We Were Dangerous was the first movie I saw at South by Southwest—a funny, heartwarming, often hilarious drama about a group of girls sent to a school for misfits in 1950s New Zealand. Under the control of a no-nonsense matron (Rima Te Wiata), the girls are given strict chores and a rigorous academic workload as punishment for going “against” the establishment.
We Were Dangerous focuses on the friendship between Nellie (Erana James), Daisy (Manaia Hall), and Louisa (Nathalie Morris), and what the film does so beautifully is explore the moments of joy that peak through our most difficult moments. We Were Dangerous celebrates girlhood and, most importantly, asks the question—who decides what society deems “dangerous,” what does that distinction mean, and who is the most harmed by these sweeping, misguided labels?
As I was leaving my screening, mentally stuck in the New Zealand countryside and trying to acclimate to festival madness, I tuned into an animated conversation between several 20-something attendees. Wrestling with the film’s questions of identity and imposed “otherness,” these women were beaming and inspired. One remarked, “This movie is why I love festivals. This movie is why I want to make movies.”
This exchange left me grinning from ear to ear and is one that I keep coming back to. Too often, modern film discourse gets lost in quick (over)reactions and cynicism, when it should really be about movies that made us feel, the movies we can’t wait to tell our friends about. I agree with the SXSW crowd; We Were Dangerous is one such movie.
At the start of our interview, I share my anecdote about the enthralled audience members with producer Morgan Waru, co-writer and director Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu, and co-writer Maddie Dai, and the trio beams, “This is exactly the reaction we could hope for.”
The jury at SXSW is in agreement, giving director Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu the Special Jury Award for Filmmaking, which is an impressive achievement when you consider that We Were Dangerous is her debut.
As the film awaits a distributor, I implore you to keep We Were Dangerous on your radar. And be wary of labels—and the power they carry.
Read more from We Were Dangerous’ Morgan Waru, Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu, and Maddie Dai below:
Awards Daily: Maddie, can you tell me a little bit about how the story of We Were Dangerous came to you?
Maddie Dai: I was interested in doing something about teenage girls. I had a great, great grandfather who was in prison on an island in the middle of Wellington Harbor in New Zealand. So, I’d done some reading about that. There was a Chinese leper on this island who was kind of forcibly removed to a cave on one side of it. There were these levels of isolation I just found interesting, and the treatment of people on the fringes of society in New Zealand, who are considered dangerous, but were, in fact, just incredibly vulnerable. It was interesting.
But then, I also wanted to tell a story about young women who were spirited, bored, and deeply, deeply caring about each other, funny, irreverent, spirited, and witty—all these things that felt like how I was when I was an awesome teenager [laughs]. So, I combined them all.
I began to dig into New Zealand’s history and how Eugenics was really popular at some point. Everything cumulatively came together. And I wrote it in a three-month fever dream.
Awards Daily: Josephine, so much of We Were Dangerous comes in across in really subtle moments, facial expressions, etc. Tell me about capturing that, and the conversations that you had with your actors to get them to a place where they can express that vulnerability.
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: I’m always looking for authenticity as a director. I’ll take it over anything, like delivering the right line or making something really funny, as long as the actors can make it true to themselves. Actors are bringing part of themselves to a character, so there has to be a little connection there for it to feel authentic.
Most of it is just trust— getting the actors to trust you and feel safe enough because they’re so vulnerable on set. They’re really exposed, they’ve got cameras pointing at them, and then they have to perform. They have to perform for you in these really tight amounts of time. So, for me, it’s just about getting them relaxed and making sure that they’re enjoying it. They have to be having fun, and I feel like that comes across on the screen in the film as well. When the characters in the film are having fun and there are these joyful moments, the actors themselves are also having fun—genuinely having fun with each other as actors.
Awards Daily: Tell me about capturing the genuine joy and innocence of youth against this backdrop of pain and isolation. It’s a delicate balance, and I think the film really threads that beautifully.
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: Thank you. My cinematographer [Maria Ines Manchego], and I talked about how we would film the three girls differently from how we would film the matron (Rima Te Wiata). So, this is really subtle, and I don’t know if you noticed, but with the matron, very rarely are we handheld. The camera is always rigged on something, whether it’s a jib arm or a dolly. Every time we follow her, her movements are very controlled, and we wanted the sense that she’s very locked into the system.
And then, with the three girls, we went handheld a lot. We wanted to create a sense of movement and play in the frame. As an audience member, you felt almost like a fourth member of the group. You’re rooting for them. You’re one of the girls, regardless of your age, your gender, whatever. You’re one of them.
Awards Daily: Morgan, I’m curious about the challenges of making a tiny film like this. Obviously, you have some incredible backers and producers. But, We Were Dangerous is a passion project for everyone involved. How did you bring it to life?
Morgan Waru: Yeah, this film was amazing in that the momentum behind it came together very organically, and I think it was a testament to Maddie’s script and Josephine’s vision, people just saw what we saw, and the possibility of what this film could be. So, in relative terms to filmmaking, it actually came together quite quickly, and we were lucky enough to have such great EPs on the project; Bill Way, Elliott Whitton, and Emily Gotto saw what we saw in the film. That was really enabling and empowering.
From a production perspective, it was definitely very challenging on a super low budget. It was just an incredible team of HODs and hardworking crew. We shot in the middle of winter on the South Island of New Zealand. It’s just a real testament to the cast and the crew and the belief of our producers that we were able to get this film going.
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: Everyone got behind us and got behind the story. Cast, crew, we were all in it together.
