ScreenTalk

Robin Scholes – producing the goods

Posted on 8 June 2010

Robin Scholes’ first taste of onscreen story-telling was in London in 1968, and involved using a Steenbeck flatbed editing suite to help friends edit protest footage of coalminers into agitprop films.

Since then, Scholes has attended New York Film School as a Fulbright scholar, and produced several feature films, including Once Were Warriors (1994), Broken English (1996), Rain (2001), Crooked Earth (2001) and The Tattooist (2007).

She has also produced hundreds of hours of television, including Magic Kiwis, The Big Art Trip, Heroes, Greenstone, Business World, Animals and Us, Grass Roots Business, Homeward Bound, New Zealand 2000, The Chosen and Burying Brian.

Scholes co-founded the production company Communicado in 1983, and remained on the board following a merge with Screentime in 2001, before joining Touchdown (now Eyeworks) in 2004.

Her latest feature film projects include The Hopes and Dreams of Gazza Snell directed by Brendan Donovan, and Mister Pip, an adaptation of Lloyd Jones’s Booker-nominated novel, directed by Andrew Adamson.

Scholes is on the NZ On Screen Trust board.

In this ScreenTalk interview, she reveals:

• the launch of NZ’s first private TV network in the 80s, and what it meant for the production sector
• how TV drama series Greenstone could have been better
• her favourite TV script writer, and why
• why the NZ Film Commission initially rejected Once Were Warriors, and how funding was eventually secured
• her apprehension following the first private screening of Once Were Warriors
• how feature film Rain came about
• details from initial test screenings of feature film The Hopes and Dreams of Gazza Snell

This video is available on YouTube to embed and distribute via a Creative Commons licence.

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