New Zealand Screenwriters Making Their Mark

Two Screenwriters From Aotearoa

New Zealand has quite a name internationally for its writers and directors.  Two of these, Jackie Van Beek and Taika Waititi are two of the most well-known.

Jackie Van Beek, actor, director, and writer was born in Wellington, and she studied contemporary dance at Wellington Performing Arts Centre. She then studied Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington. While studying she would be writing and producing plays in Wellington theatres and schools. 

“Wellington in the 90s, for me, was just hugely creative liberating period of the time.”

When Van Beek graduated, she became a Writer-in-Residence for Ohio Northern University Van Beek fell in love with filmmaking in her thirties. After writing and directing short films, Van Beek wrote a short story, In Safe Hands, that retold a real-life New Zealand hospital scandal through a young women’s eyes. The film won Best Independent Short Film at the 2012 NZ Film Awards. Van Beek then started on her Feature films, her latest The Breaker Uppers, and is now working on her new feature film.

Taika Waititi, actor, writer, director, producer, and comedian, also studied at Victoria University of Wellington, where he did a degree in Media Studies. While going to Victoria, he formed a comedy duo with Jermaine Clement called The Humourbeasts, which was part of the comedy group So You’re a Man. The group travelled around New Zealand and Australia doing a comedy show with Billy T James, the famous comedian in the process. 

Waititi began his short stories. One, in particular, was Two Cars, One Night which was a short black and white film. Three Children wait for their parent(s) in two separate cars in a parking lot outside a New Zealand pub in the 1960s and become friends. It was then nominated for Best Live Action Short at the Academy Awards. Waititi then began to work on his other feature films. 

Waititi believes that putting happiness on-screen is a worthy challenge

“It’s a way of connecting audiences and delivering more profound messages by disarming them and opening them up to receive those messages.”

Two of our Hamilton Filmmakers

Adam Harvey is a writer, editor, and director. He loves films; he’s a big horror fan, which was one of the reasons he wanted to become a writer. What got him into filmmaking was when he was studying at Waikato University. Harvey was doing a major in graphic design and took a Film Production paper as an elective. Harvey made small Videos on his own since he was a teenager. But when he started that production paper and actually learnt how to do things properly, he was taught what film is actually all about.

“That’s what got me really excited about it.”

 His favourite part of filmmaking is the editing part and being able to see the finishing product. 

 “The editing part is probably my favourite, going through the footage and putting it all together.”

 Harvey works from home. His process is “write it first, then visualise what we’ll be seeing in these moments, then tweak it from there and storyboard it.” For Harvey, he needs to have control and have backup plans. An obstacle for Harvey is that he can’t always afford to pay his team, so he must work hard to get them to be a part of it, so that he’s not wasting their time, and that they’re getting something out of it. The biggest obstacle is trying to find the time and resources. He’s a homestay dad, so once he finds time to write, it’s writing, then getting other people to be involved and trying to get them excited about the project. 

“Over the years in Waikato, we’ve found people who are like-minded and wanna make stuff”

He’s done a lot of short films, some of them have been accepted into about 15 Film Festivals.

Scott Granville is a writer, director, and producer, and is a co-owner of a business in TV drama series for English language education. He loves films and loves to be creative. When Granville began to write films, he realised that he wanted to make sure that that film got made as close as possible to what he wrote. That’s when he decided to get into producing. Granville got a degree in English and Communication at Monmouth University in New Jersey, USA, a degree in American Literature and Creative Writing at Waikato, and he took some Creative Writing classes online, Udemy. His favourite part would be creating the films. 

 “It’s creating things that have a global reach and being able to share it.”

Granville has two parts to his job: writing and producing. For writing: the creative side, he has to think in an isolated space and bring the ideas to life and have more time to reflect. For producing it would be collaboration, problem-solving, and organising, finding deals and partners. The obstacles he comes across is to keep a filming production on schedule with multiple locations and limited time. 

“If you go in as an individual to fit in a team is to find the place where you can find work, if you go at it alone to create your own production company, you need to find a way to sell your content.”

From 2011-2020 Granville travelled around the world to different film festivals with his films, but unfortunately thanks to lockdown he can’t at the present time. However, he is currently working on a new TV drama series, and it will be in production in January.