Vincent Ward

Vincent Ward (born Greytown, New Zealand, in 1956) is a film director and screenwriter. He was trained as an artist and made a pair of highly regarded short films (A State of Siege and In Spring One Plants Alone ) before his first feature-length film, the lyrical yet lonely Vigil, was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. His next film, The Navigator , took four years to make and won six AFI awards.

Map of the Human Heart (1993), a surreal romance set in World War II, while only a modest commerical success, remains Ward's most critically acclaimed film to date.

In the years following Map, Ward made an abortive attempt to direct and script Alien³, but the film's backers were leery of his underlying concept: a spirtual parable involving monks aboard a giant wooden ark in space. He was eventually asked to leave the project.

Despite this setback, Ward's next feature moved away from the lower budgets and art-house atmosphere of his earlier works: the Hollywood-friendly What Dreams May Come ($90m), starring Robin Williams, appeared in 1998.

River Queen , set in 19th-century New Zealand and starring Samantha Morton and Kiefer Sutherland, was still in post-production as of February 2005.

Ward is a personal friend of director Mike Figgis and will occasionaly do cameos in his films, such as in Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and One Night Stand (1997).

Filmography (Directorial only)

• State of Siege (1978) (short)
• In Spring One Plants Alone (1981) (short)
• Vigil (1984, director and writer)
• The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988, director and writer)
• Map of the Human Heart (1993, director and writer)
• What Dreams May Come (1998)
• River Queen (2005)