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Peter
Jackson |
How on (middle?) earth did one of the Twentieth Century's most mythic and
popular works of literature, JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, end
up being translated into cinema in the largest movie project ever
undertaken, by
a team helmed by a maverick New Zealand director refusing to budge from his home-made studio at the edge of the
planet ... a director previously best known for
his DIY Kiwi-schlock horror flicks and an art-house film about teenage
matricide? NZEDGE is proud to present a personal and
fascinating account of the Peter Jackson story (thus far) by New Zealand
filmmaker Costa Botes. Costa co-directed, wrote and produced with Peter the classic NZ mock-umentary
Forgotten Silver in 1995. His account of Jackson's journey is a
steadfastly idiosyncratic case study of innovation, focus and energy from
the edge; "In giving
himself something to watch, Peter Jackson has given the rest of us good
cause to shake off complacency and start thinking about how to realise a
few other 'impossible' goals." Roll on ...
Made in
New Zealand: The Cinema of Peter Jackson
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A DIY Guy Peter Jackson is one of the smartest people I know, and the least pointy headed. He isn't interested in the 'whys' and 'wherefores' of things terribly much. This article would probably bore him rigid. Essentially, Peter was the kind of guy who latched on very early to the notion that he could make movies, so he just went out and 'did' it. First with his Dad's Super 8 camera. Then with a spring wound Bolex, shooting 16mm. Real movie film. Peter's need to make real movies was acute. In this, he was rare, but not unique (today, the supply of wannabes lining up for film schools is positively scary). The extraordinary thing about Peter was the capacity he demonstrated to act on his ambitions.
It isn't the art in his childhood film making that's striking, but the sheer hard work and ambition. The young Jackson was a self starter, a classic 'Kiwi DIY' proponent. He learned via trial and error and any instructional material he could lay his hands on: how to shoot and edit films, how to sculpt, and paint make-up prosthetics, construct miniature models, and execute a range of sophisticated special effects. When I first met him in 1986, Peter was already a veteran. He'd been shooting his own movies since he was eight. These included numerous World War I epics, for which he continually dug up his parents lawn to recreate the Somme, Coldfinger, a Bond spoof, in which Jackson was eerily convincing as a Sean Connery lookalike, and Revenge of the Gravewalker, a wide screen zombie spectacular. By now, he was deep into the third year of production on his most ambitious self-funded epic yet, Roast of the Day. This was the film that would eventually evolve into Jackson's debut feature, Bad Taste. From start to finish, it was a triumph of dogged perseverance.
No budget? Peter paid for it all himself out of his salary as a photo engraver. No equipment? Peter bought the minimum necessary - a camera with a sync speed motor, and built the rest himself, including his own dolly tracks, crane, and even a steadicam. No crew? No problem. Peter and stalwart friend, Ken Hammon, did it all. No cast? No worries. Colleagues from work volunteered, as a laugh, then stuck around for years of weekend filming. Unfortunately, despite solid progress, the long gestating film took a body blow when a newly wed member of the core cast dropped out, forbidden to carry on shooting by his deeply religious bride. Peter's indomitable spirit could move earth, but not heaven. He'd also run out of cash. The day job as a photo engraver at The Evening Post just wasn't up to financing a major motion picture. By now, however, a few members of the film industry had got wind of this crazy maverick project, and they were impressed. NZ Film Commission CEO Jim Booth came to the rescue, drip feeding enough cash to stoke the flagging production back into life. Peter still had a hole where his story used to be, but he filled it with inspired sight gags and soldiered on. Then fate dealt another lucky card. The 'born again' bride broke up
with her husband, allowing Peter's straying star to return to the fold.
Bad Taste was back in business, and Jackson's hobby finally exploded into
a vocation. |
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From Pukerua Bay to Cannes Bad Taste was launched at Cannes, and became an instant cult classic. Jackson was hailed by horror fans as a new talent to watch. His trip to France was the first time he'd been out of New Zealand. When he showed me his travel snaps, they were full of pictures of McDonald's. I asked why. Because, he said, that's where he ate. He didn't like foreign food. I don't recall what else the NZ Film Commission was selling at the market that year - but I do recall one anecdote relayed by a Commission staffer. She described a generally dour atmosphere at the NZFC stand, interrupted by gales of laughter coming from the side of the room where Peter was giving interviews. This wasn't the last time Peter would gatecrash a palace of high
culture with his movies. |
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Bad Taste's New Zealand premiere was at the Wellington Film Festival. I was asked to write an introduction for their brochure by the Festival Director, Bill Gosden. He insisted I alter one line, where I compared Jackson to Buster Keaton.
