Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  However, the Management Committee finally agreed to the additional advance, but with reservations expressed by the Executive Director in the most serious of terms: ‘In making this decision, the Commission expressed its disappointment with the development of this project, and warned that further requests for additional investments would not be approved.’

  George Port – George performed the role of Bletch and became a founding member of Weta.

  There was also considerable concern over the content of the final script that had now been submitted and which, as Judith McCann wrote, had ‘diverged significantly’ from the original outline: ‘The story as now portrayed is sexually exploitative, verging on the pornographic’. It was, perhaps, an extreme reaction to such sequences as that involving the filming of a porno bondage movie, starring Daisy the Cow (a.k.a. ‘Madame Bovine’) and a cockroach, which was too absurd to be truly offensive. Meet the Feebles was a puppet film equivalent of Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat and other ‘adult’ animated movies. It was an irreverent idea conceived in the style of underground comics created by Robert Crumb and others. To criticise it by any other standard was to miss the point.

  As Peter would put it, during an interview on the film’s release: ‘It’s not undergraduate humour, so much as…well, the term I’d use would be “naughty schoolboy humour”, I guess. That obsession with bodily functions, all that kind of excessive crudity. And that kind of physicality suits The Feebles really well, since you wouldn’t normally associate those kinds of bodily things with puppets, so you can do with them the most disgusting, gross things possible, and get away with it. Had we been working with human actors, I don’t think we would have taken it nearly as far as we have, because it probably would have been quite sick. But The Feebles are only puppets, they are just bits of material, really, so I have no qualms about treating them in the most dreadful ways!’

  This book wouldn’t be complete without poo-eating, so here it is, courtesy of my favourite character, The Fly.

  The Commission, necessarily conscious of their responsibility as custodians of taxpayers’ money (and possible accusations of its misuse), put the script out for review. The report did not make encouraging reading: ‘ This story left me totally confused and somewhat sad at the fact that someone with Peter Jackson’s potential could create such a worthless project…There are no protagonists, no one to cheer for, no real story, no depth to any character…It’s not just the script – it’s the content, style and execution, no pun intended…I have serious doubts as to whether this film will pass the censor…Peter Jackson is a very talented film-maker with the ability to do well in any country, but I don’t think this project is necessarily going to advance his career…’

  With the possibility of money being withheld, script changes were made but there were angry allegations of ‘censorship’, which were strongly countered. The frequently acrimonious correspondence – comprising official as well as off-the-record ‘Personal and Confidential’ letters – was hampered by several misunderstandings and crossed purposes that indicated a lack of mutual trust.

  There were the occasional positive glimmerings as when Grace Carley of the distributor, Perfect Features, faxed the Commission with a letter of support for Feebles: ‘The screenplay of Meet the Feebles far exceeded my expectations in terms of originality and structure. The writers have done an admirable job in creating and sustaining a pacy, cohesive story which avoids being episodic or repetitive…’

  And, on the issue of possible bad taste: ‘Excess is a common thread running through satire or spoof in all media, and is acceptable as part of that genre…The marketing approach on Meet the Feebles is that it is a cutesie puppet show with sex and drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and violence. Its very nature dictates that it be somewhat racy although in a comical way – and it must be accepted that it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. If it loses it’s hard edge by having to compromise to a potentially sensitive audience, it runs the risk of becoming neither one thing nor another and consequently of no interest to anyone…’

  Meanwhile, the film-makers were battling on with filming while marksmen were called in to pick off the pigeons and bug-exterminators tackled the fleas.

  Marty Walsh was unit manager on the film: ‘It was all pretty nutty.

  Chris Short – our first AD on Feebles. If ever any role needed a sense of humour it was this one. Fortunately Shorty has humour in spades.

  People got sick, simple injuries turned septic and quite a few folk seriously lost the plot! Art director Mike Kane, staged a short-lived protest against the cold by lighting an open fire – on a wooden floor! It was total madness: there was no money for smoke-machines for the Vietnam battle scenes, so – crazy though it sounds – we burned old car tyres! The place stunk of acrid smoke and if you happened to be downwind of it, you ended the day with a face like a panda!’

  The memories of those involved are varied: ‘We worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week’ recalls Cameron. ‘We had no life apart from making the film…’

  ‘Despite everything,’ says Tania, ‘it was very exciting to be involved with the project, even though there were some hard moments…I remember the food not being particularly grand, probably because the catering budget was some ridiculous amount like $7 a day, which meant that we pretty much lived on mince! Most of the crew were constantly griping about the food because they had worked on other

  Marty Walsh – our second AD. That’s me shooting and Marty dragging me backwards to create a very low budget dolly move. Marty has gone on to become the AD running all the miniature shooting on Lord of the Rings and Kong.

  movies and noticed the difference, whereas Richard and I were actually grateful that food arrived each day and the fact that it was free was an absolute bonus!’

