Robert Sarkies
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robert Sarkies is a New Zealand film director and scriptwriter.
Sarkies grew up in the South Island city of Dunedin, and his two feature films released to date have been set in Dunedin or the surrounding region. He began making short films as a child, and later won international awards for his short films Dream makers and Signing Off.
Sarkies' feature film debut, which he co-wrote with his brother, playwright and performer Duncan Sarkies, is the 1999 ensemble comedy Scarfies. Winner of seven awards including Best Picture and Best Director at the NZ Film Awards, the film is part comedy, part thriller, and partly a celebration of being a university student in Dunedin. Scarfies was later released on video in the United States under the title Crime 101.
Sarkies' second feature is the true-life thriller Out of the Blue based on the 1990 Aramoana Massacre, in which a gunman killed thirteen people in a seaside town not far from Dunedin. The film emphasizes realism over melodrama, partly through handheld camerawork and a naturalistic acting style. Some of those living in Aromoana expressed opposition to the film being made; others who lost people in the tragedy agreed to do interviews with scriptwriters Sarkies and Graeme Tetley [1].
In New Zealand, Out of the Blue went on to become the tenth most successful local film yet released theatrically (as is common in the movie industry, such box office figures take no account of inflation). Reviews have largely been highly positive. As of April 2008, Out of the Blue's rating on critics' website Rotten Tomatoes was 90 per cent [2].
After the success of Scarfies, the Sarkies brothers (NOT the Armenian hoteliers of the same name) worked together on the script for a fantasy film called The Magnificent Magic Fingers. The budget for Magic Fingers was estimated to be at least NZ$20 million. It is not yet clear whether Magic Fingers will join Peter Jackson's unmade Blubberhead as one of the great fantasy films that never quite emerged from down under.
