Smith's dream

How a storied veteran of local television finally made it into the cinema. BY RUSSELL BAILLIE

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Mike Smith has directed and produced hundreds, possibly thousands of hours of television. His list of credits goes back to the 1970s when he started at the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation as a teenager. He's done programmes that were Kiwi TV landmarks and some that he probably has trouble remembering, too. In the 80s, he created pop band drama Heroes - Russell Crowe auditioned but didn't work out - in between directing episodes of Mortimer's Patch and Country GP. In the 90s it was the likes of Marlin Bay, Duggan, and sitcom Willy Nilly. Since 2000, he's been producer on Outrageous Fortune, and directed episodes of The Brokenwood Mysteries, 800 Words, The Almighty Johnsons, My Life is Murder, as well as feature-length true crime dramas such as Mistress, Mercy: The Renee Chignell Story and Siege. That's just the highlights reel.

Now Smith has written and directed his own movie called The People We Love.

It's a relationship drama about a family centred on young aspiring writer Maddie (Manon Blackman), who arrives home on the Kapiti Coast from Wellington after a bad day of professional and personal rejections. There, she finds that her parents (Neill Rea and Alison Bruce) have a relationship crisis looming, and the ex-boyfriend (Tane Rolfe) she parted on bad terms with at high school is now working for her dad. She uses the turmoil as the basis of her next story, which, while impressing her publisher, leaves her family disconcerted.