Features

Local boy, former Critic film reviewer and director of the New Zealand International Film Festival, Bill Gosden visited Dunedin last week for the launch of the festival programme. Sarah Baillie caught up with him for a chat about his cool job and what to expect from the film festival this year.

You have a dream job! How did you work your way up to being director of the film festival?
 
I started writing film reviews when I was at Kaikorai Valley High School and when I came to university I walked straight into a film reviewing job here at Critic. During the holidays I always worked at cinemas. When I was at university, every evening there would be a film screening in the union building, organised by a guy called Richard Weatherly. I worked as a cashier and helped set up. When Richard acquired a film distribution company in Wellington, he offered me a job. I worked there for a couple of years and then applied for a job at the Wellington Film Festival. I’ve pretty much been working for the same people ever since. The New Zealand-wide film festival has been going since 1984.
 
Do you get to travel around the world to go to film festivals and mingle with the stars?
 
I do a bit of that - once this year’s festival is over I’m going to Toronto and New York. I have a colleague, Sandra Reid, who lives in Paris and she goes to all the European festivals. She has to get a lot of the credit for the big swag of Cannes films on the programme. Although I did a lot of negotiation, she was the one elbowing her way into the cinema to get to see them.
 
What are your picks from the Dunedin festival programme?
 
I don’t have any real favourites. However, there are some films I really like which might need to have attention drawn to them because they’re not obvious picks. One of them is an Italian film called Le Quattro Volte which seems like a documentary but it’s not, it’s actually a very cleverly contrived film. It’s the most amazingly choreographed film about the way nature, animals, people and plant life all interact in a little mountain village in Calabria.
 
Another completely different, enormously entertaining film is Tabloid, the Errol Morris documentary about Joyce McKinney who was an American state beauty queen. In the 1970s she pursued her Mormon boyfriend to the UK when he went on his mission, kidnapped him and seduced him. The ridiculousness just piles on top of ridiculousness because Morris’ approach is through two tabloid journalists who made mountains out of her story. One of them portrayed her as the fearless liberator of the poor brainwashed Mormon boy and the other one portrayed her as a manipulative bad girl. The two of them are incredibly funny. The whole thing would be entirely distasteful if it weren’t for the fact that she gets to give her own account of the story, which is just as hilarious.
 
When you go to film festival events do you make an appearance even though you have seen the films several times already?
 
I’m very interested to see how people respond to the films.
 
I heard that when Antichrist screened at the festival a couple of years ago there were some interesting reactions.
 
Inevitably. Lars von Trier would be pretty disappointed if there weren’t. Actually, we are showing his latest film Melancholia [starring Kirsten Dunst] this year.
 
Yay, I love Kirsten Dunst! I just watched Bring it On again the other day.
 
Hahaha. Well I think Lars really brings it on for Kirsten in Melancholia.
 
What do you think of the Wellywood sign? Cool or not cool?
 
I think that it has really brought out the cultural cringe in those of us who like to think that Wellington stands for something more than being a shadow of Hollywood. It has completely blown the idea of the “cool little capital” out of the water.