Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  The Massey Memorial was located at Point Halswell, not far from the city but safely away from prying eyes. However, the remaining Salome exteriors used the towering Carillon at the National War Memorial on Buckle Street in the heart of town. There were a hundred milling extras in biblical robes, phalanxes of marching Roman soldiers and a camera crew on one of the main routes into the city from the airport.

  The production runner went to the airport to collect John Garbett and drive him into the city. We had warned the runner that I was going to be out filming and, whatever he did, not to take John anywhere near Buckle Street…Unfortunately he completely forgot–until he drove round the corner and saw, straight ahead, this film crew and me directing a whole load of guys in Roman uniforms! The runner immediately threw the car around, skidding into a U-turn–with a squeal of tyres and John clinging on for dear life–and zoomed away in the opposite direction! I don’t think John suspected anything, though God knows why!

  After that Peter showed up at the studio for a couple of days to work on The Frighteners. There was, however, still one of Colin McKenzie’s movies to shoot. In the increasingly implausible scenario of Colin’s life, it was established that he had produced the first ever colour film (using berry extracts for dyes!), the subject of which had been life in Tahiti. Typically for McKenzie, things did not go to plan in that his film, showing bare-breasted Tahitian maidens bathing in a pool, was adjudged lewd and banned while Colin himself was sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour.

  The Tahitian maids were to be filmed in front of the palm-fringed ponds in Wellington’s Botanical Gardens. Technically, Peter had weekends off, so the shoot was scheduled for a Saturday morning. On the day before, Peter learned something that made him very anxious…

  John Garbett happens to be a nice fellow and he was very good to us all the way through The Frighteners, but on the Friday before the Tahitian shoot in the Botanical Gardens, I was chatting to John and he said, ‘I really like it here, Peter. You know, every morning I get out of my hotel and go for a walk through the Botanical Gardens.’

  I was still terrified that Universal would find out that I was filming Forgotten Silver on the side, so the following morning we posted scouts on every bloody pathway anywhere near where we were shooting, in order to warn us if John Garbett was out on his morning walk. We were planning to run into the bushes and hide, until he had gone by, but as it turned out there was no John Garbett sighting that day! Still, I remember thinking, ‘God, I’m on another secret shoot; why do I always end up on secret shoots?’

  Whatever the anxieties, it would probably be true to say that Peter was at least a little excited by the secret shoot. ‘It tickled his funny bone,’ says Costa; and, like the secret shoot on Meet the Feebles, it was daring, risky and slightly naughty fun; it was the Kiwi ‘buck-the-system-and-do-the-impossible’ philosophy; it was the Jackson way.

  It was one thing to conceive the idea of creating film footage that looked as if it had been shot seventy years earlier, another thing to then do so with such authenticity that it might be taken for the real thing. It was a challenge that required an understanding of many factors: the nature of early film acting and the style of art direction, the technical limitations of pioneering cinematography and how they affected the look of early movies and the effects of the ravages of time on old film stock.

  We studied old film very closely, trying to pick out all the intricacies of how it looks and why. One of the things, which people faking film don’t usually manage to duplicate, is the way it goes bright and dark and fluctuates, which was caused by the cameras having a variable shutter speed. So when we were shooting I’d keep my finger on the iris of the camera, where you set the f-stop and, as it was rolling, I’d keep turning it up and down all the time. I wanted to avoid camera moves that looked too even and mechanical and on one occasion, when Alun Bollinger was filming a shot moving along on a dolly, I remember going up behind him, shaking his shoulders and saying, ‘Too smooth, too smooth!’

  The scenes of war reportage were all filmed, hand-held, using the 16mm Bolex camera on which Peter had shot Bad Taste. Then, when it came to processing the footage, the Film Unit made a unique contribution to the antique look of the film.

