There's a nice symmetry about the new New Zealand film Hook Line & Sinker.
Those producing and performing in the film strove to create a process and environment in which they could do their best work, and one in which everyone felt valued.
In a similar way, the message of the film is about the importance of work and the way in which it underpins our image of ourselves and our relationship to others in the community.
The approach those involved in the film settled upon will be familiar to fans of British director Mike Leigh, who is well known for starting his films without a script, or indeed much idea what the film might be about.
In this way Hook Line & Sinker directors Andrea Bosshard and Shane Loader drew together a core cast of nine actors - including such well-known names as Rangimoana Taylor, Geraldine Brophy and Kate Harcourt - to build their feature film from the ground up, using snippets of conversation and observations from the everyday milieu as building blocks.
Dunedin-raised Bosshard says when they began, all they knew was that they wanted to make a film about work and worth.
"That was as loose as it was."
They also knew they wanted to focus on "modest" working lives.
"Working lives, if you ever get to see them on-screen, tend to be lawyers and investigative journalists - the glamorous jobs."
The truck drivers and seamstresses around which Hook Line & Sinker revolves are less commonly portrayed.
"We had our cast together, then each one of those cast members ... had to go out into their community, into their homes, into their families, into their workplaces, and come back to us, the directors, with a list of 50 'characters'," Bosshard says of the way in which they began to craft a story.
The characters gathered could be single observations. "It might just be an interesting way someone eats their eggs. I remember one actor saying they watched someone in a cafe cut the yolk out of their egg and eat that first."
The hunted and gathered raw material was used to make an amalgam character for each actor, who then had to go off and live in that character's shoes.
"The characters then, I think, feel very full, very real," Bosshard says.
Improvisations came next and five weeks later, Bosshard and Loader had enough material to go away and write the screenplay for the Wellington-based production.
It was a demanding process for the directors, said Bosshard, who previously directed the film Taking the Waewae Express with her partner, Loader.
"Directors are not very good listeners as a rule, because you have your little image in your head, and you want everything to conform to that little image.
"This process forces directors to have to listen, just with all of your being, because that's the very reason you are going through these improvisations, because of the material that is being given to us through them - what the actors are saying in character, what those relationships are. So it really forces us as directors to observe and to listen in ways that we have not had to observe and listen before."
The exhaustive process of putting the story together consumed a significant proportion of the tiny $85,000 budget the film-makers had.
"In a way, what we said [was] what small amount of money we had we wanted to put into the storytelling. So in terms of the money we had, we actually put an awful lot, or a large proportion, in the improvisations because we knew they were fundamental to us actually telling that story."
An actor familiar to Dunedin audiences, Rangimoana Taylor, plays the film's central character, PJ, a truck driver whose life begins to fall apart when eye disease (macular degeneration) means he can no longer work.
Taylor, who has worked extensively in Dunedin in children's television and at the Fortune and Globe theatres, says because the characters are an amalgam of experiences they have witnessed and that have been shared with them, they need to be sensitive about the source material.
By doing so, they could get as close as possible to genuine human stories.
"One of the things people keep saying to us is, 'isn't it great, because there's no acting in this'," he says.
"With one person that I dealt with, she had actually had this macular degeneration for 30 years and she mentioned something about it, about when she first got it, then she just let it go. Then when it came up on the screen, she just threw her arms around me, and said 'I had forgotten what I actually felt when I first heard this'."
Bosshard adds: "We have been at screenings where people have come up to us, some with macular degeneration, and said, 'you have just told my story'. That was what it was like, more about losing that community through work, in the early stages, than the macular degeneration itself."
They have had similar reactions from people who have experienced being made redundant. After seeing the film, they have said "that was my story", she says.
At moments like that, those involved in the film knew they had achieved what they set out to do, to say something about the relationship between the work people do and the worth it creates in their lives.
"When people don't do work that they love, it impacts on their whole wellbeing in a negative way," Bosshard says.
"When it is something that has given you your friendships, your workmates, your community, and you have been part of it, it doesn't matter how good people are to you afterwards, you still feel that you are not now contributing," Taylor says.
• Catch it
Hook Line & Sinker is on at Rialto, Dunedin.
