John Toon: internationally-successful NZ cinematographer…

Interview – 2013

John Toon is an award-winning cinematographer who has worked in many countries and genres. His early New Zealand TV jobs include The Governor and Moynihan, while his movie credits include Rain, Sylvia and Sunshine Cleaning (all shot for his wife, director Christine Jeffs), plus Broken English and Mr Pip.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Toon talks about:

Being spied on while filming current affairs programme South Africa – The Black Future
How slow motion filming transformed documentary John Walker – The 3-49-4 Man
Filming half of historical epic The Governor with the National Film Unit
Creating wind from an old DC-3 airliner for movie The Silent One
Making a set surreal for Christine Jeffs' short film Stroke
"Stealing" the look of the film Rain from his colleague, cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh
Using subdued colours on the set of Sylvia Plath movie Sylvia
How illness kept him from realising his big break on Hollywood movie Glory Road
Ignoring official rules on the Bougainville set of Mr Pip

This video was first uploaded on 16 September 2013, 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

If you hire people to work for you who are your equal, you'll never learn anything. And so you must hire the biggest nastiest experts in their field, because then you'll learn. They might embarrass you — they probably will — but you'll learn from them, and that's the greatest thing that I gained from travelling overseas.
– John Toon, at the end of this interview

John's Full Profile