FILM director Geoff Murphy will raise the curtains at a Kokomai Creative Festival screening of his classic Kiwi road-trip film Goodbye Pork Pie in Masterton on Sunday.
Murphy, 78, was a trumpeter who co-founded and performed in music and drama collective Blerta (Bruno Lawrence's Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition), before a shift to film-making that helped ignite a late-1970s New Zealand film industry renaissance.
He directed and co-wrote with Ian Mune the domestic 1981 hit Goodbye Pork Pie, which was the first Kiwi feature to score major box-office success at home. He also directed the critically acclaimed Utu, which is sometimes described as a "Maori Western", and The Quiet Earth, a science-fiction film that won international plaudits and cult status in the US.
His work as a director took him to Hollywood in the 1990s and also led, on his return home, to work as a second-unit director on the Peter Jackson trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.
Geoff Murphy: A Life on Film is his memoir that hits the shelves on Monday. He will answer audience questions about his career as a director, screenwriter, and sometime stuntman and actor at the festival screening of Goodbye Pork Pie at Regent 3 Cinema, and will be accompanied by Masterton book-shop owner David Hedley.
