Andrew Bancroft

Andrew Bancroft began writing and directing for the stage in the late 80s. Then he got the idea for his first short film: man has baby. After a dummy run on video, Bancroft won funding from Creative New Zealand to shoot it under the title Made Man. Craig Parker played the main role in this science fiction comedy, although it was screen wife Vanesa Valentine who took away an acting award, at the 1994 NZ Short Film Festival. Made Man was judged Best Comedy.

Bancroft followed it with another high concept science fiction tale: Planet Man (1995) which would take him to Cannes. The stylish, noir-inflected short saw Tim Balme’s character narrating the lonely experience of finding that all the women appear to have suddenly vanished. Pavement magazine found it “a skilfully-paced and tightly structured work that sustains a knife-edge tension throughout, combining melodrama and sardonic humour with ease.”

In the Critics' Week section of the Cannes Film Festival, a panel of international critics voted Planet Man the Best Short Film. It was only the second time a Kiwi short had won a major award at Cannes (though Bancroft comes first if you discount Kiwi Jane Campion, whose grand prize-winning Peel was filmed and set in Australia).

Bancroft made two more shorts, children’s tale Making the Rain Breathe, (funded by French TV channel Canal Plus) and rural horror Home Kill. In 2000 he directed Nga Tohu: Signatures. Jumping between past and present, the one-hour TV drama followed a Māori whānau taking a claim to the Waitangi tribunal, over their Pākehā neighbour’s land. As well as an award for Bancroft’s direction, three of his cast members scored NZ Television gongs for their work, including George Henare and Nancy Brunning in double roles. Bancroft wrote the script with playwright Hone Kouka.

Bancroft then began moving into documentary, The poetry-keen director was nominated for best director for his first doco, Mine Eyes Dazzle (2004) which profiled poet Alistair Te Ariki Campbell. He followed it with works on painters Michael Smither and Simon Kaan.

After helping select films for Creative New Zealand in 2003, he formed a company (or in film commission parlance, a ‘pod’) with producer Nik Beachman and colleague Hone Kouka. The trio’s company Short Intercept was one of three charged by the Film Commission with finding and developing local short films. Their hit-rate proved remarkable. Three of the five shorts that emerged — Nature’s Way, Run and Fog — won invites to compete in Cannes. The Graffiti of Mr Tupaia took away the main three short film awards at home, at the 2008 Qantas Film and TV award ceremony.

Final decisions as to which films to fund were left as late as possible, allowing for extensive script development with a number of shortlisted teams. “We really pushed it as far as we could because we knew development would end, the minute we greenlit anything,” said Bancroft. “Because nobody comes to make a short film or applies to a pod because they’re dying to develop; they’re dying to shoot.”

Bancroft has also taught film, directed commercials, and has a number of feature projects in development. He has worked as a script editor on both sides of the Tasman.

Sources include
Andrew Bancroft
Nick Grant, ‘The Long and the short of it’ (Interview with Andrew Bancroft and Nik Beachman) - Onfilm, November 2008, Page 26
Planet Man publicity material