Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  We kept refusing to make a decision–kept putting it off–because we really felt in our hearts that none of the shortlisted actresses were really going to be right for the film. I remember Fran getting so frustrated and saying, ‘This film really relies on the perfect bit of casting and we haven’t got it, Peter, we haven’t got it!’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t think we have…’

  We realised that we were probably going to have to work with someone who had never acted before, which was scary for two reasons: not just the fact that she hadn’t acted, but also we still had to find her.

  It was just absolute, utter despair.

  While Liz Mullane resumed her search in Auckland, Fran decided to get personally involved in the search, telling Peter, ‘Well, I’m just going to go out there and find her!’

  Accompanied by Bryce Campbell, who was one of the Campbell brothers in whose house the first version of Meet the Feebles had been filmed, Fran set off with a map, a mobile phone, a pile of telephone directories and a video camera. As they approached a town, Fran

  Fran and I outside the old Christchurch Girls High building during the 1993 production of Heavenly Creatures, with our movie class ‘3A’.

  would call ahead to the local schools, explain what they were doing and ask whether they had any 15-year-old, dark-haired pupils who might have done some amateur dramatics and, if so, whether she could meet them.

  The response from the schools was positive, with Fran meeting a number of girls who, if they seemed at all likely, would be given an instant audition on video with Bryce operating the camera. After about three days on the road, they arrived in New Plymouth and were invited to meet the pupils of the Girls’ High School. Fran walked into a room full of 15-year-olds, saw a particular girl sitting in the class and asked if she might talk with her?

  The girl’s name was Melanie Lynskey. She had taken part in some school dramatics and was interested in acting. On went the video camera…

  I was in Christchurch in the middle of pre-production, gearing up to make the movie, and Fran phoned me up and said, ‘I think I might have found her, I think I’ve found our Pauline! But, we’ve got to figure out if she can act.’

  Fran got parental permission for Melanie to fly to Christchurch in order to meet Peter. Deciding that it would be unfair to expect Melanie to audition again without some tuition, Peter and Fran asked their friend, actress and director Miranda Harcourt, to provide some coaching. Miranda (who had played the role of Pauline’s mother in the Wellington production of the stage play, Daughters of Heaven) took Melanie to the original girls’ high school building, which was no longer being used for teaching, and talked to her about Pauline’s character and the mood of the story.

  Peter was pleased with the results: Melanie was a novice, but also clearly had a quality that was suited to Pauline’s intense–‘outsider’– temperament. However, Melanie flew home to New Plymouth without knowing whether she had won the role as Peter and Fran had not wanted to build up her hopes in case her parents, not unreasonably, baulked at having their 15-year-old daughter plucked out of school in order to fly several hundred miles away for twelve weeks of filming. It was an anxious moment when–in the midst of a research trip to the local tram museum–Peter put in a telephone call to Melanie’s mother.

  I told Mrs Lynskey we wanted Mel to be in the movie but that before we spoke to her we wanted to know how her parents felt about it. She had just the right sort of attitude and said how proud and pleased they would be. And then she handed the phone to Mel and I said, ‘You’ve got the part, Mel, you’re going to be in the film.’ It was a great moment and someone snapped a photograph of me making that vital phone call!

  A few days later, Fran and I took Kate Winslet to Christchurch airport to meet Mel’s plane and, as she walked off the aircraft, Kate rushed up and gave her a huge hug!

  The two girls quickly bonded and the more experienced Kate took Melanie under her wing and was generous and supportive to her coperformer. Kate’s maturity and Melanie’s willingness to learn was combined with a great deal of care shown towards both girls–in loco

  Kate Winslet and Mel Lynskey came to Heavenly Creatures with differing levels of experience, but both were fearless when they tackled the tough scenes. As much as I try to help cast members capture the right moment on film, I’m learning such a lot about acting and directing with every movie. Movie-making is one continual film school.

  parentis–by Peter and Fran as well as by Jim Booth and his partner, Sue Rogers. Several things inevitably followed: Heavenly Creatures featured two outstanding juvenile performances, Kate Winslet moved a little closer to that stardom which John Hubbard had foreseen for her and Melanie Lynskey took her own tentative steps towards a notable screen career.

  The film reunited Peter with several members of the crew of Braindead, including (in addition to Jamie Selkirk and Richard Taylor) make-up supervisor Marjory Hamlin; stills photographer Pierre Vinet; storyboard artist Christian Rivers; sound mixer Mike Hedges; sound editor Mike Hopkins; sound recordist Hammond Peek; and production assistant Linda Klein-Nixon. All of these individuals would still be working with Peter when he came to direct The Lord of the Rings, as would several of the ‘newcomers’ to the team, among them production designer, Grant Major; costume designer Ngila Dickson, and first assistant director Carolynne (‘Caro’) Cunningham.

  On set with my first assistant director Carolynne Cunningham. Caro has been a terrific support to me, steering us through the complex filming of The Lord of the Rings. She recently produced King Kong with Jan Blenkin.

