Letters to Ants Farrell

The day I met Ants Farrell was my first day onset of Frighteners.** **It was a big production and only my third job as a Boom Operator. I didn’t know anyone, so I was awkwardly standing around hoping someone would tell me where I was meant to be in all the hustle. Ants saw me across a hall and walked right up to me, stuck out his hand and said “G’day mate - I’m Ants, what’s your name?” That was Ants.

Since then I’ve done countless jobs with him, he was at my stag night, my wife Melissa and I were at his wedding, we attended his Police graduation, he’s worked on our house, and we were at his Mother’s funeral. I’ve been through some of the highs and lows in Ants’ life and he’s been through some of mine.

I was there when Ants was employed to come in and fit a few red 'ROLLING' lights in the Motion Capture stage in Wellington. Ants took this not just as a small electrical job but an opportunity to be a part of something he liked the look of. During the course of the day Ants worked his charm and ended up with a small crowd of Weta Digital Mocap technicians hanging off his every word while he showed them his recently uploaded app on the AppStore. The app 'Ka-Ching' became a popular favourite with crew. Once you’d put in your weekly rate, it was able to calculate your earnings per second and you could watch it roll over as you earned it… fun in overtime!

It was a thing of beauty to look over at mission control to see Ants in the middle of rows of (empty) computer stations but surrounded by people trying to get a glimpse of his iPhone screen as he gave a casual demonstration of his new app.

Another moment to mention was when we were shooting Mocap pick-ups for Tintin and there was a live video link to Stephen Spielberg and a big TV screen showing him watching and directing us from his home in the US. Ants came up to me on the floor, put his arm around my shoulder and whispered, “I can’t believe that behind us right now Stephen Spielberg is looking at our backs!” He quickly looked back over his shoulder at the screen to check and confirmed, “yep, he still is.”

Ants always had a joy and fascination for film and the opportunities it could bring.

It also has to be mentioned that Ants’ work often ran a near collision course with disaster… much to the amusement of his friends!

I’m sure there are more stories out there than any one person can know them all, but I believe I’ve heard most of them.

One time…

We’d been shooting a short film out in Cannons Creek and the Lighting department consisted of Ants and Giles Coburn. I’d been coming to work with them in the lighting truck. On this occasion, I’d stay and help wrap the lighting gear to travel home with them.

Ants plugged in his 'portable sound system,' which consisted of a large orange Pelican case with speakers fitted. Ants, at some point, plugged it into the truck so we could have the pleasure of his tunes while we wrapped. When everyone else had long gone, we jumped in the truck to go, but click-click… flat battery.

We were in Cannons Creek, and it was starting to get dark. Shit.

Trent Hiles, the location manager, was just pulling up to his house in Wadestown when he got the anxious call back from the location he’d only left 30 minutes earlier.

“G’day mate, Ants here, we seem to have a flat battery. Do you think you could come back and give us a jump?”

We finally and thankfully hit the road. But for some reason, as we drove back to Wellington, we were consistently getting cars honk their horns at us and shout and point at us as they passed us on the Motorway. Yeah, mate! We see you!

…Sheesh, full moon or what?

It turns out (as we discovered when we entered the Terrace tunnel) someone had left the side generator access door open and sticking out at 90 degrees all the way from Cannons Creek.

Well, the noise of the door tearing a lengthy groove along the wall, halfway through the tunnel before we realised what it was and had to take evasive action… (by pulling into oncoming traffic) to pull the side door off the tunnel wall and safely pulling over once outside to discover we didn’t need to worry about locking the door back in place as the lock had been sheared off completely.

Woody was not pleased.

Everyone loved being around Ants; he was engaging, a natural comic, and generous to a fault.

Ants will be missed.

Sam Spicer

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I’m going to talk about Ants in the present tense.

It could be because:

A: It seems unfathomable that a dominant figure in my life has gone.

B: This is not a funeral, so this is not a funeral speech.

C: Maybe he did do the world's greatest disappearing act and is right now, sitting at a beach bar in Mexico with a fedora hat on and drinking a pina colada.

D: The overabundance of laughter and entertainment that he has injected into my life means that I can go on remembering as if he is still around forever.

The amount of stories and anecdotes people have of Ants could fill a book. Each funny chapter is a tale of clumsiness, machine operating overzealousness, and times when his need to humour and be the funny guy would end up a complete disaster.

Like the time when he and I had been left to wrap a night shoot at Shantytown on the West Coast of the South Island. It was Friday night, and it was cold and bleak and it had just started raining. To entertain me on the way out of Shantytown (and because he couldn’t be arsed reversing the truck to the exit which was right there), Ants pretended to be a guide on a tour bus, driving through the historic town, pointing out landmarks and places of interest along the way (probably taking on a grumpy, bald 60+ man persona): Hannah's Shop, The Town Jail, The Schoolhouse on the left.

Soon we got to a tiny bridge that crossed a creek that the engineers had probably only signed off weight-wise for a small pony with a cart holding children. Not class 4 trucks. Ants figured it was even more of a pain in the ass reversing now that we had come all this way. He said, “If we can fit on the bridge, we will give it a go crossing it.” I listened in awe of those wise words from my superior. We crept forward, and it turns out we had about an inch on either side to squeeze on, so, being a man of his word, Ants put his foot down.

