Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  After my twenty-first birthday, Ken and I travelled to LA to attend a sci-fi convention. Getting an autograph from Dave ‘Darth Vader’ Prowse was a thrill, especially since he was also in some of my beloved Hammer horror movies.

  within walking distance! We discovered that was not quite the case. We had absolutely no money to hire taxis or drivers.

  They visited all the Hollywood tourists sites and several less well-known ones: ‘We took long foot tours,’ recalls Ken. ‘We walked miles and Peter never got lost, though he’d never tell me where we were going until we got there! One route march ended outside St Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank with Peter announcing, “That’s where Walt Disney died”!’

  They went to the rather better known Disney memorial, the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim where Peter was sufficiently delighted by the mix of fantasy and futurism to immediately decide to make a return visit on the following day, while the less-enamoured Ken opted, instead, for a day by the swimming pool.

  The Hollywood trip was perhaps the final spur needed to goad Peter Jackson onto the course that would eventually determine his career. The dream factories that produced the films and television shows that he loved were now real places as opposed to being part of some remote other world on the other side of the globe. He returned to Wellington and his photoengraving job with his film-making ambitions strengthened.

  One lunch break I happened to be walking past a photo-shop, next to the old Regent Theatre in town. The shop sold various second-hand movie-gear and I always stopped and looked in the window. On this particular day, I saw a Bolex 16mm camera with a big zoom lens. I’d read about them in magazines, but I’d never seen one before and now, suddenly, here was one sitting in the window of a Wellington shop. I was virtually trembling with excitement.

  The Bolex camera was light and easy to handle. It was spring loaded so all you had to do was wind it up and you were then ready to shoot up to thirty seconds of 16mm footage. A second-hand Bolex was a rare find in New Zealand and it was exactly what I needed if I was to make real progress with my film-making. I could abandon the Super 8 footage we’d shot on Gravewalker and start something new. There was only one problem: the price ticket on the Bolex was for $2,500 NZ, not a small sum today and, in 1982, a fortune. Two-and-a-half grand! There was no way that I could have saved that kind of money from my job on the paper.

  I raced home and I begged my parents if they could possibly lend me the money. They gave me a loan – which I don’t think I ever repaid! – and I rushed back to the shop and bought the camera. The feeling of holding it – owning it – was incredibly, unbelievably exciting! That kind of support from your parents is so important, and that loan was the most significant thing my mum and dad did to help me become a film-maker. When I won the Oscar for Best Director, I did what has become almost a joke – thank my parents. But for me, just saying their names – Joan and Bill Jackson – on Oscar night had a personal meaning to me that nobody could ever really understand.

  It wasn’t long, however, before Peter realised that using a 16mm camera would necessarily involve serious on-going financial commitments. One reason for the initial popularity of 8mm film was that developing the film stock, using what is called a ‘reversal’ process, gave a positive print (rather than a negative) that could be immediately projected and viewed – which was ideal for the home-movie enthusiast. The drawbacks for anyone with serious film-making ambitions were that, without a negative, any attempt at editing film was fairly irrevocable and, whilst a negative could be made from the print, doing so involved serious loss of quality.

  In comparison, film shot on a 16mm camera could either use filmstock that employed a similar ‘reversal’ process to 8mm or film that could be developed using a ‘negative/positive’ process resulting in a ‘master’ negative from which a print could be struck in order for the film to be edited. Then, once the edit had been complete, the negative itself would be cut to match and prints of the finished film would be struck.

  Super 8 cartridges, giving you three minutes of film each cost three to four dollars. To get the equivalent three minutes on 16mm, I discovered, would cost twenty times as much! It was a painful realisation that every time I loaded a 100-foot roll of film it was going to cost $100 to buy the negative and make a print. This was serious money: I couldn’t just muck around with this camera, popping-off shots without thinking. From the get-go I really had to have a plan!

