Don Blakeney: The early days of NZ film...

Interview – 2011

Don 'Scrubbs' Blakeney had a background in finance. After working overseas in the 1970s, he met Kiwi producers John Barnett and Grahame McLean. Disillusioned with the corporate world, Blakeney ended up drifting into the film industry, initially as a caterer on Sleeping Dogs. In 1979, his background in both finance and film made Blakeney the ideal first Executive Director of the newly established NZ Film Commission. He later produced Geoff Murphy’s classic Utu.

For this ScreenTalk interview, producer John Barnett was Blakeney's guest interviewer. Blakeney talked about:

How he got the NZ Film Commission’s first Executive Director job
How the commission first began
The early filmmakers the commission nurtured, and funding philosophies back then
The importance of marketing New Zealand films
Producing Utu for director Geoff Murphy
His view that luck went against Utu on both its local and international releases
How early Film Commission optimism is reflected in some later movie releases

This video was first uploaded on 1 April 2011, and is available under this Creative Commons licence. This licence is limited to use of ScreenTalk interview footage only and does not apply to any video content and photographs from films, television, music videos, web series and commercials used in the interview.

Interview - John Barnett. Director - Pat Cox. Editing - Alex Backhouse

The films that we made like Beyond Reasonable Doubt, Goodbye Pork Pie, Sons for the Return Home… these films had less than half the money put up by the film commission. The other money came from private investors and from contras and sponsorship.
– Don Blakeney on early New Zealand films being funded by both private funding and the NZ Film Commission

Don's Full Profile