Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

Peter then added one of those characteristically frank statements that, despite the gore and splatter in his movies, always endeared him to the Film Commission: ‘Don’t think for a minute that Jamboree will be arty, obscure or self-indulgent…All my instincts are commercial and I will make two very commercial films. When I say I want to make strides as a director, it’s in the direction of James Cameron or Steven Spielberg, not Peter Greenaway!’

  The story for Bad Taste 2 and 3 was very similar to that which he had outlined in his submission of the previous year–with some inevitable embellishment! The plan was now for The Boys to go to the planet Nailic Nod, find Derek, have ‘a climactic encounter with the aliens on their home turf’ and escape home. The third film was now to feature the aliens’ ‘massed revenge attack on Wellington’ with a finale described as featuring ‘a spectacular aerial battle over the city with dozens of flying houses, Buzzy Bees [New Zealand’s beloved pull-along toys] and Santa Claus.’

  After such a synopsis, it may have been superfluous to point out that Jamboree was to be ‘a visual comedy, rather than a character based comedy.’ Once again, Peter stressed the time-consuming and improvisational nature of creating good visual as opposed to verbal comedy, and took as an exemplar his favourite film director: ‘In all the reviews of my movies, my favourite comment is from one critic who described me as “the Buster Keaton of gore”; I am very proud of that, since Buster Keaton is my all time movie hero.’

  Keaton had been his icon since his first youthful viewing of The General and he knew, and envied, the comic’s film-making methods: ‘He was supplied with a permanent film-crew–assigned to him all year round. When Buster wanted to shoot a scene, they went out and filmed it. When Buster wanted to take a couple of weeks off to dream some new gags, they sat around (on full pay) waiting for him. His films were therefore worked and re-worked; scenes shot and re-shot. This was an amazing (and expensive) luxury, but it did lead to the creation of some of the greatest visual comedies ever made…’

  With a paradigm such as Keaton it should never really surprise us when we read of Peter Jackson adding, altering and developing scenes on the studio floor or reassembling casts and crews for pick-up shoots. It is all part of a Keatonesque pursuit of perfection.

  ‘There will be a script,’ Peter reassuringly advised the Commission, lest alarm bells start ringing. ‘It will detail the plot of Jamboree very clearly. That storyline will be adhered to during the shoot. What will be largely missing from the script will be all the detailed stunts and gags

  ‘For instance, the script may read: “DEREK escapes from the alien’s fast food factory, runs through the restaurant and finally makes it aboard the spaceship. He immediately takes off with two alien spaceships hot on his heels.”

  ‘Only four lines of script, but it may be a four–six minute sequence. It will contain several elaborate sight gags, a complex series of special effects shots, maybe even a surprise monster attack!

  ‘The point is: I want to have the entire shoot available to me to come up with all the gags and ideas–“the gravy” as I call it. That is the point of doing it this way. To say that all that stuff must be in the script from day one is robbing me of the greatest advantage I have in making these couple of really imaginative, unique, crowd-pleasing movies.

  ‘I guess you have to decide whether I can be trusted to come up with a lot of funny visual gags. I hope that my track record speaks for itself. Some people would say it is what I do best.’

  There was a sop to those for whom the wholesale bloodletting in Braindead had been a gallon or two of gore too far: ‘Jamboree will be made with greater audience accessibility in mind. It will not compromise in the stuff the cult fans love, but audiences will not be overwhelmed with gore. It will be good natured and silly but with none of the amateurish problems of Bad Taste and without the huge quantities of red maple syrup, the very thought of which frightened some people off Braindead.’

  Peter was still talking about using the original cast of mates (all of whom were now getting on with the rest of their un-showbizzy lives) and of shooting the movies with a small–‘second unit’-sized–film crew. However, post-Heavenly Creatures, he was envisaging a far greater sophistication in the area of special effects.