  So I bought one roll of film and shot some trial footage in order to learn how the camera worked: finding out about speed controls and how to read light-metres and set exposures. There was a lot to learn – all the things that I’d not had to even think about with the Super 8 cameras. That was a $70 experiment, but I was determined that when I bought the next roll of film, I wasn’t going to waste more money on ideas that didn’t lead anywhere. I decided I was going to make a little ten-minute film: something short and entertaining that I could hopefully enter into festivals.

  That, however, wasn’t quite how it would work out…

  Roast of the Day is what it was going to be called and it was a nice little Jacksonish joke: Giles Copeland, a young man employed by a food-processing company, drives into a sleepy little New Zealand town and begins a door-to-door collection of envelopes for an annual charity-appeal organised by his employers.

  Giles’ firm uses its sponsorship of the nationwide famine-relief appeal as a blatant public relations exercise and employees are promoted or demoted depending upon the amount they manage to solicit from the public.

  Giles, a formerly not-too-successful collector, has been given the ‘wop-wops’ run of small coastal towns miles from anywhere and it his last chance to show what he can do…It just so happens that collection-day is 31 October – Peter Jackson’s birthday but, more to the point, Halloween!

  Although Giles manages to collect a number of envelopes pinned to the doorframes of the houses, the town seems unaccountably – even eerily – deserted. Then he notices ‘a scruffy, bearded, tramp-like character’ eating a squashed possum off the road. On spotting Giles, this unsavoury character becomes a homicidal lunatic, producing a bayonet and lurching menacingly towards him. Only just succeeding in making a getaway in his car, Giles stops at a large mansion – hoping to pick up an envelope ‘bulging with green ones’ – only to find that he has stumbled into the den of cannibal-aliens-in-human-form for whom he is destined to provide first-hand famine-relief as their ‘roast of the day’.

  The services of Ken Hammon were once again enlisted and Ken, who at this time was working for a housing association in Porirua, inducted a work-colleague, Craig Smith, into the project to play Giles. In fact, Craig was another former Kapiti College student, although in

  Bad Taste shoot – Day One, 27 October 1983. At this point in time I thought we would be shooting for a few weeks to make a ten-minute short called Roast of the Day. One of my photoengraving mates, Phil Lamey, was there helping with the camera, along with Craig Smith and Ken Hammon.

  a different year to Ken and Peter. ‘My only memory of Peter at school,’ recalls Craig, ‘was when the television programme, Spot On, launched its contest for young film-makers and I went to one of the classrooms where you could pick up a leaflet and entry-form. Peter happened to be there and when he heard me ask for the form, he said, “Ah-ha! Competition!” That’s the last we saw of each other until I got involved in Roast of the Day.’

  Craig was deemed a positive asset to the production by virtue of the fact that, unlike most of the cast-members of Peter’s earlier films, he was an accomplished amateur actor with aspirations to enter the profession: ‘At school I’d appeared in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (my portrayal of Pharaoh is still being talked about today!) and I’d also been in several productions by the local repertory company, The Kapiti Players: I was the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, the Second Voice in Under Milk Wood and as for my Big Bad Wolf – well, all I can say is they loved me!’

  Ken Hammon and Pete
O’Herne were among the first members of the film crew when shooting began on 27 October 1983 in Makara, not far from Wellington, with a shot of Giles consulting a road sign. The signpost (complete with AA logos) had been made by Peter and looked sufficiently authentic to cause a memorable brush with the law. With the shot in the can, the team were taking down the sign when they were spotted by a public-spirited citizen who decided to report their act of vandalism to the local police!

  Fortunately the crew were easily able to show that the sign was their own as opposed to public property, if only because of the clearly made-up destinations: in one direction, ‘Castle Rock’ (a place-name in a story in Stephen King’s comic-book, Creepshow, and the recently-released George Romero film of the same name); and, in the other direction, the place where, unwittingly, Giles was to meet his grisly end – ‘Kaihoro’, a tasteful little joke inspired by a Maori word meaning to ‘eat greedily’!

