Roger Donaldson

Sleeping Dogs, in 1977, did something no New Zealand film had managed: it found a large audience and serious critical attention at the same time, and it is generally treated as the film that started a national industry. Roger Donaldson, Australian by birth and a New Zealander by career, directed it, then spent the next four decades making mid-budget thrillers for Hollywood and the United Kingdom.

He is a craftsman rather than an author, and the results swing hard. No Way Out in 1987 is the best of them, a Pentagon paranoia thriller that keeps tightening from the first scene to the last. Thirteen Days is the serious one, a Cuban missile crisis procedural that trusts an audience to follow rooms full of men arguing. The Bank Job is a lean, unfussy heist picture. Against those sit Cocktail, which is exactly as silly as its reputation, Species, which is a very expensive B-movie, and The November Man, which is late-period contract work.

The films he seems to care about most are about machines and the men obsessed with them. The World's Fastest Indian took him back to a New Zealand subject and is comfortably his warmest film, and McLaren, a documentary about a New Zealand racing driver and constructor, is the same interest with the fiction stripped out. Dante's Peak, The Recruit, White Sands, The Getaway, Cadillac Man and The Bounty fill in a career of steady, professional, occasionally anonymous work. Seventeen features after a debut that changed a country's cinema is a long time to keep getting the phone call, and the distance between Cocktail and Thirteen Days is wider than most careers manage.