Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

  One or two of Peter’s friends remember him talking about the possibility of going to Britain in the hopes of finding work in the film industry there. ‘I don’t recall thinking about going to England then,’ says Peter, ‘but maybe I did. My mum’s brother, Uncle Bill, knew people who worked at Elstree Studios (just down the road from Shenley); one chap had worked on 2001 and other films in the Wardrobe Department and, years later, after I had made Bad Taste, Uncle Bill took me to meet him.’ It seems unlikely that a lad who needed his father to accompany him to an interview would have ever seriously contemplated travelling halfway round the world in search of a job. If he did, then it was probably no more than the fleeting thought of someone who desperately wanted to get into the film business but really didn’t know how that ambition might be achieved.

  In the event, Fate played a different card…

  2

  GETTING SERIOUS

  The ‘Situations Vacant’ column of Wellington’s Evening Post wasn’t the most promising place for a would-be film-maker to be looking for an opening, but Peter Jackson needed a job…

  On that evening, in 1978, when Peter and his father returned from the unsuccessful interview at the National Film Unit, the Jackson family went through the Evening Post newspaper to see what employment opportunities were on offer.

  We found an advertisement for a vacancy at the newspaper itself – as an apprentice photoengraver. I didn’t have a clue what a photoengraver was, but it had the word ‘photo’ in it and that was good enough for me. At this point, I wanted to take anything so I could, at least, start earning some money. I also think if I’d failed to get this job, my parents would have sent me to university, so a job interview was arranged. I was as nervous as all hell – it’s weird the things you remember, but the night before my interview I saw The Sound of Music for the first time. In the movie, Maria sings a song about being confident – and I sat there in the dark, being totally inspired by this damn song. The next day, I walked into the interview carrying the sound of Julie Andrews’ voice in my head! I also took Dad to this interview as well – and, thank God, I got the job!

  I was amazed at what it felt like to be earning money: my first week’s pay cheque was for NZ$77. I couldn’t believe it: all I had to do was turn up there and every week somebody would give me $77! After sixteen years of pocket money, it opened up a lot of possibilities!

  The apprenticeship required Peter to attend a twelve-week course at the Auckland Technical Institute (now the Auckland Institute of Technology), which had originally been founded in the 1890s by the local Working Men’s Club to run evening classes in teaching various trades. By 1978, when Peter began his studies, the ATI was a full-time establishment running courses in engineering, commerce, fashion technology, printing, art and design.

  At the concourse bookstall on Wellington railway station, the 17-year-old Peter Jackson decided to buy a chunky paperback to while away the twelve-hour rail journey to Auckland that lay ahead. The book was The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.

  He was prompted to buy this particular volume because the cover featured tie-in art from the first – and only – part of animator Ralph Bakshi’s aborted attempt to bring Tolkien’s epic to the screen. Years later, millions of people would start reading the same story because the book carried images from the Jackson film trilogy…

  Peter had gone to see Bakshi’s film with high expectations, having seen the director’s earlier foray into the fantasy genre, Wizards, in company with Pete O’Herne and Ken Hammon. ‘It was screened at a cinema in town,’ recalls Ken, ‘and, as soon as we got out of school, we had to run to catch the train into Wellington, run to the picture house to be in time for the screening and then, afterwards, run all the way back to the station to catch the train home. It was a typical Jackson expedition!’

  Wizards was the latest animated film from the renegade director who had already outraged Seventies moviegoers with his adult-rated Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic and Coonskin. A bizarre post-apocalyptic vision set in a world of elves, dwarves and good-and-bad-wizards with strong parallels to Middle-earth, Wizards now seems like an audition for Bakshi’s ill-fated attempt at The Lord of the Rings, which was yet to come.

  I saw Bakshi’s Rings when it first came out and, at the time, I hadn’t read the book. As a result, I got pretty confused! I liked the early part – it had some quaint sequences in Hobbiton, a creepy encounter with the Black Rider on the road, and a few quite good battle scenes – but then, about half way through, the storytelling became very disjointed and disorientating and I really didn’t understand what was going on.

  However, what it did do was to make me want to read the book – if only to find out what happened!

  Sitting on the ‘Silver Fern’ train from Wellington to Auckland, he began to do just that…

  Being mad about movies and fascinated by the whole business of film-making – especially special effects – I kept saying to myself, ‘This book could make a really great movie!’ Of course, it never even occurred to me that I could make it – I didn’t even fantasise about making it! That would have been ridiculous: after all, I was just a 17-year-old, apprentice photoengraver, so there was no romantic moment that had me sitting on the train thinking, ‘One day, I will make a film of this book!’ Such a thought would have been totally crazy.

  But I did think, ‘I can’t wait for somebody to make this movie! My real fantasy would have been a Ray Harryhausen version of The Lord of the Rings – because that’s what I really want to see! Years later, a moment came when it felt like, since nobody else seemed to be going to make it, I would simply have to make it myself! But that was way off in the future…

  In fact, although people probably have this impression of me as having been a geeky Tolkien-reader as a kid, the truth is I didn’t read the book again until the idea of making the film came up – eighteen years later.

