Ian Mune

Industry icon Ian Mune is the veritable man of many parts. His contribution to New Zealand screen history encompasses acting (Sleeping Dogs), directing (The End of the Golden Weather), writing (Goodbye Pork Pie) and adapting works originally written for another medium (The Silent One). Three of the five features he has directed have won awards for New Zealand film of the year; two jumped into the ten highest grossing Kiwi films at home, soon after release.

Born in 1941, Mune dabbled in acting while growing up on a farm near Tauranga. Later he tried to balance theatre and teacher training in Wellington; acting won, taking him to the United Kingdom and job offers from The Royal Shakespeare Company. Instead, he returned to New Zealand, determined to "talk my own language".

In 1971 Mune made his screen debut in New Zealand's first ongoing drama series Pukemanu, playing a "nasty, greasy" truckdriver. He was also one of many scriptwriters to cut their teeth on the show.

By the mid-70s, Mune was on a major creative roll. In 1976 he won Feltex television awards on both sides of the camera: one for adapting Ian Cross novel The God Boy, another for his title role as trade unionist Leo Moynihan in popular trans-Tasman co-production Moynihan.

Alongside filmmaking partner Roger Donaldson, Mune was also making inroads in independent production. After their one-off drama Derek, which Mune also starred in, the pair won funding to make the anthology series, Winners and Losers, (1976). The plan was that by pooling their talents they would upskill themselves, and Mune would learn more about directing.

The Mune-directed episode Big Brother, Little Sister was arguably New Zealand's first television drama to examine alienated, urban Māori. Mune also directed the A Great Day episode of the series. The pair vigorously sold Winners and Losers at overseas markets, pointing the way for others in television to follow.

Mune and Donaldson were also collaborating on the writing of their first full-length movie, Sleeping Dogs, often seen as start point for the late 70s renaissance of New Zealand cinema. Mune took one of the main roles; as he says in documentary The Life of Ian, acting opposite the more "contained" Sam Neill taught him the value of being in the moment.

Mune then followed Roger Donaldson overseas again, to work on uncredited rewrites for The Bounty. When Mune returned home, he was ready to make his debut as a feature film director - 1984's colourful conman caper Came a Hot Friday, which American magazine Variety called "a major advance in Kiwi Comedy"; Mune called it absolutely "the best time of my life".

Both Came a Hot Friday and Mune's long-gestating The End of the Golden Weather (1991) were based on Kiwi classics from another medium (in the latter case, Bruce Mason's classic one man play). Both display Mune's keen eye for imaginative recreations of a golden, yet far from perfect New Zealand past. Both won multiple awards. The End of the Golden Weather also demonstrated Mune's abilities with novice actors: in the central role of a boy in the process of leaving childhood behind, 12-year-old Stephen Fulford took away the best actor award at 1993's Los Angeles Youth in Film ceremony.

There were more awards for 1996's Whole of the Moon, including two for newcomer Nikki Si'Ulepa, who played an outwardly tough teen cancer sufferer. Like Friday and Golden Weather, The Whole of the Moon scored yet another NZ Film Award winner for best film.

Having turned down Once Were Warriors, in 1999 Mune found himself helming the sequel, when the director pulled out a week before pre-production. Mune had already been involved in rewrites. What Becomes of the Broken Hearted? won nine of its 13 New Zealand Film Award nominations. It remains Mune's biggest commercial success to date.

Mune's writing resume ranges from 1974's Buck House to co-scripting Kiwi classic Goodbye Pork Pie. His prolific acting career has alternated between Kiwi everyman and gruff authority figure, including Bullen in Sleeping Dogs, the tyrannical father in A Song of Good, Winston Churchill (cable movie Ike: Countdown to D-Day), Air NZ head Morrie Davis (Erebus - The Aftermath) and an awardwinning turn as ex-PM Robert Muldoon (Fallout).

Off-screen, Mune has remained a passionate advocate for telling New Zealand stories, and outspoken in his belief that creative decisions should remain unstifled by bureaucratic interference. 

Mune's long acting career has also seen him treading the boards at Wellington's Downstage and Auckland's Mercury theatres. After a long period of acting in other mediums, his return to theatre was recorded in Waka Attewell's 1996 fly-on-the-wall doco In the Shadow of King Lear.

In 1991 he was awarded an OBE for his services to Film and Theatre. Mune's self-titled autobiography was published by Craig Potton Books in November 2010. In 2011 he directed feature-length doco Billy T: Te Movie, which explores the life, work and tragic passing of Mune's Came a Hot Friday star. The film mixes interviews, restored footage, and animated sequences. Billy T: Te Movie opened in August 2011, at the top of the local box office charts.

Sources include
Ian Mune, Mune - An Autobiography (Nelson: Craig Potton Publishing, 2010)
Sarah Daniell, Ian Mune (Interview) - Listener, 29 January 2005, Page 12
Trisha Dunleavy, Ourselves in Primetime: A History of New Zealand Television Drama (Auckland University Press, 2005)
Roger Horrocks, ‘New Zealand Film Makers at the Auckland City Art Gallery: Ian Mune' (Catalogue) 1985