People change every day.

A provocative retelling of a vicious crime in 1990's New Zealand. A group of young teenagers spends the hot summer day lazing by their school playground, but conflict in their social circles soon wreck havoc on Rory, the most vunerable and dangerous of the group of friends.

Double Happy is loosely based on a true story from my childhood, but I wanted to use the opportunity to retell this story to look at it the situation from another viewpoint. The results are challenging and not always pretty, but I don't think I've done my job properly unless the audience feels disturbed by how quickly something innocent can turn dangerous.

Double Happy was an uphill battle from day one. Unfortunately, I’d written a script that was quite specific about its location and the particular configuration of dairy, playground, school and even trees. And though we’d spent six months finding our cast, it would take a further six months to find a location that fulfilled the script’s needs. Eventually we found a fire station that had to be dressed as a school, a grass car park that had to become our playground and a take-a-way fish and chip shop that needed to become a dairy. At one stage we found ourselves purchasing about 2 tonnes of old playground equipment from a school and having to excavate it from concrete, transport it all the way across Wellington and install it as a fully functional playground outside the Stokes Valley Fire Department, much to the bemusement of the fire chief who kept asking “Why don’t you just film it on a real playground?” After a day of back breaking installation, we were wondering the same thing.

Despite almost a year of pre-production, casting, set-building, and 6 weeks of rehearsals, the shoot was frantic, with an average of about 40 shots a day, and even peaking at 60. In amidst that chaos, I was incredibly lucky to have a dedicated and talented cast and crew who knew what I wanted to achieve, and did everything they could to make sure it happened.