Awards Daily: With SXSW as the launch pad, what are you hoping for as people discover We Were Dangerous? Do you have a message or hope for the film?
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: One of my favorite lines of the film is one of the matron’s narration moments, where she says, “It’s hard to redeem a girl who believes there’s nothing wrong with her.”
So I always think, “There’s nothing wrong with you, and there never ever was.” For people who feel on the outside, in some way different, or off the binary— I would love for that message to come across. And from what you said about those young women that you saw after the screening—that’s really important to me. It makes me happy that those audiences are responding in that way.
Morgan Waru: No, I agree. That’s a beautiful line from the film, and I think it’s really special to launch at SXSW because it’s such a youthful, progressive, irreverent, fun festival that is really championing films like this. So it feels really special to launch at SXSW.
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: Yeah, it’s fucking cool.
Awards Daily: I’m so curious because when you’re in the filmmaking process, you write, and plan, and plan some more. Then you’re on set, and there are these little moments of magic that happen that you can never plan for. What are some of your favorite unexpected, spontaneous moments from filming?
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: There were two moments, actually. One of them is the scene in the classroom where the girls are playing a pūkana game, which is the hand-clapping game. That’s something that I saw the actors doing off-set when we weren’t shooting, they were just playing. And I thought that had to be in the film. So, I created some time in our schedule, and we just shot it in the moment, in the classroom.
One of my favorite shots in the film, was never planned, but we managed to do it. I’m so proud of us! It’s the shot where all the girls are lying down in the grass in their blue outfits, and the camera sort of comes up over the ocean, and the camera comes over the top of them as they’re all just resting after their day of work in the grass. That’s my favorite.
Morgan Waru: I think it’s interesting that you say it’s magic that happens sort of unexpectedly on set because what I really loved about the way Josephine operates and directs was that those moments were quite purposeful and created. And many of those moments have imbued the spirit of the girls in the film in a way that would have been hard to quantify in any other way.
And I think that some of the magic that happened spontaneously was some of the improv by Rima Te Wiata, who is an incredible comedic actress and did an amazing job balancing the darkness and the light of the story. We were having to leave the monitor because I was just laughing and ruining the take.
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: We’ve had to sound design my laughter out in some of them.
Morgan Waru: She’d just take Maddie’s script, deliver the joke, and then top it. It was great.
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: Yeah. And I just let it go. Like, I wouldn’t call ‘cut’ because it was gold that was coming out. And some of that ended up in the film.
Maddie Dai: It’s a shame for me that I just could never have come up with this, but I like her little riff where she’s talking about Adam and Eve and the fig leaf, and how Adam’s leaf was a little bigger. That’s just golden.
And it’s actually, in some ways, a tender and vulnerable moment. In my head, I imagine she liked getting a laugh from the girls. She liked being loved by them instead of feared by them. That is the great tragedy of her character—and what Rima could do better than anyone, I reckon, in the big wide world—is create tragedy, rage, and compassion all at once. And how beautiful to see characters and women like that.
Morgan Waru: [The matron] represents a really complicated aspect of the film. She effectively embodies colonization, and she just managed to do that with such deftness.
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: Rima’s made the matron multidimensional, which was always there in the script, but I think it is so hard for an actor to translate. And she did that beautifully.
Awards Daily: Was it always the plan to have the matron be the narrator? That was such an interesting choice.
Maddie Dai: It wasn’t. We played around with a few ideas, and then when the idea came that it was the matron, it was like, ‘Thank God. Why didn’t we think of this 25 years ago?’ [Laughs].
It’s so beautiful because she is an embodiment of the context of the time. She is the result of what these girls experienced, just earlier. She is the end result or the worst-case scenario for them.
So, she’s simultaneously subjective. She’s got this really rigid belief system. She’s got a bird’s-eye view of the girls, and she’s so flawed. So, as far as the narrator goes, she was so interesting.
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: And unreliable.
Awards Daily: I don’t know how much you want to share about the inner workings of the story, but I’m so curious about the friendship between the three girls. It’s so beautiful. But also, there’s some queer subtext there. Was that intentional?
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: Yeah, it is on my part. I can’t speak for these guys, but definitely on my part. I’m queer, so I like suggesting that. Or having people like me, in their younger selves go, ‘Oh, there’s a little bit of me in there.’ You have to see yourself on screen. But, I also very deliberately didn’t want to take the film into a space where Louisa’s (Nathalie Morris) friend group would ostracize her for her queerness. So, it was a very deliberate choice to make that character queer, but also, no one cares apart from people up in the system.
Maddie Dai: I’m also queer. And I definitely put in little crumbs that I’m happy for anyone to pick up. And that feels like the journey of being queer. You’re just throwing out little clues.
When writing it, I was toying with the idea that there was romance there. Still, I wanted it to be a story of friendship. And for that to be the overarching theme. The immense unknowns remain unknown, and that’s what the ending suggests. There are endless possibilities for how these three are going to live their lives. And we’ll just have to let them write their own story.
Awards Daily: As I let you go, is there anything that I haven’t asked you about that you want to mention? It’s so important that people watch this movie. And so, are there any final thoughts that you want to put out there?
Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu: Personally, I feel like this film is for everyone. Just because it’s a story about women and young women, that’s it’s not exclusive to the rest of the audiences. People will be able to see themselves in all of these characters regardless of their gender or sexuality. It doesn’t matter. It’s a story about freedom, reclamation, and joy.
Morgan Waru: I think that’s very eloquently put, and I would just add that Maddie deliberately set this film in a time when young women were considered dangerous. And I’d love for audiences to watch this film and ask themselves if that still resonates today.