  There’s a tradition in New Zealand that requires a film crew to cross dress on one day of the shoot–‘Frock Day’. We generally have a hard time keeping a straight face–although here we’re shooting one of the film’s most intense scenes.

  The film’s exquisite cinematography was by Alun Bollinger, who would work on Peter’s next two movies, while the Steadicam-operator, John Mahaffie, would later serve as second unit director on Rings. This extraordinary role-call–and the fact that many of these people have since continued the association by working on King Kong–is a testament to the two-way loyalty that Peter both exhibits and generates.

  In the week before shooting began, Peter and Fran took Kate and Melanie to meet some of Pauline and Juliet’s school contemporaries whom they had interviewed while researching the film. It was a unique form of preparation for the young actresses, helping them inhabit their roles.

  Kate asked one of the friends how Juliet walked and she described her as having a slightly haughty way of walking. I remember Kate saying, ‘Show me, show me!’ and the woman giving a demonstration and Kate learning how to walk like Juliet there and then in the lounge of one of her former school friends.

  Anxious to help the girls over the daunting practicalities of being on a film shoot, Peter preceded the first day’s filming with a dummy first day’s filming.

  There is a certain amount of learning and familiarisation that you need to get over before you actually start shooting a movie–needing to understand that you are really going to be in the camera, on film–and I didn’t want the first time that the girls had ever experienced a film crew to be our first day of shooting.

  So, we set up a whole day’s filming, not using the real script or the real locations, but simulating all the conditions of being involved in a film, which was especially important for Mel who had never been on a film set before in her life.

  In proposing Heavenly Creatures to the Film Commission, Peter had written: ‘Heavenly Creatures will be a very hard film to make. Every day will provide many challenges: difficult scenes to be shot, difficult decisions to be made. The characters are wonderfully complex. They have great emotional depth. Directing the film will keep me on my toes all the time, while also providing the chance to develop my film-making skills way beyond anything I’ve yet attempted.’

  Acknowledging the existence of those challenges shows considerable maturity and self-awareness. Meeting the
m with confidence was already the ‘Jackson way’. Which is not to say that filming certain sequences of this particular story didn’t present tensions and anxieties and none more so than when it came to recreating Pauline and Juliet’s murder of Honora Parker.

  Arriving on location at Christchurch’s Victoria Park, Peter and Fran followed in the steps of victim and murderesses on that fatal day in 1954.

  The track down the hill from the tea-rooms was, and is, still there. It hasn’t changed from the day of the killing. We walked down the path and knew exactly where the murder had taken place. We had read the police files and we were able to identify the precise location. As Fran and I stood on the murder site we knew that there was no way that we could recreate the murder on the spot where it happened. The place had a weird vibe and energy, and I just couldn’t face the idea of staging the scene there.

  So we found another, identical-looking path on another hillside in the park. It was enough that we were recreating the murder on film; to do that in the place where it had really happened would have been going too far…

  As it was, the murder scene was the one episode that everybody was beginning to get stressed about filming. Kate, Melanie and Sarah Peirse were already gearing themselves up for the sequence and Peter had felt ‘the tension starting to build up’ before they arrived at the Victoria Park location. There were several scenes to be shot in the park: Honora and the girls having tea in the tea-rooms, the trio walking down the path, the moment when the girls rush back, covered in blood and, finally, the murder itself. On the weekend before shooting was to begin, Peter telephoned Jim Booth.

  I told Jim that I wanted to film the murder first thing on Monday. I asked him to alert Make-up and Wardrobe, but that nobody was to tell

  In the world of low-budget films, you can’t afford more than one costume–so I wanted to make sure the bloodstains on Kate’s coat were what I imagined them to be.

  Sarah or the girls. I didn’t want to give them those extra few days to get themselves wound up about it. So, we surprised them: they thought they were going to be shooting the scene in the tea-rooms, and I went into their trailers and told them we were going to shoot the murder right now, and get it over and done with. It was very, very emotional…It took all day, and by the time the scene was finished that evening, everyone was a wreck.

  I had filmed lots of deaths in Bad Taste, Braindead–even Meet the Feebles–but they were different, they were make-believe: this was a scene recreated from real life. Not only that, but we had become immersed in the lives of these people and we felt what I guess I can only describe as guilt. There’s no way round it: you are making a movie, which is ultimately designed as a piece of entertainment and yet, at the same time, it is based on somebody’s murder; you can’t help but feel that you are exploiting those people who were affected by that murder and especially those who are still alive.

  I guess we justified it by saying to ourselves that if we are going to do this film we had to make it as real and truthful as possible; that, after forty years of this killing being described as inexplicable and the girls as being evil, if we could somehow show what happened and what was in their minds–and why it was in their minds–and what state they had wound themselves up into in order to do this, then maybe we could actually bring a level of understanding to the case that had perplexed people for so long.

  The search for truthfulness became of paramount importance to the film-makers with even the script’s fantastical episodes being inspired by the events and characters depicted in the romantic fairy-tale entries from Pauline’s diaries and eyewitness descriptions of the girls’ Plasticine figures.

