Take the Easy Way? No

When award-winning New Zealand commercial director Christine Jeffs finally got a chance to make a feature film, the experience wasn’t quite what she anticipated. “I had always hoped when I got a chance to make a movie, I would have a chance to perfect shots and make it look right,” Jeffs said.

But her film “Rain,” which she made two years ago in her native country, didn’t give her the opportunity to stretch her artistic muscles. It’s a low-budget, independent production that she shot in 32 days. “We felt there was such a rush in making the film, there was no chance for any artisticness to seep through,” she said.

“Rain,” which opens today after having made the rounds of numerous festivals, including Cannes and Sundance, is an unflinching coming-of-age story based on the 1994 novel of the same name by Kirsty Gunn.

Set in the summer of 1972 at a New Zealand beach community, “Rain” focuses on precocious and flirtatious 13-year-old Janey (Alicia Fulford-Wierzbiki) and her young brother Jim (Aaron Murphy) as they witness their parents’ marriage slowly crumble. Their parents retreat from their unhappiness by drinking during the nights, then nursing their hangovers the following day in the sun.

Janey’s mother catches the attention of a drifter photographer and begins an affair with him. When Janey discovers the affair, she becomes angry and decides to use her burgeoning sexuality to insinuate herself in the life of the photographer, with tragic results.

Jeffs was drawn to Gunn’s novel when she read it in 1994. But it was difficult to persuade producers that the mood piece could be turned into a film. “A lot of people said to me, ‘People are not interested in a story about a girl,’” Jeffs said during a recent visit to Los Angeles. “That kind of got my back up a bit. I was like, ‘Why not?’ I think it’s quite a dangerous story about a girl’s loss of innocence and how family comes undone. It’s very intimate for the audience. It is not told through a voice-over of an adult looking back.”

In the novel, the adult Janey reflects on that tumultuous summer. Jeffs decided to discard that element. “I wanted the story to be more immediate and for the audience to connect with the experience of the girl,” she said.

Gunn’s novel, said Jeffs, was very poetic and densely descriptive, not easy to translate into a screenplay. “It was hard to get tangible stuff from it,” Jeffs said. Several scenes were taken from clues in the book. “There was one line that would trigger something, and then I would write a scene out of it. So a lot of the action and scenes in the film didn’t exist in the book except from innuendo. I wanted to take it out of the poetic sense and give it a more tangible meaning.”

Jeffs knew she had to find the right children or “Rain” wouldn’t work. She saw a tape of Alicia, who had some experience as a dancer, early in the audition process. “She was original in the way she did her audition,” Jeffs recalled. “She wasn’t robotic and trying to please. She kind of had a sense of being self-contained.”

But Jeffs almost had to abandon the project because she couldn’t find the young actor to play Jim. “The intangible quality I was looking for was more special than boys being able to walk and talk their lines. They needed to be very unique and original and spontaneous.” So friends of Jeffs began going to local schools and taking photographs of boys in the classroom. Jeffs’ eyes were immediately drawn to the picture of little red-headed Aaron. She put him in a workshop with the boys who had already been considered for the part through the formal casting process. “He was so introverted,” she said. Though everyone told her not to cast him, “it made me want to see more of him. I just had to go with hunch and think he was the right boy.”

To help her young performers’ confidence, Jeffs tried as much as possible to shoot the film in chronological order. “We did a lot of talking,” she added. “My role was to focus and explain what was necessary and just keep them on track. I think they just got it.”

Jeffs’ significant other, John Toon, was the film’s associate producer and cinematographer. The two met eight years ago on her short film “Stroke.” Toon said Jeffs’ background as a film editor was a boon in directing her first feature.

“It gives you an uncanny knack of being able to judge what on set works and what doesn’t,” Toon said. “You don’t necessarily know how to get something, but you know when something isn’t working and something is.”

Their collaboration on “Rain” was not without its stormy moments. “There were times on ‘Rain’ in the first couple of weeks where I thought we were definitely making different films,” he said. “I saw a much more beautiful film and she saw a much more austere film. There were really beautiful scenes we shot that were sensational, but because it didn’t fit with how she saw the story, they went straight out the door. Her film is there.”