Hugh Macdonald
Hugh Macdonald's filmmaking career took him underwater, inside caves, and up the Denniston railway incline. Yet despite all the journeys under his belt, he is probably best known for just 20 minutes of film, made before he turned 30: beloved three-screen spectacular This is New Zealand.
Born in Invercargill and raised mainly in "idyllic" Lake Tekapo and Christchurch, Macdonald began making films as a child, using an 8mm camera — including slow motion footage of the high school rowing eight, which was used to help improve their rowing technique.
His parents suggested government filmmaking organisation the National Film Unit as an obvious place to find a job. After meeting NFU director Frank Chilton, he was offered a position. Beginning as a trainee in 1962, at age 18, he began working on the unit's monthly film series Pictorial Parade, editing and writing narrations. By the end of 1963 he'd begun directing items as well.
The following year his bosses changed their minds, and gave him a few months off to help some friends make a promotional film for cruise ship company Chandris Lines — after some special pleading to the head of the Tourism and Publicity Department by a Chandris representative, who'd once been the Minister of Industries and Commerce. En route from Auckland to Greece, the team stopped in Tahiti and spent three hours negotiating with local officials that there would be no shots of nuclear installations, or naval ships.
In the late 60s, Macdonald's NFU tourism film This Auckland was labelled "flippant and superficial" by The NZ Herald. It also won him four awards, including one in the tourist section of the Venice Film Festival, which praised "the brilliant counterpoint of images and sound that reveal the personality of the director". Macdonald's tourist films would often show the influence of British filmmaker Geoffrey Jones, who made prominent use of music and avoided narration. Some of Macdonald's friends were folk musicians; he used folk music in a number of his films, including members of the Hamilton Country Bluegrass Band.
One day Macdonald was told he'd be leading the making of This is New Zealand, after NFU manager Geoffrey Scott successfully campaigned to politicians to contribute a film for the New Zealand Pavilion at Expo '70. Lacking the resources to film on large format 70mm, the decision was made to link together three 35mm cameras and projectors, for a widescreen view of New Zealand and its people. "It gave you a great freedom for manipulation of images, music and sound", said Macdonald, who worked closely with associate director David Jordan. Images danced from one screen to another, and grand vistas played across all three screens.
It was clear from the first screening that the grand experiment had come off. At the expo in Osaka in Japan, two million people saw This is New Zealand. Although it was never part of the original plan, 400,000 people saw it back in New Zealand. Cinemas in the four main centres were outfitted to take the projectors required to play it. In Wellington the film ran for 13 weeks at the Embassy, one of the city's largest cinemas.
Advances in digital technology later allowed Park Road Post and Archives NZ to preserve This is New Zealand as a digital file, as well as a single combined 35mm negative. The film returned for the 2007 round of NZ film festivals, alongside Macdonald's 1971 documentary This is Expo, which explored the expo site in Japan where This is New Zealand first debuted. In 2014 Macdonald completed the interviews for That Was New Zealand, which explored the challenges of making his most famous film.
In 1972 Macdonald won a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grant to study overseas. Over nine months he watched actors going before the cameras at Pinewood and Shepperton Studios, and met animators at the National Film Board of Canada. Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia refused to allow him to enter the country.
Making films about New Zealand wasn't always plain sailing. During the torturous process of completing There is a Place, Foreign Affairs officials demanded that he remove any suggestion the country wasn't perfect. The finished film is roughly half its original length. In the same period he also directed award-winner Somebody Else's Horizon. Celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Tourist and Publicity Department. The 18-minute film included excerpts from government tourist films dating back before the NFU's 1941 birth.
Macdonald segued into drama in grand fashion — helming the second and third episodes of local TV's biggest production yet, The Governor (1977). His episode 'No Way to Treat a Lady' dramatised Governor George Grey's relationship with his unlucky wife. The co-production meant that the NFU developed the footage and provided the staff to make half of the six episodes. The Governor's other two directors were from state television. Macdonald followed it with offbeat parental primer It's Your Child, Norman Allenby. Playing in a Sunday night slot, it scored a Feltex Award for lead actor Ginette McDonald.
