Wayne Tourell: Creating landmark television…

Veteran producer/director Wayne Tourell's career has taken him from Shakespeare to Shortland Street. Tourell's credits include both drama and documentary — including major television series like Landmarks, Hanlon and doco Moriori, and numerous live events including the 1988 Telethon. Later he worked at Natural History New Zealand, and was a regular director on soap Shortland Street.

In this ScreenTalk, Tourell talks about:

• Unexpected adventures in Tahiti with directing legend David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia) on documentary Lost and Found
• Working with letter-perfect professor and presenter Kenneth Cumberland on Landmarks
• The challenges of bringing passion project Hanlon to the small screen
• Drama, exhaustion and Leeza Gibbon's romance, while producing Telethon in 1988
• How Gloss perfectly mirrored the money-mad era it was portraying
• Why TV show City Life was compromised by its time slot 
• Why he thinks that Shortland Street is the Shakespeare of today

This video was first uploaded on 19 August 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