What did Sam Neill see that New Zealand still hasn’t fixed?
- Grant McLachlan
- Aug 4
- 7 min read
Thirty-one years after Cinema of Unease, the industry Sam Neill helped build still hasn’t decided whether it wants to tell its own story or rent out its scenery.
I knew Sir Sam Neill and Costa Botes as colleagues, and our conversations often veered towards the same issue: how long it took New Zealand film to get anything made, if it got made at all.
Neill died in Sydney on 13 July, and almost every tribute that followed reached for the same touchstone — Cinema of Unease, the 1995 documentary in which he drove the length of his own country asking why its cinema had taken so long to exist at all.
The documentary was received coolly at home when it screened, and only later became the shorthand for the thing it was describing.
Thirty years on, with Neill gone and a new government rebate about to take effect, the honest question isn’t whether New Zealand has fixed what he diagnosed. It’s whether the country has simply found a more expensive way of not fixing it.
Contents
The road that hasn’t gone anywhere
Neill opens Cinema of Unease on an empty stretch of road he calls the country’s own central image — the journey, the escape, the going somewhere else.
It is the same restlessness that runs through the New Zealand films he goes on to discuss: characters on the run, on the road, going nowhere in particular except away.
The film itself lived that restlessness.
It was received coolly by local critics on release, in part because Neill’s own eye on the subject was more forensic than celebratory, and in part because he made it from the outside, already a working expatriate.
It nonetheless won Best Documentary at the following year’s New Zealand television and film awards, and the BFI’s own retrospective this year calls it a forensic reckoning with a nation’s filmmaking rather than a puff piece.
Neill’s death landed weeks ahead of the 2026 New Zealand International Film Festival, prompting critics to ask whether this year’s local slate finally answers the question he first put on screen three decades ago.
Cultural cringe, remembered
Neill’s own account of growing up in 1950s Christchurch is unsentimental about what cinema-going actually meant then.
For Neill, Saturday mornings at the Chums Club, Jaffas thrown as weapons, and English pictures at the Avon and the Regent while horror and rock-and-roll films played at the more disreputable Crystal Palace.
What he draws out of those memories is that New Zealanders went to the pictures constantly and saw almost nothing of themselves there — “no one we recognised, no place we knew on screen.”
The same cringe runs through the country’s mock-Tudor and mock-Stratford civic architecture that Neill lingers on, buildings built by a colony pretending to be somewhere older and better.
Cinema, in his telling, was simply the same instinct on a screen: New Zealand watching Britain and America perform the role of the real world, while its own landscape stood in for nothing but itself.
The Piano changed the arithmetic
The turning point Neill treats as decisive is The Piano, the 1993 Jane Campion feature he returned home to act in.
It was financed privately through French backer Francis Bouygues rather than the state, and its Palme d’Or, three Academy Awards and worldwide box office proved a New Zealand story could travel commercially without government money doing the heavy lifting.
That proof of concept is what eventually produced the screen rebate scheme New Zealand still argues about today.
If you ask anyone which film is the highest grossing New Zealand film, many would say Hunt For the Wilderpeople. That was the second film released that utilised the NZ Screen Production Grant for New Zealand content. Mahana was the first, released a month before, and made a loss. Wilderpeople grossed US$23million. The Piano grossed US$140million.
I’ve set out the funding mechanics — and how little of the money actually flows to profitable domestic storytelling rather than the productions using this country as someone else’s backdrop — in an earlier feature.
Middle Earth for hire
The rebate’s international arm doesn’t require a New Zealand story at all — only that the production spends its money and shoots its scenery here.
Avatar, The Hobbit, Mulan and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power have all qualified on that basis, using this country as Pandora, Middle Earth or a mythical elsewhere rather than as itself. Our Polynesian actors have portrayed Hawaiians in Chief of War, and even Jane Campion used Central Otago to represent Montana in The Power of the Dog.
The domestic rebate is meant to correct for that by testing for significant New Zealand content, but the points system behind that test sets a floor of only three points out of thirty-two for New Zealand subject matter, against six available for key New Zealand personnel alone. A production can clear the bar on the strength of its director, producer and crew without the story itself being about this place at all.
