Today Tonight - Gaylene Preston and Keri Hulme

Television (Full Length) – 1987

In this 1987 clip from regional show Today Tonight, director Gaylene Preston is visited at work. Preston is filming a documentary on writer Keri Hulme, who had won the Booker Prize two years earlier for novel The Bone People. Filming at Hulme's home of Ōkārito on the West Coast, Preston (who was born nearby) is interviewed about the region, the film, and her filmmaking philosophy. Funded partly by England's Thames Television, the Keri Hulme documentary would be titled Kai Pūrākau - The Storyteller. Preston has her baby with her at work — a very young Chelsie Preston Crayford, who is now an actor.

Well I see myself, when I'm making a documentary, as a catalyst for allowing people to tell their stories. And so I see myself basically...the filmmaker there is the midwife of the idea really...
– Filmmaker Gaylene Preston on making documentaries, near the end of this report