Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  Film fans had to content themselves with collecting images in magazines and books, buying soundtrack recordings of film scores (or illicitly record them yourself as I had done with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad) collecting toys and merchandise – anything to keep hold of the memories. That’s why I tried to grab a few souvenir photos of The Man With the Golden Gun but, needless to say, when I got them developed I found that they were all completely blank!

  Catching old movies on sporadic re-release meant, in the case of Bond movies, seeing the films out of chronology and with a central character alternately played by Sean Connery and Roger Moore. Ken Hammon recalls going with Peter to a screening of Connery’s 1971 final foray into the world of Bond, Diamonds Are Forever: ‘It was also around this time that Pete hired a copy of the fourth movie in the series, Thunderball (“Here Comes the Biggest Bond of All!”), and screened it at school over two lunchtimes, advertised by a Jacksondrawn poster of Sean Connery who, by now, was probably Pete’s favourite action hero.’

  The dynamic, thrill-packed opening which became the hallmark of every Bond film was something that would inform Peter’s later approach to The Lord of the Rings and in particular the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring.

  I’ve always been a believer in the James Bond approach, which is to blow people away in the first five minutes of the film, which buys you that little bit of story set-up time during your first act. You shift people from the state of mind they’re in when they enter the cinema, and very quickly try to ensnare them into the world of your movie. The prologue in Fellowship served two functions: it got a lot of the back-story information out of the way at the beginning of the film, which would otherwise have had to explain by Gandalf in Bag End; but we also wanted the prologue to be more than just information and having the battle scenes – even though I now feel that they were rather rushed and not as good as they should have been – provided something spectacular and visceral to rip people out of whatever frame of mind they’re in when they enter the cinema. If people sit there and their jaws drop open and they go ‘Wow!’ then you’ve got them, you’re in control.

  As for Peter’s youthful attempt at filming something in the Bond style, all that ever made it onto celluloid were two fight-sequences with Peter playing his hero in his father’s dinner-suit and with, says Ken Hammon, ‘a ton of face make-up to make him look like Sean Connery – only ten inches shorter!’ Bond’s first fight, set amongst those perilous rocks at Pukerua Bay was with Ken playing a villain who almost succeeds in garrotting the special agent with a fishing line – until the ever-resourceful 007 removes his bow-tie which handily converts into a flick-knife.

  The second fight with another baddie (played by Andrew Neale, another of those gold prospectors in The Valley) was shot on the Jackson balcony overlooking the Kapiti coast. The scene took up an entire day’s shooting and yet not a frame of footage was ever to be seen: the film had been incorrectly loaded and although the camera was whirred away as if filming, it was, in fact, doing nothing of the sort. Before a re-shoot could be scheduled, Andrew Neale had left New Zealand and so the scene was later recreated with Pete O’Herne playing the villain.

  The Bond project was another destined to remain unfinished, but Peter Jackson never lost his love of the film incarnations of Ian Fleming’s special agent. A colleague on the Evening Post, Ray Battersby, has a photograph of Peter posing in his bedroom with a cinema foyer standee of Bond from the 1987 film The Living Daylights. Since the cardboard cut-out had a removable head, the photograph shows Peter Jackson substituting for the actor who had just taken on the role of Bond, Timothy Dalton.

  As a child, Peter Jackson’s bedroom was full of model cars and aircraft-kits. Today, he owns the real things – not just an Aston Martin, but also several vintage planes from the First World War. The toys it seems have just got bigger…

  My hobbies and interests are exactly the same now as they were when I was 12 – they are essentially no different. Most people develop their hobbies when they’re young; certainly I don’t have any hobbies that I’ve taken up as an adult. For me, everything is an extension to what has gone before. Owning a WWI airplane is just a continuation from buying and building Airfix plastic kits when I was a kid; I’ve just been lucky enough now to have earned sufficient money to move on to fullsized planes. It’s really just the same old hobbies! I still have Super 8 footage of WWI dogfights I shot when I was about 10 years old.

