Shorty St’s Christmas cliffhanger

Each week we talk to an artist about their best-known work. This week Shortland Street director Oliver Driver tells us how they made this year’s Christmas cliffhanger.

‘After the Shortland Street 25th anniversary involved a volcano, the question was: How do we top that? ‘‘The cliff[hanger] is normally an action movie, sort of. There’s a siege, a shooting, an explosion – that kind of thing. But because you can’t really beat a volcano, what producer Maxine Fleming went for this year was to treat it more like a thriller. That’s what really excited me this year, it was more about psychological drama.

‘‘There’s certainly still action in it. But there’s no one big explosion, there’s lots of people in danger all the time. It’s not faceless gunmen in

We can't redo the volcano, so we went deeply personal. With the Christmas cliff, you know bad things are going to happen. Oliver Driver

masks, it’s a psychological danger. How will people talk their way out?

‘‘We wanted to shoot it in lots of close environments, so we had lots of close-ups and then weirdly wide shots to tie the drama and keep these people in suspense and danger at all times.

‘‘We normally shoot on these big ol’ things that keep the shots moving in a flowing kind of way. We lost all that. It was all hand-held, filmed much more in a way that you’d film a short film. It lost a bit of that Shortland Street feel, but we did want to make something that felt like a standalone.

‘‘With the Christmas cliffhanger, you know bad things are going to happen. We didn’t want to shy away from that. I wanted there to be a conscious fear of impending doom.

‘‘Even with the comedic pieces, because you can’t have everything all bad, there’s still an undeniable feeling that something will go wrong.

‘‘One large sequence was filmed out on a boat, but we actually had five boats. There were two safety boats [for when the character Sass got dumped at sea] and the other boats circled around. We had to ferry people on and off, so it’s like filming on top of a very high building. We were stuck on these things with cameras, a drone team, safety people and the actors.

‘‘Makeup and wardrobe had only one chance to get everyone right before they were sent off on another boat. Normally, what you might not know is that there are about 50 people standing just outside of shot.

‘‘Instead, we had another boat with all those guys that had to trail away to make it look like we were shooting out in the open. In fact, we were just past Rangitoto. It was still freezing cold.’’

– As told to Glenn McConnell