The cab got across okay. When the rear axles got onto the bridge, there was an almighty crunch, and we felt the whole back of the truck lurch backwards and come to a stop. Ants cried out, “Oh no, the bridge!” We both went to jump out, but it took about a minute for us to squeeze our bodies out of the tiny gap of the door that was hitting the railings of the structure. We looked underneath, and the whole back of the truck was hanging over the creek. By now it was pissing down and about 10:30 at night. The rest of the crew was in the hotel bar drinking beers and mulled wine, and we were in the middle of a closed family historical town in the middle of nowhere, with our only ride home hanging off a cliff.

But as much as Ants is clumsy and unfortunate, he is also very jammy. A torchlight came around the corner, and the caretaker of the place heard a commotion. He inspected the situation and told us he “just so happens to have a mate with a 50-tonne digger down the road that he might be able to get on the blower.” Fifteen minutes later, this thing came around the corner, lifted the back end of the truck up, and pulled it back onto the road. (I had to drive the truck to the hotel as Ants was still a bit shaken from the experience.) (I also chose to reverse out of Shantytown.)

By the time we had returned to the hotel, Ants’ miscalculation of bridge weight restrictions had morphed into a story that could be shared with the crew. What earlier seemed like a complete disaster was now a golden opportunity to make everyone laugh, packed with farmer impersonations of the caretaker with the torch. In case you were wondering, the cost for the repair of the bridge was a dozen Speights. I think locations supplied it. Jammy old Ants didn’t even have to sort that out.

But before all this, I first met Ants when I was 21. I was a grommet lighting assistant, and Ants was a bit of a Wellington lighting superstar. Cool but not too cool. He was always rocking a style from seven years previous. Gelled hair, plastic wraparound shades that sat high on his head due to the fact that his ears sit high on his head. He had a brown leather jacket with US Air Force badges on it as his going-out jacket. It was about seven years after the film Top Gun came out, so the timing’s good.

I was up the top of a ladder plugging the mains cable into a FEC power box hooked up to a power pole. This was a time when it seemed easier and cheaper to do this than hire a gene truck. I’d climbed the ladder with the male end of the cable. That bit I got right. But it had looped inside the coil, and so it was going to get knotted up. “Let him sort it out,” the Gaffer told Ants. I came down to sort it out, and Ants said, “Gidday mate, I’m Ants.” He stayed there with me and helped me “sort it out.” That is Ants’ style. Always available for an introduction because anyone could be up for a good time. And always willing to help you sort things out.

Up until that point, I didn’t like lighting much. I thought it was a bit of a shit job. Workplace bullying was just a part of the working environment; in fact, it was encouraged. The hours were ruining my social life, and you never stopped running around. All HMI’s had magnetic ballasts that are the most uncomfortable and heavy thing to carry, and no one had a sack barrow for the sandbags, let alone knew what a load carrier was.

Ants taught me to have fun. I don’t think I had smiled much on set before I met Ants. I certainly hadn’t belly laughed. He would ask for things on the RT in the voice of Sean Connery, or he would drive the car to work as if he was a 90-year-old man who drives slowly. He can hear an Eagles song and will air guitar it with such extreme precision you are as transfixed as if you are watching Glenn Frey himself. He is a funny little fucker, it’s been said many times. And he taught me to enjoy not just my job but my life as well. And how it is better to not take things too seriously.

Over the years, Ants has been like an older brother figure in my life. He was a groomsman at my wedding. In fact, and I’m not embarrassed to say, I was quite nervous before the ceremony, and it was hot and sunny, and I was wearing a light blue linen shirt. I got sweat marks under my arms just before the ceremony. Ants spotted them first and got a hair dryer out and stood there for about 10 minutes drying my pits. Only a brother would even consider carrying out an act like that. Someone took a photo of him doing it.

We now know that there is darkness in Ants. I think we are all surprised to realise that because how does someone that spreads so much joy do something like this? I will always regret that I didn’t see it to this degree. I may never know the true extent, but I am very much aware of it now. What is this sadness behind all that laughter? It’s something he obviously carries quietly by himself. But alongside that awareness, it is important to cherish all the jokes and impressions and stories.

It’s good to remember all the laughing fits he has put us through and the mateship that he offered up. Because at the end of the day, wherever he is, that is what Ants would want us to think about too.

Giles Coburn

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Over the last few weeks I've found myself thinking daily about Ants...

In one breath laughing at an old joke or situation, to then sadness that I won't get to see him again.

I met Ants when I was the Lighting Trainee on Scarfies in 1998… after six weeks working for him and Giles, Ants said he'd get me some work if I wanted it…

He didn't have to do that; I was just some teenage grommet from Invercargill after all.

I showed up on his doorstep in Wellington two months later. The next day I was working on the TV series Duggan whilst living on Ants' couch. Then came Lord of the Rings the same year, and the rest is a blur of projects together.

I'm in the enviable position of working with talented, and funny people every day… and I'm honoured to call many of them friends, but I've never seen what he had… he could level a lighting crew of twenty with an impersonation, or turn of phrase.

Gruff technicians, doubled over, giggling hysterically… incapacitated by laughter. And at the core of it… the cheeky grin of Ants knowing he'd got a laugh.

Words don't do justice…

Jamie Couper