  However, as Tania also remembers, the chef’s supplies were hardly sacrosanct – at least not when the artistic requirements of the model-makers were involved: ‘We didn’t have sufficient budget to buy everything we needed so, after hours, Richard and I would carry out a purge of the catering store – pinching various ingredients, like rice, frozen vegetables, milk and yoghurt – to turn it into vomit and other unmentionable things!’

  To help keep up the team’s morale – and supplement the not overgenerous catering – Peter’s mum would often pop in around teatime with piles of scones or apple slices for fifty hungry people. The support that Joan and Bill Jackson gave to their son automatically extended to those with whom he was working, without apparently, a moment’s pause over the antics of the fornicating, urinating, expectorating Feebles!

  ‘Looking back,’ reflects Richard, ‘I still think of the time spent in that railway shed as the best time of my working career, although Peter really can’t believe it, when I say it! Of course, we were too young to understand all the politics that was going on. We just thought it was the way all film-making was done!’

  Peter, of course, was aware of the politics – even though Jim tried to shield him from the worst of it; and he knew that, as far as the Film Commission were concerned, Meet the Feebles was not being made according to the way film-making was usually done!

  We kept on filming, but we were over-running and over-budget. After seven weeks we were still nowhere near completing the shoot. I felt panicked. There was a real sense at the Film Commission that I’d gone out of control, there were threats that I would be removed as director.

  ‘The threat to remove Peter,’ recalls David Gascoigne, ‘was probably intended as shock tactics to get some level of compliance; Peter could not have been replaced without the agreement of the entire board and I doubt that would have ever happened – apart from which, I can’t imagine who on earth we would have got to finish it!’

  Jim Booth attempted to salvage the situation by asking the Commission for a bridging loan of $148,000 on the guarantee that he and Peter would personally underwrite the overrunning budget on the strength of their personal assets, including their houses, Jim’s car and life
insurance policies and Peter’s income from Bad Taste.

  The loan was granted on various conditions, one of which was the appointment of a ‘completion supervisor’ to see the shoot through to its end at, ironically, a cost to the Commission that was greater than financing the shoot through to its conclusion.

  The person handed this poisoned chalice was feature film director John Reid, who had recently made Leave All Fair, a film about Katherine Mansfield starring Jane Birkin and John Gielgud. Jim ought, perhaps, to have known John Reid’s presence on set was hardly likely to be acceptable to a director who was already under serious pressure.

  Everything began looking very grim. I was determined to make the best film I could, to finish it properly, but it was so very hard. The Commission developed a really bad attitude towards me, not that I was rude…No…I was rude actually!

  John Reid showed up on a Sunday night as we were about to begin a night shoot. He had been sent in to tell me what to do to get this film finished, but I was so angry at his presence that I screamed and yelled at him and he turned and walked off, and never reappeared. John is a really nice guy and I feel very embarrassed when I remember how I behaved towards him, but I was stressed to the max and I just didn’t want this guy around, so I’m afraid I sent him packing…

  John Reid clearly found the situation untenable but felt no malice towards a fellow director so heavily under the cosh. Nevertheless, his arrival and instant departure had an immediate knock-on effect. Judith McCann wrote a letter of admonition to Jim Booth, bristling with, as the Commission would have seen it, justifiable anger:

  ‘The Commission is of the view that it cannot rely upon you to work in an open and willing manner with the Commission in order to complete the film…Accordingly, we advise you that you are in breach of the Production and Loan Agreement…’

  Although the circumstances were such that the Commission had the right to take over production and completion of the film, it decided against such action, advising Jim, ‘You can continue, if you wish, to complete the film. However, you are in default until such time as you fully repay the loan and interest.’

  In what was a stinging rebuke to her predecessor, the Executive Director wrote: ‘As you will be aware, this is the first time the Commission has had to take such a drastic and regrettable step. While the Commission has an obligation to encourage film-making, it also has an obligation to safeguard its limited funds by ensuring its contracts and agreements are complied with…Producers who are successful in obtaining the Commission’s approval have a moral obligation to their fellow producers and to the industry as a whole to comply with the responsibility they assume in accepting the Commission’s production financing.’

  WingNut Film’s response of a few days later, signed by both Jim and Peter, was passionate: ‘We were stunned to receive your letter…We consider the decision extraordinarily harsh, precipitate, and we dispute the grounds upon which it was made…’ Seizing upon the one conciliatory note in Judith McCann’s letter (‘The Commission’s door is not closed…’), they went on to outline a solution to the problem which was that all parties accept Jamie Selkirk as Post-production Producer and for Jamie to take on the responsibility of ensuring ‘the completion of the film on time and on budget.’

  The Film Commission agreed to this proposal and that, as far as finishing off Meet the Feebles was concerned, should have been that. However…

  There were still some key scenes to be shot, but the Film Commission were insisting that we stop filming and start editing the movie. At this point, Stephen, Fran and I got together and thought, ‘F*** them! We’ll finish the film the way we want!’ So, we chipped in $20,000 of our own money to fund the remainder of the shoot.

