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
Interview Credit
Copyright
This video was first uploaded on 31 March 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.
