Renee Liang interviews Oscar Kightley about being a role model for youth, how our cultural landscape has changed and the universality of storytelling.

“Maybe there’s something inbuilt, something that resonates in the stories that we keep telling about the human condition.  Maybe it needs to be that way in order for people to learn from them.”

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I’ve met Oscar Kightley once before, several years ago at a youth performing arts programme called An Absolute Rush.  That time, as Oscar stood in a corridor waiting to be announced to around a hundred excited kids, he looked around, caught my eye, introduced himself to me and quietly started finding out about my work and passions.  I remember being struck by his humility and attentiveness and the way that he later captivated his young (hard) audience by responding to them as if they were his equals.

His self-effacing nature hasn’t changed. This time, we meet in a Grey Lynn café and Oscar starts by buying me coffee, before asking me about my week. We happily launch into a discussion ranging over the history of Greys Ave, Auckland politics and my writing career before I remember that I’m supposed to be interviewing him, not the other way around.  It’s a struggle to keep remembering this as the sunny afternoon flows on – and I don’t think I’m the only would-be interviewer to have found this.  As Oscar himself admits, he’d much rather have a conversation than talk at people.

Oscar’s background is well recorded.  His family emigrated to NZ from Samoa when he was four and Oscar grew up in West Auckland during the 1970s and 80s.  The rich experiences of his childhood have surfaced in his writing since, in plays such as Nui Sila, Fresh Off the Boat and TV series Brotown, to name but a few waypoints in his 20-year career.  

Underneath the comic sugar are some dark observations about the way we humans treat each other in Godzone.  Oscar is fond of telling the anecdote about how he got sick of being regularly stopped and questioned by the police because he was young and brown. He made up a laminated card with the answers to their questions neatly written out and next time he was stopped, he handed it over to “save time”.  He doesn’t tell me how the police officers responded, but these days they might even get the joke.

I ask him if he thinks attitudes to Polynesians have changed in NZ in the last decade and he says yes. “A big thing happened in the 90’s and that was the Pacific population grew by 40%. At the same time, the plays and the media thing happened – they fed each other.”  He says that it’s weird, but gratifying, to find his work part of the mainstream – “what artist doesn’t want to be mainstream?” 

We talk about how these days, when someone is accused of a crime, there’s less of a tendency to label the whole community.  “There’s less of the – oh, they’re coconuts, send them all back.”  I stop short of asking Oscar whether he thinks his own work has contributed to a shifting of those attitudes – I suspect his humility wouldn’t let him answer. But I recall a recent Screentalk interview in which he said that his goal in writing shows such as Brotown was “to present the Pacific island community as New Zealanders, as opposed to a “thing” or issue or whatever.” He’s very clear on this. “I think we should remove the ghettoisation of cultures. Aim to change the mainstream.  I never set out to write mainstream stuff – but love that it is.”

We move onto the topic of collaboration in the arts.  Oscar has said previously that “you don’t do anything in this business on your own – it’s always a team”.  I point out that performance poets and stand-up comedians are two exceptions.  They have creative input all the way through from writing to performance and probably marketing and production as well, so it’s a good discipline for control freaks.  He laughs and says it’s a lonely game – and that stand-up is one of the hardest things he knows.  “I have a lot of respect for those guys.”

Most of Oscar’s work – his plays, screenplays and TV scripts – have been written with at least one other person, usually a trusted friend.  He claims to have “bad self-esteem when it comes to writing” and when I look at him in disbelief he points out that most writers do. He’s right, I suppose – lack of confidence is one of the major things causing writer’s paralysis, though we’re not supposed to talk about it. 

But there’s an even better reason to collaborate. “It’s harder to slack off if there’s someone else involved.  I’ve found that it’s easy to let yourself down, to miss those deadlines if it’s only you.  Writing is hard.  There’s a part of you that’s afraid to let it out there.  The hardest part is making yourself sit down.”  He lets me in on one of his anti-procrastination tricks – he makes his flatmate take the internet cable out of the house.  And recently, he’s taken down his Facebook profile because he realised how many hours he was chewing up – “ it was like watching endless reruns of people’s lives, people I didn’t even know.”

Stories fascinate him. It’s a topic we return to again and again, and by the time we’ve finished he’s dredged up a fair few of my stories.  “I don’t care so much about stagecraft. I go to watch theatre for the theatre – by that I mean a place where the artists are the forerunners of change in society.  It shouldn’t be a pleasant process.  People should walk out of a theatre either fucked up or fired up or wrestling with something.” 

I tell him how I’ve been depressed on being told by more experienced writers that there are no new stories to tell and he considers this.  “You know, I think they’re right.  But you know what? I think that’s cool. That there are common stories, that connect us all through time.  To think that the stories that moved us are the same basic stories that moved our ancestors sitting beside the campfire.  Writing and stories are important – they influence our children.  Maybe there’s something inbuilt, something that resonates in the stories that we keep telling about the human condition.  Maybe it needs to be that way in order for people to learn from them.”

The afternoon’s turned philosophical on me. I consider the golden glow of the sun hitting my empty coffee cup before heading off on a tangent. “Do you think your career’s been one long continuous journey, or a series of different careers?”  Oscar considers briefly then smiles. “Definitely the journey.” 

He tells me how he loved reading at school, then picked journalism as a career “because it was being paid to write.”  But after being lured to TV, initially as a children’s TV presenter – “I thought I was made for life”- he realised the transience of careers in the media.  ‘It wasn’t like some jobs, there isn’t just a ladder you climb.”  The first TV job lasted six months.  During periods of unemployment he and his mates auditioned for acting jobs.  “We all used to go for the same stock roles, the bouncer in Shortland Street or the centaur in Xena, but we knew that Robbie (Magasiva) would get it every time.”  There was a lack of roles for Polynesian actors at the time. So they hit on the idea of writing their own.  The rest, if I may use a cliché, is history.  The Pacific Underground (theatre company) was formed to produce and tour their plays, with Oscar and friends also acting. Later they started the Naked Samoans and started gaining the attention of some big media producers.  “We were lucky they were interested in our stories at the time.”

One suspects it wasn’t all luck.  Apart from a way with words, Oscar has the common touch, seemingly at ease and unchanged whether he’s at a big media event or out chatting to schoolkids.  I ask him about being a role model and he groans.  “They don’t know how human I am.”  But I remind him about how I once watched him mesmerise a warehouse full of “difficult” youth, and how they quoted his words for days afterwards.  Fame, he says, has its drawbacks.  But one of the definite advantages is being able to influence others. He still regularly goes out to schools to give talks.  “Fame is the new drug - everyone in high school just wants to be famous.” He tells them about the myth of self belief. “We’re told that all we have to do to achieve something is to believe in ourselves. It’s all wrong.  Look at me. I’m still scared, I still think that what I’m doing’s dumb. You can do what you want to do, even without self belief.  You just need to focus on what you’re doing.”  I ask him about being a leader.  “I tell them, if you start out wanting to be a leader, you end up being a dickhead.  Just do what you feel you need to do and you’ll become a leader.”

Our time is up, but before we say goodbye, Oscar talks about the power of stories once more. “We’re all looking for ways to connect – as humans we’re unconsciously seeking resonance, connections through time.  We’re born alone, we die alone, but we don’t necessarily want the bit in between to be alone.”