by Brian Sibley
What is astonishing about Peter’s career at this period is the way in which certain projects came and went and, sometimes, came back again; the way his expectations sky-rocketed only to plummet and be dashed before, against all hope, getting resuscitated! With every new Jackson movie to be released, the publicity sound bites offered by cast
A group of the friends we make films with: construction foreman Norm Willerton, Director of Photography Alun Bollinger and Art Director Dan Hennah.
and crewmembers repeatedly focus on Peter’s equanimity and his ability to remain single-mindedly focused. It was a lesson he learned early on.
When Peter and Fran had left the offices of Twentieth Century Fox after pitching their idea for a Planet of the Apes movie, it had seemed that that particular door had closed, but with the passing of time [(and executives)] it opened for a second time. Accompanied by Ken Kamins, Peter met with two of Fox’s senior personnel, Peter Chernin and Tom Rothman, over lunch at the Hotel Bel-Air to discuss his script idea for Apes.
We re-pitched exactly the same idea to these two high-powered Fox executives who’d never heard it before. Once again it was met with a lot of enthusiasm but then they launched into this long explanation about how they’d spent a lot of money developing a potential Planet of the Apes film–though not with us because we’d worked on spec and never earned a cent!–and how they already had one or two failed screenplays.
We heard of various versions including one by Terry Hayes, who wrote Mad Max 2 and 3 and went on to write Vertical Limit. Anyway, at the end of this preamble, they said that they’d like to use our story, have Fran and I write the script and me direct but they also wanted James Cameron to produce it and for Arnold Schwarzenegger to star in it.
‘We have had a real commitment,’ they said, ‘for this to be a vehicle for Schwarzenegger. Why not meet with James Cameron before you leave town and pitch him your ideas? We think as a group you’ll make a great team…’
Back at their hotel, Peter and Fran discussed the proposition and were of one mind.
It felt bad. Not because I don’t like Cameron or Schwarzenegger, I’m actually a big fan of their films, but Fran and I are incredibly independent spirits, you know, and we are very protective of our work. We thought that if we had James Cameron as the producer and Arnold Schwarzenegger as the star, I would have absolutely no power, and if, for example, there were a conflict with Schwarzenegger then Cameron would be likely to back him rather than me. I didn’t know for certain, it was just assumptions, but it didn’t feel like a work situation that we should put ourselves into.
So we declined to take the meeting and, this time around, it was us who passed on the project.
I finally met Jim Cameron for the first time in 2005, and found him to be charming. I couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if we’d said ‘Yes’ to the deal…
In July 1994, Miramax’s David Linde proposed that Peter and Fran should sign an exclusive three-year ‘first-look’ deal with the studio, which required them to give Miramax first refusal on any film projects they initiated during the period of the contract. ‘A first-look deal,’ says Ken Kamins, ‘means that a studio pays your overheads, so you can function and come up with ideas but with the caveat that the studio gets first crack at making those ideas into movies.’
The agreement also called for Peter and Fran to act as Miramax’s ‘eyes and ears’ in New Zealand. Harvey Weinstein was quoted as saying: ‘Some of the most compelling and unique film-making is emerging from New Zealand and this relationship provides us with an extra opportunity to access the wonderful talent there.’
However, other factors were in play. Allegedly, Harvey Weinstein was under some pressure from Jeffrey Katzenberg, then Chairman of the Walt Disney Company, to sign some of the artists with whom Miramax were working to ‘first-look’ agreements in order to keep budding talent on the Miramax-Disney team. Similar proposals would be made to fellow New Zealander, Jane Campion, following the success of The Piano, and to Quentin Tarantino after Pulp Fiction.
‘The Miramax deal,’ notes Ken Kamins, ‘was useful in giving Peter an initial grounding in America: people would say, “Oh, Peter Jackson’s made a movie that’s strong enough for Miramax to give him a first-look deal”.’
Before Peter got around to offering any projects to Miramax, Robert Zemeckis responded to the script for The Frighteners. Initially, Peter was bitterly disappointed by the director’s reaction.
He said that it wasn’t really the type of thing that he was looking for and that it didn’t really feel like a Tales from the Crypt movie. I thought, ‘Oh, s***! Well, that was a waste of time…’ But then he said that he really liked the script and how would I feel if he was to produce it and I was to direct it?
