Niki Caro: The cult of shoes to Vintner's Luck...

Director Niki Caro has made movies in East Coast townships, French vineyards, and Minnesota coal mines. Although feature films Memory and Desire and the breakthrough hit Whale Rider made Caro’s international name, her early career was also rich, and much of it can be sampled on NZ On Screen.

In this ScreenTalk, Caro talks about:

• The question she asked winemakers prior to making The Vintner’s Luck; and the similarities between making wine, and making movies
• Starting off in film
• Discovering her love for working with actors, while directing off-beat TV drama The Summer the Queen Came
• Reaching for 'a potent visual storytelling' on Sure to Rise, a short film with hardly any dialogue
• The terrors of the Cannes Film Festival, after Sure to Rise was one of only eight short films in the world invited to compete
• The delights of making Footage, an unusual documentary about the cult of the shoe
• How she bypassed the head-turning success of Whale Rider thanks to being pregnant with her first child
• A tale of toilets, trucks and self-doubt, from the first day of shooting North Country

This video was first uploaded on 23 November 2009, and is available under this Creative Commons licence. This licence is limited to use of ScreenTalk interview footage only and does not apply to any video content and photographs from films, television, music videos, web series and commercials used in the interview.

Interview – Ian Pryor. Camera and Editing - Alex Backhouse