Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  Had they but known it, Terry and Mike along with Pete, Craig and Ken, were getting themselves involved in a project that, whilst bringing them none of the usual trappings associated with being film stars, would at least give them cult-movie celebrity status. Almost twenty years on, they are still occasionally recognised and asked for autographs; Pete and Mike, particularly, are in frequent e-mail correspondence with fans all over the world, and Terry Potter, when attending the premiere of The Two Towers, was introduced to ‘the Hobbits’ and was amused to be greeted with bows from the young stars who happen to be keen fans of Bad Taste.

  Back in 1983, such goings-on would have been unimaginable. Most of the guys who helped Peter in pursuing his hobby thought of it as no more than that: a sometimes fun, sometimes boring way of spend a Sunday, hanging around with a few mates, playing at film-making and having a few beers at the end of the day.

  However, what the story of the making of Bad Taste shows – and confirms again and again – is that Peter Jackson was already developing the talents, displaying the personal philosophy and demonstrating the stamina and tenacity that would equip him to tackle The Lord of the Rings and sustain him through its making.

  ‘Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this little amateur movie,’ says Craig Smith, ‘is the way in which Peter was developing his skills as a film-maker, as a special effects artist – even as an actor. It is the story of someone developing his craft from scratch and necessity…’

  Over the best part of the next three years (specific datings are difficult due to the fragmentary nature of the way in which they worked and the inevitable haziness of people’s memories), Peter would succeed

  A home-made camera crane perched on the cliffs above Pukerua Bay. I had no way of actually seeing what I was shooting, so I’d point the camera in the basic direction and hope for the best. I’d find out how successful the shot had been when I looked at the 16mm print.

  in enthusing and involving work colleagues and friends (and often friends and relations of friends!) either as full- or part-time crew members or as ‘extras’ for those scenes involving the cannibal-cum-aliens.

  Peter built his own camera equipment including tracks and a dolly for moving the camera along the ground and a home-made version of a ‘Steadicam’ – a spring-loaded, weight-counterbalanced camera harness designed to allow the filming of action scenes in cinema-vérité – which, at the time, would have cost upwards of $40,000 but which Peter constructed for just ‘twenty bucks’! He also made an aluminium crane, ‘put together like a giant Meccano set’, that allowed – more or less! – professional-looking crane-shots…

  Once I’d mounted the 16mm camera on the end of the crane there was no way of looking through the lens, so I simply pointed in the general direction of the actors and hoped for the best! Actually, I discovered that if you used a wide-angle lens, then you’d generally get away with that sort of thing!

  Peter also created the film’s props, including a convincing-looking arsenal of weapons made out of aluminium tubing, cardboard and wood and ‘largely held together with glue!’ He particularly relished the opportunity to create the alien make-ups that were, had the world but known it, forerunners of the armies of prosthetic grotesques that would, one day, march out of Weta Workshop and onto the battlefields of Middle-earth! The foam latex was whisked up in his mother’s food-mixer and baked in the family oven – the size of which was the only constraint on Peter’s imagination…

  I sculpted the alien heads to a precise dimension so that I could squeeze them into the oven with about half-an-inch to spare – which is the evolutionary explanation for why the aliens all had somewhat flattened head shapes!

  As Joan Jackson would later recall, ‘Peter would often take over the whole kitchen. I’d have a menu planned for dinner and we’d end up

  This is the gang of photoengraving colleagues I rounded up for a scene in a crowded room. We shot it in one of the darkrooms after work on a Saturday. It was edited together with reverses of Craig in the barrel, which I shot in my parents’ garage. I used to buy old white shirts at the Salvation Army store and dye them blue – it was the cheapest alien wardrobe I could think of!

  having sausages under the grill because Peter was using the oven!’

  Peter’s diverse creativity and astonishing proficiency impressed those who knew him. Work colleague, Ray Battersby, who would briefly join the ranks of ‘Aliens 3rd Class’, recalls, ‘I was amazed at his confidence and authority on set. He was in total control, handling everything with complete aplomb. I should have known better than to have ever underestimated Peter, because he could turn his hand to just about anything: he was the Swiss army knife of creative ability!’

  Not content with his various creative responsibilities off-screen, Peter had also written himself into the action as the ‘scruffy, bearded, tramp-like character’ with the bayonet that attacks Giles on his arrival in Kaihoro. As anyone who has ever seen Peter demonstrating to actors how a scene is to be played, there can be little doubt that had he been subjected to one or two different influences or have been given some alternative opportunities to express his imagination and creativity, he might easily have been drawn to a career in acting.

  Week in, week out, on as regular a basis as possible, the guys got together and filmed. Around this time, Peter wrote, ‘I love writing, I love editing, I love dabbling in special effects, but organising everyone and getting out and filming is a real chore.’ Nevertheless he did and he got the other guys to do it, too.

  ‘After all these years,’ says Mike Minett, ‘we are all still talking about it and, of course, we always say what fun it was and how we all established this crazy, nutcase friendship…But we all had our lives and jobs and there were times when it was hard to get up on Sunday mornings – especially if it was cold or even raining – and go off filming. But Peter couldn’t afford not to film: he’d have got his pay-cheque and bought a few more reels of film. If he didn’t film, he’d get behind schedule. So, he had to do it – and we had to help him do it.’