  This response is indicative of Peter Jackson’s determination to do what he does ‘his way’; to make the film he has envisioned as fully as possible – however impossible – brooking no obstacle and holding on to the commitment and sense of shared endeavour of those with whom he works. As Marty Walsh observes: ‘Peter is a film-maker, not a poseur-director. He is the real deal. There are no duplicitous agendas; there is no tyrannical, egocentric power-play. He is only there to make the film. That is his mission and it is the opportunity to share in that mission that earns him the loyalty and commitment of others.’ That approach was first demonstrated during the marathon that was Bad Taste and again during the nightmare that was Meet the Feebles.

  We couldn’t allow the Film Commission to find out that we were still shooting, so we got the crew together and told them we would pay them to carry on but in total secrecy and, of course, they were all on board – loving the fact that it was all being done undercover!

  During the day I had to be seen going into the cutting room to work on the edit with Jamie. But at six o’clock every night, I would go down

  Another ace puppeteer, Ramon Rivero, operating the dead fish off-camera. Every conceivable method was used to bring these little bastards to life. This scene was being shot during our ‘secret week’ when the Film Commission thought I was in the cutting room.

  to the railway shed…We’d park our vehicles out of sight and have sentries posted outside to keep a lookout for any Film Commission people, while we, literally, locked ourselves in and shot in secret.

  One of the last days was incredibly stressful as we had to shoot a scene on a golf course in broad daylight with the entire crew – plus actors in full-size puppet costumes as Bletch the Walrus, Barry the Bulldog and Cedric the Warthog – hoping to hell that nobody saw what we were up to!

  ‘The infamous secret shoot on Meet the Feebles,’ says Costa Botes, ‘was an indication of Peter’s strength of purpose, his dogged, determined, never-say-die, my-way-or-the-highway attitude! It also demonstrated his ability to inspire the troops; why else would those people do what they did, working through the night to finish the film? Then as now, Peter generates a fierce loyalty within those who work with him.’

  When the time came to send the negative that we’d shot during the secret shoot off to the laboratory to be developed, we obviously couldn’t label it Meet the Feebles, so we gave it a code name and called it The Frogs of War!

  Apart from the amphibious links to the military career of Wynyard the Frog, the punning reference to the 1981 film version of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Dogs of War was appropriate since it told the story of a revolutionary coup staged by a mercenary!

  Marty Walsh remembers the last day of shooting when the production reached an all-time level of absurdity: ‘We were filming in the overgrown gardens of the local hospital, which doubled for the Vietnamese jungles. By this stage there were only three or four of us left and we were filming Wynyard running away from the Vietcong.

  This was a reasonably simple Feebles shot compared to most. Heidi’s cables operated her eyes and eyelids. Danny did a brilliant job with the rest. Meet The Feebles was the last film I operated the camera on, a job I love doing. I’m in awe of directors like Ridley Scott and Robert Bodegas, who make complex films and still manage to operate their own camera – something I’ll have another go at doing one day.

  Peter was manipulating the puppet with one hand, holding the camera with the other while running backwards through the undergrowth. Depending on your point of view, it was either amazing to think of Peter being, simultaneously, actor, cameraman and director, or just bizarre to see what was, effectively, a film-maker shooting his own hand!’

  The nuts-and-bolts of filming holds little mystique for Peter. Think of more or less any job on a movie and he will, at some point in his career, have done that job himself: model- and prop-maker, set-builder, special-effects technician, actor, animator, cameraman and director. As a consequence he knows what he is asking of every member of the crew.

  Meet the Feebles was finally completed and a fine cut was screened for the Film Commission towards the end of July 1989. Quite a lot of what they saw took them by surprise – especially scenes about which they had already expressed concern and one or two
that they didn’t expect! There was full-frontal hippo nudity, acts of fellatio and the introduction of a quite unexpected musical number. Where, in the original script, the Feebles’ director – a camp fox named Sebastian – sang a song entitled ‘How Low Can a Hobo Lobo Go?’, he now appeared on a set decorated with phallic columns singing an altogether different song. Written by Danny Mulheron, it began, ‘Sodomy, I think it’s very odd of me, that I enjoy the act of sodomy…’

  The Film Commission’s response was, perhaps not too surprisingly, somewhat cool: they were disappointed, they said, but in view of the time constraints prior to delivery of the film, had decided not to intervene over what was or was not included in the final cut, knowing that ‘the validity of your judgement on this and other aspects of the production will lie with the censor (and, subsequently, with the market place)…’

  As final closure on what had been a stressful few months, the Commission declined to receive a credit on the film.

  ‘In the Commission’s defence,’ says former Chairman, David Gascoigne, ‘it would have been a really bad idea to have invested public money in a film that was banned and couldn’t be shown. The Commission would very probably have been accused of irresponsibility.

  Danny Mulheron—Danny had the pivotal role of Heidi the Hippo, and was always a key member of the writing team on Feebles. Heidi’s voice was supplied by Mark Hadlow, so with a guy performing inside and a guy doing her voice, we all got a kick when she was nominated for Best Female Performance at the local film awards!