  ‘What, for me, came as a revelation,’ says Costa, ‘was viewing genuine old movies in the Film Archive and realising that some of the stuff looks absolutely gorgeous–it isn’t all scratched and horrible. The reason we have a stereotypical idea of what old film looked like is because it was often treated so badly. We looked at footage of New Zealand troops departing for the Boer War and it could have been shot yesterday: you could see their faces clearly, their hair waving, it looked fantastic. We decided to have some film that looked quite crappy but other examples that had been better preserved and that, as we moved through the years, we’d create different looks for the different periods. Pete was great at inspiring the Film Unit to keep aiming for perfection: sending stuff back, he’d say: “It’s not good enough…try again!” And they got into the spirit of it and it became a badge of honour for them that they could deliver the best possible results.’

  They did a brilliant job of ageing the film and experimenting with ways of making modern film stock look like old nitrate film. They used chemicals that would bubble up or eat the emulsion and, where we wanted it to look scratchy, they’d actually chuck the film on the floor and walk about all over it for a day till it was scratched to hell!

  Once the McKenzie film footage was shot and developed, Costa began editing: ‘Peter was most valuable to the project at that point: he was able to look at the rough-cut and make a few really telling suggestions about how we could trim and cut and organise the material. He also pulled the strings necessary to get the broadcaster off our backs long enough to go and re-shoot some stuff. Re-shooting in New Zealand was regarded as a bit of a “no-no”–probably a legacy of our Colonial days–in that you plan the film and go out and shoot it and if you need to go back and re-shoot anything then that’s an acknowledgement of failure. But early on, Pete looked at Hollywood and said, “Hang on a minute, re-shooting is fairly common over there and you do it to make it better because not everybody is right first time. So why cut off the opportunity to have another tinker, another play?” So with Forgotten Silver we tinkered and we played

  …’ Throughout the process, however, Costa–like the Bad Taste Boys before him–became increasingly aware of Fate determining a new path for Peter Jackson: ‘I felt Pete slipping away from me, shifting into another orbit. It was a little hard, but not as hard as it might have been in that I’ve always felt that Peter was quite special. His success is purely based on talent and nothing else: there is no bullshit, no pretence, it’s all about doing the straightest job you can and staying as true to yourself as possible. It would have felt a lot harder if I’d believed that I were of equal talent or that my abilities were just as developed. So, whilst others might find Peter’s incredible progress depressing, I find it inspiring: I see it as a reassurance that, sometimes, nice guys don’t finish last; that sometimes talent actually does bring its own reward. We all make our own way in life, according to our own strengths and weaknesses, and I’ve learnt from Pete to play to my strengths and not get too hung up about the other stuff.’

  As Forgotten Silver approached completion the two writers/directors had their first and only real disagreement. The television slot where the film was to be screened was called ‘Sunday Theatre’ and every other programme in the series was a drama as opposed to something, which–even if it wasn’t–looked like a documentary. Peter wanted to maintain the hoax to the very last, finishing up with fake endcredits: ‘For their generous assistance with research, thanks to Beatrice Aston, Thomas Robbins etc…’ not to mention references to ‘Field Workers’, ‘Archaeological and Military Advisers’ and a credit reading ‘Antique Film Equipment & Memorabilia–Richard Taylor, Tania Rodger…’ Costa, on the other hand, believed that the credits should

  Checking in on Co
sta Botes’ Forgotten Silver post-production work during The Frighteners shoot.

  be accurate and should have a cast list–‘Hannah McKenzie– Beatrice Ashton, Colin McKenzie–Thomas Robbins’: the ‘real’ people finally being shown to have been actors. ‘It would have allowed the audience,’ argues Costa, ‘to correctly interpret everything they’d just seen and come to the conclusion that they’d been “had”, but that, now that they knew it was a spoof, it was okay and had been fun. In the end, however, Peter’s way of doing things won out. It’s far too long ago to worry about who was right and who was wrong, but it did contribute to what happened when the film was televised