This, sniffed Bill, wouldn't do at all. We eventually settled on a compromise. Jackson was likened to Laurel and Hardy instead. Sorry Bill, but this has bugged me ever since. I still think Keaton was the appropriate choice.
I'll never forget that screening. The audience was tense and expectant. They'd come in on the promise of bizarre fun. Kiwi genre movies weren't exactly thick on the ground, and there'd never been a good one. They saw a great one that night. The ceiling of Wellington's grand old lady, the Embassy, almost lifted off. Even after all this, the Peter Jackson story might have ended there - with Peter the latest in a long line of genre directors to deliver an auspicious debut, only to sink back into obscurity. Despite his popularity in the world of cult film (he was nicknamed the 'Sultan of Splatter' by fans), within New Zealand Jackson's notoriety and preferred choice of genre didn't exactly endear him to the local film establishment. It wouldn't be too inaccurate to say they were embarrassed by him. The brain eating, green vomit exploding, eyeball popping of Bad Taste just didn't fit the preferred profile for 'New Zealand Cinema'.
I quietly hoped that Jackson would go the way of David Cronenberg (Rabid, Shivers), or George Miller (Mad Max), both of who started as reviled genre directors in their respective countries before securing viable international careers. Although it was obvious Jackson wasn't going to just give up and disappear, he didn't seem to have too many options up his sleeve. However, in plotting his follow-up to Bad Taste, Peter was to exhibit
great strength of character. The choices he made seemed unwise and cocky
at the time, but in hindsight one can see how they allowed him to grow as
an artist, and thus helped lay the foundation for what followed. |
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The fact that Peter skipped this particular dilemma with so little angst demonstrated how different he was to the common run of Kiwi filmmakers. It's kind of obvious, really. It comes back to self-expression. The place you live is a big part of that. For a filmmaker, the thing you make, the thing you want to sell, has to be unique, it has to be special. In a crowded marketplace filled with generic pictures, the elements that always stand out are story and style. The personality of the filmmaker is vital in determining both. Whether or not he consciously thought it through in those terms, I have no idea, but somewhere in Peter's mind, he must have made the connection between his own inspiration, his ability to see things differently from everyone else, and the place, the culture he grew up in. In all likelihood, the reasoning was entirely selfish. As much as Peter loves to stretch the envelope, even burst through it in his professional life, on a more personal level, he likes the stability and comfort of the familiar. This was the guy, remember, who ate at McDonald's in Paris. Paradoxically, it's that immersion in the cosy familiarity of 'home' which has allowed him to develop a point of view that's fresh and unconventional.
If Jackson had grown up in the world of his English born parents, his prodigious natural talent may well have been directed into more orthodox and neutral channels. Here, the young filmmaker had total freedom of thought and choice. He had no resources, no school, no contacts. But the quality of being free - to experiment, make mistakes, and mix up all one's formative influences in a playground with no rules, no rigid history of how things 'should' be done was all the oxygen Jackson's creative fires needed. And now, here he was, with a feature film behind him. Precocious, perverse, with a wicked sense of humour and peerless talent for staging spectacle, Jackson found himself between two extremes - the cool indifference of the New Zealand Film Commission, and Hollywood offers he didn't want to take. What he did want to do, was make a puppet film. A twisted black comedy. A dark collision between The Muppets and Taxi Driver. It was to be a half hour short film. Cameron Chittock designed and built the puppets. A young Richard Taylor joined the crew designing models and special effects. George Port - who would go on to be a founding partner of Weta - was on the puppeteering team.
