Breakfast - Roger Donaldson on Photography

Television (Excerpts) – 2007

Before Roger Donaldson became a successful Hollywood director he was a keen photographer, and in 2007 he held an exhibition of his work at Lopdell House Gallery in Auckland. In this Breakfast interview with Kay Gregory, Donaldson describes throwing himself into photography as a way to "escape Australia" and the pressure to "get a real job". Eventually he changed mediums and started making films. A large storage facility fire in Auckland in the early 1980s destroyed a large chunk of Donaldson's belongings and negatives. His 2008 book All Dogs Shot collected many of the photographs from the exhibition.

That's how it all started out really, it was my passion for photography in a way that I think it was one of the reasons that I really stayed in New Zealand ... I was going to be a geologist, when I came here to New Zealand it was a way to escape Australia and escape the sort of pressure from my family to you know 'get a real job' and I came here and became a photographer...
– Director Roger Donaldson on his early days as a photographer in New Zealand