  …’ What happened was every prankster’s paradox: for the joke to succeed it must be done seriously; if it is taken seriously, some people will not see the joke. Worst of all, there will be those who will not see the funny side of having been fooled…

  On the day before Forgotten Silver was broadcast, the hoax was given a boost by the weekly New Zealand magazine, The Listener. Denis Welch, a journalist friend of Fran Walsh, happily helped thicken the plot with a story entitled ‘Heavenly Features’ which began, ‘Film-maker Peter Jackson still can’t quite believe it. It’s nearly two years now since he finally yielded to his mother’s urgings and promised to look at some old films a neighbour had stashed in a garden shed. “I was expecting possibly some old home movies, that I would politely say, ‘These are fascinating’, and go and drop them off at the Film Archive and that would be the end of it,” Jackson recalls. Instead, he found a treasure trove that has changed his life, and–he believes–the history of cinema, not just in New Zealand but worldwide…’

  Despite fuelling the deception with interview quotes from McKenzie’s widow, Welch’s article was simultaneously ‘tipping the wink’ to any of The Listener’s readers willing to read between the lines: ‘What now, then, for the McKenzie heritage? Jackson confirms that Harvey Weinstein of Miramax films–the American company that backed The Piano and Jackson’s own Heavenly Creatures–has secured the international distribution rights to McKenzie’s films and plans to launch them at next year’s Cannes festival. After that…Jackson wants nothing less than full recognition for McKenzie: “After this documentary, this guy should be appearing on our banknotes. They should create a $3 banknote just to put his face on it. He is postage-stamp material.’”

  The article concluded by giving what now seems like a fairly blatant clue to the true nature of Forgotten Silver: ‘…To viewers wondering what a documentary–however sensational–is doing in the “Sunday Theatre” slot, Jackson explains: “It was actually the Film Commission which suggested it. They had already got involved in funding it and they felt that the Montana Theatre would be just right for it. There was some pressure on us at first to possibly dramatise some aspects of Colin’s life, but frankly, even though it’s a documentary, the events of his life were so dramatic that the word drama is not inappropriate.” Adds Botes, “It’s as gripping as any fictional story.’”

  Fictional story… It couldn’t have been more plainly put. Could it?

  The Listener article sealed it for a lot of people: they read it, saw the film was screening on the Sunday night, and thought, ‘God, I must watch this!’ And so they went into it totally believing it…

  They did. When the audience for New Zealand on Air’s ‘Sunday Theatre’ tuned in to watch Forgotten Silver on 29 October 1995, almost to a man, woman and child they took the bait. With so many people in on the joke–including all those Roman extras at the War Memorial in Wellington–the film-makers partly expected word to have got out before Forgotten Silver ever went to air. They also supposed that the hints and clues had been broadly enough plotted from Peter’s first exploration of Hanna McKenzie’s garden shed through to the finding of the lost Salome footage inside a huge sarcophagus, the lid of which was carved with the image of a charging bull. Forgotten Silver had, literally, led people ‘up the garden path’ to discover ‘a load of bull’.

  Not so. ‘Minutes after the screening ended,’ recalls Costa, ‘someone I knew, a very venerable educator, rang up to congratulate me on a very fine documentary. As I hung up, I realised that this guy whom I really respected had thought it was real and I felt horrible!’

  It was just the beginning…Descendents of aviator Richard Pearse rang WingNut Films grateful to have finally seen the vindication of their ancestor’s claim to be the first man to fly. A Christchurch media lecturer (who deserves less sympathy than Pearse’s relatives), confronted by students who wondered why their teacher had never told them about New Zealand’s pioneer film-maker, foolishly assured them that he knew all about McKenzie and would be teaching about him later in the film-studies syllabus. It is even rumoured that one of the curators of the still-being-planned national museum Te Papa Tongarewa announced that he wanted to devote exhibition space to Colin McKenzie. Clearly some people were going to be hurt and others made to look foolish.

