Jason Stutter is a New Zealand-based motion picture, television and commercial director. [1]
He has directed a number of short movies, including Blood Suckers and Careful With That Axe, the latter winning the Golden Spike Award for best short film at the film festival in Valladolid, Spain.
In 2009 he directed Diagnosis: Death , [2] a feature film starring Jemaine Clement, Bret McKenzie and Rhys Darby (of Flight of the Conchords fame).
In 2010 he directed Predicament, [3] starring Jemaine Clement, Heath Franklin, Hayden Frost and Tim Finn.
In 2015 he co-wrote, edited, and directed The Dead Room [4] starring Jed Brophy, Jeffrey Thomas (actor), and Laura Petersen.
New Zealand cinema can refer to films made by New Zealand-based production companies in New Zealand. However, it may also refer to films made about New Zealand by filmmakers from other countries. Due to the comparatively small size of its film industry, New Zealand produces many films that are co-financed by overseas companies.
Raybon Kan is a New Zealand comedian and newspaper columnist.
New Zealand humour bears some similarities to the body of humour of many other English-speaking countries. There are, however, several regional differences.
Flight of the Conchords is a New Zealand musical comedy duo formed in Wellington in 1998. The band consists of multi-instrumentalists Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement. Beginning as a popular live comedy act in the early 2000s, the duo's comedy and music became the basis of the self-titled BBC radio series (2005) and, subsequently, the HBO American television series (2007–2009). Most recently, they released the HBO comedy special Live in London in 2018. The special was concurrently released by Sub Pop as their fifth album.
Thomas Hern is a New Zealand actor and independent film producer. He is known for producing NZ feature films The Dark Horse, Everything We Loved, and Pork Pie. Hern also produced the action-comedy Guns Akimbo, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Samara Weaving and TIFF Midnight Madness award-winner Shadow in the Cloud.
Jemaine Atea Mahana Clement is a New Zealand actor, comedian, musician, and filmmaker. He has released several albums with Bret McKenzie as the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords, and created a comedy series of the same name for both the BBC and HBO, for which he received six Primetime Emmy nominations.
Ronald Hugh Morrieson was a novelist and short story writer in the New Zealand vernacular, who was little known in his home country until after his death. He earned his living as a musician and music teacher, and played in dance bands throughout south Taranaki. Morrieson lived in the Taranaki town of Hawera all his life and this town appears in his novels. He was a heavy drinker throughout his life and this contributed to his early death.
Heath Franklin is an Australian comedic performer, improviser and writer.
Taika David Cohen, known professionally as Taika Waititi, is a New Zealand filmmaker, actor and comedian.
Paolo Rotondo is a New Zealand director, writer and actor of stage and screen.
Tongan Ninja is a 2002 kung-fu action comedy film directed by Jason Stutter and filmed in New Zealand. The film garnered notoriety at the time for co-starring and being co-written by Jemaine Clement, star of the HBO comedy Flight of the Conchords. The movie is a parody of English-dubbed martial arts films, with a plot heavily based on Way of the Dragon. It also features songs written by Jemaine Clement and Flight of the Conchords co-star Bret McKenzie.
Peter Northe Wells was a New Zealand writer, filmmaker, and historian. He was mainly known for his fiction, but also explored his interest in gay and historical themes in a number of expressive drama and documentary films from the 1980s onwards.
Diagnosis: Death is a 2009 horror comedy film made in New Zealand, directed by Jason Stutter, co-written by Stutter and Raybon Kan, and features three members of the TV-series Flight of the Conchords, Bret McKenzie in a substantial role and cameos by Jemaine Clement and Rhys Darby.
Lucy Wigmore is a stage and screen actress from New Zealand. She played core cast member Dr Justine Jones in the long-running soap opera Shortland Street, and has also starred as Lillian May Armfield in Underbelly: Razor, a 13-part drama set in the 1920s–1930s on the rough and ready streets of Sydney, Australia. Underbelly "is one of Nine Networks most successful franchises". In 2015 Wigmore made a short film called Stationery which she wrote and directed.
Predicament is a 2010 comedy horror film based on the 1975 novel by Ronald Hugh Morrieson and starring Jemaine Clement of the musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords plus Tim Finn of the Finn Brothers. Filmed in Hawera and Eltham in Taranaki, it was the last Morrieson novel to be adapted for cinema; his other three novels were filmed in the 1980s.
What We Do in the Shadows is a 2014 New Zealand mockumentary horror comedy film written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi and the first installment in the What We Do in the Shadows franchise. The film also stars Clement and Waititi, along with Jonathan Brugh, Ben Fransham, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Stu Rutherford, and Jackie van Beek. The film's plot concerns several vampires who live together in a flat in Wellington.
Garth Maxwell is a New Zealand film director.
Jonathan Brugh, also known as Jonny Brugh, is a New Zealand comedian, actor, and musician. He is best known for his work in What We Do in the Shadows (2014). In the 1990s he was part of the comic duo Sugar and Spice.
Jackie van Beek is a New Zealand film and television director, writer and actress.