Suddenly there's quite a lot of money potentially involved.

Yeah.

So up until 95, they used to call it the days of boot cash.

So it was when the game was unprofessional, but you'd be given a car or you'd be taken care of.

And that's where Sean Fitzpatrick is in the film.

He remembers doing an ad for power tools, and then suddenly in comes Jonah doing ads for sports cars.

And it was quite a shift.

Was that a blow? Can you just explain why she didn't want to have anything to do with it?

[laughs]

[laughs] I mean, he's, so it's his first game playing on the wing against the French in, uh, in, uh, Christchurch in front of, like, 80,000 fans.

Uh, so, uh, yeah, he is, he was out of position, didn't know what he was doing, but he still had a spark.

You know, you saw that, saw that if we get some things together, he could play.

So he was dropped, um, after that game.

And Jonah being, uh, somebody who was, um, uh, you know, uh, had a difficult upbringing and, and, and he takes that really personally.

So he, we, he could've been completely lost to rugby that stage were it not for his manager at the time, um, Phil Kingsley Jones, who was, who was a Welsh man.

The fact that this has two directors, uh, including you, that's very important culturally here in this story.

And I'm just wondering, what does a shift because like I can imagine that's a very big binary shift as well to to be making things at that scale at that point?

uh yeah i was certainly like young you know and learning uh the craft so um so it's quite a big stage to kind of learn that on but yeah like uh you know you mentioned openness like i think um when you take on any subject you you basically uh you write everything you can about what the story is and like no matter what the film is i do it's you write it then you rewrite it again when you shoot it and you rewrite it again when you edit it so you're always like the thing is always developing and and sometimes you have to go back to that first you know script to kind of go like why am i actually you know doing this um so uh so yeah i i i basically you have to keep an openness you have to when you're dealing with like high profile people etc like you know you know the phrase warts and all you have to you have to go there if you don't they'll see through it and um and uh and like so i i know there's a lot of um bios and things like that but i do think that like um and there's too many but but there is there can be real value to them and and that would bring me to to jonah where like you know the the jonah lomu film where you know i really felt that there was something bigger than a sports story here and like a you know a message within it and um and something that uh you know did need to be told and it was very healing for for you know all the contributors and even the community, you know, Tongans and Pacific community who've watched this.

And, you know, I think they're somewhat, it turns a mirror on their culture and his story.

He's the biggest, probably the most famous person in New Zealand, you know, one of them for sure.

So when you're In a small country like Ireland or New Zealand, you know, there is a sense of that kind of tall poppy syndrome that happens.

And we have it here with Bono, et cetera.

So, you know, the...

And I was wondering if you could just talk to me about like what it felt like when you sat on your desk and what your approach was to getting it in.

And f- for you, was that sort of explaining that cultural side of things important to the movie and Jonah himself?

Uh, yeah, no, good question.

Um, I think like coming on it initially, uh, the way Jonah's story had been told was, was through a very Western lens.

Um, I think he really glossed over All these kind of compli- more complex, um, cul- cultural foundation and why things are done in certain ways in Tonga.

Uh, it's a very different culture.

Um, I've been there, and it's, it's, it's really f- like, you know, it is an island.

It's really about the collective.

It's fine.

And you think, how good would he have been without the handbrake on?

Yeah, that's the question, isn't it? Yeah.

He probably got that from a lot of conversations with his doctor, Doc May, who actually unfortunately passed since the documentary.

Really nice man, lovely man.

So he suspects that he picked up this illness, perhaps a blood infection when he was younger.

They don't know.

So definitely had it for most of his life.

Yeah.