  As Peter’s childhood friend, Pete O’Herne remarks: ‘Peter hasn’t changed one bit. If he had $10 he’d go and buy himself a model of a Spitfire. If he’s got a million dollars, he’ll just go buy the bigger version. Why not? That’s exactly what any of us would do!’

  Maybe so, but all of these things – becoming a professional film-maker or owning an Aston Martin – were distant, if not impossible, dreams for the young Peter Jackson in 1979. However, it wasn’t long before Peter was demonstrating his technical ambitions by not only upgrading his movie equipment to a Super 8 camera – with sound –

  This shot really captures the spirit and feel of The Curse of the Gravewalker, filmed amongst the old graves at a local cemetery. I’m playing the swash-buckling zombie-hunting hero, as Pete O’Herne goes for my jugular. Pete’s make-up would be done in my bedroom and then Mum or Dad would drive us to the cemetery and leave us there most of the day.

  but also by aspiring to produce wide-screen images by shooting in CinemaScope.

  CinemaScope had come hot on the heels of various movie innovations in the early Fifties – including 3-D and Cinerama – aimed at wooing American TV audiences back into the picture-houses. The system debuted with the 1953 religious epic, The Robe, advertised as ‘The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses’, and CinemaScope (along with such successors as VistaVision, Superscope, Todd-AO and Technirama) quickly became the way to view movies, especially big-budget musicals, westerns, war movies and costume dramas.

  In 1953 a mere five CinemaScope titles were released, during the following year, that figure rose to thirty-seven films including 20,000

  LEFT: The smallest stage I’ve ever used. Dad’s first car was a Morris Minor and he carefully built the garage with just enough space to squeeze in and out of the drivers’ door. Here, Pete and I are shooting a scene with Clive Haywood, another of my production stalwarts from the Evening Post process department. In those days, photo-litho plates came in wide flat cardboard boxes, and I used to lug piles of these home each week. Cardboard was my main building material for everything – here the boxes have been painted grey, sprinkled with beach sand and used to line the garage.

  Leagues Under the Sea, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Prince Valiant, Bad Day at Black Rock, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Three Coins in the Fountain. Within a decade, wide-screen movies were less a novelty, more the norm and, for a young man with a taste for cinematic spectacle, what he calls ‘the huge letterbox-shaped CinemaScope image’ couldn’t fail to appeal.

  Peter sent to a supplier in England for an anamorphic lens of the kind used for filming in CinemaScope. Based upon a technique pioneered in France in the late Twenties by the inventor Henri Chrétien, the lens worked using an optical trick called ‘anamorphosis’ which allowed an image twice the width of that captured by a conventional lens to be horizontally ‘squeezed’ onto film. When projected onto a screen using a similar lens, the image was ‘unsqueezed’ to provide dramatic, eye-stretching, cinematic experience. With his new camera and his anamorphic lens, Peter embarked on another movie project with Pete O’Herne and veterans from The Valley, Ken Hammon and, temporarily back in New Zealand, Andrew Neal.

  We started work on what is sometimes referred now to as The Curse of the Gravewalker, although – like all my early experiments – it never really had a title. The film was shamelessly spawned by my adolescent love of the blood-spattered, over-the-top Gothic horrors from Hammer films which I started going to see on double-bills when I was in my late teens and one in particular, Captain Kronos – Vampire H
unter, which I thought was really cool!

  Unlike many pictures to emerge from what has been called ‘the studio that dripped blood’, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, made in 1974, did not star either of Hammer’s legendary stalwarts Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee, nor even the seductive Ingrid Pitt, who had sucked the blood of young heroes and quickened the pulse of young moviegoers in such pictures as The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula. Captain Kronos – billed as ‘The Only Man Alive Feared by the Walking Dead’ – was an ingenious attempt at combining the vampiric myth with the dash and derring-do of the swashbuckler.

  Captain Kronos, played by German actor Horst Janson, is a master swordsman, late of the Imperial Guard (but flashing a blade forged from the metal of a crucifix), who seeks out and destroys the usual plague of ‘blood-thirsty’ vampires.

