Kiwi Flyer director Tony Simpson dishes the dirt at Spark
Kiwi Flyer Director Tony Simpson has seen all ends of the movie-making spectrum, and isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.
Kiwi film director Tony Simpson is living the dream – if throwing fake poo on actors is the dream, that is.
Director of family movie Kiwi Flyer, released September 2012, Simpson attended this year’s Spark festival at Wintec for a screening of his solo directing debut, a project he describes as “thrilling”.
“You start with a white page,” he says. “You sit there and you start writing a script and there it was, finally up on the big screen.”
Simpson says one of the fun parts of directing Kiwi Flyer was a scene in which “the baddies get covered in poo”, an important staple of all kids’ movies, in his opinion.
“Everyone had an opinion on how the mixture of the consistency should be,” he says. “We all stood around and we got to throw it on the actors at the end.”
With various assistant director positions on films such as Vertical Limit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe under his belt, Simpson has experienced both ends of the movie-making spectrum, as well as getting “a grounding in basic television drama” on Shortland Street in its early days.
“It was fun to work on something that was actually quite ground-breaking in its day,” he says of the popular Kiwi soap.
“They expected it to only last five years but here it is, like, 25 years later.”
Simpson is currently working on the script for a new film, Kiwi Christmas.
“I’ve got another project in the pipeline, set around our classic camping Kiwi holidays that most Kiwis know and love.
“It’s in the same vein as Kiwi Flyer, another family movie.”
Simpson says it is easy these days for any aspiring directors to follow their dreams.
“The great thing now is we have all this new technology,” he says. “Just grab a camera and you get beautiful images from these digital cameras.
“Just go out and do it.”
