How much script writing experience did you have prior to co-writing Sleeping Dogs?
Half a dozen radio scripts, a stage play, a novel, half a dozen TV series scripts, a three-part TV drama series, overseeing the seven Winners and Losers scripts, and writing three of them.

How did Roger Donaldson approach you to co-write Sleeping Dogs?
I was living in Wellington doing the second series of Moynihan. We'd just got back from our overseas selling trip for Winners and Losers. Part of the investment in that trip was my signing onto the second Moynihan series. Rog was all fired up to make his feature. He called me in Wellington and said, "I've found a book. I'm off to the Philippines tonight with Winners & Losers. Can you write a treatment for when I get back in a weeks time?" I said, "What's the book?" He said "Carl Stead's Smith's Dream." I said, "Okay send me a copy and I'll get started." " I can't," he said. "You'll have to get one from the library." And then he fucked off to Manila to dance with Imelda Marcos. Or maybe that was Bruno [Lawrence]. Yes, I think it was. But Roger was there. The Marcoses had built a special building for the event in double-quick time and three guys got drowned in the concrete. [Ed's note: Actually, according to the excellent doco directed by John Reid about the making of Sleeping Dogs that's included on The Roger Donaldson Collection DVD, this trip to the Philippines actually occurred several years later in conjunction with Smash Palace, presumably in 1982, when Lawrence won best actor at the Manila Film Festival and then reportedly danced with the country's shoe-obsessed first lady.]

What attracted you to the project? Was it the mere fact of having the chance to work on a feature film, for instance, or perhaps because the material resonated strongly with you?
I'd said yes before I even read the book, so that maybe answers your question.

How did the collaboration on the script with Arthur Baysting on the script work in practical terms?
We each wrote bits and pieces and tossed them back and forward and wrote over each other. But then Arthur had to go overseas (Noumea, I think) so I finished the final drafts myself. Arthur and I were working on another project at the same time.

How involved was Roger Donaldson in the scripting process?
Very. Roger always is. But it was his movie. I wanted to give him the best version of what he thought he wanted.

What kind of general philosophy drove the fundamental decision-making process in terms of what to keep and what to change when adapting Smith's Dream?
Roger was very keen on character and action. Arthur and I were adding a concern with structure. But, again, it was Roger's film. Scriptwriting was a kind of support role.

It seems pretty obvious from the finished film, for instance, that you took the maxim of "show, not tell" to heart. The doco also suggests that a fair bit of expediency drove the writing process, with certain scenes/settings dictated by what was available on the locations that were going to be used?
Not so much what was available, as that Rog and I went on a lot of recces during the writing and wrote specifically for where we were going to shoot. So the locations informed the script, rather than the script having to comply with the locations.

Also, the character of Smith seems quite different between novel and movie - in the former, although he's pretty diffident, he's also portrayed at being quite political in an intellectual sense at least, while in the latter he seems extremely ambivalent about the politics of both sides. How much of this was driven by your personal view of politics, the desire to make Smith more of a figure of identification of the audience (assuming that NZers are generally as passionless about politics as Gordon McLauchlan posited), and/or by Sam Neill's interpretation of the character?
You've pretty much answered your question. All of the above.

The doco suggests that given your respective working relationships with Donaldson that the casting of you and Nevan Rowe [who plays Smith's wife and Bullen's lover, and was Donaldon's office manager] was pretty much a given from the outset - is that your memory? Was Bullen always the role you were going to play?
Absolutely not. I was quietly hoping for Smith, but never proposed it. Rog chose the handsome guy and then asked me to add a bit of muscle as Bullen, doing my usual Everyman bit. Although he even tried to pretty me up with curls and a dye job!

I've got the impression from the doco that when it came to shoot the movie the script was, at times, used more as a rough guide than holy writ that could not be deviated from (you make a comment along the lines that once the shoot began it was more important what was in Roger's head rather than what was on the page).
This holy writ idea comes from funding bodies, studios and arts administrators. It's a way of keeping control in the hands of bureaucrats and control freaks and making sure that wastrel directors, arty-farty actors and other spendthrifts who know nothing about story or movies get too much power because they'll only ruin things.
Every script gets adjusted on the job. Sometimes there's dialogue there to explain things that, when you get the camera and the actors on the set, becomes redundant. So you chuck it. Roger had the movie in his head. The task of the script was to give form to it. Plus all the other things a script is supposed to do. I just wanted Roger to get the best possible shot at it that he could.

