ScreenTalk

Scott Wills began his screen career in the early 90s, with appearances in soap Shortland Street and in short films including Ouch, Permanent Wave and The Hole (shown at the Clermont Ferrand Short Film Festival in France).

In 2000, Wills was nominated for two acting awards (one for Ouch and the other for his supporting part in romantic comedy Hopeless) and also starred in feature film Stickmen, a role which earned him the award for best actor at the 2001 New Zealand Film Awards.

Wills followed Stickmen with a run of television performances, including Interrogation and Doves of War.

Big-budget vampire feature Perfect Creature put Wills alongside British actors Saffron Burrows and Dougray Scott, and in 2009 his performance in family drama Apron Strings earned him a Qantas Film and Television Award for Best Lead Actor. In the same year Wills appeared as Saul, the troubled head of security in TV thriller The Cult.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Wills talks about:

• His early work with Danielle Cormack’s underwear
• His personal nightmare at the premiere of Hopeless
• His thoughts on improving the NZ Film and TV awards
• Why he spent time with policemen from Auckland Central CIB
• What it was like working on big budget feature Perfect Creature
• How he crafted his award-winning performance in Apron Strings
• An insight into his disturbing character Saul in The Cult

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

Director Niki Caro has made movies in East Coast townships, French vineyards, and Minnesota coal mines. Caro’s latest feature The Vintner’s Luck has just been released, inspired by Elizabeth Knox’s tale of angels and winemakers. Although feature films Memory and Desire and the breakthrough hit Whale Rider made Caro’s international name, her early career was also rich, and much of it can be sampled on NZ On Screen.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Caro talks about:

• the question she asked winemakers prior to making The Vintner’s Luck; and the similarities between making wine, and making movies
• starting off in film
• discovering her love for working with actors, while directing offbeat TV drama The Summer the Queen Came (1992)
• reaching for “a potent visual storytelling” on Sure to Rise, a short film with hardly any dialogue
• the terrors of the Cannes Film Festival, after Sure to Rise was one of only eight short films in the world invited to compete
• the delights of making Footage (1996), an unusual documentary about the cult of the shoe
• how she bypassed the head-turning success of Whale Rider thanks to being pregnant with her first child
• a tale of toilets, trucks and self-doubt, from the first day of shooting North Country

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

Credits: Direction and Interview – Ian Pryor.  Camera and Editing – Alex Backhouse