Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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Maurice Askew was a production designer cum animator whose biggest credit was early
Coronation Street. He was an enthusiast, although Vincent probably had the fieriest
relationship with him”. 311 White sees it as an advantage in some respects that “we
weren’t surrounded by people of far greater experience, who could take the shortcut to a
certain sort of technical and craft expertise”. The experience “helped shape both of our
careers to some extent, the fact that we were stumbling along in the dark learning
through trial and error, learning truthfully from the grass roots up”. White concedes,
however, that while he and Ward had to go out and find people in the industry who
could help them make their film, such as Alun Bollinger, Chris King and Geoff
Murphy, who worked on A State of Siege, they were lucky in that they were maturing
“at a time when the industry was really energized, when it was about to explode into
Sleeping Dogs and Goodbye Pork Pie”. 312
In explaining White and Ward’s ability to work together successfully, Beth comments:
“Timothy came from a business background and that helped enormously. The
businessman took on the protégé, you could see that’s what the partnership was”. In her
view the strength of Ward’s approach is that “he’s got this enormous resource of the
pure artist in him, where he’s been able to intellectualise himself into that world and let
other people do it with him”. 313 White was able to see Ward’s potential and comments
that he was “fascinated” by his fellow-student’s approach to filmmaking. His
perception of Ward is that “he works to a theory of chaos” and has “a mind that can be
inspired by that kind of chaos and find things that will stimulate it”. He describes their
collaboration on A State of Siege as being a “happy collision”, and admits that he could
not have made anything as good as that working on his own. White feels that the reason
the film was successful was that they did not take any “baggage” into it. “We must
have had a sense of being really driven, we knew what we wanted to do and we were
pretty determined to do it well”. 314 (The content and style of A State of Siege will be
discussed in a later chapter.)
Parts of the film were submitted to fulfil the requirements for Ward’s Third Professional
Examination of the Diploma of Fine Arts at the end of 1977. The requirements for the
course were that the students had to produce one major (completed) film for each unit or
311 Lynette Read, interview with Timothy White, 29 September 1999.
312 Lynette Read, interview with Timothy White, 29 September 1999.
313 Lynette Read, interview with Stephanie Beth, 26 January 1999.
314 Lynette Read, interview with Timothy White, 29 September 1999.