Owen Ferrier-Kerr

Owen Ferrier-Kerr’s mother once told him that he'd never get a job watching television. At the time Ferrier-Kerr was a teenager living in Hamilton, after his family relocated from his childhood home of Christchurch. A longtime enthusiast of visual narratives, Ferrier-Kerr recalls returning home from school and watching the test pattern on television until the evening broadcast began. He even started a film society at his high school, Fairfield College, where he hosted weekly screenings. 

Soon after leaving school Ferrier-Kerr was offered his first editing job, at Avalon Studios on the edge of Wellington. Years later, he would joke with his mother that he'd managed to get a job watching TV after all. The job was “kind of a fluke”. In December 1975 he arrived at Avalon for what he thought was a tour of the studio. Halfway through, the supervising film editor took Ferrier-Kerr into his office and asked him why he wanted to be an editor. Although Ferrier-Kerr had “no idea I wanted to be a film editor” at the time, he must have been convincing: two weeks later he was offered a position at Avalon as a trainee film editor.

Ferrier-Kerr began his career at Avalon in the film preparation room, readying television shows for transmission. After six months editing for the news, he became an assistant editor on several TV dramas. Then he graduated to editing current affairs shows. During this time Ferrier-Kerr edited many shows for state television, including Country Calendar, Fair Go and Close Up. Ferrier-Kerr recalls the 80s as an exciting time for Kiwi television. TVNZ was born as the decade began, and the screen industry was experiencing a boom.

In the 1990s Ferrier-Kerr began cutting dramas himself, including award-winning anthology series Pioneer Women (1990) and Joyful and Triumphant (1993), an adaptation of Robert Lord's classic play about family.

One of Ferrier-Kerr’s biggest and most memorable jobs that decade was An Immigrant Nation, which told stories of the migrant experience in New Zealand. The series consisted of seven episodes; five were edited by Ferrier-Kerr. He feels that the show provided "a sense of the building of this nation…you got a feeling that there’s many layers to us”. The episode on immigrants from China proved a particular highlight. "The thing about editing," he says, "is that you travel the world without leaving your room… you go into people’s homes although they’ve never met you". 

Ferrier-Kerr has cut numerous documentaries over the course of his career, among them A Cat Among the Pigeons (1992), David Lange doco Reluctant Revolutionary (2004), Children of the Migration (2006), Dark Days in Monkey City (2009), and big screen doco Te Hono ki Aotearoa (2012). He says that documentaries can have their own "unreality", where moments are captured in time forever; for example "a person's beliefs could very well change from something they said in an interview 20 years before". He finds working with archival footage of particular interest, where old footage can be reused for a new purpose.

In the late 1990s, Ferrier-Kerr edited 50+ episodes of The Tribe (including this first episode), a teen drama set in a post-virus world where all of the adults have died. The show was extremely successful, with distribution to over 120 territories. 

In the same period Ferrier-Kerr edited The Shirt (2000), directed by John Laing. The low-budget feature follows two Wellington drug addicts, and explores addiction and dysfunctional family dynamics. Ferrier-Kerr recalls the experience as “guerrilla filmmaking”, with Laing often shooting and directing at the same time, and Ferrier-Kerr editing pro-bono when he had a spare evening. Despite the dark subject matter, he found "hilarity in the strangeness". In the same period, Ferrier-Kerr edited Stickmen (2001). The hit movie follows a group of friends who enter a high-stakes pool tournament in Wellington. A big hit with New Zealand audiences, Stickmen saw Ferrier-Kerr nominated for Best Editing at the 2001 Nokia NZ Film Awards.

The early 2000s also saw Ferrier-Kerr working on three successful TV dramas: Starting over tale The Strip saw him nominated for Best Drama Editing (alongside Paul Sutorius) at the 2003 NZ Television Awards. Ferrier-Kerr also cut four episodes of The Insider’s Guide to Happiness (2004), an offbeat, award winning 13-part drama series, and the first season of black comedy Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby (2005), for which he was nominated for Best Editing (Non-Factual) at the Qantas Television Awards. Later that decade, Ferrier-Kerr also cut three episodes of Qantas winner The Cult. 

Ferrier-Kerr also edited Taika Waititi’s Oscar nominated short, Two Cars, One Night (2003), which explores the developing friendship between two kids as they wait for their parents in a pub car park. Ferrier-Kerr took the Best Editing award at Kiwi short film festival Drifting Clouds. Working on Two Cars was “a treat”. Although often a line of dialogue will get cut or moved around during editing, "that was the only drama where I don't think I took out any lines, or thinned it out”. Ferrier-Kerr also cut Chris Graham’s absurdist climate change tale Water (2003), in which a young girl’s home fills with water, yet her family refuse to acknowledge it.

Ferrier-Kerr’s editing career has spanned decades and technologies. He counts himself lucky to have learnt the art of editing in a hands-on way, as it required a discipline he feels is less important with digital editing. When editing on film, “you thought about where you were going to cut really carefully...so it indented a kind of visualization which is kind of missing today, because with modern technology you can cut forever”.

The nature of editing means that when the editor does a good job, their contribution is often invisible. This anonymity doesn’t bother Ferrier-Kerr at all. People often ask him "oh so you’re an editor, but what do you do? Just put one shot after another?". He usually nods in reply. He says that being invisible is the "most Zen thing about editing", and what attracts him to it. "I will argue for scenes; you need to have an opinion, and they want you to have an opinion. But you're not the director...so don't pretend you are".

Profile written by Emily Moss; published on 11 June 2020  

Sources include
Owen Ferrier-Kerr