  Craig Smith reflects, ‘I often ask myself what it was about Peter that made us all get involved and go along with his schemes. Peter was something of an oddball character, but then, the truth is, we were all oddball, nerdy fan-boys, hanging out together, going to movies and then trying to make a movie…But Peter had a knack for motivating people. I believe he felt completely secure in himself – he had inherent self-belief and was always totally focused – and those are qualities that attract other people like a magnet. That’s what kept hauling people in Sunday after Sunday.’

  Jamie Selkirk, Peter’s long-time editor and co-director of Weta Workshop, sees him as employing a similar, if refined, technique today: ‘Peter has a great knack for starting people off with something that is little more than the germ of an idea. He gets people excited and committed, draws them in further by soliciting their input and then develops and embellishes the idea to a stage where they’re hooked! Then he can push them, because he knows that once they’ve made a creative and emotional investment, they are unlikely to quit until they can deliver something with which both Peter and they are totally happy.’

  By the end of 1985, after a period of fifteen months, Giles’ Big Day had got substantially bigger…

  I didn’t have any editing equipment, so I just shot and shot and shot and stacked the film away under my bed. Although I knew that it wasn’t finished, I was still, at the time, thinking in terms of a ten- to fifteen-minute film.

  Eventually I took a week’s leave from work – I was only allowed three weeks off each year – went to the Film Unit and hired a little machine, called a Pic-sync editor, and a splicer for joining the cut footage and a pair of rewind arms so that I could manually wind back and forth through the film spools. I put the rewind arms on an old plank of wood, which I then clamped onto my parent’s dining-room table – for the week while I was editing, they had to eat off their laps in the lounge!

  I had shot four hours of
film and – by the end of the week – ended up with 55 minutes of edited footage. I was amazed, I’d no idea we had something that was almost already an hour long…There was a moment where I debated trying to cut it back down to the original ten- to fifteen-minutes, because I knew that there was always a possibility of showing a short movie at film festivals. On the other hand, no one would want a picture that ran for an hour – there was no market for it. It was a pivotal moment, but I figured, ‘I’ve only got another half an hour to go and I’ll have a full-length feature!’ So, all of a sudden, Giles’ Big Day was going to be a feature film…I was shocked, because I’d never even considered the idea until that point.

  If the little amateur movie was now to run to feature-film length then clearly an injection of cash was required to make that possible. To date, Giles’ Big Day had cost $8,500 (of which Peter had invested $8,000 and Ken Hammon $500) and Peter decided to turn for help to the New Zealand Film Commission. The founding of the Commission, less than a decade before, had been based on a series of proposals written on behalf of the Cultural Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs by Jim Booth, later assistant director of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand and a man who was to play a significant role in the shaping of Peter Jackson’s career.

  Jim Booth’s proposals were for a Film Commission that would be totally ‘market-orientated’ as opposed to the government-sponsored film-making undertaken by the National Film Unit (where, as a schoolleaver Peter had gone in search of employment) or the funding of experimental films, which was to be left to the Arts Council.

  The Film Commission was to be run ‘strictly on an investment basis with an eye very firmly on the market’, investing in the production of films – for television and theatre – that, in addition to generating income, would provide ‘cinematograph expressions particular to New Zealand’ as opposed to what was seen as being a ‘largely unrelieved diet of films from foreign cultures.’ In addition it was hoped that such films would ‘do much to announce the existence of New Zealand to the world at large’.

  Jim Booth, the author of these plans, had become Executive Director of the New Zealand Film Commission in 1983 and it was two years later – on 18th January 1985 – that a fifty-five-minute videotape and a nineteen-page document entitled Giles’ Big Day arrived on his desk from a ‘Peter Robert Jackson (copyright owner)’ who was applying for $7,000 ‘to assist the completion of filming on a low-budget 16mm Feature Film’. On the following page, the applicant refined that definition to ‘Ultra low budget,’ and went on: ‘I would be tempted to call it zero-budget if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’ve put $8,000 of my own money into it.’

  It was to be the beginning of an exchange of correspondence that would eventually bring about a break-through in Peter’s long-held ambitions to be a film-maker, but which, again and again, demonstrate the extent to which the determination and tenacity that would become hallmarks of the Jackson personality were already firmly established.

  Peter’s letters to Jim show him to have been a young man with strongly held views that he was not afraid of expressing, with belief in his skills and abilities – articulated with self-affirming confidence but also a total absence of arrogance – and with a positive, upbeat philosophy of life that was undimmed by momentary disappointment. The occasional typos and spelling errors have been corrected – ‘(excuse the mistakes)’ he added in pen at the bottom of the nineteenth page – the italics, where used, are my own.

