Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  I hadn’t heard much about McKee, but the opportunity came at an important time because we were working on the script for Braindead and we thought it might be a useful exercise.

  There were a lot of rumblings at the time of McKee’s visit, with people saying, ‘Why should this American come here and tell us how to write our films? What does he know about telling Kiwi stories? He doesn’t understand anything about our culture…’ Which is true: but what he understands, and what he teaches, are the fundamental theories of narrative momentum, within a screenplay. These theories are universal, and transcend borders and national pride.

  And McKee goes to great pains to say that, once you know the theories, you can apply them to any subject matter in any cultural context. You can make them your own. But he also makes it clear that if, as a film-maker, you choose to ignore the principles and theories he teaches, then you will have a flawed film. And he’s right; analyse all the great movies and, in terms of screenwriting, they all, more or less, adhere to a basic structure.

  What was fascinating for me was that the Film Commission had given him a videotape of Bad Taste and he really loved it! I didn’t think he would, since it’s without structure, but he was incredibly enthusiastic about it.

  For their part, Peter, Fran and Stephen were equally enthusiastic about what McKee had to offer. Drawing on cinematic examples from over 100 films, he illustrated his thesis on story structure, which briefly put (in McKee’s words) rests on the following twin hypotheses:

  ‘Story is Supreme – Characters are what they do. Story events impact the characters and the characters impact events. Actions and reactions create revelation and insight, opening the door to a meaningful emotional experience for the audience.

  ‘Structure is Character – Story is what elevates a movie, transforming a good film into a great one. Movie-making is a collaborative endeavour…but the screenwriter is the only original artist on a film. Everyone else – the actors, directors, cameramen, production designers, editors, special effects wizards, and so on – are interpretive artists, trying to bring alive the world, the events and the characters that the screenwriter has invented and created.’

  McKee taught us that a film story is made up of different ‘acts’, like the acts in a stage play, each of which has certain things to achieve. He talked about establishing the turning-points in a screenplay; how the set-up should be handled and what he calls ‘the inciting incident’, which is the moment, about ten or fifteen minutes into the film, when you suddenly realise what the film is about and the viewer says, ‘Right! So this is the story…’

  In The Fellowship of the Ring it is the moment where the Ring passes to Frodo. At that moment our story defines itself – it’s the tale of Frodo Baggins and the powerful ring he possesses.

  The Lord of the Rings was not just written, but also edited, with McKee’s principles of story structure in mind. When, as we did, you begin editing the film during the course of shooting and then spend time shooting pick-ups, the structure can easily get a bit loose. So, what we did on Rings was to take a look at our first cut, where you actually have everything you’ve shot in the movie; you then reappraise it again, using McKee’s theories.

  This was where most of my time was spent, writing Braindead and then Meet the Feebles with Stephen Sinclair and Fran Walsh. We worked in a little flat above a restaurant in Courtney Place.

  In 1988, Peter and his collaborators began to apply McKee’s lessons to the writing of Braindead and the story development showed a new understanding of character and motivation: the domineering mother who has kept her son both under her thumb and out of the clutches of womankind, has a dark secret: not only was her late husband of hallowed memory a shameless womaniser, she had murdered him together with one of his mistresses.

  ‘In a final confrontation with his snarling zombie mum, [Lionel] presents her with the lie she has forced him to believe. She reacts by literally exploding in an angry storm of bile. The house burns its mess of mutilated zombies as Lionel and Cathy make their escape. The Underlying Human Truth: Guilt Sucks.’

  The content and layout of the application itself demonstrated how swiftly Peter was picking up the ways of the professional film-maker. He was, as so many people noted, a quick learner. The Commission approved the finance and work began on the script and on building the unstoppable horde of zombies needed to create what Peter referred to as the film’s ‘grisly chaos’.

