Quinn Life of Extremes

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77559-471-0
Verlag: Exisle publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten

In this personal account of Max Quinns extraordinary filmmaking career, get a first-hand look at the most extreme places on earth. From travelling 80 kilometres over crevassed ice to keeping bodies and cameras warm in the coldest climates on earth, Max has plenty of adventure to share in this inspiring insight into life on the edge.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Quinn, Max

Leseproben

1 Journey into the Unknown

CAPTAIN ROBERT FALCON SCOTT’S DIARY, 2 AUGUST 1911

Scott was referring to the harrowing journey three of his men had just completed to Antarctica’s Cape Crozier emperor penguin colony in the winter of 1911.

This expedition, undertaken while Captain Scott was waiting out the winter prior to his ill-fated push to the South Pole, was led by Dr Edward Wilson, the expedition’s doctor, zoologist and Scott’s most trusted companion. At that time, emperor penguins were thought of as among the most primitive of birds, as they bred in the depths of an Antarctic winter. Wilson suspected an evolutionary link between emperor penguins and dinosaurs. If he could collect newly laid eggs, their embryos might hold the answers to his theory.

Crank forward 80 years, and Captain Scott’s diary could well be foretelling a series of journeys I was about to make to that very same penguin colony in the depth of a similarly foreboding polar night. Unlike Wilson and his team, who man-hauled sledges in atrociously cold conditions for nineteen days, I would make my journeys in the relative comfort of a Hägglunds snow vehicle. In a modern context, I was still going to have it tough. The winds would be just as fierce and the temperatures just as cold.

It was January 1991 — high summer in New Zealand. My soundman and I waited on the tarmac to board our aircraft. It’s 30 degrees Celsius, and we are sweating heavily in our Antarctic survival gear. Our next ten months were to be spent in temperatures down to minus 50 degrees Celsius — so cold that a cup of boiling water thrown into the air instantly snap-freezes into hail. I was terrified at the thought.

We were to join a small group of eleven Kiwis, wintering at New Zealand’s Scott Base, to film a documentary for Television New Zealand’s renowned Natural History Unit. It would be about the life cycle of the emperor penguins of Cape Crozier, demanding several daunting 85-kilometre journeys over heavily crevassed ice, in the middle of a long Antarctic winter. I felt grateful to have been chosen but also anxious. Few had ever encountered the emperor penguin in a polar winter at Cape Crozier since Wilson and his two companions, Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard, in 1911. That their winter expedition ended in disappointment, infamously described by Cherry-Garrard as ‘the worst journey in the world’, didn’t exactly fill me with confidence as I boarded the US Navy C-130 Hercules.

Captain Scott statue in Christchurch. Max Quinn

The plane was packed with support staff and scientists all scrambling to find a comfortable sleeping spot in the cluttered fuselage. They were a collection of mainly New Zealand and American researchers and support staff heading south for the brief summer months.

Sitting on uncomfortable military webbing seats with my mind continually drifting gave me plenty of time to reflect on how I had got myself into this predicament. If this were a scene from a movie about my life, now would be the point where, in my soporific state, I would flash back 37 years. The incessant pulse . . . pulse . . . pulse . . . of the aircraft’s throbbing engines would give way to a recurring whirr . . . whirr . . . whirr . . . and an echo-like chant of children’s voices would fade in, chorusing . . . ‘Charlie was the odd-job man at the local variety theeeaaaatre!’

Max’s introduction to the world of movies was through his father’s hand-cranked Charlie Chaplin movies, aged three. Max Quinn Collection

I would then dissolve through to a close-up shot of the rhythmic grinding of a hand-cranked home movie projector and the overexcited refrain of small boys with light flickering across their faces reciting caption cards up on the big screen. For this was my earliest memory of what was to become a life absorbed in moving pictures — me and my three older brothers sitting cross-legged on the lounge room floor, engrossed in magical images of Charlie Chaplin dancing in front of my wide three-year-old eyes.

