![]() ![]() Sam Neill makes his feature debut as Smith, an isolated man who wants nothing more than to reside quietly on his island ignoring the civil war erupting around him. The story throws the country into a state of political unrest and social rebellion fuelled by an energy crisis and a totalitarian Government. It sounds simple enough, until you take a look at Sleeping Dogs, a film unlike any that had been produced in New Zealand. With the New Zealand Film Commission not yet established, he had to get creative, contributing his own seed money through his production house Aardvark Films, along with funding from the Broadbank Corporation, the Development Finance Corporation of New Zealand, Television One, and others. ![]() Stead’s dystopian novel Smith's Dream, off the ground. “We could do something in the world of feature films and make our mark.”ĭonaldson gave himself six months to get Sleeping Dogs (1977), his adaptation of C. “We came back, particularly me, with a real belief that we could do something,” Donaldson says. After watching a lot of movies he thought were “a load of crap”, he returned to New Zealand and set about making his first feature. In the midst of this, Roger Donaldson attended the Cannes Film Festival in support of Winners and Losers (1975), a series of short-story adaptations he had produced and directed with Ian Mune. French New Wave had made its mark, the dismantling of the Motion Picture Production Code allowed a new crop of Hollywood directors to develop darker, increasingly experimental films, and, perhaps most importantly, the aftermath of the Vietnam War was still being digested. In the late 1970s, the sensibilities of mainstream cinema were rapidly changing. Aotearoa at the movies: Sleeping Dogs by Sam Hollis ![]()
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