Wild Man: Geoff Murphy and the Birth of the Aotearoa New Zealand Film Industry

For much of the 20th century Aotearoa New Zealand had no official film industry to speak of. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that conditions became ripe for development. Young aspirant filmmakers joined collectives and made independent productions – including Geoff Murphy’s (1938–2018) first feature film made with his musical co-operative Blerta, Wild Man (1977) – eventually spurring the government to action.

Established in 1978, the New Zealand Film Commission functioned to encourage and promote screen production, and in the decade after its inception more films were completed in New Zealand than had been made over the previous 80 years. Murphy was amongst a core group of figures who contributed to the industry’s increasingly diverse production slate, along with Roger Donaldson, Ian Mune, Gaylene Preston, Merata Mita and Alun Bollinger. Hollywood stars also started to travel to New Zealand to add a little international flair, and when Smash Palace (1981) became the first production of this renaissance to screen at Cannes, the industry seemed to have finally come into its own.

After his own initial critical and commercial success with the groundbreaking Goodbye Pork Pie (1981), Murphy directed two key films of the era, Utu (1983) and The Quiet Earth (1985), both of which feature in this program and star iconic actor Bruno Lawrence.