Getting to know 'Marlon from Lyttelton'

As Marlon worked on a deeply personal project - his first te reo Māori album Te Whare Tīwekaweka -Ursula Grace and her cameraperson were given intimate access to the singer's world to film Ngā Ao E Rua - Two Worlds.

Although Marlon allowed her to film him showering for the doco, for Ursula Grace, the scene where he makes a rare request for time out after a gig more deeply conveys the mutual trust they'd established.

"Marlon is so welcoming and so warm," she tells Music 101. “He's so generous with his time, and he'll give you a lot of his time even if he doesn't know you. [That request for space] meant a lot to me in terms of trust-building - that he was able to ask that of me. That [trust] actually took time to grow."

Related stories:

Ursula Grace was present for almost every moment seen inTwo Worlds, apart from around three minutes of archival footage and some shots by Mark Perkins (aka Merk) of Marlon and Kiwi megastar Lorde recording the duet ‘Kāhore He Manu E’.

"You can't take that lightly when you're invited into somebody's world and you're representing them and their lives in a public sphere and it's going to be documented forever.

"It's so delicate, especially when other musicians were inviting us into their space, like, Lorde, for example, it's delicate, you know. These are relationships that are forged over years between Marlon and Ella (Lorde). I didn't take that opportunity or that honour lightly."

The scenes of Marlon showering were shot a few years into filming, Ursula Grace says, on a morning the singer had woken up feeling "a bit dusty".

"I was like, 'Do you mind, I know this might sound a bit creepy, but do you mind if we film you having a shower? You can totally say no, of course.'

"There's something extremely personal about the way in which people turn on a tap or wash their face and what goes through their mind. Even the fact that he opened the window and looked out towards those landscapes... There isn't really anything more personal, really."

Ngā Ao E Rua doesn't shy away from the impact touring has on Marlon's health, which is "borrowing against the bank", as he puts it.

Accompanying the musician on tour overseas, Ursula Grace witnessed him "being pulled in all sorts of different directions" and says she couldn't tell his story without showing the toll that takes on his wellbeing.

"There's no consistency. You're not waking up and going to the gym and having a green smoothie, you're on the road and it's gruelling. I witnessed that first-hand, and there's no way that I could kind of take that out, you know?"

The filmmaker also got to see how much Marlon's pace of life changes when he gets home to Lyttelton.

"He gets to just reconnect back with his family, reconnect back with the land where he's from, reconnect back with his friends, go back to (restaurant) Civil & Naval and, you know, play basketball and just be 'Marlon from Lyttelton'."

Ursula Grace was a fan of Marlon's music, and he was also familiar with her Vice series Zealandia when they had a "fortuitous" introduction by mutual friend Mark Perkins at a Christchurch dumpling house, she says.

"He gets to just reconnect back with his family, reconnect back with the land where he's from, reconnect back with his friends, go back to Civil & Naval and, you know, play basketball and just be 'Marlon from Lyttelton'."

Ursula Grace was a fan of Marlon's music, and he was also familiar with her Vice series Zealandia when they had a "fortuitous" introduction by mutual friend Mark Perkins at a Christchurch dumpling house, she says.

Although they talked about collaborating on a film that first night, Ursula Grace hadn't thought any further about the idea until catching Marlon speaking about embarking on his first album in te reo Māori on Music 101 - and got excited about the idea of filming his process.

"I knew that that story had to be something that sat in our archives for Aotearoa. It's a really special moment, both musically and to capture it onscreen so that people had an understanding of his decision to make that album. It seemed like one that had to be documented.

"A couple of weeks later, I presented him a full pitch document with vision boards for and was like,'This is kind of the vibe I'm thinking.' And he was like, 'Oh, that feels right.’ A couple of weeks later I was talking to his manager and then five years later, here we are."