S3 Ep 5 – Sam Neill – Acting, Architecture and Wine
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What is the podcast episode introduction and why is Sam Neill being featured?
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Hello, and welcome to Tim and Kev's Big Design Adventure. Hello, Kevin.
Hi, Tim. How was your week in design? Was it an adventure?
It was an adventure. That's an interesting question because I was thinking while I was writing something today, because you were quoting someone in an episode a couple of weeks ago, our episode with Peter Barber, talking about the theatre of how we live. Who was that again?
That, I think, was Walter Benjamin.
Walter Benjamin.
Who was a Marxist philosopher in the 1920s. And look, all I'm doing is re-quoting Peter's own, because he's got the quote up on his website, as part of his own manifesto. Yeah. Because Benjamin wrote this book called One Way Street and talked about buildings being used as stages and... The fact that balconies and courtyards and all the bits of them, gateways and so forth, are quite scenic, that they're the setting for human beings to live out their lives and we can sort of interact with the building in a way which enables us.
I was quite touched by that and it made me think of what we're talking about today actually, which is Sam Neill, because I feel like Sam, the late wonderful New Zealand actor who was a fan of architecture, but I felt like he was living his life on a larger stage. than just the screen, but he was playing out his life on Instagram and as a wonderful human that, you know, he was able to engage with people beyond his work as an actor in more recent times, particularly during COVID where he just sort of picked up his phone and he connected with thousands and thousands and thousands of people all over the world and brought them joy. I think he enjoyed all those interactions. Yeah. with the world as much as he did work.
Yeah, I get that feeling. It's curious, isn't it, that in his work, you never really got the sense that here was a troubled human being trying to deliver this performance, that there was a fantastic... sort of warmth and dependability and a measured quality, but that extended to him, didn't it? Not just his performances that I always, in watching his posts and stuff, always just enjoyed his humor. I love his humor. I mean, his website for his winery, I think he wrote most of the copy for it. And it's just, it's hilarious. He was on the one hand, incredibly private, and protected the privacy of his family, understandably, as you would want to. And on the other, found all these ways of reaching out. And I think not least through the commercial enterprise he had, which was wine.
And I only found out yesterday, because I was reading a couple of wonderful obituaries, that he was really sort of trying to make peace with his parents, with his father, through the wine. Because his father was a wine trader. He imported French wine into Australia and New Zealand. And I think the idea of having grown up in those countries, particularly in New Zealand, that there was an opportunity for him to sort of answer his father back almost and add to the family legacy of wine.
The philosophy that he had, which was take what you do seriously but never take yourself seriously, Yeah. I really like. But there have been so many of his wonderful quotes and thoughts and takes on life being re-sent around everywhere as a tribute to him. Today's episode is about Sam because earlier this year I sent him an email and asked him to come on the podcast. His answer was yes, but we'd made a decision that we wanted to do it face to face. So we could all be in the room at the same time. The timing didn't work for him when you were in Australia. So it was like, let's do that in the future. Sadly, of course, that hasn't been able to happen. But one of the things I do have for us today is an interview that I did with him a few years ago for a project that got shelved that no one's ever heard, apart from Sam and I. And in it, he talks about his love of architecture.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the podcast episode introduction and why is Sam Neill being featured?
0:00–7:49
2
How did Tim Ross first connect with Sam Neill and start their correspondence?
7:49–32:56
3
How does Sam Neill compare being an actor to running a winery?
32:56–48:20
4
What early career turning points led Sam Neill from New Zealand to international acting?
48:20–51:31