John Milligan: cars, battle scenes and the New Zealand accent...ry and lifestyle...

Interview – 2015

Producer, director and writer John Milligan has worked on a wide range of television shows. His many credits include Maggie’s Garden Show, Epitaph, Shipwreck and Mucking In. Milligan also directed and produced motor racing documentaries Trio at the Top and Monaco Monza Macao Wellington.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Milligan talks about:

Working on live, non-commercial morning show Weekend
Commanding 14 cameras on his first documentary Monaco Monza Macao Wellington
Not knowing anything about plants when he began on Maggie’s Garden Show
Being surprised at how long it took to make Kiwi bach documentary A Summer Place
Digging into history for motor racing documentary Trio at the Top
The challenges of creating battle scenes in the rain for Von Tempsky’s Ghost
Convincing people Kiwis have an accent when making New Zild
Thinking there’s too much TV nowadays

This video was first uploaded on 13 April 2015, 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

We only had two days to shoot all the battle reenactments, and it rained for a large part of that. I'd made all the props myself and I was doing a lot of the armouring myself, because I'd collected all the antique weapons and got them going
– John Milligan on the challenges of the battle scenes in documentary in Von Tempsky's Ghost

John's Full Profile