New Zealand: Leo Woodhead; Twin Speaks

When Leo Woodhead was growing up in the “industrial and pretty gnarly” English town of Macclesfield, his film-mad mother allowed him to watch horror movies from the age of eight. As a result, the 31-year-old New Zealand screenwriter and director inherited her love of film, and the most frightening images still resonate today. “I was out surfing yesterday with my girlfriend and another guy, and they went back in [to shore]. It was early morning, very quiet, and I was sitting there thinking, there truly is something underneath me… come on, get it together!”

Woodhead and his family moved to New Zealand when he was 13. “It was pretty hard back in England then. There was quite a lot of crime all over the news and it wasn’t the greatest place for a kid growing up. My parents just wanted to get away from the north, where it’s sunny for about 17 days of the year. They’d had enough.”

Real life Lord Of The Flies

The upheaval of moving to the other side of the world was reduced by the fact that Woodhead has a twin brother, Max: “At 13, you don’t know exactly what’s going on, but fortunately the whole reason it was OK then, and now, is that I am an identical twin; it would have been a lot different without him.” That said, the transition was still a shock.

“My parents had friends in Waihi Beach, which is a really small place. We turned up from the city in jeans and sneakers and we’d never seen kids in bare feet and shorts. Max and I were just under six feet tall, aged 13, but even so it was Lord of the Flies for the first six months.”

The culture shock continued with a move to the eastern suburbs of Auckland. “It’s like American Beauty; it’s just complete suburbia,” says Woodhead. “There was quite a dark undertone, like Blue Velvet. I’m just glad not to still be there.”

Woodhead began university in Auckland; dropped out; worked in a video store; went back to uni to study English literature and film theory; worked in the library and watched “all these amazing films, like Tarkovsky”; put together a portfolio and signed up for a master’s in screen production in 2005. It was then that his career began to take off.

Two Czech students had been studying at the university and the chance arose for a reciprocal exchange to Prague. Woodhead seized the opportunity and decided to shoot a short film about child trafficking. He raised the money, spent six months preparing and then, after “a five-day shoot in the freezing cold”, produced Cargo. “It was quite scary at times,” Woodhead recalls, “but it left me with the feeling that anything was possible.”

After Cargo premiered at the Venice Film Festival Woodhead was awarded a scholarship to work with Killer Films in New York. “I lived in New York for four months, and when Max came over we spent a lot of time together and met a whole bunch of people. I felt it was the first time I’d been in control. As an artist, you’re looking for a group that can motivate you and you can motivate them and in New York I felt like I’d finally found my gang.”

Commercial considerations

Back in New Zealand, Thick as Thieves producer Nik Beachman had suggested he should try his hand at commercials. As a long-time fan of Jonathan Glazer – “his work was so powerful, like a dream, it stood out from everything else” – Woodhead was interested, but wanted to finish his second short, Zero – “another tough growing-pains film” that was selected for the Berlinale. He also shot a documentary on the making of a New Zealand feature film, Under the Mountain. In 2010, when Beachman offered him a Saatchi & Saatchi online spot for Toyota, “I was like, OK cool, and that was the first job that we ever did [together].”

Woodhead’s current reel includes more work for Toyota (starring a tough, off-roading Kiwi bloke and a “fruit-cake” chimpanzee), a My Sky spot, 60 Things in 60 Seconds, and the Brothers campaign for Hallensteins men’s clothing. The ideas are a bit, well, blokey, but Woodhead says that as a director there’s plenty to play with: “I guess Toyota and Hallensteins in their nature are quite masculine, but you always try to come back to something that’s true and honest, that will get people’s attention.
In the Hallensteins spots I’ve tried to use early Scorcese as a reference, with a gritty feel that grabs you and takes you with it.” It’s not all grit with Woodhead though – he has his lighter side. “Kids love the Toyota spot,” he adds “so if you can cut through all the noise that’s out there and make a kid laugh in 30 seconds, you’re onto a good thing.”

Like any ambitious filmmaker, Woodhead is keen to shoot a feature. Right now, he’s close to finishing his third short film, called Cold Snap, which is “about a kid who lives off the land with his father in a forest.”

How does he define his style? “I guess cinematic, probably, and truthful. In the films it’s quite still and patient; I’m interested in the human condition and they’re all quite social realist. With the commercials, it’s kind of like a piece of music;
I try to give it a muscular feel, with the rhythm to carry it along.”