The Unlikeliest Slasher

A decade ago, the 32-year-old was essentially an honorary Kiwi, the headliner from Peter Jackson's The Lord Of The Rings, the trilogy that injected endless cash into the New Zealand film industry and, even, the local tourist economy. Yet now, in July this year, here was the New Zealand Office Of Film And Literature Classification denying classification to Maniac, the nasty, late-night 2012 slasher-flick in which Wood headlined as a psychotic killer with a bent for young ladies. “I find it hilariously ironic,” Wood says, with an attendant laugh. “Coming from this country that I've spent so much time in, have such a love for, and famously played a very different character in, there's just so many funny elements to the fact that Maniac was banned. Like, even though they banned it in New Zealand, it could still be screened exempt from classification. So here was this banned film, yet people could still go to the [New Zealand International] Film Festival and see it.”

Though he's best known for his turn as Frodo Baggins, Wood's played the creep before – amongst ensembles in Sin City and Paris Je T'aime, for two – but Maniac is something else. Shot from the point-of-view perspective of Wood's titular sociopath, it invites an audience to be complicit in his scalping killings. Visually, the experience sits somewhere between Gaspar Noé's cinematic 'head-trip' Enter The Void and that cheesy video for The Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up, even if Wood sees its cinematic antecedent as Michael Powell's provocative 1960 thriller, Peeping Tom. “The choice of shooting it in POV,” Wood explains, “was a way to try and experience an interior perspective of a character through watching a movie. To put yourself in the shoes of a character that is as disturbed as this, and is sort of helpless against his own impulses, it can be confronting to people. And when you're, as a viewer, experiencing something from the first-person perspective that you wouldn't want to be doing yourself, that's disconcerting.”

The NZOFLC's verdict claimed that the first-person perspective is a 'tacit invitation to enjoy cruel and violent behaviour', yet it's clearly a case of the opposite. Wood's character has some pleasingly-creepy mummy issues, and, the actor thinks, there'll definitely be “sympathy” for him for many audience members. But it stops there. “Hopefully we, as an audience, aren't endeared to him, but are repulsed by what he's doing, and are trying to understand where the humanity in him may still exist, and how it can be reconciled with these unconscionable things he's doing,” Wood says. Does he see any merit in Maniac's refusal for classification across the Tasman? “I don't see it as a particularly harmful film. It's extremely violent, but it's also deeply psychological, and deeply troubling. I'm never one for banning films. It denies the intelligence of the viewer. It harkens back to this question that has been discussed so much over time: can films be held responsible for people's violent actions? I truly believe they cannot. One has to have a predilection, internally, that makes them predisposed to committing violence, to actually go out and do it. Someone who isn't a violent person won't be swayed, by way of simply seeing a horribly-violent film, to go out and commit acts of violence. The fault never lies in a movie, but in the psychology of the individual who is taking on that movie.”

Of course, Wood sees the flipside to the saga – it's good publicity. He's emerged, in recent years, as a proponent – and student – of genre. Maniac is itself a (very loose) remake of a grubby, grimy, no-budget 1980 movie that met the censor's wrath, too: William Lustig's original was originally banned in England. There, Maniac was one of 72 films that earned the ire of watchdogs in the UK in the '80s, becoming a pseudo-genre – Video Nasties – worshipped by cult fans. “There's some real classics in there. It's almost an honour to make that list,” Wood laughs.