Nikki Caro

She’s a hot international movie director, he’s an award-winning architect and they have two young daughters. Niki Caro and husband Andrew Lister do whatever it takes to keep their family together wherever they are in the world. Words Kate Coughlan; Photographs: Mark Smith & Andrew Lister.

IF EVER that clever Niki Caro were to direct her cameras on herself and husband Andrew, the resulting film would be a love story. “He is magnificent,” she says about him as an architect, a father and a husband. “Niki is everything to me,” he says, “so whatever she’s doing I want to be there for her.”

Niki’s latest work, The Vintner’s Luck, which opens nationwide this month following an invitation to screen the première at the prestigious Toronto Film Festival, took the family to Beaune in the heart of the Burgundy wine district of France. There Andrew set up home for the four months that it took Niki, working six days and all hours weekly, to translate the magic of the novel by Elizabeth Knox into film.

Andrew’s home-establishment regime is an impressive production from a man who only ever wanted to be an architect and who hates the upheaval of having to up-stakes with his two small daughters (Tui, six, and Pearl, two) and move to another country in the wake of Niki’s international movie-directing career. “I don’t relish the idea of moving as it is coming, so I make lists,” says Andrew, a lister by nature as well as name. “Andrew worries for us all,” says Niki. “That’s my job,” says Andrew, “to take care of them, to take care of anything that arises and anticipate anything that might arise.”

So he researches everything he needs or might need for the girls before deciding where they will live. “A child’s world is quite small and it doesn’t matter where in the world they are; as long as we are together then that is home. But before I commit to where we will live while Niki is on location, I need to know where is the nearest swimming pool, the closest playground and a good supermarket and how can I access public transport with a stroller. Then I choose the house that is most suitable for kids and sometimes that means living in places that are not very swanky if they are good for kids.”

He is, according to Niki, something of a genius at getting the lie of the land wherever they are in the world – whether it’s Tokyo, rural France or North America. His research is intensive but he likes figuring out how cities work. It is that architect’s brain of his. “My goal is to move the family seamlessly round the world – and we have lived in many different places. Home today, there tomorrow.”

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