  On the Monday morning, the nation was just abuzz with this thing. It was snowballing. Within twenty-four hours it was obviously getting out of hand. Costa and I were getting very concerned about the fact that the story was growing and building and that no one was actually dispelling it. TV New Zealand said that they needed to run a story, revealing the hoax. I had already started filming The Frighteners, so they came and interviewed us on one of the sets and we came clean, told everyone that Colin McKenzie was made up and that his story was nothing but lies.

  As a result there was a very angry backlash. Some people were embarrassed that they had fallen for it and turned their embarrassment into anger towards the people who’d pulled the prank. Others were upset because they had become emotionally involved in Colin McKenzie’s story–even shed a few tears–which was, of course, one of the things that we really set out to do. I think those people felt really betrayed at having been manipulated in the most private way.

  For others it was simply the case that we’d created and given them a new national hero and, within twenty-four hours, had destroyed him…

  The journalists were largely on the film-makers side: reporting the furore, but pointing up the film’s brilliance. The headline in the Evening Standard a few days later read: ‘FORGOTTEN SILVER A DELICIOUS HOAX’ with writer Dave Mahoney remarking: ‘As McKenzie’s amazing story unravelled. I kept thinking that I was watching the most exciting piece of New Zealand television ever made and upon reflection, maybe I am near right

  …’ Several commentators took the opportunity to suggest that Forgotten Silver was a timely reminder that the camera can lie and that all people should be wary of believing all that they read or see. Joanne McNeill, in an article in the Northern Advocate, wittily entitled ‘FORGOTTEN SILVER FOUND TO BE FOOLS GOLD’, wrote of the gullible believers: ‘“But Leonard Maltin was in it,” they said, dismissing any argument that movie critic Maltin and all other television personalities are creations, powdered, primped and prompted images, as opposed to whoever they may be at home picking their noses. Surely, aware of this duality in his own personae, Maltin would be delighted to lend his complicity to any cheeky creation of illusion? It should have gone without saying that everything on television is illusion–a shiftless parade of provenance-free images made of artifice, sound waves and insubstantial light which viewers, with the aid of perception and experience, realise as whatever they seem to be.’

  ‘Mind you,’ McNeill’s article concluded, ‘there’s a fine line between illusion and deception and…those who cross it deliberately had better watch their backs.’

  The proof of that came in a torrent of letters received not just by the film-makers (bizarrely including death-threats!) but also by most of New Zealand’s newspapers and magazines. The programme was denounced as ‘tomfoolery’ and Messrs Jackson and Botes as ‘cheap confidence tricksters’. ‘The role of the documentary,’ wrote one furious correspondent, ‘is to reveal and educate, and the programme does not qualify. It does reveal that intellectual arrogance is to be found among those
whose vocation it is to entertain or inform

  …’ ‘An outrageous waste of money’, screamed one letter; ‘heads should roll in Television New Zealand,’ declared another. Someone calling themselves ‘Celluloid Sucker’ wrote, ‘Following Peter Jackson’s litany of lies, it now only requires New Zealand on Air to inform him that their offer of funding from the broadcasting fee was just a hoax, and could they please have their money back? (Correction, OUR money.) The look on his face would go some way to compensating our family for now not knowing what to believe, and henceforth caring even less, about early New Zealand film-making

  …’ It’s an old but true adage that bad reviews stick in the mind and good ones are instantly forgotten, so it is tempting to think of the entire New Zealand nation as fulminating in harmony. On the contrary, many people wrote of their enjoyment of the film.

  There was the viewer who seemed to have accepted the documentary as true and then added a reference to Orson Welles and a ‘certain radio play’, revealing not just that an understanding of the true nature of the programme but also making an appreciative link to Welles’ historic radio broadcast which presented The War of the Worlds as a bulletin of breaking news. One writer even offered an elaborate addition to the story by claiming to have known the illegitimate daughter of McKenzie’s brother and actress Maybelle–a child named on her birth-certificate, what else, Salome!