Given you were on set for much if not all of the shoot, were you script doctoring as you went?
Yes, but the process was not one of mutating into something different, but more of sharpening, focusing what we had already written.

What are your abiding memories of the shoot?
Continuous crisis, but equally continuous good work being done. Any movie is management of crisis, but this one, because of its historical position and the lack of experience in feature-making, was a little bit more so. It would be a bad thing in a regular job, but it's a good thing on a movie. Another point the funding bodies, producers and control freaks have yet to learn.

What did you find most challenging about the shoot as an actor?
Keeping up with Sam, who is such a sly dog. You can't see what he's doing on the set; just looks like being diffident. I saw him do a close-up in which he didn't move a muscle, but when I watched the rushes back I saw him change his mind. That's quite a trick. Also, keeping up with Warren Oates. This is a lesson I have learnt a number of times from American actors in particular. I come from the theatre, where you try to get it right in rehearsals first. But movie actors, and particularly Americans, don't want to waste a performance on the air. They want to tread softly, and then when the camera is rolling, they fire their big guns.

Do you recall how long the actual shoot was?
I think seven weeks. Seven seems to be the number for Dogs.

At what stage of proceedings did you see an assembly of the film? Were you, for instance, consulted during the edit?
Ian John was cutting through the shoot, but he was in Auckland. We were all over the shop, so we saw bits every now and then. I wasn't specifically consulted on anything, I was working with Rog on everything.

How did you feel about the completed film?
Gangbusters! Except for the death scene at the end, and after the movie opened, Rog and I went round the country with a splicer and took seven minutes (that number again) out of every print. The death scene was still too long. And Rog, every now and then, doesn't trust his story-telling enough and puts in a real clunker on-the-nose. In SD it's Jesperson's line "Smith! This is definitely your last chance!" That was never in the script, but added on the day and is still in there. Yahhhhh!

When did you get your first inkling about how significant Sleeping Dogs would be to the development of NZ's national cinema?
I don't want to sound big-headed here, but we knew the reaction and the significance while we were shooting. When you've got your arse out in the wind like that, you'll crash and burn if you don't believe it. That's not conceitedness; that's survival!

It's suggested during the doco that all those making the film discounted the possibility of anything like what was portrayed in Sleeping Dogs coming to pass, and the edition of Smith's Dream I have has CK Stead insisting "it proposes not a likely scenario but an unlikely one". What was your view at the time, and what was your reaction to the images of the Red squad at work during the Springbok tour?
When we were working on the script, I remembered a tiny page five item in the Auckland Star from a few months before, announcing, demurely, that [prime minister Robert] Muldoon was training up an anti-terrorist squad. That was what we based our Specials on. So when Red, White and Blue Squads turned up four years later on the tour, I felt quite at home. Home is a different place now; nobody now is quite as hungry for power as Muldoon was. Refer Musharef. Refer also to the armed farmers on horseback during the early waterfont strike, the laws that were passed without comment banning the populace from feeding the strikers in the '52 strike. Refer to today's version with the meek compliance with the crimes of Telecom, TVNZ and the power companies. The Kiwi character shifts with the circumstances.

When was the last time you watched the film, and how do you think it stands up, both in technical terms but also as far as its thematic content goes? (I couldn't help but think that 30 years on, images of an arguably imperialistic occupying army and arguments about the difference between terrorists and freedom fighters have as much currency as when the movie was made.)
I'm with you on the themes, but also it stands up bloody well technically. Roger's direction still stands up bloody well too. It's the costumes and hairstyles that give it away.

Given the film was largely made via private investment and that its success is given a large amount of credit for the establishment of the NZ Film Commission, an institution you've apparently been at loggerheads with in recent years, does this 30th anniversary give you pause to reflect on the state of the film industry today?
I am always reflecting on the state of the industry, whatever the day.

Or to put the leading question another way, do you agree with the contention that, wittingly or otherwise, the commission has helped foster a film industry dependent on the NZFC and do you think there realistically remains room for the fiercely independent, DIY approach of Sleeping Dogs 30 years on?
I certainly agree with the comments about the Commission. The artistic decisions have been hijacked by people who have never exposed a foot of film. There is never room for the "fiercely independent DIY approach" of 30 years ago, but we have seen it since with Bad Taste, The Shirt, Christmas and a few others. In the end, the important stories are told by people who HAVE to tell them. If they don't have to, then maybe they shouldn't.