John Laing
John Laing has worked prolifically in both television and film. He has helmed six features and nine telemovies, two-thirds of them involving crime or murder, and many of them based on true stories. The editor turned director has also worked on dozens of TV shows — including an extended run producing Outrageous Fortune, as well as directing on Go Girls, Step Dave, Jackson's Wharf, Mercy Peak, Cover Story and Street Legal.
Laing's parents were "a feisty Scottish woman" and a sheet metal worker and "all-round practical genius". In his hometown Dunedin, he studied English and history at Otago University, was a cameraman on a "chaotic" sci-fi film, and fell in love with Japanese and European cinema at the local fleapit cinema. After working for two months as a sub-editor at a local newspaper, he headed to Wellington to become a trainee at government filmmakers the National Film Unit. Following four months of making cups of tea and carrying gear, Laing got a "baptism by fire" when he was given a 20 minute tourist film to direct.
Over his two years at the NFU he made four more films. On the side, he co-directed a film based on a Denis Glover poem and rode a unicycle for a Paul Maunder theatre production of Hamlet. Laing decided to exit the NFU after Kariotahi Beach, a mood piece about fishing, caused "a bit of a stink" because it lacked the NFU's traditional voice-over narration. Told "the film will never go out", Laing won the battle to release it as intended.
At that point making feature films in Godzone did not seem a realistic proposition. In late 1972 Laing and his then partner, future producer Robin Laing, departed for England. John worked as a truck driver, and edited for the BBC in Bristol and London. In 1975, he got a contract with the highly regarded National Film Board of Canada. "It was the first time I'd been in an environment where I was genuinely encouraged to do good work".
During his three years in Canada, he edited (and sometimes helped write) ten documentaries for the NFB, and another five elsewhere. He also worked for the first time with his future Lost Tribe cinematographer, Montreal-born Thomas Burstyn. Laing edited and wrote extended scenes for cult 1977 feature The Rubber Gun, about a bunch of Montreal junkies with robbery in mind. The film would have echoes in a later Laing project, black comedy The Shirt.
Producer John Barnett invited Laing home to direct his first feature. Based on the Arthur Allan Thomas murder case, Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1980) marked a leap into the deep end. Laing had rarely worked with actors; now he was contending with a large cast, and lawyers on the hunt for any "contentious" dialogue. Real life events changed from month to month. Thomas was pardoned a few weeks before filming began, making "us feel a lot less nervous about some of the issues we were getting into". Laing discusses the film's mixture of drama and realism in this making of documentary. Nominated for Best Film at the Chicago Film Festival, Beyond Reasonable Doubt was briefly New Zealand's most successful local feature, until Goodbye Pork Pie roared into view.
Next Laing spent eight months editing chase movie Race for the Yankee Zephyr, and worked on the script for his dark, stylish second feature, psychological thriller The Lost Tribe. Laing has described it as "a bizarre tale of a brother searching for his twin who was lost in a wild area of Fiordland". John Bach, playing chalk and cheese twins, praised Laing's skills in keeping on top of subtle differences between the two characters. "One day I changed characters five times, and he enabled me to do it." The Lost Tribe won the international critics prize at the Sitges fantasy film festival in Spain.
Laing followed The Lost Tribe with the more widely-seen Other Halves (1984). The "superb screenplay" was by Sue McCauley, based on her award-winning semi-autobiographical novel. The film chronicles the relationship between an affluent 30-something Pākehā woman (Lisa Harrow), and a 16-year-old Polynesian with a criminal record (newcomer, Mark Pilisi). Harrow learnt "a huge amount" from Laing about screen acting, describing him as "the ideal director because he's calm, prepared, clever and imaginative." Laing talks about the project in this video interview. Other Halves won praise from The Listener, The Auckland Star and North and South reviewer John Parker, who praised its power and performances.
The first half of the 80s proved especially busy, with four features released in six years. The next project for the longtime fan of film noir was mystery thriller Dangerous Orphans. The cast included Zac Wallace and a singing Jennifer Ward-Lealand (see also this clip, where the film is being promoted at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival.) Laing was also making his first ventures into television — a useful "boot camp" in terms of concentrating on the basics of story and character. He directed episodes of light drama Inside Straight, and the penultimate episode of working-class trucking drama, Roche. Laing and Chris Hampson were contracted to produce a second series, but despite excellent reviews the project was cancelled.