New Zealand still qualifies as somewhere else more easily than it qualifies as itself.
Exile as the operating model
Neill closes Cinema of Unease by naming the industry’s own founders as its first and most durable exiles.
At the time, Roger Donaldson, Geoff Murphy, Jane Campion and Vincent Ward, all gone offshore by the time he finished filming. His closing question — what do they see when they dream of home — has only gained more names since. Taika Waititi works out of Los Angeles; Jemaine Clement has said Flight of the Conchords found success more easily in Hollywood than at home.
I’ve traced that pattern at greater length as part of the country’s wider brain drain in the same earlier feature, including the two Roger Donaldson features — The World’s Fastest Indian and his Bruce McLaren documentary — that were each undercut on release: one landing a week after the Oscars had already moved on, the other pushed online in some markets while still in cinemas in others, exposing it to piracy before it had finished its theatrical run.
The focus seems to be getting funding to make films rather than making money from them. That doesn't make the pie bigger. It squares off film makers to compete for a slice of the funding pie.
The Upham gap
No New Zealand film industry retrospective is complete without its most conspicuous absence.
Charles Upham remains the only combat soldier ever awarded the Victoria Cross twice, and eighty years on, no feature film about him has ever been finished — including a screen adaptation whose own director walked away and criticised the script for restaging Upham’s citations instead of explaining the man.
In Cinema of Unease, Sam Neill sat in the dining hall of his former school, Christ’s College, and cryptically made the following point:
“It seems amazing to me now that all our heroes had foreign accents, that all the adventures happened somewhere else in the world. There was no one we recognised, no place we knew on screen. New Zealand cinema in a fictional sense did not exist. The most we’d get would be a short from Wellington, rugby if we were lucky, before the real thing. And the real thing, of course, was from overseas.”
Another old boy of Christ College was Upham, who Neill knew well. At the time of the shoot for Cinema of Unease, he was involved in another attempt to bring Upham to screen, but conceded on his blog a decade later:
“if you filmed his actions exactly as they really happened, no one would believe it.”
Neill is right. I have interviewed over a hundred war veterans and many veterans had not previously shared their experiences because they feared that few believed them. I have repeated their stories and got the response they feared. Yet, ironically, New Zealand has become the preferred location for many fantasy and futuristic films.
Emma Slade leads the latest attempt to produce a film about Upham. Fingers crossed.
Sam continued to support New Zealand stories. He was involved with The Guinea Pig Club about the New Zealand surgeons who pioneered plastic surgery. Again, that project stalled due to scheduling. Roger Donaldson told me how frustratingly long it took to get New Zealand projects produced.
I’ve examined why failures like Upham keeps repeating, across a hundred veteran interviews on three continents, in a separate feature.
A bigger rebate, the same test
Budget 2026 makes the domestic rebate materially easier to reach.
From 1 July, the minimum spend for a qualifying feature film drops from $2.5 million to $1 million, the cap on above-the-line costs disappears, and the per-project ceiling rises from $6 million to $12 million. The New Zealand Film Commission is calling it support for a sector that now contributes $3.5 billion annually and employs around 24,000 people.
None of it touches the points test itself.
The threshold for qualifying spend has moved, the caps on who gets paid have moved, but the arithmetic that lets a production pass on personnel while barely nodding at subject matter is untouched.
It is a more generous version of the same settlement Neill was describing in 1995 — New Zealand paying handsomely for its own crews and scenery, still undecided about whether it insists on its own stories.
The conversation we need
Neill’s real question was never really about money.
Neill was more concerned about whether the country believed its own stories were worth telling before an audience existed to reward it for doing so — whether The Piano’s Palme d’Or and Sleeping Dogs’s US release were the beginning of an industry that backs itself, or simply the exceptions that let everyone else keep waiting for permission.
Thirty-one years on, the rebate is bigger, the thresholds are lower, and the sector’s economic case is no longer in dispute. What remains unsettled is the cultural one: whether New Zealand makes films because it has something to say, or because a foreign production needed somewhere else to say it instead.
Sam Neill spent thirty years asking whether New Zealand actually wanted to see itself on screen. The country he left behind still hasn’t given him a straight answer.