  By way of introduction, Peter offered the following self-portrait: ‘I am 23 years old and all I want to do is make movies. I’ve always been keen on films, especially ones of the fantasy/horror genres. Special

  My bedroom in my early twenties, already starting to groan under the weight of geekdom books and videos.

  effects have long been a fascination, ever since being exposed to Thunderbirds at the age of 5. All I wanted to be when I was a little boy was a special effects man. Fortunately I didn’t just dream, I grabbed Plasticine and started making monsters and masks when I was still at Pukerua Bay Primary School. It is this grounding that I’m finding so useful now…’

  Of the film he was attempting to make, Peter wrote: ‘The movie is science-fiction/horror film with large doses of extremely black humour, some of which is quite tasteless. It is science-fiction but not in the connotations that most people have with that term (i.e. Star Wars, Doctor Who etc.) The horror is mainly in the gore field. We sacrificed potential “scariness” for humour at an early stage…’

  As his mother would later report: ‘I didn’t think it would be quite so gory as what it is, but then as Peter said: “There’s a laugh with every drop of blood, Mum. There are laughs…” I know him very well, he’s always had a great sense of humour, I think that’s his forte, but he covered it with horror, too…’

  Despite its laughs, Peter stressed that the story, had ‘its moments of suspense’ and was ‘aimed directly at the Monty Python/Animal House punters, as well as the standard sci-fi/horror buff. Someone who goes to Friday the 13th to enjoy eight inventive murders will have plenty to drool over in our film.’ Lest the concept of drooling over grisly deaths strike a wrong chord, he added a disclaimer of the kind usually displayed on films in connection with the treatment of animals: ‘Having said that, I must make the point that NO women get killed or threatened in the film.’ His point, and it is the redeeming feature of the eventual messiness that is Bad Taste, was that not only were its horrors tempered by humour, but that the film could in no way be accused of being exploitational.

  Peter provided details of those involved in the project and what, to date, had been achieved. ‘Continually giving up Sundays over such a long period of time is a lot to expect of a fairly large group, and it is to everyone’s credit that interest and enthusiasm has hardly waned since the start. In fact it is stronger than ever now as in the last couple of months everyone has suddenly realised that it is GETTING SERIOUS.’

  However, he went on to explain, he was now facing problems: the film contained a great many special effects and he simply did not have the time during the week to get everything made and ready for the following Sunday’s shoot and the other guys in the group couldn’t assist either because they didn’t live close enough to ‘pop around’, had wives and families to think about or lived in flats that didn’t have sufficient space to work. ‘Above all is the simple fact that the work is so complex and requires a knowledge of materials and techniques that takes a long time to develop, as well as a fairly high level of artistic skill.’

  Lest the point hadn’t been clearly enough expressed, he added – using words that have a prophetic ring when one remembers the level of personal control exercised over every facet of the filming of The Lord of the Rings – ‘I also like to be in complete control of the look and quality of the stuff that goes on screen.’

  One can only speculate on the picture of Peter Jackson which must have begun to form in the mind of Jim Booth, before he even reached ‘The Proposal’ which was for $7,000 to enable him to take four months unpaid leave and work on ‘the extensive make-up and visual effects that form the last thirty-five minutes of our already partially completed feature.’

  The figure proposed comprised $4,200 for sixty rolls of film and $2,800 which would give him $175 a week for sixteen weeks: a sum that would be spent on board and keep to his parents and the purchasing of essential materials: ‘paint, timber, latex, fibreglass, and sundries like glue, screws, cables etc.’ Although it was apparently not possible to give a detailed breakdown of these costs, Peter, happily announced, ‘All I know is that $175 per week will be quite adequate to produce the goodies I’ve got in mind.’

  About one thing, Peter was adamant: ‘A loan of the type that has to be repaid within twelve months, or whatever, is something I have no interest in. I have enough on my plate getting the film finished without having to worry about big debts…I realise that the whole financial aspect of producing a feature film is something I am going
to have to face up to at some stage, with legal agreements, copyrights and everything else involved sorted out, but I want to shield myself from that side of things as much as possible until we have completed filming. It is far more important for me to concentrate on next Sunday’s camera angles, with as few distractions as possible.’

  A detailed synopsis of the ‘Plot – Part One (filmed)’ ran to five pages while ‘Part Two (unfilmed)’ took up six pages, which really ought to have suggested that the action described was likely to run for somewhat longer than the promised thirty-five minutes! The action-packed conclusion of the film featured Giles making a crazy thrill-ride escape down the gully of a stream (inspired by a scene in Romancing the Stone), an elaborate sequence involving an alien spaceship, a flying ‘chair type thing’, and an encounter with a ‘vaguely humanoid creature’ that would have been brought to life with stop-frame animation. Called ‘the feared Troppe Marcher of Om’, it was described as ‘standing there, all seven feet and pointy teeth’! The dénouement saw Giles defeating the Troppe Marcher, destroying the aliens and their spacecraft and concluded with the revelation that even though he lost his job (having failed to collect sufficient charity

  The vomit drinking scene. I had somebody help me mix the green gloop, which I’d prepared with food colouring, yoghurt and diced vegetables. I remember taking a look at it and suggesting to somebody it needed thickening up. Unbeknownst to me, they went into the garden and added handfuls of dirt – unbeknownst to them, I needed it to be consumed by our hungry aliens, so they all ended up drinking something similar to thick green mud. I had no idea why people complained about the horrible taste!