Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  There was no sound, but Peter and Tony provided an aural sound score to the movie, creating the effects with mouth noises! ‘I was in hysterics; hooting; tears running down my face! It grabbed me and reminded me of going to the local “bug-house”, as a kid, to watch giant versions of John Wayne and Donald Duck when, if anyone messed around or made too much noise, the film would be stopped and we’d be told if we didn’t quieten down we’d all be sent home!’

  At the end of the screening Tony asked if Michelle wanted to work on the film. ‘Of course I wanted to work on it! Not because I wanted to work on a feature film – it was to be my first – but because I wanted to work on this film!’

  Michelle did her research: ‘When I work with a film-maker, I want to get into their mind, know what they’re thinking of in relation to the score. Peter told me he was a great fan of The Beatles and would have loved to use Beatles songs on the soundtrack; I also discovered that he was a fan of James Bond, so I went off and watched about nine Bond films and some zombie splatter movies that Peter lent me

  I was worried about copyright issues involved in using an existing image of The Beatles, so I painted these myself. I’m not a great artist but the silliness of it all gets the laugh I was after. For a long time I harboured a dream of including one or two Beatles songs on the Bad Taste soundtrack, but that could never have happened.

  Three key collaborators in Bad Taste – from the left, editor Jamie Selkirk, producer Tony Hiles and composer Michelle Scullion. Concentrating on the newspaper crossword at that moment, they were the perfect team to help me when I needed it.

  from his collection! I felt that what it needed to be was a big score, plenty of full-on, wall-to-wall music and – thinking “blokes”, “cars”, “guns” – went off on a misguided “heavy metal” tangent, before changing course to a more “classical” approach.’

  As the score developed and began to be recorded, Michelle was intrigued by Peter’s intuitive grasp of the process: ‘Peter sat on my shoulder the whole time. He may have lacked musical vocabulary, but he had all the words necessary to explain the shape and the emotion of what he wanted. I was surprised that someone so new to the film business could do that, but he was not only smart, he was an incredibly quick learner: each step was just another thing to be taken in by his huge sponge-brain that soaks up experience and uses it; in turn, I learned to go with him and let him guide me…’

  Reflecting on Peter’s subsequent career, Michelle Scullion says: ‘I won’t jump on the bandwagon and say I knew then that he was a film-making genius, but I will say that it was clear that he was totally dedicated and had ambition. Bad Taste may have started out as a weekend “guerrilla film-making” project, but I don’t believe that it was ever truly a hobby in Peter’s mind.’

  The score for Bad Taste was richly varied to match the moments of insidious menace and relentless pursuit; for the scene where the aliens feast from a bowl of regurgitated pea-green ‘gruel’, Michelle wrote a subdued jazz score with a muted trumpet: dinner music for chuck-eating; while the climactic battle scene had all the energy of a full-on, rock-and-roll number.

  In July 1987, as Michelle was completing her score and the sound effects were being added, a rough-cut of the near-completed film was screened for the New Zealand Film Commission. Internal reports reveal a mixed reaction that veers between arch condescension and blatant dislike. Seeing Bad Taste, it seems, had left its audience with something of a bad taste…

  The film was disparagingly described as ‘a backyard 16mm feature film made by Peter Jackson, a former employee of the Evening Post Circulation Department’. Whilst ‘its very explicitness should ensure that it can earn some money from the grosser end of the international video market’ it was thought to lack ‘style and verse’ and suffer from various weaknesses including ‘minimal acting talent and characters who are unsympathetic and crude.’ The report went on: ‘The film includes a lot of misjudged humour, which could be enjoyed by the crassest of audiences, but very probably not, because much of the dialogue is incomprehensible, especially so for anyone outside New Zealand.’

  Jim Booth defended the project, saying that ‘viewing a film with only an unedited dialogue track (and no atmosphere or effects sound) is an unusual experience and perhaps gives a false impression of the finished film’, but it was left to Tony Hiles to ride to the defence of the project on which he had been serving as Consultant Producer.

  In a document sent to the Film Commission entitled ‘Bad Taste: Report on an Experience’, Tony presented not only a vindication of the support which had been shown towards Bad Taste, but a moving, often prophetic testimony of belief in Peter and his incipient talent:

  I worked with Sue Rogers on the Bad Taste poster design. I always liked the image of the alien jabbing his finger up, and had attempted to shoot it myself several times. This is a shot I did at the end of my parents’ garden. Eventually a professional photographer, Rob Pearson, came onboard and shot the final memorable image on the coast at Moa Point near Wellington Airport. Cameron Chittock was wearing the alien costume.

  ‘I see him as an amiable mixture of Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen – he is creative, inventive, a good actor and he loves film. However, I do not see him as some sort of messiah. He has a hell of a lot to learn – his comprehension of story and scene structure is limited, as is his ability to utilise his time and that of his co-workers in a fully economic fashion. But these things will change, as he learns fast…’

  Countering murmurings that the Commission ought to insist on more changes being made to the film, Tony continued, ‘Bad Taste is an individual film with both the strengths of a film-maker with talent and the weakness of a film-maker with limited experience – and that is exactly why Bad Taste essentially works and should be left alone to work in that way.