  Meanwhile, Bad Taste was continuing to garner reviews ranging from the critic of The Hollywood Reporter who declared: ‘I’ve never seen a movie that’s so disgusting – it’s great!’ to the description included in the programme for the forty-third Edinburgh International Film Festival:

  ‘The title is an understatement. Blood cascades, heads fly, torn-out guts are slurped underfoot, brains leak, green vomit is joyously imbibed. Bad Taste reduces schlock ad absurdum, but Peter Jackson is a film-maker with more than a hint of inspiration and fearsome dedication. No situation, no effect is too outrageous for New Zealand’s own Sultan of Splatter…The wonder of it all is that Bad Taste doesn’t look anything like a home movie, far from it…Most feature length films consist of about 800 to 1,200 separate shots. Bad Taste has closer to 2,500. You might need a sedative by the time it’s over.’

  It was around this time that what would prove a significant development in Peter’s career took place. Jim Booth, the Film Commission’s Executive Director – or ‘Ex-Di’ as he called himself – decided to quit his job and set up as an independent film producer, taking on the responsibility for producing the films of Peter Jackson.

  Recalling his late friend and colleague, David Gascoigne says: ‘Jim Booth was a good chum, a long-time person and one of the people I miss most in life. It’s dangerous to make friends too closely with people with whom you work, but with Jim you simply couldn’t help it!’

  Jim’s partner, Sue Rogers, catalogues some of his attributes: ‘He was kind and had intelligence, integrity and an impish sense of humour. He had no pretensions, but was an enthusiast who was willing to take risks. He possessed a good sense of self-esteem and was a generous, positive force in that he also topped up other people’s self-esteem.’

  ‘Everyone loved Jim,’ says Lindsay Shelton, the Commission’s former Marketing Director. ‘He was very bouncy and eager. After spending much of his life as a back-room bureaucrat he became the Film Commission’s second Chief Executive and had a wonderful time, using the considerable flexibility that the staff had in those days to help people and make things happen. In his decision to leave the Commission and become Peter’s producer, there was also a certain ambition.’

  Jim Booth’s decision was doubtless taken for a variety of reasons: those close to him recall Jim espousing the philosophy that a job need not be held for life, or at least for any longer than it gives satisfaction. At the age of 43, he may also have decided that it was time to be more intimately committed to the day-to-day creativity of film-making as opposed to the arm’s length involvement at the Film Commission. Having recognised Peter Jackson’s potential (and had his somewhat cavalier backing of Bad Taste finally vindicated), Jim doubtless saw Peter’s future career as being in need of help, guidance and support that it would be difficult for him to give if he remained within the bureaucratic restraints of the Film Commission.

  Jim asked if it would be of interest to me if he were to come on board Braindead. I liked him and he’d been a great help to me with Bad Taste and in talking with Andrés Vicente Gómez about the co-production deal for Braindead. At the time, I didn’t have a producer but I knew that I needed one because the budget for Braindead was going to be significantly larger than the cost of making Bad Taste and Jim’s help was going to be invaluable.

  ‘I think Jim gave Peter a huge amount of encouragement and confidence,’ reflects Lindsay Shelton. ‘Financing a movie in New Zealand, other than with money from the Film Commission, is a mammoth task that takes knowledge, experience and a lot of effort. Jim was equipp
ed to be able to do that and was a producer in the best sense of the word, in that he enabled Peter to focus on what he wanted to achieve without having to worry about the mechanics involved.’

  Following Jim Booth’s resignation, he and Peter started work together on advancing the film. Script consultant, Linda Seger, had submitted a positive report, which concluded: ‘A good rewrite…Have fun filming the blood and gore and gristle and dead furry animals!’ Aiming to do just that, they had found premises in a former railway shed to serve as a studio, and were already scouting for locations, casting roles and assembling a crew.

  Two more key people entered Peter’s life at this point: Richard Taylor and his partner, Tania Rodger, who would later become the creative backbone of Weta Workshop and oversee the staggering miniatures, prosthetics and weaponry used on The Lord of the Rings.

