SCRUBBS

Don “Scrubbs” Blakeney spent decades in the white collared suit and tie world of corporate finance in New Zealand’s capital city of Wellington, where he gained a reputation amongst his peers for being very clever. Perhaps a little too clever. “There was some professional jealousy, and I also began to attract a lot of attention from Inland Revenue, to the point where I felt compelled to have a career change,” he tells me wryly, some decades later.

Blakeney went on to, the Maori word for revenge), a gritty tale set in the New Zealand Land Wars of the 1860s. The film is widely credited for bringing New Zealand film making into international focus.