Star of the year
Russell Crowe named “Male Star of the Year” at ShoWest 2001, the largest motion picture industry convention.
News of New Zealanders via Global Media
Go Russell, go!
“What we do in life/echoes in eternity.” Russell “Maximus” Crowe gets a second Best Actor nomination (last year was for The Insider), continuing a fine run of Wellington actors and filmmakers who have been…
Mad world of Milk
“In the real world, Lucinda probably would be in court-ordered psychotherapy, with a restraining order or two thrown in to boot. In the fanciful world of The Price of Milk, however, Cormack’s Lucinda is…
Lost in Te Anau
New Zealand-filmed BBC production of sci-fi dino classic The Lost World set to be “a ripping yarn with some of the most exotic locations we’ve seen in television drama”.
Hunter is home from the (Beverly) hills
Rachel Hunter features in a movie about a furry antipodean who gets lost and ends up in LA…
In the can
“I can shut my eyes and imagine the movie playing in my head,” says Peter Jackson, spilling the exhaustion and elation of moving from filming to post-production.
Political Thrills
“I felt that this picture was made for me, because I love politics and I love making thrillers,” says Kiwi-spawned director Roger Donaldson of missile-drama Thirteen Days, reviewed as “a sleek, fast and…
Acting love
British actor Toby Stephens “sips cranberry and soda in restaurants with his girlfriend, the New Zealand actress Anna-Louise Plowman (Flick, The Adulterer)”, and enjoys “choosing colour schemes for his new north London flat.” …
Dinosaur amore
Sam Neill confesses to feeling something for his Jurassic co-stars: “There was one little female velociraptor who had a cute haircut, but it was never anything more than holding hands… holding claws.”
Cultural resonance
”Everything I saw in this film I see in my own country,” says Maori Jillian White, speaking of Native Canadian films screened at Canada’s Sundance festival.
Lang may his lum reek
New Zealand’s now home for Scottish actor John Cairney but he makes a yearly return to Scotland for Burns night.
Web savvy
Lord of the Rings producers have played it cool with net marketing – giving away photos and info titbits to keep the fans keen. The redesigned Rings site has already clocked over41 million…
Blanchettes
Maybe it was all the fresh air and vigorous activity? Cate Blanchett says “working on the Lord of the Rings trilogy in New Zealand made her feel especially broody”.
Prehistoric background
New Zealand provided the background – and the KY jelly – for the phenomenly successful Walking with Dinosuars, soon to be followed by The Ballad of Big Al.
Ringing up the gold
Lord of the Rings has brought the gold into Wellington, the city of “tearooms and sea views”. View the New Zealand setting in the round at the official site.
NZ film in NY
“2001: A New Zealand Film Odyssey” currently running in New York festures “new, rediscovered and undiscovered” New Zealand films, including hot-now The Price of Milk and classics Utu and War Stories Our Mothers Never Told…
Greenstone Hit
New Zealand historical drama Greenstone infiltrates Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples Television Network.
Trailer Lords
“There’s an advert currently going out on Virgin radio encouraging listeners to go to the cinema this Friday. It does urge you go to a film but only because this is the first opportunity…
First Baggins off the rack
“The most ambitious undertaking in the film world recently has been Peter Jackson’s filming of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in New Zealand. If the results are as epic as the production, the first…
More Cate
“I’m so excited to be doing all three movies,” says Blanchett. “It’s thrilling. I wanted this project so badly. We’re talking Peter Jackson. And Tolkien – my God! That man, Tolkien, created a whole…
Change your life
Get prepared for Rings-mania: Brush up on your Tolkien makes number 16 on the list of 99 ways to change your life.
Rings v Potter
“If the budget on Lord of the Rings is sky-high, so are expectations surrounding the films. Fans of Tolkien’s 1,000-page trilogy about hobbits and elves in the fantasy land called Middle Earth are truly…
Going Vertical
Kiwi filmed/helmed Vertical Limit gave star Chris O’Donnell a few moments of terror: “my next thought was, somebody better show me a copy of my paycheck again, so I can remember why I’m doing this…
Dishy Neill
Sam Neill puts in a “terrific performance” in The Dish, a “little-known story of how an obscure Australian tracking station provided the crucial downlink for the worldwide broadcast of the 1969 moon walk”, which has…
In the Pink of Elf
“Cate Blanchett is looking particularly ethereal…perhaps it’s just a little leftover glow from the four months spent in New Zealand playing the Lady Galadriel…”
Vertical #2
“Vertical Limit has its flaws – but they’re not enough to dim rousing, old-fashioned escapism which uses modern techno-skills to really put you in the picture and on the mountain peak.”
Escape from Middle Earth
With a $100 000 budget and all the glamour Wellington could muster, the Rings wrap party was like “something straight out of Tolkien”.
Year of the Crowe
What sparked Crowe-mania? “I don’t know mate. Luck?” suggests the man himself, Entertainment Weekly‘s entertainer of the year. Proof of Life co-star David Caruso disagrees: “Once in a generation an actor will come along and…
Manly, subtle Crowe
“We already knew from The Insider that Crowe was a fine, subtle, vanity-free actor, happy to ruin his looks to play pudgy and useless. But Gladiator and Proof of Life prove that he’s also a great movie…
Romper Stomper
Crowe’s “breakthrough film” released on DVD: “Crowe is electrifying as the brutal head of a group of neo-Nazi skinheads who harass the Vietnamese community in contemporary Melbourne”.