  Richard and Tania had first met Peter during the latter days of the Bad Taste project when their friend, Cameron Chittock, had invited him to visit a studio set where the three of them were working on a TV commercial. Richard recalls: ‘We were building massive trees, vast jungles, futuristic cities and all sorts of stuff. We only talked with Peter for a few minutes but we took to him immediately as being a really pleasant guy. He was clearly genuinely interested in what Tania and I had been doing in setting up our company and trying to earn a living from building models, props and puppets and I was very interested in hearing how he was trying to make his own movie at weekends.’

  Richard and Tania made puppets caricaturing politicians and celebrity figures for Public Eye, a satirical television show in a similar mould to British TV’s equally anarchic and generally offensive Spitting Image. ‘Several months passed following our meeting and we never thought anything about Peter. However, he had seen our puppets for Public Eye and had obviously logged away in his mind that there were two young people in Wellington who were very interested in working on this kind of thing and so, when Braindead went ahead, we got the call…’

  Braindead opened with a scene set on a mysterious island that was the habitat of the rat-monkey carrying the zombie-creating virus that would plague the life of Lionel Cosgrove. There was to be an ancient fort on the island and Richard and Tania’s first contribution to Braindead was building a massive cannon for the battlements.

  The island scenes as they would eventually be represented in the film (sadly, sans fort and cannons) were filmed at the Putangirua Pinnacles in the Wairarapa, a few hours out of Wellington, where a decade later Peter would film the scenes in which Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli travel the Dimholt Road to the Paths of the Dead.

  It’s a very evocative location and I figured that, because so few people in the world have seen Braindead, we could get away with using it a second time in The Lord of the Rings. I had decided that the rat-monkey was to be captured on an exotic island near the coast of Sumatra and, of course, there was only one island that fitted that description – Skull Island!

  Not shown on any map or chart, it was a name that had captured Peter’s young imagination from the first time he saw King Kong and the island, with its sinister skull-shaped mountain peak, loomed up out of the mist. One day he would go there again in search of a creature rather larger than a rat-monkey…

  By 1989, Peter had left his parents’ home in Pukerua Bay and was living in a small, two-roomed bungalow in Seatoun, just a short drive from the centre of Wellington. Richard and Tania began socialising with Peter – or, as Richard puts it, ‘just hanging out together’ – as often as two or three nights a week.

  ‘Richard and I didn’t own a television,’ remembers Tania, ‘but Peter had the biggest TV we’d ever seen! He also had huge, beautiful couches, and because the room was really quite small it meant that you were virtually sitting on top of the television set! On Friday nights, Peter would invite us around to watch the latest video that he’d got from the States and we’d grab a big bag of fish ‘n’ chips and a big bottle of Coca-cola and sit inches from the screen eating supper and watching some really gory, over-the-top movie! I remember seeing the American Civil war film Glory, starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, and Peter fast-forwarding to all the gruesome battle scenes!’

  ‘Because the bungalow was right beside a footpath,’ adds Richard, ‘we’d often look round and find a group of passers-by standing outside, looking through the window getting a free view of the movies. It was bloody funny!’

  In October, Jim and Peter flew to Milan, venue for the annual International Film and Multimedia Market (Mifed) where they joined the Film Commission’s Marketing Director with the aim of generating pre-sales for Braindead. Jim was becoming anxious about financing the project since, with a budget of $2.5 million, it was not possible for

  In 1988 I finally bought a little cottage of my own. My parents loaned me most of the money. I thought their house was small – this was half the size and I had trouble finding room for all my stuff.

  the Film Commission to single-handedly underwrite the picture and the hoped-for co-production deal with Spain had failed to materialise. Jim had an investor interested, but promoting the film to international buyers at Mifed was crucial if Braindead was to remain alive.

