Steve Sachs

Steve Sachs moved to New Zealand in 1994 with his Kiwi wife, Margot Francis, an Emmy award-winning film editor. Sachs had previously worked in America on independent features and television dramas. He is one of 17 producers listed on Fallen Champ, an acclaimed documentary about boxer Mike Tyson directed by Oscar-winner Barbara Kopple.

After arriving in New Zealand, Sachs produced the television series True Life Stories. Drawn from an American concept, the show looked at true stories of young people as they overcame various difficulties from alcholism to eating difficulties. The show was notable for using a high proportion of women writers and directors - including Riwia Brown, Christine Parker and Niki Caro.

True Life Stories won an award for Best Drama Series at the 1995 NZ Film and TV Awards. It also introduced Sachs to his future directing partner, Mark Beesley. "Mark directed three episodes and we just clicked," Sachs said.

Around this time, Sachs established his own company, Rocket Pictures, and worked with Beesley (Xena, Outrageous Fortune) on developing Beesley's project Savage Honeymoon. Originally proposed as a sitcom about a party-loving West Auckland family, it became Beesley's first feature with Sachs as producer. The Savage shoot required constant juggling thanks to unexpectedly bad weather, which at one point flooded the film's camp ground setting.

Savage Honeymoon would win controversy after the Office of Film and Literature Classification gave it an R18 rating, thanks to scenes of drunkedness and a gas cylinder being placed on a bonfire (the rating was changed to R15 after appeals). Sachs has argued that "the whole film has a resonance for me, because I've always been a bit of a rebel."

On its release in March 2000, New Zealand Herald reviewer Peter Calder wrote that Savage Honeymoon was "a film with such a self-confident swagger that it gets under our skin". The Evening Post's Philip Wakefield praised the film's Kiwi characters and "infectious exuberance".

Sachs followed the rain-soaked locations of Savage Honeymoon with a rural horror movie, The Locals (2003), filmed almost entirely after dark. The offbeat supernatural tale was directed by filmmaker/musician Greg Page who Sachs had worked with previously on the award-winning short film Sarah's Washing (1997).

Other shorts produced by Sachs include fisherman's tale A Moment Passing, the first of two shorts he made with director Charlie De Salis. The film won official selection at the 1997 Venice Film festival. Nothing Special (2005) was a tale of a man whose mother thinks he is the new messiah. Directed by music video-maker Helena Brooks and co-written by TV personality Jaquie Brown, the film won official selection at the Cannes Film Festival.

Sachs produced the television drama Highwater and two made-for-television American movies that were shot in New Zealand: Deceit, filmed aboard the ferry Interislander; and the 2004 romance Raising Waylon, directed by Sam Pillsbury.