John Keir: documenting Erebus, Hillary, Mani and more...

Interview – 2014

John Keir has had a long career producing both documentaries and short films. He has collaborated on several projects with director Grant Lahood, including Lemming Aid and The Singing Trophy. Keir has also directed high profile documentaries, and produced major live TV events like Sir Edmund Hillary special On Top of the World and Anzac Day coverage for Māori Television.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Keir talks about:

Telling the quirky story of temperance in the documentary Fight the Good Fight
Battling lawyers in order to film in court for Flight 901: The Erebus Disaster
How Edmund Hillary live special On Top of the World nearly came a cropper
Why the weather created havoc during the filming of Grant Lahood short Lemming Aid
Being disappointed over the poor box office for movie Chicken
Being fascinated by the idea behind Treaty of Waitangi series Lost in Translation
Finding Mani’s Story the most incredible documentary he’s worked on
Making actor Mark Mitchinson shave his eyebrows for the TV movie Bloodlines

This video was first uploaded on 7 April 2014, 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, Camera and Editing – Andrew Whiteside

...about 20 minutes before we were due to go on air, the phone system to Nepal went down so we had satellite coverage, but we couldn’t talk to the team . . . literally seconds before we were due to go on air the phone system came up again, and everything ran and it ran smoothly. But I think that was one of the most stressful days of my life.

– John Keir on coordinating a live interview with Sir Edmund Hillary in Nepal

John's Full Profile