  We got to a point where we didn’t want to make anything up or put anything in the movie just because it suited us. I was reminded, much later, of the experience of making Heavenly Creatures when we made The Lord of the Rings.

  With Rings, we were constrained by the book–and maybe we broke the shackles of the book more often than we should have done–but with Heavenly Creatures, whilst it wasn’t adapted from a book, we were basing it on our researches into the real life events to an extent that we ended up with our own version of a Tolkienesque bible that we then had to stick to when making the film.

  Despite their desire to be true to the historic events, Peter and Fran had decided not to seek out any of the surviving members of the families nor indeed to attempt to communicate with the girls themselves.

  They had become aware of the names under which Pauline and Juliet were living following their release from prison when, during their researches, they were inadvertently shown files that should not have been made available to them. In his first approach to the Film Commission in May 1992, Peter stated, ‘In the course of my research, I uncovered Pauline and Juliet’s new identities and their whereabouts. I have no intention of contacting them and will keep the information totally confidential. They are entitled to their privacy.’

  The revelation, made in the wake of the film, that Juliet Hulme was now living in Scotland as Anne Perry, a highly successful writer of period crime fiction, and the subsequent discovery, a few years later, that Pauline Parker was now Hilary Nathan, a retired schoolteacher living in a Kentish village in Britain, reawakened interest in the events of the Parker–Hulme case and also, inevitably, focused on the Peter Jackson film-version of those events.

  At the outset of the project, Peter had written, ‘The moral issue of making a film about the murder of Honora Parker is one I have thought long and hard about. The story is part of New Zealand’s history and is certainly valid material for film-makers…I think it is very important that the film has integrity and treats the key people involved with a degree of understanding that has thus far been denied them.’

  During filming, Peter discovered that Juliet Hulme’s new identity was already known outside of the prison service, since one of the actors on the film who had also been a cast member of the stage play, Daughters of Heaven, revealed that the Hulme-Perry connection was a well-known fact to those involved in the Christchurch run of the play.

  Appropriately, Peter–who ‘felt indirectly responsible’–refused to capitalise on the exposures and wrote to the Film Commission asking them not to make film stills available to journalists covering the ‘outing’ of the two women: ‘WingNut Films will not be involved in any intrusion into the adult lives of Pauline and Juliet.’ Later, however, when the film received its American release, Miramax–to Peter and Fran’s disgust–promoted the film under the poster tag, ‘Murder she wrote! The true story of the mystery writer who committed murder herself.

  ’ Despite Peter and Fran’s best intentions, Anne Perry clearly laid a degree of blame at the film-makers’ door and, whilst not having seen the film, strenuously denied its premise that it was the threat of being parted from Pauline that had led her to take part in the murder on Honora Parker, preferring the explanation that she had feared Pauline would commit suicide if she failed to kill the mother.

  Subsequent events would make it difficult for some people to view Heavenly Creatures dispassionately and the arguments as to whether it should have been made or made differently (perhaps rewritten as a work of fiction) or, indeed, how another film-maker might have approached the material, if Peter hadn’t made it, will doubtless be replayed from time to time. What was clear as the film came together in editing was that it was a mature and powerfully-structured drama.

  Several scenes in Heavenly Creatures were set in a sanatorium (Juliet Hulme contracted tuberculosis) and among the background extras were Jim Booth as a patient and his partner, Sue Rogers, as the nurse looking after him. The poignancy of this detail, unnoticed by the average audience member, is that Jim’s state of health was consistently and seriously worsening. The colostomy operation had failed to stem the advance of the cancer…

  Jim produced the movie and was with us in Christchurch every day throughout the making of the film, but all the time he was becoming weaker and sicker as the cancer took hold. He fought bravely, bu
t was being slowly overpowered by the disease.

  Jim Booth watching us shooting Heavenly Creatures. Although Jim’s health was failing him during this time, he still produced the film with his trademark good humour and irreverent spirit.

  Heavenly Creatures went into post-production, which involved the new experience of grappling with the time-consuming frustrations of the Silicon Graphics SGI computer! ‘There was so little storage space on the computer hard-drive,’ remembers George Port, ‘that effects could only be created one frame at a time!’ The forty-odd digital shots occupied George, seven days a week for seven months.

  It may have been the case that computer effects weren’t strictly necessary for Heavenly Creatures, but with a director whose boyhood ambition had been to become a special effects technician, it was likely that his future films would require special effects and as the blockbuster movies coming out of Hollywood increasingly demonstrated, special effects now meant computer effects. Seeing the digital dinosaurs in Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993 made as dramatic an impression on Peter Jackson as his first encounter with the stop-motion monsters created by Willis O’Brien, sixty years earlier, for King Kong.

  On a practical level, WingNut needed somewhere to house its computer work while Richard Taylor’s company, RT Effects, was seriously in need of a permanent workshop in which to create models and prosthetics. Although now known throughout the world as a multi-Oscar winner, Richard and his company had very modest beginnings.