After screening in Auckland and Wellington at this year's NZ International Film Festival, Mega Time Squad will appear in select cinemas nationwide from August 30.

His last feature was a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet for the You Tube generation.

Now Tim van Dammen has taken on an even more ambitious project, writing and directing a time-travel comedy action-thriller set in Thames.



Making its debut at Canada's Fantasia Festival in Montreal on Tuesday (New Zealand time), Mega Time Squad will have its New Zealand bow at Auckland's Hollywood Cinema on Friday night as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival.

Inspired by a combination of 1990s sci-fi infused comedies like Groundhog Day and Multiplicity as well as the works of the Farrelly Brothers (Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin), it's the tale of low-level drug dealer Johnny (Anton Tennet), whose life is turned upside down when an attempted heist of local Chinese-run emporium brings him into contact with a mysterious relic that gives him the power to travel through time.

Anton Tennet plays a low-level drug dealer turned time-traveller in Mega Time Squad.

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Speaking to Stuff just hours ("I have a pizza stone in one-hand and car keys in the other," he opens our conversation with) before heading off an overseas trip that will culminate in presenting the movie in Montreal, van Dammen says it has been more than four years since he first had an idea to make a movie about a bumbling time-traveller.

"It took that long because I came to the harsh reality that I was going to have to learn how to write. So I spent two-to-three years just doing that, until I got to a point where I thought I was ready to produce something."

Johnny Brugh plays the maniacal Shelton in Mega Time Squad.

While shooting took just a month, Mega Time Squad spent 18 months in post-production "simply because we didn't have any money at all to put towards this project".

Calling in friends and favours, van Dammen also had to wait for some key people to become available to work on it as they fitted it in between other projects.

"I wanted to work with people that were better than me at what they do, especially since this was my first effort at producing one of my own scripts. It transformed massively during rehearsals, shooting and post-production thanks to the input of others - I was constantly reshaping my story. I also kept thinking, 'what if it's not funny, too short, doesn't make any sense?', even though I knew it made sense on paper. Most of the cuts were just because there were just too many jokes."

The heist of a Chinese emporium has some unexpected consequences in the Thamses-set Mega Time Squad.

So why set the movie in Thames and was the gateway to the Coromandel always the story's setting?

"Yes it was, because I lived there when I was kid and was living there and working at the Pak N Save while I was writing this. I think there's something about the place –- the small community and being surrounded by the mountain range. I think it's an interesting community because it pretty much has a parole office, a hospital and a Pak N Save. It also has a lot of elderly people. I really love it and it just felt right."

Best-known as a music video director (he's helmed clips for the likes of Sola Rosa, Boh Runga and Kids of 88), van Dammen says the skills he learned on those came in handy for making the special-effects creation as easy as possible.

"I couldn't afford techno-cranes, so one of the fundamental compromises was to keep the camera static for the entire movie. That was a real challenge, especially when you're trying to create a sense of tone and wide waves of drama."

Wanting his sound and visuals to be in keeping with the movie's overall comedic tone, van Dammen says he was determined to find a way to make his time-travel effects look "silly".

"I wanted it to look like someone being sucked down the drain and all the sound-effects were me sucking on McDonalds' drinks and popping straws."

And while he hopes the film will have universal appeal, the very heart of his idea was to try and make a genre movie that was uniquely Kiwi.

"I tried to write the dialogue as much as I could in a voice that if you weren't a New Zealander you probably wouldn't know what they were talking about."

Mega Time Squad will make its New Zealand debut at Auckland's Hollywood Cinema on Friday, July 20 as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival. For more information, see nziff.co.nz