  The film had a significantly open-ended conclusion, clearly paving the way for a possible series. However, Hammer never accorded Captain Kronos the opportunity for a hoped-for encore and it was left to a young man in Wellington, New Zealand, to take up the theme with his Grave Walker project.

  Ken Hammon and Andrew Neal, played assorted vampires and met repeated deaths while Pete O’Herne portrayed their leader, ‘Count Murnau’, named after W.F. Murnau, the German director of the first ‘Dracula’ movie, Nosferatu. Not surprisingly, Peter Jackson cast himself as the hero, a fearless vampire-slayer going by the name of ‘Captain Eumig’ – a film-maker’s joke on the name of a well-known Austrian make of cameras and projectors.

  As well as acting and directing, I created the make-up effects for the zombie-kind-of-undead-creatures. I was continually coming up with story ideas and shooting endless bits and pieces in the hope that I’d eventually end up with a feature-length film! The results still exist, albeit as a rather fragmentary thing running probably forty-five minutes to an hour and very roughly cut and glued together.

  ‘My strongest memory of the film,’ says Ken Hammon, ‘is of digging! We dug for corpses of the undead in an overgrown graveyard, in the woods around Pukerua Bay, in the Jackson’s backyard. The joke was, “OK, guys we need some more digging!” If Peter knew what the final outcome was supposed to be, I never heard it! Shot over a period of

  When it came to needing actual graves, we wisely abandoned the cemetery and my parents found me a tiny spot in the middle of their carefully tended garden. Here, amongst the rows of carrots and spuds, I am happily going about my grave robbing duties. From the first trenches I dug when I was about 8 years old, I was constantly digging holes – either graves or trenches – in my parents’ garden.

  Pete O’Herne under a headful of Plaster of Paris in my mum’s kitchen. Pete was playing a zombie in my Super 8mm epic Curse of the Gravewalker. A much softer material, alginate, is used by the professionals to make head casts. I didn’t know that then, and we all suffered through the hot, stifling, direct plaster moulding process. The pad in Pete’s hand is a safety measure, so that he can scribble a warning if he can’t breathe!

  The result of the head cast, the severed head, is sitting on the cabinet behind Pete as I make him up for a day’s shooting on Gravewalker. The look of the zombies is very much inspired by the Hammer horror Plague of Zombies.

  perhaps two years, it was, without doubt, the maddest project of them all! Pete’s homage to Hammer, filmed with an anamorphic lens gaffer-taped onto camera and then shown with the lens gaffer-taped onto the projector, but throwing this amazing great image that filled the entire wall of the Jackson living-room.’

  Peter’s ambition was still that of an aspiring special-effects man as opposed to a director, and he was already devising ideas for using forced-perspective in a way not unlike that in which it would later be used in The Lord of the Rings. Ken remembers Peter plotting a scene that would feature adults in the foreground and school children (as adults) in the background in order to create an illusion of distance. Make-up experiments were, on an amateur scale, as ambitious as some of those that would be eventually created for the occupants of Isengard and Mordor – with as much discomfort for those involved! Pete O’Herne recalls: ‘Do you know how I’d spend my Saturdays and Sundays back then? I’d go round to Peter’s house and he’d say, “OK, mate, I’m going to put Plaster of Paris over your head today, and you’re going to have to breathe through drinking straws up your nostrils until it sets!” God knows how many nights I’d be coming home tearing bloody tissue-paper off my face; or, worst of all, trying to get latex rubber out of my eyebrows!’

  Peter shot ‘day-for-night’ using a blue filter on the camera lens to give the impression that the film had been shot by the light of the moon when vampires might be expected to prowl. He also experimented with dry ice in order to create the obligatory misty atmosphere typically found in woods frequented by zombies. ‘We went down into the forest,’ recalls Pete O’Herne, ‘dug a pit and filled it up with dry ice so that I could lie in it and rise up out of the grave in a spooky way. The problem is that dry ice is comprised of CO2, and if you’re going to be stupid enough to lie in a lot of it, you have to be very careful not to inhale! My only consolation was that Peter had already discovered the dangers through experimenting with dry ice in the bathtub at home!’

