Peter Wells

Peter Wells was a film fan as a child; he has written how New Zealand's isolation gave the movies a heightened impact: "It was foreign travel, before we had even got on a plane".

Wells began acting as a nine-year-old, and it was on stage that he first grew to appreciate the interaction of a fantasy world with everyday life. In the early 70s Wells studied history - at that point "there was nothing like film studies" - though by now he was spending much of his time at the cinema. He then took off for five years overseas, where he began to write short fiction.

By the early 80s, while working as a proofreader at the NZ Herald, Wells would finish his night shift then watch a film crew shooting short film Queen Street. As he later wrote in the book Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, "..it was a fantastically empowering experience. The whole mystery of film, at that moment, collapsed as if someone had pulled a curtain away, rudely". Wells realised he could make films too.

Annoyed by the linear storytelling approach of pioneering Antipodean gay feature Squeeze, Wells set about making something provocative, and less reliant on dialogue: experimental short Foolish Things (1980).

The film got its first screening alongside early shorts by Gregor Nicholas and Shereen Maloney. Foolish Things won awards in Europe, and screenings in Australia. Wells began to develop a "feeling of solidarity" with these and other emerging filmmakers; the film also marked the first of many collaborations with editor/director Stewart Main.

In 1985, Wells and Main worked on two short dramas made for TV's About Face. This ground breaking anthology series came about partly thanks to the crusading efforts of Wells - he had banded together with other independent filmmakers to form the New Film Group, partly from a feeling that short films were as valid - perhaps even more so - than feature films. The NFG 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  Anne Kennedy, writer of the original short story; star, future politician Georgina Beyer; and novice director of photography Stuart Dryburgh. In later years a documentary on Beyer, co-directed by Wells and Annie Goldson, would win two awards at gay film festivals in the United States. For About Face, 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, screened around the world, and won an award at The American Film and Video Association Awards. 

Two other notable films by Wells demonstrate his fascination with architecture. 1986's The Newest City On The Globe (about Napier) and 1988's The Mighty Civic (about the iconic Auckland theatre) both mix straight history with colourful flights of cinematic fancy.

The first and (up to 2011) last feature film made by Peter Wells is Desperate Remedies (1993), co-directed with Main. Starring Jennifer Ward-Lealand and flamboyantly shot by Leon Narbey, this deliberately melodramatic take on our colonial beginnings offered an expressionistic alternative to the man alone machismo that had dominated Kiwi film.

After being selected for the Cannes Film Festival, Desperate Remedies quickly sold to more than 25 countries. Screen International called it "an exuberant Victorian bodice ripper", while Variety's David Stratton found it "a feast for the eyes and eyes" - Stratton described a Cannes screening where many hooted "cheerfully at the pic's wild extravagancies and gay abandon". Reviewers for The Dominion and North and South both praised the film for staking out new ground from Kiwi realist traditions.

Since Desperate Remedies, Wells has concentrated on writing for the page. 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 Ricordi!, an operatic dramatization of Katherine Mansfield's Wellington stories, commissioned for the NZ International Festival of the Arts. Wells also helped out on the script for Garth Maxwell's 1998 feature When Love Comes.

Two short stories from Wells' 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 in 1997. Soon after, working from a Wells script, Stewart Main directed 60s coming of age tale One of Them! as an hour long TV film; Wells also wrote a novella of the same name.

Wells' 2003 novel Iridescence was a runner up in the fiction category of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, and a finalist for the 2005 Tasmania Pacific Fiction Prize. In 2009 he won a non-fiction writing award which allowed him to work on a book involving William Colenso. He was also a founder of the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, with novelist Stephanie Johnson.

In 2006 Peter Wells was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature and film. The previous year, he had written about his life as a cinema-goer and film-maker for the book On Going to the Movies (Four Winds Press).

Sources include
Peter Wells
David Stratton, 'Desperate Remedies' (Review) - Variety, 7 June 1993
Roger Robinson, 'Wells, Peter' (Profile), New Zealand Book Council Website. Accessed 20 December 2010
Peter Wells, ‘Glamour on the Slopes: Or the Films We Wanted to Live’ in Film in Aotearoa New Zealand. Editors Jonathan Dennis and Jan Bieringa (Wellington: Victoria University Press, Second Edition 1996)