“Mum, how do you feel about the movie I made about us?” Chelsie Preston Crayford and Gaylene Preston’s heart-to-heart

Caterpillar, she says, is a work of autofiction in its story of three generations of women in the same Wellington house: a sulky teenager with acting aspirations, a harried film-maker mother and a grandmother facing the onset of dementia.

Preston Crayford, the acting daughter of director Dame Gaylene Preston, grew up in such a place with her mother and her grandmother Tui, who died in 2006.

Gaylene Preston had been inspired by her mother’s life in her films Home by Christmas and War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us. Now her daughter has added a third to the Tui Preston trilogy, though it’s a fictionalised drama with the three leads playing characters with soundalike names. It stars veteran NZ actress Lisa Harrow as “Huia”, up-and-comer Anais Shand as “Cassie” and Australian star Marta Dusseldorp as “Maxine”.

The film arrives three years after Preston’s memoir Gaylene’s Take charted her struggle to juggle her life at home with Tui and Chelsie, with a precarious arts career. Preston Crayford addressed the struggles of her own young motherhood in her 2018 short film Falling Up, not long before starting the Caterpillar script.

The senior film-maker’s only credit on the new film is “stunt driver” when Huia ill-advisedly gets behind the wheel of the family car. Given the intriguing line between family history and fiction, we asked the two directors if we could eavesdrop on a conversation about a film that is, partly, kind of, set in the space between them.

Chelsie Preston Crayford: How are you feeling with Caterpillar about to be out there?

Gaylene Preston: Ah, well there’s a thing. What you’ve done is really interesting. You have trawled a lived life. Yours and everyone else’s. While the context is the same – yes, the house was falling down around our ears; yes, our bedrooms reflected our different worlds, Tui’s all pink and floral with yours electric blue with a drum kit in the window and mine full to the brim of scripts and scribbled notes – you have built fictional characters and a plot that is entirely made up. No event in your film actually happened, but it could have. You have elevated and heightened the story to make it more enlightening, more entertaining, and more universal. But somehow you have kept the relationships true to us. It’s not necessarily easy for me to look back on but it’s definitely truthful. That space between us that made that time so difficult for us will illuminate to many what many mothers and daughters often face. I don’t know how you did it. But you have.

CPC: Did you ever feel worried when I was exploring this territory and these characters?

GP: Well, I haven’t got a leg to stand on, have I? I could worry my way through it but what’s the point? I mean, I’ve done it myself to Tui twice, so I can’t very well stand on ceremony if you want to do it. The characters are enhanced, they’re embellished. And they’re made more entertaining than us.