One year after The God Boy was screened on New Zealand television, the next major movie to be locally produced, Sleeping Dogs (Roger Donaldson, 1977), was launched in cinemas around the country and instantly became a box office hit. As Jonathan Dowling, a New Zealand producer, has observed, the film ‘almost single-handedly created a climate of acceptance within the country for a Kiwi film industry.’ Even in the USA, where the film was released in 1982, it was critically acclaimed. The reviewer for the weekly American entertainment trade magazine Variety, for example, wrote: ‘Sleeping Dogs has sharp directional flair evident, particularly in the action segments, taut performances by the large cast and a handsome technical gloss in all departments.’ New Zealand feature-filmmaking had thus arrived, and Sleeping Dogs – the success of which encouraged the formation of the New Zealand Film Commission in 1978, which has provided funding for most of the local films made since – can justifiably be regarded as inaugurating the New Zealand New Wave.

More importantly for the purposes of this study, it announces the advent of a new mode of filmmaking – one that would characterize many of the coming- of-age films that would be made in the years to come. First, it exemplifies a new approach to the adaptation of a literary source. Rather than functioning simply as a metteur-en-scène, as Murray Reece had done with The God Boy, Roger Donaldson seized upon his literary source, C. K. Stead's novel Smith's Dream (1971, revised 1973), for its potential to be rewrought in ways that transformed it into a vehicle for personal expression, self-discovery, and even self-justification. He thus approaches the material from the perspective of an auteur who has selected it because of its latent capacity to be converted into a vehicle for personal cinema. Second, it displays the incursion of a globalized American youth culture into the experience of young Antipodeans, along with the influence of the American New Wave that flourished briefly between the mid-1960s and the mid-1970s. Thus, whereas Reece's The God Boy shows the influence of the French New Wave and European directors like François Truffaut and Ingmar Bergman directly, Sleeping Dogs exemplifies that influence as refracted through the New Hollywood, especially in the forms in which it was hybridized with American genres.