Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  It was the final acknowledgement by the movie industry of a staggering achievement, and the night when they went against every precedent and prediction and declared a fantasy film the film of the year…

  No wonder Peter Jackson began his Best Director acceptance speech with the one word, ‘Wow!’

  ‘Thank you so much to the Academy,’ he went on, ‘you’re giving us an incredibly overwhelming night. We just appreciate it so much. Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, you did the most risky thing that I think anyone has ever done in this industry, and I’m so happy for you that it paid off. Your collaboration and your partnership and your support just gave me the most incredible working experience of my life. To Barrie Osborne, our producer, thank you so much, Barrie, for just being there every day and supporting us. To a wonderful cast, and a wonderful crew in New Zealand, everybody that made my working days so enjoyable. It was just there when I needed it to be there. And the actors were just doing such a wonderful job…’

  Peter then added an intensely personal remark. In the arena of the Oscars, where everybody tearfully thanks more or less everyone except their plastic surgeons, it doubtless passed over most of the audience without remark. But anyone who knew of Peter Jackson as the kid from Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, who had grown up wanting to make movies, it was a poignantly emotional moment: ‘And I just want to thank two very special people that, when I was 8 years old, I made films at home on a Super 8 camera that my mum and dad had bought for me. And they supported me all through the years. And they died in the last few years. They didn’t see these films made. So for Bill and Joan, thank you. Thank you…’

  I look back on it now and I can’t really connect with the night. It felt amazing, fantastic…I was so nervous. I remember badly wanting Fran to win the Best Song award for ‘Into the West’…I really wanted her to win more than any other, and I was so incredibly proud and happy when she won that. And then, from that point on, it sort of just became a blur! I feel unconnected with it, in a strange kind of way: I don’t really feel like someone who’s won an Academy Award. I don’t think about it very much, although they are sitting on a shelf in our office so they’re a

  Whilst The Lord of the Rings was destined to be made by New Line Cinema, not Miramax as first planned, Harvey Weinstein had a vital role to play in the journey of the book to the screen. As we would cross paths at various industry events during those years, he was unfailingly gracious. (Image courtesy of Dave Hogan/Getty Images)

  bit hard to miss! Occasionally I look at them and get a sort of buzzy feeling: ‘Oh, that’s mine! Gosh! I won an Academy Award…’

  It’s something that’s happened now, something I’ve achieved and, as such, it actually takes the pressure off. It does. There have been lots of wonderful, wonderful film-makers who never ever won an Academy Award – incredible directors like Hitchcock and Kubrick – and I think what it must be like to have had their careers and to have had that body of work behind you and not to have won an Oscar. So, having now won means I never have to do it again! Or I never have to worry about it again in the future and I’m very relieved about that!

  Long before that victorious Oscar night – in fact long before even The Fellowship of the Ring had been released – Peter had spoken to me of his passion for the project he was embarking on: ‘I guess,’ he said, ‘it’s a certain form of madness, but I’m a real believer in trying to push yourself and if you’re a film-maker then I don’t think there could be anything more amazing to be involved with than The Lord of the Rings: it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience and if we do it and do it in a way we can be proud of, then I feel that I would probably want to retire when it’s all over because there’d be nothing else left to do!’

  On 30 March 2003, eight months before the premiere of The Return of the King, news broke that suggested that Peter Jackson would not be retiring after The Lord of the Rings. A press release from Universal Pictures announced that, following the release of the final instalment of Rings, Peter was going to be making a new version of the tale that had inspired his film-making career; the tale of a creature described as the Eighth Wonder of the World…

  A long-held ambition was finally about to be realised – it was time for the return of the Kong!

  10

  RETURN TO SKULL ISLAND

  A SPOTLIGHT SWINGS across the CLOSED CURTAIN…The LARGE CROWD APPLAUDS as DENHAM strides onto the stage in the GLARE of THE SINGLE SPOTLIGHT. He waves enthusiastically…basking in the acclaim he has waited for for so long.

  DENHAM

  Thank you! Thank you!…Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to show you the greatest thing your eyes have ever beheld.

  He was a King in the world he knew but he comes to you now…a captive…

  Ladies and gentlemen: I give you Kong – the Eighth Wonder of the World!!

  When Universal Pictures announced that Peter Jackson was going to make a new version of a film that the National Film Registry of United States Library of Congress had designated being among the 1,200 Greatest Films chosen for preservation as a national treasure, it was the occasion for fanfares!

  ‘Peter Jackson,’ noted Stacey Snider, Chairman, Universal Pictures, ‘is a film-maker uniquely capable of capturing the core appeal of enduring classics and in expanding the visual language of motion pictures, as inarguably evidenced in his landmark achievement with The Lord of the Rings films. We are thrilled to be working with Peter and Fran, and we are confident that their execution of King Kong will amaze moviegoers…Peter will bring Kong to life as a real character. His vision for the tragic tale of the misunderstood creature, with its poignant character development and technological wonder, will make King Kong compulsory viewing for any real movie lover.’