  The bravado of his statement belied the serious challenges that George Port had been wrestling with over the past several months. What they had achieved to date, said Peter, was ‘a gentle introduction into the computer effects world and a chance to figure out how it all works’, and what they needed was an opportunity ‘to further develop the techniques…’

  The hype was running high, but this was, after all, Peter’s first love –special effects: ‘The Heavenly Creatures effects are low key, as they should be for that movie–but in Jamboree, we will really let rip! It would give us the chance to produce effects of a quantity and quality that would rival advances that Industrial Light and Magic have only recently made. The only limit to computer effects is the imagination of the film-maker–and I have a fairly vivid imagination!’

  In the event Jamboree–or, at any rate, this project with that name– never got any further than a twenty-two-page proposal and a detailed scenario. Even so, the idea lingers on.

  In answering the question ‘Why two sequels?’ Peter had given as an additional reason to those of its being more fun and more economic, that if they didn’t make the movies soon the ‘Bad Taste Boys’ (himself included) would ‘all be too old and fat to make any more.’

  Nevertheless, ten years later, while in the middle of editing The Return of the King, Peter had not yet finally ruled out the possibility, saying: ‘I still have a real desire to do a Bad Taste 2 and I actually think, as the years go on, it could get more interesting. It would be quite fun to do a sequel where everyone is older and fatter but all still having to do the same things. I keep toying with ideas for the plot line and have quite a good little idea ticking away in my head

  …’ In 1993, in a covering letter to the Film Commission, Jim Booth had written, ‘Jamboree is a follow-on from Bad Taste, but of a sophistication undreamed of in Bad Taste and with an emphasis on fantasy and special effects which will take New Zealand into an international arena which we have not previously been able to contemplate.’

  Jim’s passionate enthusiasm both for Jamboree and for his vision of WingNut providing a launch pad for other New Zealand talents was what might have been expected of a man in the prime of life with a reasonable expectation of seeing some of those things come to pass. This, however, was far from the truth.

  The submission was made to the Commission in late November 1993, by which time Jim’s health had taken another serious downturn: his office was now his bedroom and despite his courageous battle against the cancer, it was clear that his life was moving towards its end.

  Meanwhile, Peter and Fran were working on that script for Robert Zemeckis.

  Writing The Frighteners, which was all about death, funerals, ghosts and the afterlife, when we knew that Jim was dying felt really weird and wrong. We were committed to the script, so we had to carry on with it but I remember our thinking, ‘God, this is the very last subject matter we want to be writing about at a time like this…’

  Over the Christmas holiday, there was a further, dramatic deterioration in Jim’s condition. Although he and his partner, Sue Rogers, had been determined that, with nursing care, he would see out whatever time was left him in his own home, that was now no longer possible. A lifelong asthmatic, Jim’s lungs had finally succumbed to the cancer, and the need for assistance with breathing and effective pain-management precipitated his move to the Mary Potter Hospice.

  It was a deeply distressing period, not just for Sue and for Jim’s children, but for his many close friends. Rotas were drawn up to make certain that Sue had round-the-clock support. It was a time both of great sadness and much selflessness. Sue, who had been given a low fold-away bed alongside Jim’s regulation-height hospital bed, recalls the day when Peter and Tony Hiles rearranged th
e beds in the ward in order to create an almost double-bed for a couple who were anxious not to be parted from one another.

  At the time, Jim was the only patient in a four-bed ward, so the support team virtually camped out in the hospice, ensuring that there was always one of them awake, while the person on the next shift slept on one of the spare beds. ‘Those last days,’ remembers Tony Hiles, ‘exposed a great many raw nerves. We lived at the hospice, doing what little we could, watching Jim vomiting black blood and fighting for his life.’

  Jim was courageous and, although desperately sad for Sue and his sons, had absolutely no self-pity. He was someone who was clearly dying and yet, at the same time, was refusing to feel sorry for himself–almost as if he were refusing to accept death.

  Even towards the end, he was still talking about the future, giving me advice and discussing all the things we were going to do, and I was sitting there thinking, ‘God, you’re not going to be around, Jim; you’re not going to be around…’

  There was this poignancy about seeing somebody who was so keyed up about the future when his own future was slowly slipping away, getting shorter and shorter by the day.

