Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  Essentially, the Feebles were satirising human greed and weakness; we were sending up human beings and human nature, not puppets themselves.

  The original concept for using the Feebles had sprung out of a suggestion by Grant and Bryce Campbell for a possible late-night television show hosted by an elderly, cantankerous character called Uncle Herman who would tell a series of unlikely (even unsuitable) bedtime tales.

  Uncle Herman’s Bedtime Whoppers, as we called it, was to be a series of outrageous one-off, half-hour films devoted to different subjects, featuring different actors and probably made by different film-makers. In fact, they’d have nothing in common other than being introduced by Uncle Herman. Talking with Cameron, Stephen and Fran, we decided that this puppet thing featuring the Feebles might be a good candidate for one of Uncle Herman’s Whoppers!

  Stephen and Fran roped in another of their friends, writer, actor and cabaret comic, Danny Mulheron, who had directed Stephen’s satiric musical, Big Bickies and was collaborating with the playwright on an outrageous farce, The Sex Fiend. Described as possessing an ‘unstoppable curiosity and twisted perception of the world that is truly frightening and thoroughly entertaining,’ Danny was a suitably anarchic talent to be invited to join in the creation of the Feebles’ madhouse of mutated Muppets. Danny joined Peter, Stephen and Fran in writing the script as well as contributing lyrics for songs while Cameron Chittock began designing the stars of the show that was now being called Meet the Feebles.

  Peter was feeling decidedly happy with life.

  I thought, ‘This is fantastic! This is a five-month project that will keep me busy until May when I go off to Cannes and get the money for Braindead.’ We applied to the Film Commission for some funding – not much, $30–40,000 – convinced that it was a pretty much guaranteed certainty. After all, I had finished Bad Taste…True it hadn’t yet been released or sold anywhere, but they’d seen it and knew what I could do. They were hardly going to turn us down for an inexpensive half-hour TV show.

  But they did. The Film Commission declined the application on the grounds that Peter had assumed would make them assist: Meet the Feebles was not a feature film project, but a one-off TV programme which was never going to have any sales in the film marketplace. The money requested might have been relatively small, but it was an unsound investment. The group explained that Feebles would be part of a TV series, but it was a series that had yet to be commissioned and funded.

  We had a council of war and were very angry with this – as you always were in those days, whenever we got turned down or knocked back! Stephen, Fran, Cameron and me decided that we would fund it ourselves. It felt a bit like Bad Taste all over again, except that we were going to be doing it on a reasonably professional level: we were going to have a small crew, shoot it in a block and get it done. So we drew up a minimal budget of $25,000 and all chipped in equal shares. We put together a crew and Cameron and I started building puppets, getting together each day in the basement under his flat, chopping up foam and carving and sculpting these characters.

  Characters like Bletch the Walrus, a lascivious impresario and, literally, a ‘cat-lover’; Arthur the Stage-manager, a cockney worm in a flat cap and jumper (knitted by Peter’s mum); Wynyard the Drug-and-war-crazed Frog with a perilous knife-throwing act; and the star of

  Stephen and Fran came on board Meet the Feebles, not just as writers but also co-financing a self-funded Bad Tastestyle short film shoot. It was another case of everyone pitching in – here one of our puppeteers, Eleanor Aitkin, and Fran build sets for the forthcoming mini-production.

  ‘The Fabulous Feebles Variety Hour’: Heidi, a ‘gorgeous hunk of hippohood’, played by Danny Mulheron inside a huge, pink foam-rubber hippopotamus suit.

  As is done with animated films, the Feebles’ dialogue was recorded prior to the beginning of filming so that the puppeteers would be able to perform to a pre-recorded voice-track. The vocal cast included Peter Vere-Jones, who had provided the voice for Lord Crumb in Bad Taste, as Bletch and Brian Sergent, who would later play Ted Sandy-man in The Lord of the Rings, as Wynyard the amphibious heroin addict, haunted by the horrors of Vietnam.

