Niki Caro: from the cult of shoes to cold mornings in Minnesota

Director Niki Caro has made movies in Kiwi coastal towns, French vineyards, and Minnesota mines. Although movies Memory and Desire and especially her breakthrough hit Whale Rider made Caro’s international name, her early career was also rich. Much of it can be sampled on NZ On Screen.

In this ScreenTalk interview, Caro talks about:

• The question she asked winemakers before making The Vintner’s Luck; and the similarities between making wine, and making movies
• Starting off in film
• Discovering her love for working with actors, while directing offbeat TV drama The Summer the Queen Came
• Reaching for 'a potent visual storytelling' on low dialogue short film Sure to Rise
• The terrors of the Cannes Film Festival, after Sure to Rise was one of only eight short films in the world invited to compete
• The delights of making Footage, an unusual documentary about the cult of the shoe
• How she bypassed the head-turning success of Whale Rider thanks to being pregnant with her first child
• Tales of toilets, trucks and self-doubt, from the first day of shooting North Country

This video was first uploaded on 23 November 2009, 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 – Ian Pryor. Camera and Editing - Alex Backhouse