In the 1980s Macdonald moved increasingly into producing — including this TV series on artists, and nature documentary Primeval Survivors. He also explored a longtime interest in animation, producing for the NFU's new animation unit. Award-winner The Domino (1981) marked the first of many collaborations with animator Bob Stenhouse. In 1986, with fellow NFU veteran Martin Townsend, Macdonald co-produced The Frog, the Dog and the Devil, Stenhouse's fantastical tale about the 'demon drink'. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, it won the Grand Prize at the Hamilton International Animation Festival in Canada.
Later Macdonald produced Stenhouse's richly realised The Orchard. Based on a story by Joy Cowley, it scored a jury prize at the 1996 Chicago International Children's Film Festival. The Stenhouse/Macdonald team produced two further Cowley adaptations, which were collected on 2009 DVD Fish Bay.
Macdonald had produced his first feature film back in the mid 1980s: War Years, a compilation of Weekly Review newsreel footage from the Second World War. The same year also saw logging short Logger Rhythms, the first Kiwi short to use the Dolby Stereo process (Kiwi horror movie Death Warmed Up was released in Dolby the same year). For a number of years to come, Dolby experts in London used the work of Macdonald and sound designer Kit Rollings to demonstrate how to record and mix sound in Dolby.
Appropriately Macdonald's last film at the NFU as director was another tourism title: 1985's Right Next Door, which won another travel award. Macdonald had long planned to eventually leave the NFU. When Geoff Dixon set up commercials company Silverscreen in the mid 1970s, he invited Macdonald to direct for him. But Macdonald didn't relish the idea of a commercials-only diet. In 1985 he went solo, launching company Hugh Macdonald Productions Ltd.
He began producing and directing a variety of films — from training videos to corporate work, including many projects involving the dairy industry. The NZ Dairy Board enlisted him for commercials and films for both promotion and training, some of which entailed overseas filming and editions in six languages. His knowledge of the extensive NFU catalogue came in useful when he made documentaries about family farming, and the 74-minute long Toogood Tales, in which host Selwyn Toogood reflects on the NFU films he worked on.
In this period, the distributor of War Years asked "could you do anything else like this?" The director's first thought was of After Ninety Years, his 1967 Pictorial Parade documentary about the Denniston rail incline, and the self-sufficient West Coast community who lived nearby (Macdonald writes about making it here). He teamed up with fellow ex NFU staffers — writer/director David Sims and sound veteran Kit Rollings — to make a series of self-funded films for rail aficionados. The trio formed Memory Line Productions, and later invited cameraman Bruce Dunn on board. Memory Line made seven one-hour programmes (including this one) covering aspects of Kiwi transport and history. The Denniston film sold over 15,000 copies.
Macdonald also worked on films and attractions for museums, including The Tanker Ride at Hawera's former Dairyland visitor centre. In 2006 he produced an instructional film to promote Musacus, an NZ-born musical education system that helps students learn keys via colour-coding, instead of notation. Directed and animated by Euan Frizzell, it was a finalist in the distance learning category of the 2007 New York Festivals.
In 2017 Macdonald's feature documentary No Ordinary Sheila was invited to the NZ International Film Festival. Later it screened around Aotearoa. It follows the adventurous life of his first cousin, nature writer and illustrator Sheila Natusch — described by Stuff reviewer Graeme Tuckett as, "one of the most fascinating, storied, admirable and occasionally hilarious individuals you will ever have the pleasure of meeting".
Hugh Macdonald passed away on 28 May 2024. He was 80.
Profile written by Ian Pryor; updated on 10 June 2024
Sources include
Hugh Macdonald
'Hugh Macdonald: Expos, epics and animated amphibians' (Video Interview), NZ On Screen website. Director Ian Pryor. Loaded 30 June 2015. Accessed 10 June 2024
Hugh Macdonald Film website. Accessed 10 June 2024
No Ordinary Sheila website (broken link). Accessed 15 February 2020
'Playing Favourites with Hugh Macdonald' (Interview) Radio New Zealand website. Loaded 1 March 2014. Accessed 15 February 2020
Warren Barton, 'Videos for steam enthusiasts' - The Dominion Sunday Times, 8 September 1991, page 11
Peter Griffin, 'Digital dust-off for Godzone' (Interview) - The NZ Herald, 29 March 2007
Graeme Tuckett, 'No Ordinary Sheila: The Kiwi doco that will leave you smiling' (Review) Stuff website. Loaded 18 October 2017. Accessed 10 June 2024