  That was the beginning. But only the beginning…

  Craig Smith reflects, ‘It had all seemed nice, clean, simple and easy: six weeks work tops and we were out of there. But, if there is no script, if it’s not locked down then – whether it’s a five-cent

  A moment captured at work at the Evening Post – it was what we did to fill in the days!

  movie or a million-dollar movie – anarchy ensues!’

  Today, Peter Jackson would probably agree (although his films have tended to allow for a greater degree of script flexibility than other directors); at the time, however, the film featured few dialogue scenes and his approach was one of shooting from a storyboard of mental images: ‘There has never been a script,’ he would tell the New Zealand Film Commission after fifteen months of filming. ‘There has simply been no need for a script. I have gone to the locations with every shot, every angle in my head. I just direct the others according to my plan.’

  The process by which Roast of the Day grew – or, to use a better word, mutated – into what would eventually become the cult movie, Bad Taste, is a intriguing, often bewildering, saga of plot developments and restructurings the full, intricate complexity of which are probably only of interest to the most devoted Bad Taste fans and are already chronicled on a variety of internet web-sites.

  Suffice it to say, as Craig Smith puts it, that ‘once Pete got the bit

  At one point I started drawing caricatures of my Evening Post workmates, including a self-portrait (bottom left).

  between his teeth – he just kept throwing more and more ideas into it.’

  ‘It just kept going,’ recalls Pete O’Herne, ‘building and building until for some of us – though probably not for Peter – it all started to blur!’ Twists and turns developed, details and gags were added and, says Ken Hammon, with no script, there was an inevitable tendency ‘for simple sequences to end up much more elaborate than planned.’

  I kept shooting, shooting, every weekend and then I’d go into the Evening Post to do my job all week long and I’d be sitting there, bored, thinking up ideas for the next weekend’s filming. It was a classic ‘make it up as you go along’ situation – and I had all week to make it up, before the next weekend’s shooting would happen. That thinking time always led to my coming up with something new that I’d get excited about and, in that way, the story kept expanding.

  Progress, however, was intermittent and entirely driven by what I could afford from my weekly pay packet. I would save up several hundred dollars in order to buy four or five rolls of film, we’d shoot for a day and use them all up and then I’d realise that I couldn’t afford to process the film, so I’d have to put them in the fridge until I’d get my next wagecheck and could afford to put the film into the lab for processing. But having to pay the lab-bill meant that I then wasn’t able to buy any film for the following week, so I’d lose another weekend’s filming and would have to wait for another pay-cheque in order to buy some more rolls of film.

  Nevertheless, new sequences continued to be shot at a variety of locations around Pukerua Bay, including the historic Gear Homestead in Porirua, which served as the cannibals’ mansion. An elegant, whitepainted, clapboard house with a colonnaded veranda, the Homestead had been built in 1882 by New Zealand tycoon James Gear whose

  Gear Homestead near Porirua served as the main location for Bad Taste. My parents knew the caretakers and they kindly gave us free access during the weekends when there weren’t weddings in the garden, which was the principal use of the old dwelling.

  fortune had come from the Gear Meat Preserving and Freezing Company – an appropriate sponsor for Roast of the Day!

  Gear Homestead was administered by the local council but Peter’s father happened to know the caretakers and arranged for ‘the boys’ – as Peter and his friends were referred to in the Jackson household – to shoot there on ‘three or four occasions’, although, by the time the film was completed, the number of filming days in or around the house had risen to a figure closer to thirty or forty!

  Roast of the Day briefly became Sapien Alfresco before acquiring a new working-title of Giles’ Big Day. A major development in the plot occurred when the cannibals became invading aliens hoping to make earth a source of fast food for the people of their planet who were otherwise forced to live on guinea-pigs! Then the S.A.S. suddenly burst onto the scene. When making The Lord of the Rings, Peter would discover that a member of his cast – Christopher Lee – was a former member of the 22nd Regiment, the Special Air Service (Motto: ‘Who dares Wins’), but he had long been fascinated by stories about the exploits of the S.A.S. and they soon had a key role to play in Giles’ Big Day.