  Unable to afford a studio in which to film, the group took over the upstairs rooms of a somewhat decrepit Victorian house in the Wellington suburb of Thorndon where Grant and Bryce Campbell were living. Not long before, the Campbells’ landlord had evicted a group of drunkards and derelicts and offered the vacated rooms to the brothers on the understanding that they clean up what was several years’ unsavoury mess. Peter took on the responsibility in return for permission to use the space as a studio for shooting Feebles.

  Everyone was supposed to help, but I remember it was mainly me doing it! I cleared out piles of old newspapers and absolute filth too disgusting to talk about. I had buckets of bleach and I scrubbed and washed and mopped for days on end. Finally, I cleaned up three bedrooms, and a lounge, and a loo – and that became our Feebles studio.

  Shooting the short version of Meet the Feebles was a sharp shock. A very small team worked incredibly hard to complete the filming just before I jumped on a plane for Cannes in 1988.

  The cleaning process and some major structural renovations took time and shooting on Meet the Feebles didn’t finally begin until a little over a week before Peter needed to depart for Cannes. Filming with puppets proved more complicated, and therefore slower, than had been anticipated and the shoot ran behind schedule, resulting in only two-thirds of the thirty-minute show making it onto film by the deadline. Feebles had to be put on hold until Peter’s return and he headed off for the south of France.

  Peter travelled to Cannes with Tony Hiles, a curious journey via Los Angeles, Amsterdam and a series of milk-trains to the city on the Riviera whose motto is ‘La Vie est un Festival’ (‘Life is a Festival’).

  Looking back a few years later, Peter’s father, Bill Jackson, would recall: ‘I told Pete, don’t be too disappointed if it isn’t a success at Cannes. It’s a heck of a lot to achieve – if it is, all to the good, if not don’t be upset by it…I was thinking: having put four years into something, no one could be told that it was a failure…’

  ‘ It was,’ says Peter, ‘a real “Dad” thing to say!’ But Bad Taste was anything but a failure. Peter and Tony promoted the film in every possible way: a rash of garish stickers (hot red with a black splat in the middle and the words Bad Taste) broke out all over Cannes and, having been produced using a particularly strong glue, stubbornly resisted removal!

  ‘We wondered whether the foreign audiences would get the jokes,’ recalls Tony. ‘But we showed the film to the French girl who was working on the New Zealand stand at the Palais des Festivals and, having watched the scene in which Derek puts his own brains back in his shattered cranium, she commented, in not great but interesting English: ‘Oh, the head! And poor Derek, he was not very well before that!’

  Bad Taste was greeted with a standing ovation and generated much enthusiastic interest. Despite the New Zealand Film Commission’s fears that the picture was ‘unsaleable’, it sold to ten countries in six days and went on to sell to twenty more.

  The French distributor invited Peter to attend the seventeenth International Festival of Fantasy and Science Fiction that was due to be held in Paris a couple of weeks later and offered to pay his expenses to stay in France.

  These two pictures really go together. We finished the Feebles shoot on the day I flew out to Cannes. Here, a shattered Cameron Chittock is crashed out on the couch at our Hawkestone Street shooting location, whilst a few days later I’m having my first taste of international cinema in Cannes, May 1988.

  Tony Hiles headed back to New Zealand alone: ‘My job was done, but Peter was clearly going somewhere – I didn’t have a clue where – but I just tried to give him a helping hand to go there…I always thought of working with Peter as like driving along a desert road in an old Citroën DS, when up behind me comes this really fast little red sports car and I wave it on…’ />
  The opportunity that Peter had been hoping for came when the Spanish producer, Andrés Vicente Gómez, buying Bad Taste for distribution in Spain, expressed interest in seeing any other projects that Peter might have in development. Gómez read the script for Braindead and began discussions with the representatives of the New Zealand Film Commission about the possibility of a Spanish/New Zealand co-production. It was suggested that if the film’s hapless hero were to have a Spanish girlfriend, it would help any deal, so Peter telephoned Stephen and Fran, who agreed that if casting a Spanish actress was a route to getting Braindead in front of the cameras, it was one that should be pursued!