  For Peter, of course, it was a return to a place he had been before, literally four years earlier, and before that, countless times in his imagination. He was quoted in the press release as saying: ‘No film has captivated my imagination more than King Kong. I’m making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old. It has been my sustained dream to reinterpret this classic story for a new age.’

  Ken Kamins comments, ‘Peter had said on several occasions as The Lord of the Rings was drawing to a close that he wanted to move on to making a smaller movie next, but when Kong became a possibility I think he thought about what would happen if the appetite of audiences for these big-budget extravaganzas was to wane in a few years’ time. He was clearly at the height of his ability to generate the sort of creative environment he would need to make that movie in the way he wanted to make it. So, the confluence of events dictated that now was the best time to make Kong, wrestle old demons to the ground and realise a fantasy that he’s harboured for ever.’

  ‘Peter really wanted to remake Kong,’ says Philippa Boyens, ‘in order to be able to see that movie; to be able to sit down in a cinema, get blown away, and know that he made it. It’s what makes him tick.’

  ‘The story of Kong,’ continued Peter’s press release statement, ‘offers everything that any storyteller could hope for: an archetypal narrative, thrilling action, resonating emotion and memorable characters. It has endured for precisely these reasons and I am honoured to be a part of its continuing legacy.’

  Two years on, having played his part in the continuance of that legacy, Peter reflects:

  When I first saw the original King Kong, on TV back in 1970, it thrilled me and I am still thrilled by it.

  What I most like about the original film – and I think it’s an important part of the way in which the story is structured – is that it plays itself out as a fairly straight, romantic drama in which Ann Darrow and Jack Driscoll are thrown together by circumstances on a boat-trip heading off on some sort of adventurous expedition.

  For the first thirty minutes of Kong, you could be watching a typical Hollywood romance that’s ultimately going to lead to these two people getting together…Then, suddenly, the movie takes you by surprise and switches genre and you land on a mysterious
island with its great high walls – to keep something out – and the film’s become a monster movie.

  Through repeated viewings across the years, Peter came to realise that, whilst his enthusiasm for the film remained undimmed, appreciation for the original King Kong was becoming increasingly limited to aficionados of early cinema in much the same way as the first versions of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, all of which had been re-made in various shapes and forms to suit new and more sophisticated audiences and to take advantage of technical advances in cinematography.

  The truth is that, despite being a wonderful story filled with excitement, heart and emotion, all the technical aspects of the original version now seem very dated: the dialogue, the acting, the directing, the special effects.

  When I was a kid, living in an era when colour television was a dream of the future, King Kong seemed an extraordinarily rich and vibrant film. But that was then, and I feel very strongly that no matter how much we devotees may treasure and revere the original picture, there is now a generation of youngsters who would never sit down and watch a black and white film with jerky animation and creaky, old-fashioned dialogue – no matter how good you tell them it is!

  The younger generation have switched off their tolerance for things that are old and, in doing so, miss out on a lot; the truth is that if today’s kids were channel-hopping on TV and happened to flick onto a channel that was showing Kong, they’d be flicking onto something else in a flash. I honestly can’t imagine many teenagers buying or watching a DVD of the first Kong, or standing in line at a film festival to watch a retrospective screening of this old movie that I love so much.

  Peter’s motivation for making King Kong, therefore, springs not only from his abiding passion for the film that excited him as a child, but

  Ray Harryhausen had mentioned a couple of times how much he and his wife wanted to come down to New Zealand. At the end of The Lord of the Rings, we were figuring out how to thank the Weta crew for all their hard work – so we decided to combine the two ideas, and we flew Ray and Diana down for a couple of weeks’ vacation. We arranged a helicopter tour of our South Island locations; then Ray spent a few days visiting Weta, and meeting our crew – most of whom had grown up with his films – and he hosted a great Q&A session that went on for five hours! And I finally got to show him some of my childhood stop-motion models, and thank him for having such a powerful influence on my life.

  from a belief that today’s generation – and future generations – of youngsters will probably never ever see that film and experience that sense of excitement and wonder.

  I thought, ‘Maybe if we can recapture the wonderful escapism of the original movie, it could mean as much to a 9-year-old kid who sees it in 2005 as the original version meant to me when I saw it.’

  Because the original film is so good, the one thing I didn’t want to be doing was just making a colourised version of the 1933 film. My intention was always to do something that feels like a modern remake of King Kong – not updated, but presenting the original story in a way that is familiar to modern cinema audiences and yet still manages to capture the magic of the original.