Meet The Feebles became a crucible into which Jackson poured in all the precocity, all the perversity he could muster. It was disgusting, vile, gross. And very funny. After a year, it was also unfinished. Like Peter's career, the film was teetering on the edge. Then Peter had the bright idea of taking a rough cut to Cannes. A Japanese distributor saw it, and offered $250,000 - on condition that the short film was expanded into a feature, and finished in time for next year's market. It wasn't enough money. He needed at least twice that much. And the deadline was crazy. But Peter went for it anyway. The writing team was Peter, Fran Walsh, Stephen Sinclair, and Danny Mulheron. A lot of comedy firepower was sitting in that room. Some of the material they came up with was brilliant. Some of it was scatological nonsense. The structure of the story was hit and miss. But none of that mattered. The script had attitude, and cut deep into the funny bone. Jim Booth came aboard as producer. His insider knowledge of film funding politics helped smooth the way to gaining the balance of the budget from the New Zealand Film Commission. However, they always remained, to say the least, uncomfortable with the project. The film's content alienated more than one member of the Commission Board. Peter had stuck his neck out and refused to compromise any of the script's more far out excesses. Thus, when the shoot ran over time and budget, there was no comfort to be had from that quarter. I ran into Jim Booth at a fast food joint one night about this time. He was demoralised and angry, but Jim being Jim, he wasn't dwelling on it. The plan seemed to be, grin and bear it. In the event, the crew backed their director and finished the shoot with no pay. There was to be no happy ending, no massive hit at the end of this rainbow. Peter's insistence on retaining Meet The Feebles grosser sequences ensured the film failed to get wide distribution. On the other hand, its cult following remains strong to this day, when other, more 'respectable' films of the time have long been forgotten. Peter later explained that he was most nervous about the reaction of
his Japanese investors to the wicked Asian stereotypes in the film's 'Deer
Hunter' parody (Winyard the Frog and his army buddies are taken prisoner
in 'Nam by Vietcong Mongeese, who proceed to eat their legs). The
screening went well, and everyone seemed happy, so Peter asked the
investors what their favorite sequence was. To a man, the Japanese reached
up, pulled their eyes into slits, and made chattering noises like the
Mongeese! |
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In 1990, story analyst Robert McKee was brought to New Zealand by the Film Commission and delivered his famous seminar on screenplay story structure to packed lecture rooms in Auckland and Wellington. In the audience were Jackson and Fran Walsh.
Over three days, McKee laid out a series of broad principles and practical tools which fell on the director and writer like thunderbolts. If any single event marks Jackson's transition from flash in the pan local hero to internationally capable competitor, the McKee seminar is it. Just a couple of years earlier, I recall Peter asking me to take a look at some pages of hand written notes he'd drawn up in planning the last phase of Bad Taste shooting. They were a joke. An almost incomprehensible jumble of notions that barely resembled a laundry list, let alone a screenplay. In those days, Peter was finding his movies as he went along, virtually creating them on the spot. Meet The Feebles was a token advance. The script was ingenious and quirky, but also sketchy and disjointed. Afterwards, in his heart of hearts, he must have known it wasn't good enough. From then on, his grasp of screenwriting had to equal his mastery of the camera.
Jackson and Walsh went back to their stalled zombie project, Brain Dead, and redesigned it from top to bottom. Through nine drafts, the script evolved from being a clever but wildly uneven series of gross sight gags, to an equally clever, but ultimately much more engaging story with powerfully interlocking elements. Love, lawnmowers, body parts, gallons and gallons of blood. Brain Dead must rank as one of the grisliest, most shockingly violent pictures ever made; and also one of the funniest. In hindsight, an amusing and telling aspect of the film's production was the casting of the Spanish love interest, Paquita. Originally, one of the film's key investors was to be a Spanish distributor. Their money was conditional on casting a Spanish actor in a leading role. The solution was to change the story's love interest, a Kiwi shop girl, into the daughter of Spanish immigrants. Peter thus found himself stuck with the onerous duty of auditioning a bevy of gorgeous Spanish girls. He found his ideal Paquita, and promised her the part. And then, the Spanish investor dropped out. The money was found elsewhere, but Peter kept his promise. The Spanish girl stayed in the movie. Nobody ever questioned the veracity of the casting. Fran and Peter wove Paquita's Spanish identity into the story so cleverly, it became an asset rather than an imposition.
