While he was grounded in the British documentary tradition, particularly during his years at the Australian National Film Board working under Ralph Foster and Stanley Hawes, he developed his own style noted for its lyrical quality.
In these early years he worked on such feature films as Heritage, Thoroughbred, White Death in which Zane Grey appeared, and Forty Thousand Horsemen.
During these apprenticeship years, he worked with some of Australia's most experienced directors and cinematographers, including Charles Chauvel, Arthur Higgins and Frank Hurley.
[1] However, his involvement in the film society movement during the height of the Cold War also brought him to the notice of ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, which suspected him of being a communist.
In an article in 1957, he praised Shell for being "the first entry of a major private sponsor into the production and distribution of films in Australia on a solid basis".
In an interview in 1976, he agreed that Shell's commitment to distribution, with its libraries and its vans fitted with projectors, was one of the issues that prompted his move from the Film Board.
[6] In 1967 he retired from Shell and set up the John Heyer Film Company through which he produced a series of documentaries including The Reef for the Australian Conservation Foundation.
In 1977, John Heyer had done extensive research to establish the predicted area the Pandora wreck was in and launched a discovery expedition with the help of Steve Domm.
Academics and critics have written extensively on his influences, citing particularly his work with Harry Watt on The Overlanders (1944–1945), his training in the Grierson tradition under Stanley Hawes at the Australian National Film Board (1945 1948), and his interest in the British, Russian and American documentaries of the 1930s and 1940s.
These films are good examples of the way Heyer engaged "the aesthetic strategies of [the] international documentary movement filtered through a particular Australian creative imagination".
[11] In other words, Heyer believed that documentary had to tell the truth about its subject but that it could use any of the tools at its disposal: re-enactment, drama, history, science.