  Ken Hammon recalls that it took Peter some time to wade through the full 1,000-plus pages of Tolkien’s book: ‘We ribbed Pete about it so much that it became something of an on-going joke: ‘Have you finished reading The Lord of the Rings yet?’ we’d ask. Now, I guess the joke’s on us, because whenever I hear Pete talking about the film, he clearly knows Tolkien’s writings inside out and back to front. Not only that, but I remember telling Pete that the “unreadable book” would make an “unwatchable film”, but he sure as hell disproved that theory!’

  Meanwhile, back in 1978, Peter excelled at his studies at Auckland Technical Institute. As he was to report in a funding application to the New Zealand Film Commission, a few years later: ‘I served my three-year term, gaining the highest marks out of fifty students for both Trade Certificate and Advanced Trade Certificate.’ To which he added, ‘I mention this not to boast, but to show that I do try my best at anything I take on.’

  Peter was to spend seven years working at the Evening Post and as he jokingly reflects:

  It’s reassuring to know that I’ve always got a career in photoengraving to fall back on if I ever need it!

  Photoengraving is the process by which images are engraved onto zinc or magnesium plates to be used on a press for printing photographs and images in newspapers. The metal plate is coated with a substance called a ‘photo-resist’, which is both photosensitive and yet resistant to acids. Strong ultraviolet light is then shone through a photographic negative causing those parts of the image through which the light has passed to harden. The image is then developed, using a solvent to wash away the unhardened parts of the image on the photo-resist. The metal plate is next placed in a bath of acid that dissolves those areas of metal that have been exposed and creates a plate from which a positive image can then be printed.

  The process at the time was pretty primitive, and as the lowly apprentice, it was my job to etch the magnesium plates in big sulphuric-acid baths that, afterwards, had to be drained and scrubbed-out by hand. There were no real safety precautions and I’d lose the skin off my fingers and have my T-shirts go int
o holes and fall apart from the effects of the acid!

  About a year into Peter’s apprenticeship, the Evening Post merged with Wellington’s daily paper the Dominion Post and Rob Lewis (‘Mr Lewis’ to the apprentice lads) became manager of the process department for the combined papers. Peter Jackson was one of Mr Lewis’s employees and he still has clear memories of the young man who was already trailing clouds of glory as ‘Apprentice of the Year’: ‘Peter was a delight. He was a little shy or, more accurately, someone with a certain

  Rob Lewis, my boss in the Evening Post process department, standing on the left. Mr. Lewis was a little fearsome at first, and certainly a boss who commanded respect – but looking back, his idea to feature my home-made gorilla suit in a newspaper story kicked off a series of incidents and meetings that changed my life. I love the way fate weaves its complex, unpredictable path.

  quietness about him; that said, he could also be full of fun and mischief. There was no question that he was good at his work – very good, although he clearly had his own agenda, his own road to run. With two daily papers and a Sunday edition to print each week, I always needed people to take on overtime and Peter was always the one person it was difficult to get to do overtime – not because he was a reluctant worker, but because he had other things to occupy his spare time – like making movies!’

  Mr Lewis is not entirely accurate – there were periods when I’d desperately do as much overtime as I could squeeze in, to pay for ever-growing film-making costs!

  Indeed, despite the demands of the day-job, Peter still retained his filmic ambitions, one of which was to emulate a particular effect created by Ray Harryhausen in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, the film that had provided so much of the inspiration for The Valley. One of the most ingenious sequences in the film was that in which the actor playing Sinbad had a sword-fight with an animated skeletal warrior. It was a brilliant set-piece and the precursor to a tour de force scene in the later Jason and the Argonauts in which the crew of the Argos engage with an entire army of battling skeletons.

  I really wanted to try and do the types of movie tricks Ray had done: I wanted to film a sword-fight, with a human (me!) sword-fighting an animated skeleton. You had to film the live-action human first – a shadow-sword-fighting – rear-project it on a small screen and shoot a stop-motion model in front of it.

  I built a little skeleton in cardboard with a wire ‘armature’ – that’s what animators call the poseable skeleton inside a stop-motion puppet, so this was a skeleton inside a skeleton! This figure was going to be my opponent in the scene I wanted to film.

  Even though I didn’t have any of the equipment which Ray Harryhausen would have used to create his effects, I was still determined to try and make this work using just my Super 8 camera, so I shot some animation tests with the skeleton, copying the moment when one of them breaks out of the ground in Jason and the Argonauts. I was then forever attempting to figure out a way of projecting an image of me onto a screen so that I could put the skeleton in front, animate it in synchronisation with the film and photograph the combined images. I tried various experiments, but the results were terrible!

  While I was trying to solve the logistics, I carried on filming the live-action half of the sequence. I made myself a Sinbad costume, dressed up in it and went with Pete O’Herne down onto the Pukerua Bay beach to film the live-action side of the fight among the rock-pools.