  The making of Gravewalker was clearly an ad-hoc process and Peter was undoubtedly the engine driving the project; nevertheless, his approach was also – as it would often be on Rings – collaborative.

  LEFT: Occasionally the holes were faked, as this interesting pair of shots reveal. I’m firing my zombie-killing crossbow into the bottom of a grave, and this was the way we faked it in our garage, which also doubled as a sound-stage on a number of occasions.

  Ken Hammon recalls: ‘Peter was a spontaneous film-maker: open to other people’s ideas and not in the least protective of his own ideas – which probably sometimes accounts for the jagged rhythms of his first experiments.’ Despite all the work that went into the film, the results were, for Peter, disappointing…

  Towards the end, I was getting kind of dispirited, because I was pouring a huge amount of effort into the project – making stuff for it, shooting it at the weekends – but, however much work I did, it never seemed to look quite how I saw it in my mind’s eye…

  Pete O’Herne understands Peter’s frustration: ‘The problem was that the limited equipment available to us for effects meant that whatever we achieved fell short of what was going in Peter’s head. With The Curse of the Gravewalker he probably would have liked to have seen all those things he loved in the movies – the horse-drawn carriage galloping along in the dark, down an old road in a dense forest – and of course he had to make do with us guys, doubling up and playing all the parts and not being particularly good at it either. We couldn’t even manage decent fight sequences because there weren’t enough of us. With someone always having to operate the camera, just about every encounter was inevitably limited to one-on-one. So, I think Peter began to get bored by just how frustrating it was.’

  Eventually, Peter reached the conclusion that, in their current form, his film experiments were going nowhere.

  I realised that nobody was ever going to see the vampire film since Super 8 was a format that had no ability to be copied and no means of ever being professionally screened anywhere…What, I asked myself, am I ultimately doing all this for? I knew it was time to move on – to put the 8mm camera away and start filming on 16mm. I was going to have to figure out how to make films in a more professional format.

  My twenty-first birthday cake, decorated by my mum.

  In 1982, around the time that Peter’s ambitions were focusing on pursuing a more professional approach to film-making, he and Ken Hammon took a three-week trip to Los Angeles, his first close-up experience of the movie-Mecca – Hollywood.

  The lads packed a lot into their time in ‘tinsel town’: going to horror and sci-fi conventions (at one of which they met Dave Prowse, the man under the Darth Vader mask in Star Wars) and attending a talk by Frank Marshall, an associate of Stephen Spielbe
rg who had recently served as a producer on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Poltergeist and whose next few films would include The Goonies (the cast of which included the young Sean Astin), two more Indiana Jones titles and three Back to the Future movies.

  Peter and Ken watched a taping of the then-popular TV comedy, The Dukes of Hazard. Although an interesting experience, it was a series that neither of them followed or particularly liked and Ken remembers their disappointment that the recording had not been of the contemporary show, Fantasy Island. Set on a mysterious island resort where any fantasy requested could be fulfilled, the show starred Ricardo Montalban as Mr Roarke, the island’s urbane, whitesuited host, and Hervé Villechaize as Roarke’s diminutive assistant, Tattoo.

  ‘We visited the set of Fantasy Island,’ says Ken, ‘but we were really frustrated that we weren’t able to see the show being recorded because it was unique in that it not only featured a former Star Trek villain – Montalban was Khan Noonian Singh in The Wrath of Khan – but also an ex-James Bond villain, since Villechaize had been Nick Nack, Christopher Lee’s side-kick in The Man with the Golden Gun. You have to remember that we were real movie-buffs!’

  Neither Ken nor I had our driver’s licence – that’s a kind of necessity to be a real geek – and we somehow thought that everything in LA was

  After my twenty-first birthday, Ken and I travelled to LA to attend a sci-fi convention. Getting an autograph from Dave ‘Darth Vader’ Prowse was a thrill, especially since he was also in some of my beloved Hammer horror movies.