  Peter travelled to Paris and introduced the screening of Bad Taste at the Festival of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which was held in the 3,000-seat Le Grande Rex Cinema where, fourteen years later, The Two Towers would receive its European premiere. The Auckland Star reported Peter as saying of the event: ‘It’s full of crazy Frenchmen, and there are guards at the door. Everybody that comes in gets searched. When the film’s screened, there is a continual barrage of chanting and screaming, clapping and cheering. I had to go on stage before Bad Taste was screened, which was an experience…’

  As the Star journalist wrote, the whole event was ‘an eye-opener during an eventful year for the 26-year-old Wellingtonian’; topped off by the fact that Bad Taste went on to win the coveted Prix de Gore.

  Following this triumph, Peter flew to Madrid to meet potential Spanish actresses for the romantic female lead in Braindead. One of those who auditioned for him on video was Diana Peñalver, who had appeared in a number of successful films including El Año de las Luces, (The Year of Enlightenment), which had been produced by Andrés Vicente Gómez and written and directed by Fernando Trueba,

  The Olympia Cinema in Cannes. Home of our Bad Taste screening, and thirteen years later the very same cinema screened the first footage from The Lord of the Rings to the world’s media. If I had a lucky cinema, I guess this would be it!

  who would go on to make the celebrated romantic comedy, Belle Epoque.

  Peter decided that, despite her lack of English, Diana Peñalver was ideal for the role of the girl whose destiny was to save Lionel from his tyrannical mother. Then, after so many excitements, it was time for Peter to return home.

  Everything had happened very quickly: I was supposed to go to Cannes for eight or ten days and ended up being abroad for two months. I arrived back on the day Bad Taste was having its New Zealand premiere as part of the Wellington Film Festival. I was exhausted but I went straight to the midnight screening at the Embassy Theatre where, fifteen years later, we would hold the world premiere of The Return of the King.

  The Festival programme note on Bad Taste read, ‘If Laurel and Hardy had decided to make a film about flesh-eating zombies from outer space, this is how it might have turned out.’

  It was a description that might have seemed guaranteed to attract only the most dedicated of fringe audiences, but reports of the film’s success in Cannes and Paris ensured that the film-makers were local, if somewhat maverick, heroes!

  Mike Minett remembers that night: ‘The theatre was packed; everyone was cheering and applauding! It was crazy! None of us had ever expected that kind of reaction. We had no idea that Bad Taste would end up being shown around the world, which is why we were willing to do all those mad things and make fools of ourselves – willing to fall out of a tree twenty-five times if that was what was needed! We didn’t care! We just did it! We could only be ourselves and maybe that’s why Bad Taste worked. That night, I had tears in my eyes and thought, “Pete’s finally done it! He’s broken through! He’s going to be famous…

  Four of the NZ film industry players at Cannes 1988 – from the left, John Maynard, Jim Booth, Lindsay Shelton and Barrie Everard. Jim was the Executive Director of the NZ Film Commission, and I had gone the full nine rounds with him getting funding for Bad Taste. In the end it resulted in a great respect, love and partnership with this very funny, brave person.

  We’re going to be famous!” Well, anyway, Pete got to be famous…And I love him and am proud of him.’

  The following day, Peter’s old employer, the Evening Post, raved: ‘Gore…Blimey! There’s heaps of it in Peter Jackson’s simply spiffing splatter movie, Bad Taste…An eager audience delightedly lapped up the offal action as a team of dedicated Kiwi E.T.-busters machinegunned, macheted and chain-sawed their way through a swag of galactic nasties.’

  In Tony Hiles’ report to the New Zealand Film Commission, submitted as Bad Taste was approaching completion, he had written: ‘The film will soon be finished, but for Peter it is just the start – his next few films are going to be most interesting.’

  How true that was…

  4

  SPLATTER AND SPLUPPETS

  ‘Let’s not waste any money on this!’

  That was one person’s verdict when an application for $10,000 development funding had landed on people’s desks at the New Zealand Film Commission at the beginning of 1988.