Partly thanks to changes in tax law, local features were slowing to a crawl. When Dangerous Orphans premiered in September 1986, Laing was in Canada, directing the first of a series of foreign-funded television projects, many of them horror, thriller, or fantasy based. Each episode of The Hitchhiker was "shot in six days with a pretty quick turnaround". The budgets for some were equivalent to what a feature film cost back in New Zealand. Other shows (Xena, Hercules) were made locally, under the wing of American-born impresario Rob Tapert. Laing also directed two films for the New Zealand pavilion at Expo 88.
In 1992 Laing helmed the long in gestation Absent Without Leave. In his big screen debut, Australian teen idol Craig McLachlan starred as a soldier going AWOL for the woman he loves (Katrina Hobbs), after being told his final leave had been cancelled. The film was based on the experiences of James Edwards, whose story Laing heard in a radio interview. Edwards would turn his story into both a book — AWOL — and a feature script.
Since then, television has been Laing's base. Through the 90s he directed for acclaimed making-a-current-affairs-show drama Cover Story, Tom Scott police pilot Tiger Country, and historical drama Greenstone. He reunited with Lost Tribe/Roche actor John Bach for episodes of detective series Duggan, and directed two feature-length crime dramas for Australian television.
As the century turned, he also squeezed in another film. The Shirt, surely the cheapest feature Laing ever made, is a darkly comic tale of three junkies who find themselves in serious trouble, after accidentally damaging a drug dealers' shirt. It was invited to the 2000 Wellington Film Festival. Laing told writer Ian Conrich that he "learnt more from that than just about anything else I have done".
Laing went on to produce 60 episodes of small town drama series Mercy Peak. Later he did an extended stint as producer of Outrageous Fortune, and also worked on prequel show Westside. As a director, he has found time to helm episodes of border security series Orange Roughies, hit shows Go Girls and Nothing Trivial, and Mike Bungay legal drama Dear Murderer.
Since the mid 90s, Laing has directed eight TV or cable movies, including Safe House (which he discusses at the end of this interview), A War Story — a dramatisation of journalist Peter Arnett's encounter with Osama bin Laden — and American-set cable TV movie No One Can Hear You, which he co-wrote. A second movie for cable, Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior (2005), was watched by millions; the teen martial arts tale broke records on the Disney Channel in Japan, Europe and the United Kingdom.
In 2017 Laing had two projects nominated for Best Television Feature in the same year: Abandoned — about the crew of capsized trimaran Rose-Noëlle — and arson drama Venus and Mars.
Laing's work is analysed in a chapter of 2007 book New Zealand Filmmakers.
Profile written by Ian Pryor; updated on 30 April 2025
Sources include
John Laing
‘John Laing: from Beyond Reasonable Doubt to Outrageous Fortune' (Video Interview), NZ On Screen website. Director Andrew Whiteside. Loaded 3 March 2014. Accessed 30 April 2025
Ian Conrich, 'Crisis and Conflict: The Films of John Laing' in New Zealand Filmmakers (2007: Wayne State University Press, Detroit)
Carol Cromie, 'Movie-maker must stay on the move' (Interview) - The New Zealand Sunday Times, 10 August 1986, page 11
Sue May, 'Playing Twins Bach To Bach' (Interview) - OnFilm, March 1985, page 7 (Volume 2, Number 2)
Steven Menzies, 'Hitchhiking' (Interview) - The Evening Post, 21 June 1989
Scott Murray and Robert Le Tet, 'John Laing - Director' (Interview) - Cinema Papers - Special Issue, The New Zealand Film Industry, May 1980, page 34
Ian Pryor, 'A Kiwi wartime romance' - The Evening Post, 17 March 1993, page 26
Nevan Rowe, 'Lisa Harrow' (Interview) - Onfilm, June 1984, page 9 (Volume 1, Number 4)
'Other Halves' (broken link). The Film Archive website. Loaded September 2005. Accessed 7 November 2012
Absent Without Leave press kit