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Ainsley Amohaere Gardiner MNZM is a film producer from New Zealand. Early life. Gardiner was born in Palmerston North and grew up in the Wellington suburb of Wadestown, attending Wadestown Primary School. Her mother is former MP Pauline Gardiner, and her father was a civil servant and politician, Wira Gardiner.
- Patricia Grace’s Novel Had A Long Journey to The screen
- Cousins Was A Challenging Novel to Adapt
- Indigenous vs Hollywood Storytelling
- What Made This The Right Time For Cousins to Be Made?
- Cousins Was Spoilt For Choice When It Came to Casting
- When It Comes to Budget, Constraints Can Help Things Turn Out Better
- Commercial Success, Cultural Impact and Colonisation
BRIAR GRACE-SMITH: I had a baby who was only a few days old, and they had the book launch in Takapūwāhia. It was some 28, 29 years ago. There’s a marae in Titahi Bay down near Wellington, and they passed the book around the meeting house, and then they also passed my new baby around the meeting house. And the book eventually—many years later—came b...
BRIAR GRACE-SMITH: The issue I know that they came up against is that there’s so much material in the novel that I gather they were telling too many stories. This is the feedback that they got. So with that in mind, I just went in and, well, I had Ainsley there and we just talked about what stood out for us and made some really strong instinctual m...
AINSLEY GARDINER: I think what we were also exploring, at the same time as just the material, is, “what are the processes of storytelling that are inherently indigenous?” What are the storytelling formulas that work for us that we’ve borrowed from a pretty short history—the Hollywood filmmaking kind of history is only 120-something years old. The l...
BRIAR GRACE-SMITH: We were just talking before about how neither of us wanted to make this film. I didn’t want to direct it by myself. Ainsley didn’t want to direct it. So we can’t imagine having done it alone, and there’s no way I could have or would have. So yeah, it’s been a real collaboration of minds and experiences, eh? AINSLEY GARDINER: Yeah...
BRIAR GRACE-SMITH: here was so much talent out there, and we put out a big casting net, particularly for the children. So there were many, many children that we auditioned, and we had to watch and then sort through the versions and swap them around. And Ainsley, who loves her diagrams and maps and graphics, would continually, every day, present to ...
AINSLEY GARDINER: I think the thing is that Georgina [Conder] and I, as Miss Conception Films, we came up under Larry Parr through these low-budget filmmaking schemes, and, I don’t know, it’s just never really been an issue. You do ask a lot of people, and you hold people to a really high standard, and then together you’ll work out a way to do it f...
AINSLEY GARDINER: We want to do well because so many of the films in the kind of top 10 New Zealand box office are Māori films, and none of them are films by Māori women. So there’s things like that. In terms of the big goals around Cousins and how it reflects on the culture, yeah, I’d love it to generate the same kind of conversations about cultur...
Jun 16, 2021 · ‘The need for community’: directors Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace-Smith on the beauty of ‘Cousins’ | SBS What's On. Their astounding adaptation of Patricia Grace’s much-loved novel about powerful Māori women finding their way in the world is a must-see. Source: Vendetta Films.
Mar 8, 2021 · A film adaptation of Patricia Grace’s novel Cousins, directed by Māori directors Briar Grace-Smith and Ainsley Gardiner, is a hopeful glimpse at what could be a new era of cinema in New Zealand,...
Jun 11, 2021 · Co-directors Briar Grace-Smith and Ainsley Gardiner said their film is a story of colonisation and what's lost in the process.
- Ahmed Yussuf
May 28, 2021 · In this month’s Perspectives, they discuss their new film, Cousins, a drama based on Māori author Patricia Grace’s beloved 1992 novel of the same name, delving into their creative process and underlining the importance of representing Māori stories and experiences onscreen.
Aug 3, 2021 · The 98-minute feature is an adaptation of the 1992 novel of the same name by Maori author Patricia Grace (who I met in the 1990s at a literary symposium of Pacific Islander authors in Honolulu) and co-directed by Maoris Ainsley Gardiner and Briar Grace Smith (who also wrote the screenplay).
