Geoff Murphy: Filmmaker who put New Zealand cinema on the map

He made second-rate Hollywood films for money with the comfort of knowing he was responsible for landmarks in Kiwi film

Murphy, pictured in 2007, took uncompromising looks at his homeland in the eighties (Rex)

When Geoff Murphy first began making films, there was no film industry in New Zealand. But between 1981 and 1985, he made three features that would set a benchmark for the country’s directors.

The irreverent, uncompromising vision of Murphy’s first three films won him praise from the likes of The New Yorker’s formidable film critic, Pauline Kael, and later on, Quentin Tarantino.

While Murphy never saw any of these features win huge successes beyond New Zealand, the anarchic spirit that infuses Goodbye Pork Pie (1981), Utu (1983) and The Quiet Earth (1985) demonstrates an antipodean original.

In 1983, Kael wrote of Utu: “We know this basic story of colonialism from books and movies about other countries, but the ferocity of these skirmishes and raids is played off against an Arcadian beauty that makes your head swim.”

From 1989 to 2003, Murphy would live in Los Angeles and work as a jobbing director for Hollywood studios.

Here he directed the likes of Young Guns II (1990), Freejack (1992) and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995) – all forgettable fodder that cleaned up at the box office. He then returned to New Zealand at Peter Jackson’s request to work as a second-unit director on The Lord Of The Rings series and again began directing in his homeland.

Murphy, who has died aged 80, was born in Wellington where he also trained and worked as a school teacher across the 1960s. By the late-1960 he was increasingly unhappy with suburban life, so embraced the new possibilities offered by a nascent counterculture then taking root in New Zealand. Teaming up with Bruno Lawrence, a jazz drummer who also found inspiration in American novelist Ken Kesey’s bus full of LSD-fuelled pranksters that crossed the US, the two men formed Blerta, a group of itinerant musicians, and began living communally with their families and other like-minded individuals.

Blerta toured New Zealand in a bus painted in psychedelic colours, putting on improvised performances involving theatre, comedy, music and much else. Murphy proved adept at directing events and this lead to provisional work directing shorts for Television New Zealand. TVNZ eventually funded 1976’s Wild Man, a primitive 75-minute film that Murphy directed.

For this anarchic yarn about miners and carnies on the South Island’s wild west coast, he employed many Blerta members. In 1977, Murphy co-directed Dagg Day Afternoon with the comedian John Clarke (who played much-loved Kiwi farmer Fred Dagg) and both films were screened in New Zealand cinemas – at the time local audiences were almost dumbstruck to see their own culture on screen and the double bill was not a great success. Murphy persevered, working in television until, in 1981, he directed, co-wrote and co-produced Goodbye Pork Pie, an irreverent, knockabout road movie using a bright yellow mini and some intense male bonding that became the first New Zealand film to be an unqualified box office success.

1983’s Utu was a more radical film in every sense – it used the western genre to detail a Maori warrior rising up against the British army as they attempted to colonise 1860s New Zealand – and in its epic scale and achievement, is Murphy’s masterpiece. 1985’s The Quiet Earth, a science fiction thriller which finds Bruno Lawrence possibly as the last human alive, won Murphy and Lawrence wide international praise.

His 1988 action comedy Never Say Die was a commercial and critical failure. Chastened, Murphy moved with his second wife, the Maori film director Merata Mita, to Los Angeles.

Here he directed films that paid well – Pauline Kael even praised his striking cinematography on Young Guns 2 – but the rebellious visionary of Kiwi cinema was now, as he admitted, just a hired hack: “I spent a lot of years making American rubbish,” he told Diana Wichtel. But, he noted, it made him wealthy.

Once back in New Zealand, he directed a documentary about Blerta, 2004 drama Spooked – a failure that ended his desire to make movies – and a TV sitcom Welcome To Paradise. In 2014 he was honoured as an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit. He is survived by his children.

Geoffrey Peter Murphy, born 12 October 1938, died 3 December 2018