Peter Salmon

A video store botch up on Peter Salmon’s thirteenth birthday opened his eyes to filmmaking. He requested Disney movie Flight of the Navigator, but the shop gave him Vincent Ward's The Navigator instead. "I remember my friends were pretty bored and disappointed. But I was sold, and couldn't believe films could be so visionary and compelling."

Born on Auckland's North Shore, Salmon comes from "a long line of electricians". His English parents settled in New Zealand in the 1960s. The youngest of three boys, Peter attended Beach Haven Primary School and Takapuna Grammar. He wasn’t especially into sports or academia, but when he was 14 a friend’s mum, a media and film studies teacher, began encouraging his interest in video production.

Classes in drama and film studies helped him find his groove — from then on he was rarely seen without the school’s video camera. "My other classes suffered from that point on. There was a New Zealand secondary schools short film competition at the time and I think I submitted about four films into it. I ended up winning the main prize for a very long film called The Irrelevance of Reason. It doesn’t get more teen angst than that."

After high school, Salmon signed up for the film and TV course at Unitec in Auckland. He assumed he’d stay with the technical side of filmmaking, but after becoming fascinated with storytelling, chose writing and directing as his major.

In 1998 Salmon wrote and directed short film Playing Possum. The playful "live action cartoon for adults" won awards at festivals in France and Turkey. Both Playing Possum and his previous film, The Creakers (1997) were comedic films that relied heavily on visual storytelling — neither contain any dialogue. For his third short, the dystopian sci-fi tale Letters About the Weather (1999) Salmon went the other way. "I was wanting do something serious, about an issue I felt really connected to."

TV series Being Eve (2001-2002) was Salmon’s career breakthrough. Producer Vanessa Alexander had seen Playing Possum and loved it. Salmon vividly remembers walking onto the set of his first directing job. "I had absolutely no idea how to prep, let alone shoot a whole television episode. It was a baptism by fire, but I was surrounded by an amazingly supportive crew and cast. I ended up directing 13 of the 26 episodes. Being Eve is still my favourite show I've ever made, probably because I was so naive to how everything worked".

The quirky comedy/drama centres on high schooler Eve Baxter (Fleur Saville) as she experiences first love, family stress and teen politics. Being Eve launched several careers in acting and production (Saville and Salmon included), sold globally, was named Best Drama Series at the 2002 NZ TV Awards, and got nominated for an International Emmy. 

This emphasis on younger TV audiences continued. In 2005 Salmon was motion capture director for CGI children's series Jane and The Dragon. Around that time he became a writer and director on pioneering 'mobisode' drama My Story. The two minutes episodes were designed specifically to watch on mobile phones. The cast included emerging talents like Matt Whelan and Chelsie Preston Crayford (who would later star in Salmon’s short Fog).

In 2007 Salmon was a scriptwriter on The Wot Wots, an animated series for pre-schoolers featuring two loveable aliens studying life forms on Earth. It became a Kiwi kids favourite, and screened internationally.

Salmon's fourth short Fog chronicled a prickly teenage relationship in Ngawi, a remote fishing village on the Wairarapa coast. Salmon stripped back his storytelling technique, so the raw performances of Chelsie Preston Crayford and Joe Dekkers-Reihana could be front and centre. Fog was invited to compete in the Critics' Week section of the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

From 2008 to 2012 Salmon directed a list of high profile, high rating dramas. In 2008 he directed four episodes of Westie saga Outrageous Fortune. He also helmed seven episodes across three seasons of Go Girls (2008–2012). Salmon especially loved being part of the first season of the show. "I enjoyed the raw energy of the characters and the style of the show; it felt like I was doing Being Eve again for an older audience."

This is Not My Life (2010) provided creative stimulation of a deeper kind. The award-winning mystery/thriller was created by Rachel Lang and Gavin Strawhan. Alec (Charles Mesure) wakes one morning to a new reality in an eerie suburb. Salmon shared directing credits with Robert Sarkies, and the duo relished putting their visual stamp on the story. Mesure praised the project, calling it "the smartest script I’ve ever worked on". 

Comedy-drama Nothing Trivial (2011-2013) is the third major TVNZ series on Salmon's CV from the creative powerhouse of Lang and Strawhan. He directed four episodes across two seasons; he talks about the awkwardness of directing a sex scene involving his new girlfriend, actor Morgana O’Reilly in this ScreenTalk interview.

In 2012 Salmon helmed four episodes of Agent Anna, a comedy about a flailing real estate agent (played by Robyn Malcolm). The same year, Salmon and O'Reilly left home to seek work opportunities across the Tasman. Salmon quickly got an Australian agent; his first directing job was Mr and Mrs Murder, a comedy/ drama series about a husband and wife murder scene clean up team. Work began to flow. His Australian credits include award-winning Martin Henderson miniseries Secrets and Lies, Rake, Halifax: Retribution, Doctor Doctor and four episodes of hit Offspring, another comedy/drama series whose tone harks back to Being Eve. 

Salmon hasn’t stopped writing for a younger TV audience. He reunited with Pūkeko Pictures in 2018 to write Kiddets, a spin-off series from the now iconic Wot Wots. In 2015, he directed for Australian series Nowhere Boys, a "high concept action adventure". It went on to win several awards including a British Academy Children’s Award. Salmon has been nominated at the Australian Directors Guild Awards for his directing on Nowhere Boys and the final episodes of both Secrets & Lies and romance The Beautiful Lie. 

In 2018, Salmon turned to producing, with the third season of Aussie series Wanted, a renegade adventure starring Rebecca Gibney. He also won Best Director at the 2018 NZ TV Awards for his work on the show's previous season.

Salmon began shooting comedy thriler INSiDE in his house, the day Auckland left level four lockdown. Morgana O'Reilly stars as a germophobe who deals with lockdown by snooping into other people's lives online. "I could pretty much roll out of bed and onto set, " said Salmon of the experience. "I spent nearly the whole shoot wearing my slippers." Salmon co-created the show with Dan Musgrove and Shoshana McCallum.

In 2021 Salmon directed limited drama series The Pact, which tackled the fraught subject of euthanasia. Starring veteran performers Ian Mune and Irene Wood, it was nominated for six gongs at the 2022 NZ Television Awards, including for Best Drama.

The same year, Salmon returned to Wellington to shoot all six episodes of After the Party, a psychological family drama centered around middle aged teacher Penny played by Robyn Malcolm (also series co-creator). The show attracted high ratings and screened on the ABC (Australia) and ITV (the United Kingdom). Spinoff writer Duncan Greive called it gritty, "beautifully shot", and New Zealand's "the most powerful TV drama" in years: "a dark, tense and highly provocative drama which will rattle uneasily around your mind for days".

Profile written by Gabe McDonnell. Updated on 13 March 2024 

Sources include
Peter Salmon
Peter Salmon website. Accessed 13 March 2024
Duncan Greive, 'Review: After the Party is queasy, morally complex and NZ's best TV drama in years' The Spinoff website. Loaded 25 October 2023. Accessed 13 March 2024
Fog press kit. Accessed 13 March 2024
Playing Possum press kit. Accessed 13 March 2024