  ‘Bad Taste is more than a New Zealand film, more than a regional film, it is a Pukerua Bay film. For what it will ultimately cost, Bad Taste is an extremely low-budget film, which should return its investment if correctly marketed. I believe the actions and support of the New Zealand Film Commission to be an excellent example of how to assist and encourage a new film-maker.

  ‘The whole project is really based on taking a risk; Peter started taking the risk nearly four years ago and the Film Commission took its risk on Peter almost a year ago. Completing the exercise will prove that risks are worth taking.’

  Bad Taste was completed and without any further demands for changes.

  The song accompanying the end credits – as the survivors drive away into the sunset in Derek’s eccentric car – was composed and sung, not by The Beatles, but by Mike Minett with a backing group that included Fran Walsh and Michelle Scullion. It caught the renegade spirit not only of the Bad Taste Boys but also of the film and its director…

  We’re gonna be winners, this time we will;

  We’ve got a good team, unbeatable.

  This time unite, we’ll be as one,

  Our private army will never run.

  The last Bad Taste photo, taken to promote Tony’s Good Taste documentary. In its own way, it sums up the spirit of the preceding four years quite well.

  We’ve got the reason to believe,

  We’ve got the power to succeed;

  But the minute you let me down,

  You’ll leave a bad taste in my mouth.

  Let’s get the permission,

  Let’s do it right,

  License to kill,

  License to fight.

  We’re only Human,

  We’re only Boys,

  We’re only…Dispensable toys.

  After four years, it was finally over. The little weekend hobbyist film had been given the necessary professional finish. The exhausting, occasionally tedious, week-in-week-out regimen had ended with a flourish of high-energy activity, an injection of much-needed cash and the involvement of people who worked in the real film industry. It was a moment that marked not just the completion of a moviemaking project, it was
also the close of an era and that closure had different consequences for different people.

  Of The Boys, one or two entertained the hope that they might have a role to play in future Jackson projects, but it was an unrealistic and unrealisable hope. The very qualities in Peter Jackson that had drawn others to him, had made them pitch in on the Bad Taste project and, more or less, stick with it for so long, had finally carried him out of their orbit. As participants in what would rapidly be considered a cult movie, they would acquire their own unique cult status: they were, and always will be, ‘The Bad Taste Boys’. Otherwise – despite having helped save the world from being consumed by aliens! – it was, for them, the end of the road. Most of them embraced their fate philosophically; one or two, perhaps, thought they were, in the words of the film’s closing song lyric, ‘only dispensable toys’.

  Peter was, and still is, deeply conscious of his indebtedness to the group: ‘Bad Taste,’ he says, ‘was an endurance test. I have great admiration for the guys because they showed up week after week in order to help me get that film made.’ There would even be talk, over several years, of a sequel to Bad Taste being made and, five years on, WingNut Films would indeed present the New Zealand Film Commission with a proposal for a project to make two such sequels, back-to-back. It is a project, however, that has yet to get off the ground…

  Reflecting on that ‘endurance test’ today, Peter sees several similarities between Bad Taste and The Lord of the Rings:

  Both took four years to shoot and both employed the same film-making techniques. The way we made Bad Taste was not a bad way to make a film and that is why I adopted a similar approach to The Lord of the Rings. Neither was made using the principle: ‘Lock a script down, rush off and shoot it without any changes, cut it and release it.’ I don’t think a rule that says you get one crack at a script and that it never changes is a particularly smart way of making films. I prefer an approach that enables you to pause every now and again and say, ‘Yes, this is working okay, but I could really do with a scene that does this, I’d like to put in a sequence that does that, or I need to explain this a bit more…’ and you then go and shoot those things as we did with the pick-ups we filmed for The Lord of the Rings. Handcrafting a film has always appealed to me: refining, finessing, streamlining as we go along – it’s a process that started with Bad Taste.

  For Peter, in 1987, completing Bad Taste was not so much an ending as a beginning. It was, as one observer puts it, now the moment for Peter to move on; he was now a professional film-maker; the talent would soon be recognised, the promise and the ambition fulfilled; it was time for him to step up to bigger challenges.

  Although completed and delivered, the Film Commission decided not to show Bad Taste prior to screening it at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. Doubtful of the film’s ability to succeed, the policy was to hold back release in order to get the maximum publicity from any response at Cannes – however unlikely that might be! For Peter, the opportunity for Bad Taste to become a possible topic of conversation along the length of the Promenade de la Croisette, represented the hope that offers of other work might follow. There was, however, one snag…

  The Cannes Film Festival takes place in May which, at the time I finished work on Bad Taste, was still several months away. I’d left my job, was unemployed and had no income. There was nothing to do, except wait…

  Wait…and come up with new ideas!

