Bruce Morrison: Heartland, poetry and liquor bottles…

Interview – 2013

Filmmaker Bruce Morrison has directed arts documentaries, beloved series Heartland, and an eclectic trio of movies. The arts shows include Profiles and award-winning James K Baxter documentary The Road to Jerusalem. Morrison also directed feature films Constance, Shaker Run and Queen City Rocker, and was a key player behind Gary McCormick's iconic Heartland series.

In this ScreenTalk, Morrison talks about:

Getting funding for his Profiles series of art documentaries
How a collection of old liquor bottles lead to the film Constance
Learning to direct action films by doing car chase scenes on Shaker Run
Making Queen City Rocker a musical film without having anyone "breaking into song"
Not realising what he had with his Raglan by the Sea
Creating a fake living room for McCormick Country
How the show Heartland gave rural life a voice
Bringing poetry and imagery together in The Roaring Forties Tour
His favourite moment in The Roaring Forties documentary
How being appalled by settler history led to documentaries Bastion Point — The Untold Story

This video was first uploaded on 4 March 2013, 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, Camera and Editing – Andrew Whiteside

It was pretty amazing; it was like a university class in how to make a camera go really fast safely, because the whole thing was conducted pretty much at 80 miles an hour...
– Bruce Morrison on making car chase film Shaker Run

Bruce's Full Profile