  The producer and director had a supply of flyers with an image, designed as a poster concept by Cameron Chittock, showing Lionel’s Uncle Les – a deeply unpleasant superannuated swinger who blackmails his nephew over having zombies in the cellar – pursuing Baby Selwyn with a motor-mower. The resourceful Peter also packed a videocassette in his suitcase.

  The tape contained fifteen to twenty minutes of Meet the Feebles. After returning from Cannes, while we were starting to prepare for Braindead, I took a look at the Feebles footage and decided I better get it edited into shape. It was incomplete and it didn’t have a climax but it gave an idea of what it would be like.

  I had already met and got to know quite a few of the international distributors because of Bad Taste’s success at Cannes, so while at Mifed I showed Feebles to anyone who’d take a look. One of them, Mack Kawamura, the Japanese distributor of Bad Taste, was to my great surprise particularly interested – I really hadn’t imagined there would be a market in Japan for a film about puppets into sex and violence! He was, however, only interested if Feebles was a feature film, which was not something we had considered or – with Braindead about to go into production – could even begin to consider.

  Peter and Jim returned from Milan but, as 1988 drew towards its close, unexpected political and economic factors conspired to deal Braindead a serious blow. The finance minister for New Zealand’s Labour government, Roger Douglas, had been the author of a series of economic policies aimed at controlling inflation, cutting subsidies and trade tariffs and privatising public assets that were regarded, by many, as a betrayal of left-wing ideologies. There were serious differences between Roger Douglas and New Zealand’s Prime Minister, David Lange, and after months of growing dissent within the cabinet – heightened by the effects of the previous year’s ‘Black Monday’ Stock Exchange crash – the Prime Minister dismissed one of Roger Douglas’

  Cameron designed and illustrated this Braindead flyer, intended to raise market interest in the film before it was made. Ultimately, this version of Braindead was never produced.

  prime supporters, causing the finance minister to resign from office.

  It was an unexpected lesson for a young film-maker: the realisation that political ups and downs can have an adverse – and totally unexpected – impact on the arts. Jim Booth was forced to advise the Film Commission that the resignation of the country’s Minister of Finance had ‘given our proposed investor the collywobbles’ and that, as a result, the proposed commitment to Braindead was ‘postponed’.

  The timing could not have been worse since the Commission had just agreed to a major investment in the film of $1.5million, but that sum needed to be matched with a further $1million from elsewhere. Various banks and finance houses were approached for investment; meanwhile the film was alrea
dy heavily into pre-production, with model-making and set-building, and Jim was faced with the need for an adequate cashflow to keep the zombies alive until a funding deal could be struck.

  An appeal to the Commission, a few days before Christmas 1988, to either underwrite the entire venture or to keep it going until the end of January was met with a refusal. The language was regretful – there were references to a ‘fine project’ and ‘talented people’ – but the Commission had already advanced $300,000 towards the film and was not going to pay out more money without any guarantee of a film being made as a result.

  At the beginning of January 1989 Jim sent a long, passionately argued letter to the Commission analysing the state of New Zealand film-making, reminding them of their responsibilities and repeating his appeal for sufficient funding to keep Braindead active until the end of the month. ‘Rather than giving a shove to a New Zealand film,’ he told his former colleagues, ‘I feel that I have my bare foot wedged in a door, which is being vigorously slammed. It hurts a lot.’

  The Film Commission reconsidered and relented, agreeing to advance the project two weeks’ sustaining funding. Those two weeks passed in a flurry of desperate activity but, two days before the Commission’s money was due to dry up, no investor had been found and it was clear that Braindead was just that – dead.

  On 20 January 1989, the cast and crew were handed a letter telling them that it had been necessary to postpone the start of filming on the film. All those involved remember their feelings when the blow fell: ‘We were devastated,’ remembers Richard Taylor. ‘We had been working for a number of years to try and become film-makers and suddenly we were on our first feature film with a guy that we really liked, and just as suddenly it was all over and we were out of work. We went home, opened a bottle of wine and drowned our sorrows.’