Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  ‘We had several creative meetings at New Line,’ notes Mark, ‘where, basically, no one took us particularly seriously! I’m sure Bob Shaye really thought Peter was very talented, but I don’t believe he really thought anything would come out of the Nightmare on Elm Street idea. But I was persistent and he let me do it and Peter turned in what was a really amazingly innovative script.’

  Meanwhile, an alternative script was also being developed by New Line staff member Michael De Luca, who had a proven track record on and around Elm Street, as Production Executive on the fifth Nightmare and Executive Consultant on the TV series Freddy’s Nightmares, as well as having scripted The Lawnmower Man, based on the story by Stephen King.

  Michael De Luca would eventually rise to the position of President and Chief Operating Officer of New Line Productions and, on the day in August 1998 when New Line announced their intention to produce The Lord of the Rings trilogy, would be quoted as saying: ‘Peter’s creative foresight, technological prowess, and passion for the project uniquely qualify him to translate one of the world’s most imaginative novels to the screen.’ Back in 1990, however, in the battle for the scripting of Elm Street 6, Mike De Luca was the clear favourite to win.

  When we learned that the other script was being written by Mike de Luca, we thought the writing was pretty much on the wall, but we knocked out our script very quickly and really just saw it as a quick gig as well as an opportunity to get paid some much-needed money.

  We were in this lull between finishing Feebles and hoping Braindead would get made. I wasn’t earning any money at all. In fact, Feebles had cost us money: we had put our own money into making the half-hour TV version of it and ended up putting our own money into finishing the feature-length version!

  So Freddy turned up at a very good time and helped me survive during a difficult year.

  Apart from the money, the Freddy experience had brought Peter into contact with other young American film-makers and given him an invaluable insight into the differences between power-brokering in Hollywood and the rather more parochial politics of the New Zealand film world.

  Ultimately, New Line went with Michael De Luca’s script and 1991 saw the release of Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare–though it was not quite final, since Freddy’s creator, Wes Craven, eventually returned to Elm Street to direct the true coda to the series, A New Nightmare.

  ‘Even though we didn’t make Peter’s version of Nightmare,’ reflects Mark, ‘it was enough to show Bob Shaye that this guy was as clever as I said he was! So, Peter went on to make Braindead–another one we didn’t buy…And Heavenly Creatures–but we didn’t buy that either! Eventually, however, our time would come!’

  I don’t recall feeling particularly devastated when we didn’t get our Freddy film made, because–pretty neatly as it turned out–by the time Mark was breaking the news that they were going with Mike De Luca’s script, Braindead was back on its feet and I was very happy about that. It was unfinished business and let me stay in New Zealand. It was not the last time a project came together at the eleventh hour and let me stay home instead of working in the US.

  The task of returning Braindead to the land of the living had not been easy. After various prospective investors had backed off, Jim Booth finally succeeded in securing finance from distribution pre-sales in Japan and an investment from Avalon Studios, once the staterun home of TV New Zealand.

  When they had opened in 1975, Avalon was the largest studio in the southern hemisphere–and known by a variety of nicknames including Buck House, The Factory and The Taj Mahal. The home of telethons and such popular game shows as Wheel of Fortune, Avalon had, at the time of its investment in Braindead, been recently privatised and as part of the deal the film was to be shot on their studio complex, which was a significant improvement on a flea-ridden, rat-infested railway shed!

  These two pictures have a special significance to me. My mother is walking me through the bush near Mt Egmont. She was great at creating off-the-cuff stories about the trolls in the woods or goblins who lived high in the branches. Here, I’m clearly captivated by a wild story she’s concocting–and thirty-five years later, here we are on the set of The Return of the King, with her son having turned those wild stories into something of a career. With a different mother, it would almost certainly never have happened. Her health was going downhill fast by this stage and, despite trying to hang on, she died just three days before The Fellowship of the Ring was finished. The first ever screening of the finished movie took place for my relations on the afternoon of Mum’s funeral. Dad had died in 1998, so neither of my parents, who had been so supportive, got to experience The Lord of the Rings craziness.

  LEFT: Me shooting a close-up of a creepy hand rising from a fogshrouded grave. I did this type of shot alone at night –aim the camera on the tripod, set it going, then quickly do the ‘hand acting’ in our family’s bath tub.

  BELOW: This is one photo that makes me pinch myself a little. I know the 21-year-old Peter was looking out across the Universal backlot, dreaming of becoming a ‘real film-maker’. In 1982, working in Hollywood was the only real option, but I had no idea how I was ever going to make it.

  I’ve always been the product of films I’ve seen and that have excited me. From Thunderbirds to King Kong, James Bond, WWII and Hammer Horror films, I spent my youth stockpiling the influences that I carry around as a film-maker today. Growing up with Harryhausen’s movies, seeing the animated The Lord of the Rings in 1978 and then reading the book, and the arrival of movies like Conan the Barbarian all resulted in me building this troll head in the early Eighties. I had just bought a 16mm camera and for a while the brutal barbarian vs. troll fight-scene was going to be my first 16mm movie. I built a complete troll suit but eventually I moved on to what became Bad Taste.

