Producer Pat Cox instigated Kiwiana classic Footrot Flats: The Dog's (Tail) Tale and has produced some of New Zealand’s most iconic commercials, including the long-running Speights 'onya mate' adverts, the "these things take time" ad for Mainland Cheese, and a 100% Pure New Zealand tourism campaign.

In this ScreenTalk, Cox talks about:

• Growing up in Ireland and getting into filming while drumming in bands
• Early screen gigs in the late 1960s in Ireland and America, before emigrating to New Zealand in the early 70s
• Forging a freelance career in a country where there was virtually no film industry, and setting up Film Editing Services, and importing the country's first Steenbeck editing desk
• Teaching film and TV to future screen legends at Wellington Polytechnic
• The growth of the commercials sector in the 1970s, and working with Geoff Dixon, Tony Williams and John Blick
• Production managing on Tony Williams’ first movie Solo (1977), in an era when there were barely enough people to make two local features at the same time
• Getting to grips with New Zealand culture as a fresh off the boat Irishman, by reading Janet Frame and Footrot Flats
• Cold-calling Murray Ball and proposing a movie of the Footrot Flats comic strip, and being flatly refused — at first
• The long and painstaking task of animating the film with 1980s technology

Images courtesy of Pat Cox. Selected images are from Wikipedia Commons, or courtesy of the NZ Film Commission and The Post.