  You had to admire his bravery and the absolute positivism of his attitude, but it was also heartbreaking.

  Shortly before the end, which came on 4 January 1994, Peter was sitting with Jim so that Sue had the opportunity to snatch an hour or two of much-needed rest. Jim was, by then, in a distressed and feverish state, tossing and turning and throwing off his bedding, and Sue remembers Peter’s concern to take care of Jim and help him maintain his human dignity.

  It was the night before he died, and I sat with him from about eleven o’clock at night until six in the morning. He was quite delirious, thrashing around and drifting in and out of consciousness.

  I had never seen anyone dying before, never been with somebody as they slipped away…

  And Jim was the first dead person I ever saw. It may sound strange, but I was happy about one thing: if I was going to see a dead body for the first time, then I was glad that it was someone that I knew. I really didn’t have any qualms about it because it was my friend, Jim.

  ‘The loss of Jim,’ says Tony Hiles, ‘was devastating. At his funeral, a lot of effort went into celebrating a death that could not be celebrated.’ It was a day that would reveal the depth of people’s feelings.

  Instead of the mourners symbolically scattering a handful of earth onto the coffin, it had been suggested that they should be invited to fill in the grave. Many of those attending the funeral were taken aback by this unconventional conclusion to the ceremony and none more so than Peter.

  I just remember finding myself with a spade in my hand and I remember chucking in the first shovel-load of dirt, and the sound of it hitting the coffin with a wooden reverberation. It was a terrible sound, like something out of a horror movie, and it made me feel really sick. And then I just got to it and shovelled away and kept shovelling until the bloody hole was full…

  Others by the graveside, uncertain about what to do, were stunned by Peter’s zeal and devotion in almost single-handedly tackling and completing the task. It was a bizarre event that, for several of them, remains an unforgettable memory of a sad day.

  It was an odd experience and something I really didn’t expect to do. But it was also moving and I actually felt all right about it at the end because I thought, ‘Well, if I were lying there in the coffin, I would rather my friends fill me in and pat the dirt down than for it to be done by complete strangers.’ But it took quite a long time…Twenty or thirty minutes…It was hard yakker.

  ‘Hard yakker’, the ANZAC slang for hard work, derived from the aboriginal word ‘yaga’, aptly summed up Peter Jackson’s approach to life: get stuck in and do the job.

  It was precisely this determination and dedication that had caught the imagination of Jim Booth and prompted him to throw in his lot with the amateur film-maker from Pukerua Bay. In just a few years, Jim had seen Peter mature from an enthusiastic photoengraver, making a weekend movie with his mates, into a world-class director with a potentially brilliant future ahead of him.

  In the many thousands of interviews Peter has given during and after the making of The Lord of the Rings, the name of Jim Booth has seldom if ever been mentioned. Nor would it be…Jim had nothing to do with that project. And yet, as Peter is well aware, without the kick-start that Jim gave to the Jackson career, it might never have happened. There can be little doubt that Peter would have still succeeded as a director, but whether the game would have played out in quite the way it did, remains one of the great unknowns.

  I don’t want Jim to be ‘the forgotten person’ in my career and, just because he’s not around anymore, it shouldn’t deprive him of the right to stake his place in my story. He was there for me at just the right time…and had he lived, I’m certain we’d still be partners today. Since Jim’s death, I’ve never really settled down with another producing partner. It has a left gap in my life that I still feel today.

  My lasting regret is that Jim died when things were just starting to go well for us and, if you can ever talk about somebody’s death in business terms, then I think the biggest bummer of all was the fact that Jim checked out just when things were starting to take off.

  Eight months after Jim’s death, Heavenly Creatures received its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Before the film’s prologue and title sequence there appeared on screen the two words, ‘For Jim’. As the closing credits rolled, the audience rose to give the film a ten-minute standing ovation. When, at the end of the festival, Peter accepted the Silver Lion, the Jury Grand Prize, he referred to the award as being ‘truly a tribute to the producer, the late Jim Booth.’

