More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He and his men were dug in, waiting for reinforcements. To their astonishment they spotted a courier of some kind, hightailing it up the mountain and dodging sniper fire. The messenger arrived safely, and put an important-looking document directly into Dad’s hands. He opened it and found it was from Lloyds Bank, informing him that he was overdrawn to the tune of two shillings and sixpence, and if the situation was not immediately rectified they would have no choice but to close his account. For the rest of his life Dad would invariably curse whenever passing a branch of said bank.
This is a great book already.
I was fifteen when they arrived on our radio, and twenty-two when they broke up. I was formed, grew into a man, to a Beatles soundtrack.
Gaggie sailed out by herself about five years later and stayed for some months. I don’t know what she made of New Zealand. I was so pleased she was with us, but I probably didn’t do enough to show how much I loved her. Then she went home and I never saw her again. I still have most of my Dinky Toys, which she would send me every Christmas. I treasure them, largely because of her. She would have saved to buy them, this I know. She did the pools every week, but riches never came her way. Genteel poverty, I think they call it. She died in 1968, and I still grieve for her.
I am a firm supporter of the EU. Any organisation that has meant no war between France and Germany for more than seventy years gets my vote. Any organisation that diminishes nationalism is to be applauded. I think the EU is one of the great achievements of the twentieth century. It was tragic that the British chose to leave it. And what was the name of the man who was the main driver behind this madness? None other than Nigel.
Hahaha
Must try harder. A dreamer. Irredeemably lazy.
Dad had a knack for finding exactly the wrong place to establish camp. It’d be a nice, clear, dry stream bed, for instance. Which would be fine until you’d wake up and find your camp bed floating away in the now flooding creek.
A colleague of his once said to me: you do realise your brother is one of the four or five top Shakespeare scholars in the world? No, I didn’t know that, but I’m glad I do now.
Aw
Nevertheless, I cannot help but have nostalgia for those ancient cockroach cars. They were cherished by their patient, loyal owners.
I also have, at my farm, a 1947 Chevy Thriftmaster pick-up truck. It is exactly as old as me, built in September. I did quite a bit to get it restored. It does zero to sixty in about five minutes. Actually, I’m not sure if it’s ever gone that fast. I like having grandchildren back on the deck.
The only thing I have insisted on with my children is that they never, ever ride a motorbike or even get on the back. I’ve lost too many friends now that way.
After my father died, I found a scrapbook in his desk. For years and years he had diligently cut out clippings from the Press (and later from British newspapers) that started with my acting at school and morphed into my full-time acting career. I was very touched that Dad, who never expressed much interest in what I did, would have kept this up for all those years.
I’m from a small city in a small country, profoundly isolated from the rest of the world, at the deep south of the Pacific Ocean. The idea that I could become an actor, a screen actor, was something so far over someone else’s horizon that I never gave it a second thought. There was nowhere in New Zealand where you could train to be an actor. No one was making movies, no one thought of making films in New Zealand when I was a kid, as far as I knew.
The trajectory of your life, I often think, is like a driverless train careering along. I was going somewhere, but I had no idea where. And the train would change direction from time to time, because someone would pull a lever, flip a switch, and I would head somewhere else.
The actors got to eat whatever the audience left. Being excessively poor I was only too grateful to eat the same awful lasagne night after night. I think this is where my lifelong affliction of heartburn began.
I swear this is the story of every actor's first years.
A freelance actor had every opportunity to starve, unless you were one of the half-dozen favoured actors who could scrape by doing some radio drama.
Life, I think, is often as much about the people who say no to you as the ones who say yes.
I had to shoot myself. We had no access to the approved blood bursts that you might find in a normal film. No, this was the kind of detonator that they use to blow up canyons for hydro dams. I asked Geoff if he was certain that I was safe. He paused for what seemed like five minutes. His answer was ‘Yeah. Probably.’
Where does the line lie between solitude and loneliness? And does there come a point in your single life where you are not only reluctant to live with someone again, but you strongly suspect that no one in their right mind could put up with you?