Finding Forrester
“I knew that if Gus Van Sant was wanting to make the movie, then it definitely meant there was something special about it,” says Anna Paquin. She plays opposite co-Oscarites Sean Connery and F….
Neill at home
“It’s good to get back to New Zealand and Australia to make a film because I feel more at home in that part of the world,” says Sam Neill, now on screen in Aussie…
Vertical Exhilaration
NZ-filmed and directed Vertical Limit goes public. The scenery scores universal acclaim: Ottawa Citizen, Chicago Sun-Times, USA Today, ctnow, entertainmentnewsdaily, National Post, Chicago Tribune, the Star, Washington Post. Scott Glen battled Mt Cook, the…
Moko on Film
Jillian White’s Moko, a short documentary featuring the first contemporary man to wear moko, included in Sundance 2001. Felicity Morgan-Rhind’s short Donuts for Breakfast, is also on the programme.
Proof of Life
The plot goes wobbly, but Russell Crowe is the man. Crowe is “a powerful screen presence, the sort of fellow every man wants to befriend and every woman wants to love”: “the movie comes…
Proof of quality
Oscar noms tipped for Crowe’s Proof of Life turn as kidnap and ransom rescue specialist Terry Thorne.
Price of Milk
“So this film is my dream about New Zealand, this make-believe country that seems almost empty of people” – director Harry Sinclair on his dairy-tale romance, The Price of Milk.
Shifty Crowe
New DVD’s reveal Crowe’s dark, pre-Gladiator side: “With his shifty eyes, stocky frame and ready fist, he was born to be the heavy. His roles have included portrayals of a neo-Nazi skinhead (Romper Stomper),…
Fantastically weird
“The Price of Milk is a fantastically weird and funny little film. Boasting the sort of edgy, quirky slant usually only maintained in short film, it never compromises its oddness which is a joy.”
Punitive Damage
New Zealander Helen Todd’s documentary inditing the Indonesian military for the Dili massacre screens at the Las Vegas CineVegas festival.
O’Donnell’s limit
“As star of the (Kiwi-directed) mountain-climbing epic Vertical Limit Chris O’Donnell had been helicoptered to the edge of a jagged rock formation in New Zealand’s rugged Southern Alps and deposited to “hang out” for…
Location location
New Zealand is hot property, drawing location scouts who scour the planet looking for the perfect waterfall or mountain stream.
Counting Crowe
Amazon keeps count of DVD pre-orders. Gladiator gores Perfect Storm 80 000 to 30 0000 . Also due out on DVD is Crowe’s “breakthrough performance” in Romper Stomper.
Xena kills jiggle TV
“Is it the end of the Baywatch phenomenon? In place of the silicon- enhanced charms of David Hasselhof’s babes is the well-toned New Zealander who yells yi-yi-yi-yi when vanquishing an opponent, leaps through the…
Location #2
“As globalisation impacts mainstream Indian cinema, one of the early fall-outs is a flight of locations, with Indian film-makers snapping up every excuse in the book to shoot everywhere – from Alaska to New…
Hrithik era
Indian tourists are awarding New Zealand an Oscar. Visitor numbers have shot up on the back of a high-profile film starring mega-hunk Hrithik Roshan and New Zealand as the backdrop.
Whitewash
Maori cut from crowd scenes in Her Majesty, US-funded feature film set in New Zealand c.1953-54. Producer Walter Coblenz (All the President’s Men), said historical accuracy motivated the cutting.
It’s a Wrap
Lord of the Rings is due to wrap three days before Christmas, right on schedule. Director Peter Jackson notes the authenticity index has climbed during filming: “way back at the beginning we thought there…
PC Lost World
New Zealand will host BBC’s dinosaur/sci-fi classic The Lost World. Offensive passages, referring to “sub-humans noted for their savage behaviour and low intellects” will be removed, cutting down the number of politicians moonlighting as…
Shorts and sweet
Four NZ films feature in NY’s Shorts International Film Festival, including Felicity Morgan-Rhind’s Donuts for Breakfast. Top shorts will be considered for Oscar noms.
Vertical limit
The stunning slopes of Aoraki (Mt Cook) backdrop Kiwi Martin Campbell’s ice action thriller, Vertical Limit. Starring Chris O’Donnel and Nicholas Lea, Vertical Limit is scheduled for 15 December release.
Sam Neill is in LA filming Jurassic 3
The grounds of his temporary residence are described as “park-like”…
Join the army and let the world see you!
New Zealand defence personnel will feature on big screens around the globe – as extras in Lord of the Rings. The soldiers were perfect when the filmmakers needed “big numbers of people who were…
Three Foot Six and still growing
Vanity Fair estimates the cost of Lord of the Rings at NZ$623 million. If correct, Wellington company Three Foot Six is producing the second-most expensive movie ever.