  I plotted a sword-fight routine where I was battling with this imaginary skeleton. There were to be several shots of me – as Sinbad – fighting desperately, swinging the sword round and then, at the end of the fight, the climactic moment was me being knocked backwards off the rock and falling into the sea with a splash!

  At the beginning of the day, we looked around for a safe place where I could fall back into the water, found one that was good and deep and started shooting…

  Pete O’Herne recalls filming among the rocks, operating the camera to immortalise Peter’s performance: ‘I remember Peter saying that he wanted to do a skeleton sword-fight like the one in Sinbad or Jason and the Argonauts, so, of course, I went along to help out. That was how it was in those days; it was just what we did. We were always going to be there, hanging out, doing stuff…It never occurred to me to say, “Hey, Pete, hope you don’t mind, but I really want to hang around with some other guys…” I didn’t question it. It was, “OK, so what are we up to this weekend?” And it was fun, good fun.’ Except, on this particular weekend, it was also wet! ‘We shot versions of the sword fight for best part of a couple of hours, with me in the water almost up to my waist and pretty much drenched. Then the accident happened…’

  Peter has his own painful memories of that day…

  After several hours of shooting me sword-fighting with an invisible skeleton, we reached the point at which I had to hurl myself backwards, as if knocked into the water by the skeleton. I splashed into the water – and suddenly felt a sickening pain as something whacked against my spine.

  Unfortunately, as we had been shooting for several hours, the tide had dropped a couple of feet – something that hadn’t occurred to me – so when I took my spectacular stunt dive I crashed onto a sharp rock that was now just below the surface of the water. I was in instant agony, but somehow managed to get home. Some time later, however, I developed a pilonidal cyst, caused by the trauma to the lower vertebrae, and ended up being admitted to hospital for surgery.

  After the operation, I was off work on convalescence for two or three weeks. This was valuable time, not to be wasted, so I started chopping up foam rubber and began work on building a full gorilla suit which would later play an unexpected, but life-changing role in my future career…

  As for the skeleton fight, I never did manage to solve the technical problems involved and it remained a sadly unfulfilled ambition. But what I just love about such things is that a few years ago, Ray Harryhausen visited our house in Wellington and he opened this little box, produced his original stop-motion skeleton puppet to show us…And I couldn’t help thinking that there I’d been, as a kid, animating skeletons and falling off rocks because I’d seen Ray’s movies and now here he was in my home with an original model from one of those films!

  It is simply the greatest thing in the world when those kinds of circles turn and connect. Little moments that connect me to the kid I was, and remind me of the kid I still am.

  The accident temporarily forestalled Peter’s plans to make his Sinbad adventure and it was destined to be one of many juvenile projects that would never see completion.

  I was always thinking of ideas that were ambitious, technically complex films and all I had was a little Super 8 camera that couldn’t shoot sound. So I’d always be disappointed by the results and eventually abandon one project and start work on something else. This pattern of being unable to make something within my means – and most of all original – became something I was conscious of and which started to worry me.

  Among the discarded Jackson ventures of the late Seventies was a short experiment loosely inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and John Carpenter’s Halloween in which an unseen intruder – the camera films from the intruder’s point-of-view – enters a house and shoots a terrified old man. Filmed in the Jackson home (with Pete O’Herne in heavy make-up as the elderly victim) the exercise was shot in a single, continuous take.

  Another uncompleted project later came to be referred to as Coldfinger although, at the time, it was known simply as ‘The James Bond Thing’.

  The first Bond movie I saw was Roger Moore in his debut performance, Live and Let Die, in 1973. Shortly afterwards, The Roxy cinema in Wellington ran interesting (if slightly unlikely) double-bill featuring the WWII movie, The Dam Busters along with the first-ever James Bond film, Dr No, starring Sean Connery. Then, in 1974, I saw the film that confirmed me as a huge Bond fan: The Man with the Golden Gun with Roger Moore in his second outing as Agent 007 and my favourite actor from the Hammer horror movies, Christopher Lee
, as Francisco Scaramanga. A fabulous villain, Scaramanga had, supposedly, been born in a circus as the son of a Cuban ringmaster and a British snake-charmer and had, as a distinguishing feature, a third nipple or, as Bond refers to it, ‘a superfluous papilla’!

  I loved The Man with the Golden Gun! I just had to keep going back to the cinema to see it. It was the first film that I saw four times in one week (the next would be David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai), and it made such an impact that I even tried to take photos of it. I had a camera that used to take slides, so I smuggled it into the cinema and during some of my favourite moments in the film – like when the car jumps over the bridge – I’d whip out my camera and snap off some pictures.

  It’s hard for anyone to understand who wasn’t living in the time before videos but, unlike now, we weren’t able to watch just about any movie that’s ever been made whenever we wished. Videos and DVDs have profoundly changed movie-watching: when I was young, a film came to the local cinema for one week only – it was on and then gone; only a handful of cinemas ever showed double-bill revivals and our single-channel TV station in New Zealand didn’t get films for years and years. So, once a film had played, you were unlikely to see it again in under a decade.