Originally Published in 2024
When 24-year-old Caleb Corlett looks back on the first film he made as a teenager –a yarn about a teleporting bank robber –he tends to judge himself harshly. “It’s pretty shocking,” he laughs. “That’s definitely not going on the internet.” And yet this digital marker in time serves an important purpose. It shows how far he has come and, on a deeper level, represents what rescued him from an environment where he didn’t quite fit in.
Caleb, who was born in Gisborne, spent much of his childhood in Thailand where his missionary parents enrolled him in the American international school. “I wasn’t super smart or sporty –it felt like there was no space for visual artists,” he says. His love of photography began when his dad won a camera and, in father-and-son bonding sessions, they’d head out into the streets of Chiang Mai to capture the buzz. When Caleb started to shoot video as a point of difference from his dad, something bigger than a shutter swing clicked.
At school, a few like-minded souls gathered around his passion. He began to make short films with friends. “I became addicted to it, not so much because I loved the images, but because of the collaborative process –the cool ways a team solves problems –and that’s still how I feel.”
Moving back to Wellington at 15 was another turning point. “I grew up in a Christian bubble so being at Wellington High, which was fairly liberal, was a culture shock,” says Caleb. The young filmmaker matured fast. He began to develop a sense of his own identity. Dropping out of high school, he joined his sister as a wedding videographer using skills he had picked up watching countless hours of tutorials on YouTube. Then he said “I do” to a job at Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post and his real education began.
His experience in the video department on The Lord of the Rings and Avatar proved invaluable. He learnt the mechanics of set etiquette, and that his heart lay not in corporate hierarchy but in creative autonomy. “I love storytelling and experimenting,” he says.Now working as a cinematographer in Auckland, he’s pragmatic about the ups and downs of self-employment. For a while there, music videos were his bread and butter (he’s collaborated with artists such as Benee and Melodownz) but now his sights are set firmly on film. Cetology, which played at the New Zealand International Film Festival, is one of his favourite recent projects. “It was so quirky; I’d never read a script like it. It’s exciting to be able to help such talented writers and directors technically achieve what they want to.”Naturally Caleb watches movies in a different way to most. Recently he saw Los Delincuentes, a comedy-drama about a bank heist by Argentinian director Rodrigo Moreno. “He really knows how to build the visual language, when to edit and when not to –that movie felt so natural, as if it was shot with no lighting at all,” he says.
Being able to craft scenes for the silver screen that feel to the viewer like an amplified version of reality, that’s his ultimate goal. And to be noticed for not being noticed.