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It’s early on a chilly Monday morning and Ōrewa’s Hillary Square is more a film set than a town centre, standing in as the fictional town Mōwai Bay for TVNZ’s crime drama Blue Murder Motel.
Cameras and lights front local butcher Marrow as the crew prepares for the next take, while background actors dressed in summer attire sit wrapped in blankets. Nearby, the leads, Michala Banas and Brett Tucker, nurse coffees as they wait to be called.
The series is back on the Hibiscus Coast filming its second season, and Great Southern Television producer Steven Zanoški says Ōrewa provides exactly the kind of setting he and co-writer Kate McDermott envisaged when planning the show.
“We talked about the nostalgia for the type of holiday that you used to think you had as a kid,” Zanoški says. “Beachfront, a little old-fashioned, sun-kissed and sun-faded, songs on the radio, chips on the beach.”
Ōrewa was part of those early conversations, Zanoški says, partly because McDermott’s family had connections to the area, but it was not until location scouting began that the production team was taken to the Edgewater Motel, coincidentally near where McDermott’s family had once owned property.
Although they continued searching for several weeks, they kept coming back to the Edgewater.
“We said, ‘This place is perfect’. We did our due diligence, but in the end we just thought, we can’t do better than this.” Zanoški says.
The motel provides the show’s exterior setting, while interiors including the reception area, local pub and police station are filmed in studios. The Ōrewa Beach Holiday Park has also featured as a location.
Ōrewa has changed over the years but retains an “essential Kiwiness” that works for the show, Zanoški says. The production deliberately retains New Zealand locations, expressions and accents rather than disguising them for an international audience.
That local identity has not stopped the series travelling. Blue Murder Motel screens in Australia and has been sold to international markets including Acorn TV in the US and ITV in the UK.
It also joins a growing list of productions using northern Auckland and Rodney locations.
Long-running series The Brokenwood Mysteries, now in its 12th season, films extensively around Warkworth and the wider Rodney area, while other productions have shot at Wenderholm, Te Muri, Waitoki, Martins Bay, Weiti Bay and Shakespear Regional Park, including The Convert, East of Eden, The Wrecking Crew, The Gulf, Sweet Tooth and The Wilds.
Screen Auckland’s Matthew Horrocks says that visibility can have benefits long after filming ends, through what has become known as “set-jetting”, where visitors seek out places they have seen on screen.
Horrocks says the phenomenon is also called the White Lotus effect after destinations featured in that television series experienced sharp increases in visitor interest. New Zealand has already seen the effect on a much larger scale through The Lord of the Rings.
Horrocks says television series can be particularly powerful because audiences spend years becoming attached to characters and locations.
“The Brokenwood effect is real,” he says, with visitors travelling to the area to seek out locations from the series.
Even though they may not always travel solely to see a filming location, once they are in an area it can become another reason to stop, explore and spend time there.
For Zanoški, the best outcome would be simple – that Blue Murder Motel continues to build an audience and keeps returning, and if that happens, Ōrewa may increasingly find itself playing two roles: seaside town and television star.
