Peter Wells

Peter Wells got his first public reaction as an actor, aged nine. It was on stage that he first grew to appreciate and love the interaction of a fantasy world with everyday life.

During the early 1980s, Wells was a film reviewer for the NZ Listener. While he was writing about cinema, he was also exploring the medium artistically, often collaborating with like-minded individuals such as Stewart Main.

His earliest productions were the semi-experimental shorts, Foolish Things (1980), and Little Queen (1984).

The promise of these films quickly bore fruit. In 1985, Wells and Main collaborated on two short dramas made for About Face. This ground breaking television drama series was produced by John Maynard and Bridget Ikin. About Face came about partly thanks to the crusading efforts of Wells - he had banded together with other independent filmmakers to form the New Film Group, which pressured the powers that be to devote more funding to short films.

The About Face love story Jewel's Darl, directed by Wells, launched a number of careers - for its writer, Anne Kennedy; its star, future politician Georgina Beyer; and novice director of photography Stuart Dryburgh. Wells also wrote the humorous, semi auto-biographical My First Suit, directed by Main.

The following year, Wells and Main caught the zeitgeist perfectly with their TV drama, A Death In The Family, about the loss of a friend to AIDS. In the year that the homosexual law reform bill was working its way into law, this was a hot button topic. The film was hailed locally, and shown in New York.

Two other notable films by Wells show his fascination with architecture: The Newest City On The Globe (1986) and The Mighty Civic (1988) both mix straight history with colourful flights of cinematic fancy.

The first and (up to 2008) last feature film made by Peter Wells is Desperate Remedies (1993), co-directed with Stewart Main. This deliriously mannered take on New Zealand's colonial beginnings was selected to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, and represented a an expressionistic alternative to the man alone machismo that dominated NZ film in the 1970s and 80s.

Since Desperate Remedies, Wells has concentrated on developing his writing career. His short stories and novels have been widely praised. But he has not entirely abandoned drama. In 1996 he collaborated with theatre director Colin McColl on an operatic dramatization of Katherine Mansfield's Wellington stories, commissioned for the NZ International Festival of the Arts.

Two short stories from his awardwinning 1991 collection Dangerous Desires have been filmed to date: Of Memory & Desire, the tale of a Japanese couple travelling around New Zealand, was adapted by Niki Caro for her first feature film in 1997. The same year, working from a Wells script, Stewart Main directed 60s coming of age tale One of Them! as an hour long short.

Wells' 2003 novel Iridescence was a runner up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and a finalist in the 2005 Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize.

In 2006 Peter Wells was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature and film.