The place is Benneydale, a remote coalmining town deep in the King Country of New Zealand’s North Island. The year is 1953. Our dad, Harry, is the projectionist. One of Mum’s old white sheets is tacked to the wall as the screen. It’s not some DVD or even a VHS tape we’re watching — unheard of in those days — but Dad’s newly acquired 9.5 mm Pathescope hand-cranked home movie projector. He bought it on impulse, as a treat during one of his many visits to Auckland’s Greenlane Hospital where, unknown to us kids, he was being treated for a very aggressive form of cancer.

From all accounts our life in Benneydale was idyllic. My newly married parents had moved there from the South Island’s West Coast during the war, when Dad had the chance to manage the local state coal mine. I came onto the scene in March of 1950 and saw my first feature film just three years later — Walt Disney’s , at the local coalminers’ hall. I only remember the frightening scenes of Dumbo leaping off the trapeze and using his big elephant ears to fly like a bird — marvellous stuff to ignite a little boy’s imagination.

By 1954, Dad’s health was deteriorating and he was offered a job in New Zealand’s capital city, Wellington, as a librarian. Reluctantly the family moved from its tranquil life in the country to a scary new life in the big city.

For our mother Helen, it must have been a journey into the unknown. How would a rural mum cope with four lively young boys and a two-year-old toddler? Would Dad’s health continue to decline or was there a miracle cure on the horizon? It wasn’t long before one of those questions was answered. Barely six months after arriving in Wellington, and just a month after I started school, Dad’s life would end.

Quinn Family group, 1953. L–R: Keith, Harry Snr, George, Helen holding baby Harry Jnr, Jim, Max in front wearing braces aged about three.
Max Quinn Collection

Now, here I was at 40 years of age, contemplating my own journey into the unknown. A few hours before, my wife Carol and our two children Jeremy and Ellen had waved me off for a filming stint that would take me away from ‘civilization’, for at least ten months.

Today, it’s hard to explain, but my father’s untimely death must have had a profound influence on the future lives of not only me but of all my brothers. His independent outlook on life saw us all relatively successful in our chosen fields, something our mother Helen encouraged. My young brother, Harry, was a police officer all his working life. My oldest brother George made an academic career from his lifelong passion for the complex country of Indonesia, while Keith became a world-renowned sports broadcaster, writer and rugby commentator. Sadly, my second oldest brother Jim, the one with an incredibly independent streak and who always willingly acted in my early home movies, succumbed to cancer at just 36 before his full potential was realized. Yet they all had a big influence on me, not least in my first tentative steps as a filmmaker.

My passion for film started as a schoolboy. I had the use of an 8 mm movie camera that George bought after a volunteering stint in Indonesia. On his return, I picked it up and, using money earned during the school holidays, bought rolls of Kodachrome movie film. Soon a series of home movie epics were rolling out of my ‘movie studio’ — the backyard of the family home in a hilly suburb of Wellington. They usually starred my brothers Harry, Keith and Jim with Mum playing the odd bit part. and were two of the family dramas I made more than 50 years ago. However, my very first film, although I didn’t recognize it at the time, was a ‘natural history’ film, . As a very shy schoolboy, I headed down to the nearby zoo, paid my entry and wandered around, poking my camera through the bars and collecting shots of the animals not doing very much in particular. It wasn’t very good.

So smitten was I with anything to do with nature, I would have loved to work in a museum. At my primary school in the South Wellington suburb of Berhampore a spare classroom was transformed into a school museum. I became the proud ‘Director’, resplendent in white lab coat. The kids were asked to bring in suitable objects to display. Soon tables were festooned with shells, rocks and bones — in fact all sorts of paraphernalia children might find interesting. My contribution was a family heirloom, a mounted jaguar head, supposedly shot by my paternal grandfather in Brazil when he worked in a mining camp in the state of Mato Grosso in 1906. We opened at lunchtimes for the school kids to wander through. My teacher, Mr Hainsworth, arranged for some of the staff at the Dominion Museum to visit and I had the honour of showing them around. They were obviously impressed, asking if I’d like a behind-the-scenes visit to the museum in town. Would I ever!

I was particularly taken by the work of the taxidermist, Mr Lindsay, who was stuffing a black-backed gull at the time. I watched in amazement and thought this was the job for me. On returning home I immediately tried to do it myself with varying degrees of success — usually with dead sparrows, courtesy of our pet cat. On one occasion a boy from school brought me his dead pet budgie and asked if I’d...