling and so forth, I would imagine.

However, he's not complaining as landowners are concerned about forecasts of an El Niño drought.

We've been nervous as to what's going to happen with the potential Super El Nino.

So I guess with us, we're looking forward to as much rain as we can get for us to be able to have it there for the start of the spring.

But it's certainly been wetter than normal.

And with everything else we just discussed, there must be a bit of, like, a, just a skill in that in itself, dealing with a client.

Well, well we do a, um, we do a rev- We, our, our methodology is doing a re- a reverse brief.

So, um, um...

And it came about doing a museum in Taranaki, Len Lye.

We, we perfected it.

And that was a very complicated project 'cause we had three clients.

The, the, the, the Len Lye Foundation, who the, who the, who the building was for, the council, who, who w- who were the, who were the, running the project, and the, and the government, who was paying for the project through the, um, Provincial Museum Fund.

Committee