Charlie Haskell began his career behind the scenes over twenty years ago. Since then he has worked as a First Assistant Director, Second Assistant Director, and Director on a huge range of film and television productions. These have included New Zealand films like The Piano, and local television series such as Hercules,Xena, Maddigan’s Quest, and most recently The Cult. He has also worked on many international productions such as the films Bogeyman and Thirty Days of Night and television production like Power Rangers.

“Tangiwai totally stood out. From a script perspective it was incredibly emotional. I had the same reaction that most people do where I cried when I read it. I was incredibly caught up in the story. My first reaction was ‘is this a true story’ because it sounded like one but I was so surprised I hadn’t heard it.”

Renowned production designer, John Harding is known for his a varied and versatile career. Recently he was a costume designer on James Cameron’s epic Avatar. He worked for five years on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in many design, construction and art director roles. He also designed and developed miniature sets, native costumes and weapons for Weta Workshop, and for Peter Jackson’s King Kong.

“It’s an interesting part of our history. Everyone knew somebody involved in it. And as we started working on it, we realized it was true to a far greater extent. So many people, so many little connections. The guy who painted the miniature train, the only referenced photos I could find for him  to work with were all black and white images of the train crash itself. It turned out they were taken by his grandfather who had been on the second train. And the security guard at Avalon was on the actual train and he got off at the last top beforehand because he met relatives on the train and they said “come and have Christmas with us.”

Award-winning cinematographer, David Paul, has worked on many productions, including documentaries, dramas, short films and commercials and music videos. He is best-known for his work on Until Proven Innocent, the New Zealand telefeature drama, the films Second Hand Wedding and Show of Hands and television series The Insiders Guide to Happiness and The Insiders Guide to Love. 

“Precision was one of the things I wanted to bring to it as a cinematographer, just more attention to detail. I spent a lot of time studying the light at the time, like how the houses were for New Zealand. It was a lot of bungalows, the windows aren’t big and often they’re not facing the right way so there’s quite often light by the window which just tapers off really softly inside the house. That was for me what I focused on." 

As the Head of Miniatures at the acclaimed Weta Workshop, Ian works alongside Oscar-winner Richard Taylor to create believable miniatures for films such as The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings and District 9. For Tangiwai, Ian and his team created a miniature version of the steam loco and carriage accompaniment from 1953 as well as miniaturizing the location itself, including the tracks, the river and lahar.

“For the train, we took a silicone mould from a model locomotive one of Richard’s friends had actually built over the last ten years, which was basically the same model. We then cast the whole fuselage of the train in a type of durable urethane. There was an enormous amount of detail to go on after that, but it just gave us a head start on building the train. We then spent months detailing the outside of the locomotive and matching it exactly. I also went down in Plimmerton, where there’s a sister locomotive to Tangiwai train, and photographed everything out of it, so we were able to copy out of that as much as we could. There were eleven carriages in total that we needed to build and every single car had a separate design.”