  Perhaps an even greater tribute was that, for Peter, it was just the start of more hard yakker and more movies.

  6

  CHEATS, SPOOKS, HOBBITS AND APES

  ‘Fear, like your imagination, has no limits.’

  Peter Jackson was talking about The Frighteners, the ghost story that he and Fran had been writing for a film to be directed by Robert Zemeckis. They had completed the script in early January 1994, not long after the death of Jim Booth.

  The original story idea of the double-dealing, psychic con man had developed into a far more sophisticated, cross-genre story: it now incorporated elements of the thriller when fraudulent ghosthunter, Frank Bannister, sets out to investigate a series of mysterious deaths, and a touch of romance when Frank falls for an attractive doctor who is the widow of one of the dearly departed. Other ingredients now included sinister unfinished business resulting from a gruesome serial killing in the past, the meddling machinations of a loony FBI agent and several scary, heart-stopping interventions by a being that appears to be none other than the Grim Reaper.

  Peter sent the script off to agent Ken Kamins on what seemed like a decidedly inauspicious date: 17 January 1994–the day on which Los Angeles was devastated by the Northridge Earthquake–and waited for Zemeckis’ response.

  Meanwhile, Miramax had rushed an early print of Heavenly Creatures to the selection committee at the Cannes Film Festival, hoping for the film to be included in competition. When, instead, they were offered a midnight screening out of competition, Miramax decided to withdraw the film, wait several more months and premiere it instead at the Venice Film Festival in September.

  We were all in this holding pattern: Melanie Lynskey had gone back to school; Kate Winslet had returned to making sandwiches in her local deli, because she didn’t have another acting role and no one had yet seen her performance in Heavenly Creatures; and Fran and I were waiting for people to see and react to what we had made.

  As always, Peter had various possible projects ‘ticking away’, as he likes to put it, but early in 1994 he had other responsibilities, one of which was to honour Jim Booth’s commitment to Tony Hiles’ film, Jack Brown Genius. T. S. Eliot once observed that ‘between the conception and the creation…falls the shadow’ and that can be as tr
ue of movies as of any work of art.

  Maybe what was essentially a fairytale about two characters, separated by a thousand years, who need to prove that a man can fly didn’t really require as many special effects as it was given. Perhaps the combination of the WingNut name, Peter’s contributions as co-writer, producer and second-unit director combined with the casting of Braindead’s Tim Balme as the film’s eponymous hero suggested far too strong a link to the Jackson opus. There is little doubt that everybody did what they did with the best of intentions, but most of the parties involved were either novices in their various roles or else were reluctantly discharging their duties as a debt to Jim Booth.

  For whatever the reasons, Jack Brown Genius was misapprehended and, eventually, misjudged as a failure. As a result there were some regrets and a few recriminations and long-standing friendships were tested, strained and, in some cases, irreparably damaged. ‘It was very sad,’ reflects one of those involved. ‘After all it was only a damned movie…’

  Oddly, seen today, devoid of the expectations and disappointments that cursed it a decade ago, Jack Brown Genius is wistful and zany. The locations create an off-the-wall sketch of daily life in Wellington and there are strong, energetic performances from the cast, notably Tim Balme as the engaging and sympathetic Jack and Marton Csokas (later Celeborn in The Lord of the Rings), in his feature debut, as Jack’s best mate.

  When it was first screened at Cannes, the film had its advocates: Variety described it as ‘wonderfully loopy…exciting and funny’ and praised Tony Hiles’ direction for keeping ‘the action and the comedy bubbling along’. Subsequently, it would acquire the status of being a poor–even bad–movie. Now, however, occasional internet critics are chipping away at that reputation (a ‘charming, if thoroughly bizarre little film…I don’t know what they put in the water in New Zealand, but it’s time they started exporting it!’) and it is tempting to suggest that, one day, Jack Brown Genius will be reassessed, if not as a work of genius, then at least as anything but an ignoble failure.