[1][2] He was the nephew of General Sir Harry Chauvel, Commander of the Australian Light Horse and later the Desert Mounted Corps in Palestine during World War I.

The Chauvels were descended from a French Huguenot family who fled France for England in 1685, and soon established a tradition of serving in the British army.

He was fascinated by films and pestered a friend, showman Reginald "Snowy" Baker, to give him work as a production assistant; usually, he was the man in charge of the horses.

[2][4] Chauvel followed Baker to Hollywood in 1922, at his own expense, and spent some time as a jack of all trades, including working as an extra, a lighting technician, a publicist, and a stunt double.

Back in Australia after about a year, Chauvel obtained finance from Queensland businessmen and friends to make his first film The Moth of Moonbi.

The Moth of Moonbi is a country girl who flutters to the city lights, loses her fortune, but eventually returns home and finds love with her father's trusty stockman.

[5] In Greenhide a city girl struggles to cope on a cattle station and gradually finds love with her polar opposite, an extremely taciturn bushman.

Like Moonbi the film was made in Harrisville near Brisbane, enlisting the locals as extras and using locations around his family property "Summerlands", near the edge of town.

[9] In 1935, Chauvel won a Commonwealth Government competition for Heritage which gave a panoramic view of Australian history.

Chauvel then focused on making a series of propaganda shorts for the Australian war effort including Soldiers Without Uniform (1942).

He died unexpectedly of coronary vascular disease on 11 November 1959, less than a month after Errol Flynn, whom he cast in In the Wake of the Bounty.