  I rented a sound camera from the National Film Unit for the first few days of filming Bad Taste. Holding that camera made me feel like a real film-maker–here I’m trying really hard to look like one too! Years later, when I bought the Film Unit and we sold off most of the old equipment, I made sure this camera was kept in the company for sentimental reasons.

  Fran in full zombie mode for Brain dead. The fun thing about making zombie films is how everyone, no matter how unlikely, gets into the spirit and wants to play a zombie. During Braindead, most of the crew and a lot of our friends and relatives came along to do the undead shuffle.

  Richard and Tania clowning around with Tim Balme at Cannes in 1992. We would head out each day at the crack of dawn, papering the entire town with Braindead flyers. Anything to get your movie noticed!

  One the puppets I made for Meet the Feebles. As crazy and tough as that film was, I loved being able to build some of the characters, although Cameron Chittock and Richard Taylor did most of the puppet work. Apart from making a few model trams for Braindead, it was the last time I’ve been able to be hands-on involved in the special effects–which is the reason I wanted to make films in the first place.

  Bad Taste was fuelled by the great Kiwi tradition of fish ‘n’ chips. Back in those days, it was all we ever ate!

  LEFT: During the period between Meet the Feebles and Braindead, I met a whole lot of people: some were idols who had influenced my life, like Ray Harryhausen, here at a German film festival; others were people who would become friends and profoundly affect my future.

  RIGHT: Film collector and passionate historian Bob Burns, who had just been presented with Baby Selwyn to look after in his museum in LA. Selwyn’s still there, and Bob came down to New Zealand recently to visit us and do a cameo during King Kong.

  LEFT: In 1990 I travelled to Turkey to visit the Gallipoli battlefields during the seventy-fifth anniversary. Here I am with an old tin can lid, found after scrambling up through the gorse of Shrapnel Gully. Being able to stand on ‘S Beach’, seventy-five years to the day after my grandfather stormed ashore there, was an emotional experience.

  LEFT: My thirty-fourth birthday on the set of The Frightene
rs.

  RIGHT: During our 1992 trip to Sitges, we visited the nearby Barcelona Zoo with Rick Baker, who introduced us to Snowflake, the world’s only albino gorilla. Snowflake had such a wonderful face and made a huge impression on us–to the point that we used him as our unofficial model when designing King Kong thirteen years later.

  LEFT: Our first draft of King Kong required a 1917 Sopwith Camel aircraft and I managed to track an airworthy example down. Trouble was, it arrived in New Zealand one day after Universal had shelved the movie! Putting the aircraft together provided a welcome diversion from the stress and, without a movie to star in, it has since become a regular performer at local air shows.

  Mum and Dad visiting the set of Heavenly Creatures in Lyttelton.

  The first award I ever received for The Lord of the Rings was a Bafta in 2002. In some respects it remains my fondest memory, since it was the David Lean Directing Award and it was presented by Kate Winslet–both had great personal significance for me. (Image courtesy of Dave Hogan/Getty Images)

  Christian Rivers and Richard Taylor get under way on a ‘Mum-monster’ hand for Braindead. Christian was a very young school kid who had written me a fan letter with some of his art. As a result, he did storyboards for all my movies from Braindead onwards, working at building up his skills with Richard and Weta’s digital department. This resulted in Christian winning an Oscar as an animation director on King Kong, fifteen years after this photo was taken. He supervised all aspects of Kong’s performance. Fran and I are currently working with Christian on a movie for him to direct.

  Despite the ‘bad boys’ reputation that Feebles had earned Jim and Peter at the New Zealand Film Commission, the request for production investment financing was given unbiased consideration. The script-assessment, which was to help the Commission reach a decision to support Braindead for the second time, was written by Costa Botes. After several pages of detailed analysis, he concluded:

  ‘The imagery in Braindead will be gross and violent, and will certainly be beyond the pale for many people. This film isn’t meant for them. For those who enjoy fantasy and horror genre pictures, there is still a fine line between tasteless crudity or cheap shock, and genuinely inspired black humour.

  ‘Peter Jackson has already demonstrated twice that he knows where to draw that line. Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles have both been notable for the positive reviews they have drawn from critics and audiences not normally responsive to splatter films. Part of the reason is that Jackson is a movie fan himself, an enthusiasm which equals his love of actually making films. He respects his audience, odd as that may sound, and is not at all interested in brutalising them. Humour, not brutality, is the abiding impression his films leave in the mind.

  ‘Jackson has no equal amongst New Zealand film-makers in terms of sheer bravura cinematic style. Braindead is full of opportunities for Jackson to unleash his manic brand of slapstick…but now, for the first time, he also has a cohesive script to work from.’

  The script Costa was assessing was Peter, Fran Walsh and Stephen Sinclair’s final revision of the material. As Costa Botes notes today, ‘There was clearly a massive shift in the quality of the writing preand post-Feebles. In the finished script of Braindead you see a definite move towards the classic paradigm of screenwriting. It was as if they had come away from that seminar by Robert McKee with a whole new bunch of tools and they were learning how to use them.’