In other respects, Peter paid much more attention to Brain Dead's Kiwi identity than he needed to. I don't think anyone has ever quite captured the look and feel of 1950s Wellington on film as he has. There were not only the fantastic miniature buildings and model vehicles built by Richard Taylor's effects workshop, but also a careful and affectionate recreation of language and customs of the period. Essentially, Jackson delivered a popular genre film with universal appeal, which nevertheless evoked a clear sense of national identity. The NZFC had long preached this as an ideal, but somehow or other, our films rarely delivered. And they still don't, as if somehow these two things are naturally incompatible. It just takes a great deal of courage and talent to follow through on the rhetoric, and unfortunately, one or other is usually lacking. At this point, if Jackson had been working in any other genre but horror, he would have been already certified a national treasure. Even his staunchest critics in the business had to take a step back at the sheer artfulness of this film. It was staggering, beyond belief, and it reeked 'New Zealandness' from every frame.
A few years later, when Sam Neill made Cinema of Unease, a personal
view of New Zealand film, Brain Dead figured large in his choice of
favorites, as did Jackson's next film. |
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I think it was in trying to make the transition from this kind of organic, fun style of production, to the ultimately pre-planned, storyboarded, and tightly pre-constructed requirements of a big special effects driven flick that Jackson lost the plot on The Frighteners. Maybe it was just the pace of post-production, which had to be accelerated to meet a hastily rearranged release date, or it could have been that the casting was wrong - with a miserable, haunted looking Michael J Fox stepping too far from type; perhaps the marketing promised a far merrier, simpler movie than the complex and very edgy picture Jackson ultimately delivered. Probably, it was a combination of all these and other factors which led The Frighteners to a relatively disappointing box office result. Artistically, it's an interesting film that improves on repeat viewings, but it's most definitely not a great one.
On the positive side, Peter showed that his mastery of special effects and ability to choreograph spectacular action had gone from strength to strength. With backing from a large Hollywood studio, he was able to invest in the growth of Weta. Richard Taylor's physical workshop, and the Digital FX side of the business grew exponentially. Fresh talent arrived from around the world, and a bunch of young New Zealand artists got an introduction to the industry. Some of them, like Andrew Adamson, co-director of Shrek, went on to
Hollywood. Many of them stayed here, and are now working on Lord of the
Rings.
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A few weeks later, I got a very intriguing phone call from Fran Walsh. She and Peter were flying to Los Angeles to pitch a number of projects. They had designs on acquiring the rights to a rather famous book. They needed someone to prepare an accurate plot summary of this book so they could quickly move on to developing a filmic adaptation. When she told me what the book was, I immediately thought two things. First, that they were crazy … and second, that there was no other director on earth who could do it justice. Why? Because I knew him. Because of everything that's set down here about his attitude and talent and taste. Peter Jackson is uniquely suited to translating JRR Tolkein into film.
Of course, the book was Lord of the Rings. I then spent the next ten days reading all three parts, summarising Tolkein's plot as faithfully as I could, producing a kind of 'cheater's guide', with page references. This was a simple exercise. Pondering the task ahead for Fran and Peter, who had to somehow distil all this material into three compelling and cinematic screenplays, I vacillated between the same two extremes - from a conviction they really were nuts, to the inexplicable gut feeling they might actually pull it off. Well, we often talk about the 'Big One' in the film industry, as in, "see you on the Big One", the mythical film that never comes. They're always too small, too hurried, too under-budgeted. Now I can say that in my lifetime I've seen the Big One. And it really was a beautiful thing.
Director of Photography Andrew Lesnie half jokingly called Lord of the Rings, "the biggest low budget movie in the history of the planet". Even with all the hundreds of millions spent on it, the film's production has been characterised by a rough and ready, DIY feel. Even with the best, and brightest movie minds minds on the planet on the case, chaos and confusion have reigned. But somehow, the bright vision at the center of it all has shone undimmed. It's hard to comprehend the amount of detail Peter Jackson holds in his brain, sifting, collating, making a multitude of choices daily, all to keep this movie - actually three movies - on track, moving forward, being the best they can be. He's had six years of Rings so far, with another two to go. It must take a toll - and yet, there he is, the classic Kiwi hero. Rumpled, unflappable, cheerfully barefoot in more ways than one.
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MAY 2002
BY COSTA BOTES |
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Aitken | Alda | Alley
| Atack | Batten | Bowen |
Britten |
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