Peter Wells

Peter Northe Wells (8 February 1950 – 18 February 2019) was a New Zealand writer, filmmaker, and historian. He was mainly known for his fiction, but also explored his interest in gay and historical themes in a number of expressive drama and documentary films from the 1980s onwards. Career Film Wells's first feature film was Desperate Remedies (1993), co-directed with Stewart Main. This take on New Zealand's colonial beginnings was selected to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, and represented an expressionistic alternative to the "man alone" machismo that dominated New Zealand film in the 1970s and 80s. Writing In the years that followed, Wells concentrated on developing his writing career. His short stories and novels have been widely praised. In 1996 he collaborated with theatre director Colin McColl on an operatic dramatization of Katherine Mansfield's Wellington stories, commissioned for the NZ International Festival of the Arts. Two short stories from his 1991 collection Dangerous Desires have been filmed to date: Of Memory & Desire, the tale of a Japanese couple travelling around New Zealand, was adapted by Niki Caro as her first feature film in 1997. The same year, working from a Wells script, Stewart Main directed 1960s coming of age story One of THEM! as an hour-long short.