Director: Roger Donaldson

Roger Donaldson came out of New Zealand with Sleeping Dogs and Smash Palace before moving to American studio work, where he settled into thrillers about capable people in situations that are about to exceed them.

No Way Out, Thirteen Days, The Bank Job and Dante’s Peak are all built on procedure and escalating constraint, and Thirteen Days in particular treats a political crisis as a workplace problem, which is more tense than dramatising it would have been.

The World’s Fastest Indian, about Burt Munro’s speed record, is the personal one and the one he has said matters most to him.