  The SAS appearance in Bad Taste is directly linked to the siege of the Iranian embassy in London, which occurred while we were making the movie. I saw the TV images of these guys storming the building and put them in the movie!

  Peter came up with the idea of a bunch of balaclava-wearing S.A.S operatives storming the house and rescuing Giles who was gently marinating in a barrel of herbs and vegetables with an apple stuck in his mouth! However, there was a twist: although the S.A.S. seem to be helping Giles to escape from the alien-cannibals and are seen killing

  RIGHT: This is the original Mark One design for the Bad Taste aliens. In the midEighties, American Werewolf in London had come out with Rick Baker’s brilliant transforming latex ‘change-o-heads’. I tried to copy that with these designs, which were based on the idea that the S.A.S. rescuers would actually transform into aliens. Everything, including plot and designs, got overhauled following Craig’s exit from the project.

  his captors, it is nothing more than a cruel joke since the rescuers eventually turn into aliens who have simply been enjoying themselves by ‘playing with their food’!

  The involvement of the S.A.S. required additional cast and, in addition to Pete O’Herne, Peter Jackson enlisted the help of two work colleagues at Wellington Newspapers: Mike Minett and Terry Potter. ‘The rest of us,’ recalls Mike, ‘were into sex, drugs and rock-and-roll but Peter was just this nice, adorable guy who loved his mum and dad and was really into making movies.’

  ‘I really liked Peter,’ says Terry Potter, ‘I liked his sense of humour.’ Legend has it that a sign appeared in the process department of Wellington Newspapers that read: ‘Who needs drugs when you’ve got Peter Jackson?’ There were the occasional practical jokes – paper bats in the darkrooms, larks with home-made tarantulas – but those who knew Peter at the time recall him not so much as an ‘outright funny guy’ as someone with an engagingly quirky way of looking at things: an off-the-wall take on life seen in the Monty Python TV shows and the surreal films of The Beatles, whose music he adored.

  Peter’s love of The Beatles was shared by another Post colleague, Ray Battersby (with whom he later planned to make a TV documentary on The Beatles’ visit to Wellington), and Mike Minett who, as a member of a local rock band – ‘almost everybody belonged to a band in those days’ – had taped his own versions of some Beatles numbers on his four-track recorder: ‘Pete heard them a
nd spent several lunch breaks – while the rest of us were sitting around playing cards – attempting to add the vocal track. He was enthusiastic and knew all the lyrics but, unfortunately, couldn’t sing for shit!’

  Years later, when the Howard Shore soundtrack for The Fellowship of the Ring was being recorded at London’s Abbey Road Studios, Peter and Howard along with Recording Engineer John Kurlander (who had worked on the Beatles’ Abbey Road album) and Associate Producer, Rick Porras, paid homage to the iconic coverimage of the 1969 album by posing for a photograph while striding across the famous nearby zebra-crossing. But long before that, as we shall see, The Beatles would have a fleeting connection with Bad Taste…

  Mike after a hard night out on the town. I had to be careful with my camera angles on that day. Something very similar happened years later on LOTR with Viggo Mortensen, except that was due to an encounter with a surf board, not a fist!

  Apart from his Beatlemania, the driving passion in his life was film. ‘He was always talking about movies,’ remembers Mike Minett. ‘It was movies, movies, movies!’

  ‘In the end,’ recalls Terry

  Potter who admits to not being much of a cinemagoer before meeting Peter, ‘he talked us all into liking movies and, eventually into making movies. It started out with our lending a hand when he needed people to help with transport and carrying equipment: it really wasn’t that much hassle and, after a bit, we started enjoying it.’

  ‘There were times,’ says Mike, ‘when it was terminally boring. It would be: “Just ten minutes more…” “Not long now…” “Almost ready…” We’d be waiting and waiting till it was all boredom, boredom! Then, instead of just helping out as crew, we got the chance to be in front of the camera!’