  Describing Peter’s ambition for Kong, Philippa Boyens says, ‘He wants to inspire that level of love and excitement and getting lost in the story that he was privileged to go through when he was a child. He wanted that for his kids, for a new generation of cinemagoers, so Kong isn’t just a theme park ride at Universal studios, but a real story that you engage with and which stays with you, the way it stayed with him.’

  The response of the 9-year-old boy watching the original movie on TV, one Friday night in Pukerua Bay, had been immediate and intuitive. What he could not have known as he marvelled at scenes like Kong’s battle with the dinosaurs or his rampage through New York, was that the film would continue to be a touchstone and an ambition that would endure into his forty-fourth year.

  What is fascinating is the way in which Kong has spanned almost my entire life: seeing it when I was 9; wanting to do a remake of it when I was in my teens – and trying to do so; putting in a very serious effort to make a new version in ’95-’96; and finally, finally making it now!

  Even though all these ‘versions’ (imagined, semi-realised or achieved) were based on the original Kong, each of them was conceived as a very different film. As a result, I’ve never had a precise or particular vision in my head for a remake of Kong – it has always been a product of who I am at a particular time.

  Any movie reflects who you are at the time you make it, I guess, and it’s very interesting that the film we’ve finally ended up making now is very different to the one that we would have made a decade earlier. Interestingly, it is like a lab experiment – the same story, firstly conceived pre-The Lord of the Rings films, and then again straight after. They are completely different films!

  The 2005 version of Kong is a far more technically complex film than Peter would have been able to make a decade earlier – however much he might have wanted otherwise – because Weta Digital now has a streamlined system that was still being established during the making of the Rings trilogy, by which they can efficiently produce the many hundreds of complicated visual effects shots. The chief difference, however, between Peter’s Nineties vision of Kong and the way in

  Following the experience of The Lord of the Rings, we had another terrific cast to work with on Kong. Boy, it makes it much more enjoyable if there’s no tension on set – just a bunch of good people, doing their best for the movie.

  which it has finally been realised is in the way in which the story is told.

  Peter describes his and Fran’s original script as being written as ‘a very Indiana Jones-ish, slam-bang, Hollywood-style movie, which at the time we thought was the way to go.’ But as he told the press shortly after the Universal project was announced: ‘We can do a complete rewrite. Now that Philippa Boyens has joined the team, it’s a chance to start over. The basic storyline will be very similar but the scenes, the sequences and the detail will be very different to the flip, smartarsed tone of our old script. We are better writers now…This movie will be so much better than the 1996 film would have been. In hindsight, fate has been kind to us!’

  Not only had Peter and Fran matured as writers and developed through their collaboration with Philippa, but they had also learnt many lessons from writing and filming The Lord of the Rings:

  I think the most predominant lesson that came out of Rings was to keep it real. Unless you make a film that feels fundamentally real then you’ve immediately entered the world of artifice and you’re operating at a very shallow level. You’re simply saying to your audience: ‘Hey, we don’t believe in this ourselves, so we’re not really expecting you to believe in it; let’s just indulge ourselves for an hour or two and have some fun…’ And I think it’s better to try and treat your subject matter with more respect than that…

  Despite the often ‘hammy’ dialogue and the stiff stereotypical characterisations, the 1933 Kong was, in its day, more ‘realistic’ than modern audiences appreciate. The expedition in search of Skull Island is presented in a believable, naturalistic way that would have seemed convincing to a member of the moviegoing public at a time for whom foreign travel – other than war service overseas – was a largely unknown experience. The depiction of the island’s natives and their rituals, which any modern anthropologist would find deeply offensive, seemed ‘realistic’ to audiences at a time when – outside occasional cinema documentaries and the pages of The National Geographic – most Americans and Europeans had no windows on to the people and places of their world.

  There is also the very realistic representation of the city of New York and in particular the 102-storey building that then dominated its skyline.

  It’s no coincidence that the Empire State Building was featured. Kong was used to living in the top of the mountain on Skull Island, so the top of the Empire State Building was a reminder of his lair and the natural pla
ce for him to escape to in New York. But the film-makers were also using the building to showcase an extraordinary feat in architecture and engineering – the world’s tallest building which had been completed only two years before. For a depression-era audience who were going to the movies for escapism (which in a very tough time they needed to do)

  The huge New York street set, built in Wellington. Everything beyond the set was created with a digital New York model – as were many of the cars and pedestrians.

  it must have been incredibly inspiring to see this towering symbol of American pride and achievement.

  In approaching the remake, Peter took the decision not to even consider location filming in New York. Whilst the Empire State Building and a great deal of early New York architecture is still extant, the seventy years separating the film’s Thirties setting and the present day would make filming on the streets difficult and costly.

  Another alternative was to use the standing New York City set on the Universal back-lot but Peter also decided against this option since the set was small, narrow and had short streets. The solution was for WingNut to build its own New York back-lot set – in New Zealand.