  The proposal, for a film variously titled House Bound – or, more ominously, Braindead – had been submitted by Peter Jackson, Stephen Sinclair and Fran Walsh and was described as ‘a tongue-in-cheek zombie genre movie’ intended to exploit ‘the characteristics of that genre in an over-the-top way.’ The proposal went on: ‘It will achieve that combination of gore and humour which was foreshadowed in Bad Taste, but this time with a script and the backup of a small professional crew.’

  Some of the recipients of this proposal were singularly unimpressed: ‘Peter Jackson has some talent as a film-maker,’ one grudgingly admitted, ‘but he has fallen into the trap of selling himself short on “sensation” rather than “soul” and “intelligences”.’

  The film certainly featured its share of ‘sensation’: severed limbs and exploding body-parts; an ear in a bowl of custard; quantities of pus, gore and other bodily emissions; a rabid rat-monkey whose poisonous bite is the primal cause of the zombie infestation; and Baby Selwyn, a murderous zombie-tot in a striped romper suit, whose terrifying behaviour is as lethal as it is ludicrous.

  Nevertheless, the script assessments that had been carried out were, given the ingredients, surprisingly positive: ‘A highly entertaining, funny, gory, horror-love film,’ read one report, ‘it could emerge as a strong blend of both black comedy and horror…’ While another read: ‘The visual potential, excellent. The script is good…While the story indulges in lots of bloodthirsty violence, the writers haven’t indulged themselves in any off-the-point navel-gazing. I believe this script could well make a successful film.’

  Shortly afterwards, Bad Taste had become the toast of the town in Cannes, Paris and Wellington, and the odd doubting Thomas was, if not silenced, then at least only permitted muffled protests!

  Hedging its bets, the Commission finally settled on a compromise and advanced $6,000 instead of $10,000. But, by July 1988, Peter was back with a new request for financial assistance with his ‘touching story of a young couple’s relationship placed in jeopardy by a swarm of zombie relatives.’

  On this occasion, Peter was asking for $31,300. The money was required in order to rewrite the script with a Spanish female lead, following the decision to cast Diana Peñalver. As a result, the character originally called Cathy would eventually be rechristened Paquita – conveniently the same name as the role Diana had portrayed in the celebrated El Año de las Luces.

  Since the film was to feature ‘a swarm’ of zombies, money was also required for ‘necessary development of zombie manufacture’, which was, Peter explained, as important and as time-consuming as the scripting process.

  The balance of the funding application was to pay for the advice of the American script consultant, Dr Linda Seger, who, a few years earlier, had established a reputation by defining ‘script consultancy’ as a useful – even essential – adjunct to the process of screenwriting and who would go on to write a number of best-selling handbooks, including Making a Good Scrip
t Great.

  The emergence of Linda Seger and other screenwriting consultants and experts was part of a new awareness of the importance of script-to-movie that sprang, in large part, from the work of a man who would become Hollywood’s guru of gurus: Robert McKee.

  Now known to the cinema-going public through being portrayed as a character in the 2002 Nicholas Cage film, Adaptation, Robert McKee’s career was founded on both academic study and practical experience – as an actor and director – of theatre arts. He attended film school, wrote and directed short films and, moving to Los Angeles, wrote scripts (and analysed other peoples’ scripts) for United Artists and NBC. In addition to feature films, McKee contributed scripts to such TV favourites as Kojak, Columbo and Quincy, MD.

  In 1983, McKee joined the faculty of the School of Cinema and Television at the University of Southern California, where he first presented his groundbreaking seminars on Story. Within a year, McKee was opening the three-day seminar – thirty-hours of intensive conceptbroadening tuition over three days – to the wider public. It was the start of a twenty-year career, during which McKee would teach his principles to over 40,000 aspiring screenwriters – like Nicholas Cage’s character, Charlie Kauffman, in Adaptation.

  In 1988, the New Zealand Film Commission invited Robert McKee to Wellington and Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Stephen Sinclair signed up for the seminar.