New Zealand Is Fertile Ground for a Filmmaking Boom
March, 05, 2012 4:13 pm | Comments On #MoviesWhat makes New Zealand a fertile ground for a filmmaking boon?
As a moviemaker you need to be resourceful and adaptable and perhaps due to our isolation -- or having to make do with what we have -- we Kiwis seem to be able to do a lot with a little.
On Friday, my film "Good for Nothing" -- the first Western shot entirely in New Zealand -- will be released in New York. We used the Kiwi landscapes as a stand-in for the Wild West, similar to the way Sergio Leone used Italy and Spain in his famous spaghetti Westerns from the '60s starring Clint Eastwood.
We were able to shoot our film on a budget of about $60,000, while getting all the high production values similar to a large studio-backed film. We weren't able to pay for large amounts of studio time, or the cost of re-creating the Wild West on set, so we had to use the actual landscapes...
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Description
First-time director Mike Wallis began his career in a video store in Queenstown, New Zealand. At age 21, and determined to make films, he moved to Wellington and made his first short film starring Bret McKenzie (“Flight of the Conchords”). At the time, Miramar, a Wellington suburb, was starting to expand with production on Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and Wallis got a job as a runner. He later found a niche in the Animation and Motion Capture departments at the visual effects house Weta Digital, eventually becoming animation manager, writing screenplays in his spare time.
In 2005, he and his fiancé Inge Rademeyer decided to self-fund and produce their first movie, "Good for Nothing," the world's first Pavlova Western -- pavlova is New Zealand's national dish. It opens March 9 in New York.
