Vincent Ward

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Vincent Ward (born Greytown, New Zealand, in 1956) is a film director and screenwriter. He currently works for a New Zealand based production company called The Sweet Shop.

[edit] Biography

He was trained as an artist at the University of Canterbury and made a pair of highly regarded short films (A State of Siege and In Spring One Plants Alone) before his first feature-length film, the lyrical yet lonely Vigil, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. His next film, The Navigator, took four years to make and won six Australian Film Institute awards.

Map of the Human Heart (1993), a surreal romance set in World War II, while only a modest commercial success, remains Ward's most critically acclaimed film to date.

In the years following Map, Ward made an abortive attempt to direct and script Alien³, but the film's backers were leery of his underlying concept: a spiritual parable involving monks aboard a giant wooden ark in space. He was eventually asked to leave the project.

Despite this setback, Ward's next feature moved away from the lower budgets and art-house atmosphere of his earlier works: the Hollywood-friendly What Dreams May Come ($90m), starring Robin Williams, appeared in 1998.

River Queen is set in 19th-century New Zealand and stars Samantha Morton and Kiefer Sutherland.

Ward was dismissed from the film towards the end of the shoot, and then in an unusual reversal, was rehired just weeks later for six months of editing, and additional shooting in both New Zealand and England. Ward had been working on scripting and pre-production for five years and said his hair turned grey during those few weeks away, though he was fueled to make his film into something worth all the effort. "We have been able to create a very strong movie. Initial preview screenings in New Zealand and Australia have gone exceptionally well," Ward stated.

Ward filmed the last shots of the film himself, alone, mid winter, freezing, and waist-deep in the middle of the River Thames. He was so intent on his work he didn't notice the rising tide and his possessions from the bank behind him being swept away downstream.