  A crucial decision was that of moving the story from the present day back to the more innocent era of the 1950s.

  It meant that we could get away with a lot of hi-jinks that people would believe in to some degree–if ‘belief’ is the right word in connection with something like Braindead–because the Fifties is regarded as an age of innocence where boys could still live at home with their mother and not be scorned and when you could believe that unspeakable things could be going on behind the closed doors of suburbia, without the knowledge of the neighbours, let alone the rest of world…

  Stephen is an essentially satirical writer and part of his interest in Braindead was satirising the stiff, formal conventions of 1950s New Zealand society and then turning a load of zombies loose into that environment!

  Despite the fact that the film was being largely funded with New Zealand money, Peter, Fran and Stephen decided against reverting to the original scenario, which had featured a New Zealand girlfriend for Lionel. ‘Cathy’ had become ‘Paquita’ and even though there was now no requirement to maintain a ‘Spanish connection’, the writers considered that it gave the script an interesting and individual flavour and–since the story also featured Paquita’s mystical, tarotreading grandmother–a quirky touch of exoticism.

  Once the choice had been made to keep Paquita, it was then a simple decision to keep Diana Peñalver, the actress who, more than a year earlier, had been cast in the role. An inspired piece of casting, Diana added a charming sense of bemusement, as her character becomes embroiled in the unbelievable gruesome events unfolding at her boyfriend’s family home.

  Tim Balme, a stage and television actor, would make his impressive feature film debut in Braindead, playing Lionel Cosgrove.

  The role of Lionel’s domineering mother, Vera, went to Elizabeth Moody, an actress who was also known as a regular panellist on Beauty and the Beast, a popular TV show in which a team of four women and a token male gave agony-aunt advice to viewers’ problems.

  My mother was a big fan of Liz Moody because she was outrageous, opinionated and not the sort of person to suffer fools gladly. Liz was rather formidable but she was also funny, with a pretty dark sense of humour.

  She was the perfect choice to play the mother from hell! Later she would appear in Heavenly Creatures and play a cameo in The Fellowship of the Ring as Bilbo Baggins’ hated cousin, Lobelia Sackville-Bagg

  The cast also included Feebles’ voice artists Peter Vere-Jones and Brian Sergent (later Ted Sandyman in The Lord of the Rings) and another local actor who would go on to appear in Rings as the Orcs, Sharku and Snaga: Jed Brophy.

  The cameras rolled on Braindead for the first time on 3 September 1991. The Film Commission, with whom good relationships had been restored, sent two fax messages to the director on the first day of shooting. Commission Chairman, David Gascoigne wrote:

  ‘Dear Peter…This is to wish you and Jim and all your cast and crew the very best of luck with your despicable, rotten, appalling, disagreeable,

  Liz Moody disappears under alginate during her head-cast. Liz was a lot of fun to have around and gave us the perfect ‘Mum’ performance in Braindead. You certainly need a good sense of humour to go through this.

  agreeable, we-wish-we’d-never-heard-of-it project, Braindead. Actually, we are all looking forward to being soothed by its discreet charm and grace…’

  Another fax, signed by all the staff at the Commission, simply read: ‘Break a leg…and an arm…and a skull!!’

  Braindead was Peter’s first experience of directing professional actors (other than those who had provided the voices for the stars of Meet the Feebles), and he seems to have intuitively understood the process both in terms of what he required as director and what actors need to be given to do their job well.

  Former work-colleague, Ray Battersby, received a telephone call: ‘Want to be a zombie?’ and found himself on the set of Braindead. ‘Having previously watched him directing on Bad Taste, I was aware that he was now a “proper director”–professional, authoritative, obviously in control, but still the friendly guy who had directed his mates in Bad Taste. Perhaps that was part of his secret: having learned to deal with people–cast and crew–as friends.’

  Jed Brophy describes Peter’s directorial style: ‘There is no secondguessing how Peter will direct a scene, but he wants you, as an actor, to bring something to the set–some idea or approach with which he can work. The more you give him, the more he will let you give and, as a result, characterisations become fuller, more rounded. I remember him saying on Braindead that the actors
had made more of the characters than he could have imagined and he thrives on that approach. By the same token, Peter will shoot until he’s happy with what he has on film, which can be exhausting but which is also satisfying because, in the end, what is on film is the best that everyone can do. Peter is the only director I know who gets on screen what he has in his head. And I have never worked with a director who has had so much fun directing!’

  It was fun! It was a good time. I look back on both Feebles and Braindead as a time of great freedom, because the Film Commission funded these movies and, essentially, we had no masters.

  In the case of Braindead we were living in an era that had seen some classic zombie movies, such as Stuart Gordon’s film of H. P. Lovecraft’s Re-Animator and Sam Raimi’s brilliant comedy-horror movie, Evil Dead II. There was this great feeling of trying to top the previous zombie film –to go as far as possible beyond what they had done–and without any concern about what censorship or ratings were going to do to you: it just didn’t matter because these were always going to be un-rated films.