Interview
The DevonporT FlagsTaFF page 20
February 11, 2022
TV man’s lens tilts from celebrities to critters Producer Tim Lawry is on the hunt for some of New Zealand’s rarest creatures. He tells Helen Vause about his television career – and the challenge of capturing footage of endangered native species. When Tim Lawry makes it back home to Devonport for weekends over the coming months, he’ll have some amazing work stories to tell. Television producer and director Lawry has filmed numerous demanding shoots abroad for high-rating shows, but the latest assignment in his home patch will take him to the remotest corners of the country in search of wildlife most of us would never get to see – except on screen. Lawry is working on a new television series that has the working title Endangered Species of Aotearoa. And finding those rare creatures, who will be the stars of the show, could be the biggest challenge of his programme-making career. He may be used to wrangling celebrities, wannabe chefs and budding builders, but this time the talent will be much more elusive. Capturing those great shots is the name of the game, grins Lawry, who was at home at the start of the year, fine-tuning the planning and logistics for his upcoming weekly filming forays. Lawry and crew are filming – and trying to dodge Covid – from now, until mid-year. The first trip to Pureora Forest, near Taupo, is in search of the short- and long-tail bats whose numbers have been have been steadily dropping due to predation by rats, possums, stoats and feral cats. Lawry comes to this project not long after putting teams of assorted well-known Kiwis through their paces in Northland for the making of the latest Celebrity Treasure Island series. After long, tough days outdoors capturing the tears, victories and squabbles with a camera that never stops running on a reality TV series, Lawry was happy to get home to his wife Meredith Dawson Lawry and their two young children Sebastian and Madeleine. “It was a great series and it was really good to be working in a beautiful local lo-
Going bush... Tim Lawry will visit a wide range of remote New Zealand locations in pursuit of shots of endangered species cation with the support of iwi there instead of heading overseas again to film the show. But it’s hard work day after day and very full-on for everyone involved.” These days, Lawry and crew get to retreat to the relative comfort of regular accommodation at the end of each day of filming. But he laughs at memories of earlier shows, where it was “airbeds in tents in the middle
of nowhere for us”. Previous seasons working on the making of Survivor New Zealand took him and the crew to locations in Nicaragua and Thailand. Lawry grew up with the influence of close family and friends who worked in film and television. After university and post-graduate study at the South Seas Film
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