I never rented the place out when I was away, but I would instead allow friends and family to stay, particularly those who couldn’t afford to live in London, ostensibly to look after the place. No one ever took the last part of that seriously. Hardly a week goes by when I don’t run into someone who will say, ‘I went to a fantastic party at your flat in Kentish Town. Best bloody party ever!’ Needless to say, I was never myself the host of any of those wonderful parties, or even there to clear up the bloody mess.
I sold the place in the 1990s because we needed the capital to buy the cottage next door in Sydney. I couldn’t have timed it worse. A matter of weeks after it went, the London property market, which had been pretty level for decades, suddenly went into overdrive. Some people have the knack for these things, and I don’t. Sometimes the kids will look at me and say, Why did you sell that flat, Dad? They loved it. And I ask the same thing of myself. Why? Bloody thing would be worth millions now. The answer, of course, is that I bought the cottage next door largely for them. Children, my children,
...more
AFTER my first chemo, it took only a little over two weeks for the hair to disappear completely from the top of my head. My brother was unkind enough to say, as we FaceTimed, Black men look cool bald, but white men look like some giant’s thumb. I am no exception. I look like a boiled egg that’s been sitting around in the pot long after the water has dried up. Someone has peeled that egg, but not very well.
‘Mum,’ I said, ‘I’m not doing too well. Not at all well. I think I might be having a mental breakdown.’ I suppose I imagined that Mum would make soothing noises, stroke my head or something like that. What was I thinking? Mum took a sip of her tea, put the cup down on the saucer and looked straight at me. She said, ‘Well, darling. You’ll just have to pull yourself together. Won’t you?’ I hitchhiked back to Christchurch and pulled myself together.
Extremely relatable lol
nowadays, if I’m in a bed scene, I’m usually to be found in pyjamas, with a pair of glasses and a book. I say, ‘Night night, dear,’ and turn off the light. No need for counselling at all.
I’ve always been a rather more instinctive person. I don’t give things a lot of thought. And until tonight it’s probably true that I haven’t thought much about myself. I don’t have a great deal of self-regard. I don’t have tickets on myself. I think I can honestly say I don’t have a big ego. I am, after all, a New Zealander; we don’t do ego much.
There was a perfect collision of coming-of-age computer-generated imagery (Steve Williams) with state-of-the-art puppetry (Stan Winston). Some describe the rise of CGI as a contributor to the death of cinema—CGI took the world subsequently by storm, and movies often became spectacles robbed of content. You could destroy cities on your laptop, and not have a reason to care. But Jurassic still had both. Audiences loved it, all around the world.
It was great to be in such a success, and I owe so much to Spielberg and everyone involved, but I don’t think the Jurassic series made any seismic shift in my career. I didn’t become Mr Action Hero or anything, though there is a weird action-man figurine from 1992 in which a muscular version of me wears peculiar underpants. Between Jurassic Park and Jurassic World Dominion, I went back to making films that interested me here and there,
My agent Philip called one morning recently and I called him back. ‘Sorry I didn’t pick up the first time,’ I said, ‘I was hanging out my laundry.’ He was horrified. ‘You do your own laundry? Oh…my… God!’
He pulled up beside me at the lights in his large Mercedes-Benz. I was driving a rental VW Golf. He caught my eye and wound down his window, as did I. He was aghast. ‘Sam!’ he yelled. ‘I never ever want to see you driving a Golf in this town again. Jesus! You hear me? You’re Sam fucking Neill, for Chrissakes!’
The dog walker turned up to take her pooch for its walk, and off they went, dog plus walker for a good hour’s exercise. Meanwhile my agent, the dog owner, was doing her morning exercise on her walking machine. It’s a different planet, Los Angeles.
I remember standing in front of a bank of hundreds of photographers, the two of us, and hearing the clack clack clack of a thousand shutters, and the shouts. ‘Meryl! Meryl! Over here!’ ‘Sam! Sam! Get out of the way!’
I’d prefer to live. It’s more interesting, I think, than whatever happens next.
‘Daddy, where are they?’ ‘What, Bubs? Where are what?’ ‘Daddy, where are the…where are the dinosaurs?’ Sigh.