  Peter had become close friends with Stephen Sinclair and Fran Walsh following their introduction from Costa Botes. Two more of those film industry rebels who were attracted to Peter, they had given him encouragement on Bad Taste (as well as lending a hand when the scale replica of Gear Homestead needed painting) but, more importantly, the three of them were already working on a film script together. Throughout 1987, the final year of making Bad Taste, they were writing what would eventually become Braindead.

  One day Stephen had pitched me an idea about a young man who lives at home with a domineering mother who turns into a zombie – that was the story. It had started life as an idea for a play (and would eventually be staged as Brain Dead: The Musical in 1995) but Stephen was also interested in developing the idea for a film with me as director. I thought it was a great idea; I’ve always thought that zombies are fantastic and I was, and still am, a huge zombie film-fan.

  Zombie pictures are as old as popular cinema and Bela (‘Dracula’) Lugosi had starred in what was probably the first of the genre: White Zombie, made in 1933. Several cult zombie films had appeared in the Sixties and Seventies, including Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, but by the 1980s it had reached plague proportions with The Evil Dead, Re-Animator and many others. Indeed, during the two years from 1985 to 1987, over twenty zombie-themed films were released, many of them low- or no-budget pictures with such improbable titles as Night of the Living Babes and Bloodsuckers from Outer Space.

  Braindead went through several drafts during 1987 and was budgeted as requiring in the region of $2.5 million, making it a relatively expensive project at that time. Peter, Stephen and Fran submitted an application for development finance to the New Zealand Film Commission:

  ‘Braindead is a zombie movie. It is also a parable about breaking away from family ties and emerging into adulthood. As a satirical tale of life in the suburbs, the film is a study of emotional repression and social propriety. There is an inversion of the usual sex role stereo-typing: Lionel, our hero, is trapped in a fraught domestic situation until he is rescued by Cathy, who offers him the chance of another life.

  ‘The splatter aspect of the film is highly stylised and tends more towards farce than naturalism. It is more in the style of Monty Python than Sam Peckinpah. Similarly, the characters should not be read as naturalistic. Lionel and Cathy are naïve innocents in a world populated by the bizarre and the grotesque.’

  We were very aware that, whilst we had a script, nothing was going to happen with Braindead before Bad Taste was screened in Cannes, but it was a strategic decision to have a prospective next project to capitalise on any attention that Bad Taste might pick up at the festival. Nevertheless, I was still faced by this five-month period of unemployment…

  More plans were hatched at regular meetings at Fran and Stephen’s flat over a Chinese restaurant in Courtney Place, past which, years later, Peter would ride in the triumphant motorcade en route to the premiere of The Return of the King.

  Cameron Chittock, who joined in many of these sessions, recalls: ‘Basically, we would get together and conspire to make evil projects!’ One of these dubious enterprises would eventually carry the unlikely tag line: ‘Sex, Drugs and Soft Toys’. While working on Bad Taste, Peter had coined the term ‘splatstick’ to describe something that combined the gory messiness of the splatter movie with knockabout laughs of a slapstick comedy. Now he was thinking of another combinationgenre by grafting the ever-appealing splatter movie with – a puppet film. The new idea was for a ‘spluppet movie’!

  In the Seventies and Eighties puppets had achieved a new worldwide popularity through the work of Jim Henson, whose contribution to the American educational television series, Sesame Street, had led to the international hit TV series, The Muppet Show. The premise of a group of puppets producing and starring in a vaudeville show – with intriguing glimpses of backstage tantrums and traumas – not only made household names of Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Rowlf and the rest of the gang, it catapulted them into a series of big-screen adventures beginning, in 1979, with The Muppet Movie, which was followed by The Great Muppet Caper and The Muppets Take Manhattan.

  With each of the Muppet feature films, the characters became increasingly liberated not simply from the confines of their puppettheatre home but also from their puppeteers, to the extent of finding it possible to take a cycle ride through London’s Hyde Park. It was a conceit that Peter and his ‘co-conspirators’ wickedly seized upon…

  My initial idea was a very simple image: an all-singing, all-dancing Muppet-s
tyle TV show, except that back-stage there are no puppeteers taking puppets off their arms; the puppets are not puppets at all, they are real: they walk into the dressing-room, rip the tab off a can of beer, light up a cigarette and say, ‘God, that was a terrible show tonight!’ As for the show itself, that was just a piece of cheesy entertainment put on

  Following the completion of Bad Taste in November 1987, there was an agonizing wait until the film was to be screened at Cannes in May 1988. I was unemployed, broke and still living at home, so I filled in the time writing Braindead with Stephen and Fran, and devising the idea for Meet the Feebles with Cameron. Eventually Cameron and I started building puppets to bring our ideas to life.

  by these characters that have the same flaws and weaknesses as any human being.

  Unlike the mild-mannered Muppets – whose frailties and idiosyncrasies are charmingly portrayed and utterly inoffensive – the Feebles, as the puppets in this version were to be called, were to be blatantly into anything and everything that was either illegal or immoral, or both! Although the name suggested that this devious, dubious bunch of crooks and perverts were somehow related to the clean-living characters created by Jim Henson, Peter never saw the idea as being a parody of The Muppet Show.