After conquering cartooning, NZ-born illustrator Maddie Dai is now based in London and telling stories on-screen.
"I ended up on this trajectory that spun me across the world but I've always felt quite Kiwi … that style of Kiwi comedy and Kiwi filmmaking has always been like such a huge influence to me," she tells Kathryn Ryan.
Illustrator and filmmaker Maddie Dai Photo: Supplied
Maddie Dai's quirky short film Ministry of Jingle is screening at this year's Show Me Shorts festival and her debut feature film We Were Dangerous is due out next year.
Growing up in Wellington, Maddie did debating, played soccer and studied art but says she didn't feel like a stand-out in terms of "artistic talent".
"I've always been drawn to art where I think you can get away with being not that good an artist, which thankfully, cartooning is.
"I mean, I'm a good enough artist to service the joke, but I've never threatened anyone with oil paints … I feel comfortable in this sort of pencil-and-eraser zone, really."
In her last two years of high school, and with her English teacher's encouragement, Maddie attended the international boarding school United World College in Hong Kong, where her father's side of the family lives.
(She recommends anyone who knows "a talented 15 or 16-year-old who's curious about the world" encourage them to apply.)
From Hong Kong, having never set foot in Vermont, Maddie went there for university then moved to New York.
"I ended up on this trajectory that spun me across the world but I've always felt quite Kiwi … that style of Kiwi comedy and Kiwi filmmaking has always been like such a huge influence to me."
While interning in New York, and inspired by New Yorker illustrator Maira Kalman, Maddie first explored cartooning at an evening class taught by another New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake.
"In the opening class, she says something like 'some of you will find you'll have you have a deep well of cartoons that you'll tap into'. And we all looked around hopefully, like a bit of a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory kind of experience..."
For months after, she delivered a portfolio of cartoons to The New Yorker's then-cartoon editor Bob Mankoff – "a grizzled, old, grumpy, sparkly New Yorker" – who would deliver brutal feedback but tell her to come back the following week.
"I knew Emily Flake, my teacher, had been rejected for two years…. there's an urban legend among cartoonists that I think is true, that someone was rejected for 25 years [so] I kind of was like 'okay, well somewhere in between two years and 25 years. I'll brace myself for a few years of rejection'."
The first of Maddie's cartoons for The New Yorker was about the father issues of one Jesus Christ:
A cartoon by Maddie Dai Photo: Maddie Dai
"It was a good bit of news to bring to my Catholic parents … something unbelievably useful about a Catholic upbringing."
Religion has a lot to offer cartooning in terms of characters and stories and ideas, she says: "I mean, God - that's quite a good character, you know. Someone all powerful all knowing, all loving… there's a lot of room there. So yeah, he does come up a lot."
Cartooning offers a succinct way to deliver difficult or complicated ideas in a way that's slightly surprising or unexpected, Maddie says.
Done well, they hit you "with a little bit of a gut punch", and once you come up with a good one yourself, creating them becomes like a "drug".
"You're just looking everywhere for them and it changes the way you see the world … Every interaction, every conversation, you're overhearing every ad… the world sort of sparkles with potential. And it also sparkles with rejection – I mean, there's a lot of rejection as a cartoonist."
Maddie says it was her love for graphic novels like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis that first led her to explore writing and then screenwriting.
When she was first studying that art form, books on the subject seemed more like "an autopsy of a film" than useful how-to guides, she says.
What was more useful to read – and something Maddie recommends to other people interested in screenwriting – is reading scripts of the movies you love.
"They are really fascinating to read, how they put it all together and how they have both a blueprint but really like a feeling … and you're in the world of the film."
In 2020, Maddie joined the writers' rooms for the second seasons of HBO's Our Flag Means Death and Amazon's The Power.
The process of writing her first feature film script – for We Were Dangerous – was "sort of a thrilling roller coaster".
The film was shot in NZ last year, directed by Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu and produced by Piki Films.
It centres on the lives of three teenagers living in an institution for delinquent girls in 1950s New Zealand.
"It's about the history of women and friendship and colonialism and [the girls'] spirit and the friendship that sort of drives them through … I hope it's funny as well."
The cast of Ministry of Jingle Photo: Supplied