As it transpired, Zemeckis never did direct a Tales from the Crypt movie and only two titles ever appeared: Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood. As for directing The Frighteners, Peter agreed–on one condition:
By the time Fran and I had finished the script, I really liked what we had written and I thought it would be fun to make…So I said, ‘Well, I’ll do it, if I can make it in New Zealand.’ I really didn’t have to think about whether or not I wanted to do it, but I did say that I didn’t want to go to America to make it. I remember Bob saying, ‘Well, does New Zealand look anything like America?’ And I said, well, for the small town depicted in The Frighteners, I’m sure it could…
There was one other factor involved in committing to Zemeckis and Universal–the first-look deal with Miramax. As Ken Kamins explains: ‘Obviously, a studio doesn’t want to have a first-look deal with somebody who is unproductive or where no movies result from the relationship. Although, at the point when Peter was offered The Frighteners by Zemeckis, Harvey hadn’t had any movies from Peter, he simply said, “Fine, since we don’t have anything right now, we’ll suspend and extend…” This meant that the deal was suspended for an agreed period while Peter made The Frighteners; afterwards, the terms of the deal would come back into play, but be extended by the same length of time as the suspension so that Miramax wouldn’t lose out.’
September 1994, the Lido, Venice, Italy: Chairman of the Film Festival’s jury, David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) presented Peter Jackson with the Festival’s Silver Lion.
Mel, Kate and Sarah Peirse were with us and there were hugs and sobs afterwards; it was a very emotional experience because Jim wasn’t there and we were all feeling that really heavily…
This was borne out by reviews, first at the film festivals at Venice and Toronto (where 600 members of the international journalists gave it the Metro Media Award) and, subsequently, in Britain:
Venezia La Nuova called Peter Jackson ‘New Zealand’s Spielberg’ while the Toronto Globe and Mail declared that ‘Never has the reinvention of adolescence seemed more haunting, more frightening, more wickedly credible…’ Hugo Davenport in London’s Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘Jackson has confounded expectation. Though familiar ingredients are present–murder, fantasy, a satirical view of New Zealand society–they yield a film of memorable atmosphere and originality’; while Christopher Tookey in the Daily Mail wrote: ‘Astonishingly…Jackson has turned out a film unrecognisable from the rest of his oeuvre–mature, sensitive and profound.’
The American press were uniformly ecstatic with a preponderance of such words as ‘startling’, ‘original’, ‘exhilarating’, ‘stunning,’ ‘compelling’, ‘powerful’ and, not surprisingly, ‘troubling’. Variety praised Peter’s ‘drop-dead command of the medium’ and the film’s marriage of ‘a dazzling, kinetic techno-show and a complex, credible portrait of the out-of-control relationship between the crime’s two schoolgirl perpetrators.’ Kenneth Turan in The Los Angeles Times described it as ‘adventurous and accomplished, burning with cinematic energy’ with ‘the ability to get inside hysteria and obsession, the skill to make us feel sensations as intensely as its protagonists…’ There was hardly a review that didn’t try to emulate the ecs
tatic mood of the film: ‘a mesmerising black diamond’, ‘a fever nightmare’, and ‘a pathologically autobiographical fairy tale…’ Heavenly Creatures, wrote the reviewer in the Oregonian, was a film that elevated Peter Jackson ‘from the ranks of genre film-makers to the ranks of major directors.’
At the Wellington Film Festival, Heavenly Creatures’ premiere screening received a tumultuous reception from the art-house cineastes who, a few years earlier, had probably avoided the renegade attraction offered by a midnight serving of Bad Taste.
It was a reception that left at least one of Peter’s associates feeling decidedly queasy: ‘They got up en masse at the premiere screening at the Wellington Film Festival and gave Peter a standing ovation, and I just remember feeling sick to my stomach that some of those same people had been not terribly supportive of him a year or two earlier. But now that he was suddenly making “the right kind of film” it was acceptable to jump up and call him a hero. Well, no, I think if you love cinema then you love all kinds of films and you see that there is no “right kind of film”, there are just good films and bad films
…’ In proposing his Bad Taste–Jamboree project to the Film Commission, Peter had articulated what he knew would be the question on everyone’s lips: ‘Why take a giant leap backwards–especially since Heavenly Creatures could establish me as a SERIOUS FILM-MAKER’ The answer? ‘I want to spend my career making the films I want to make at any given time–not the films other people think I should make…One of the greatest advantages of working in New Zealand is the freedom I feel I have to make my own films…It’s a freedom I relish and appreciate.’
What Peter did next was to exercise that freedom…
Forgotten Silver runs for fifty-two minutes–the shortest of all Peter’s professional films–yet it had a lengthy gestation period and was nurtured and coaxed into life through the combined passions and imaginations of Peter Jackson and Costa Botes.
Costa knew about film; he was a respected writer on film but he also wanted to make films of his own. He had made some short subjects and wanted to stretch himself to a feature length film. It was 1988, Peter Jackson was writing Braindead with Fran Walsh and Stephen Sinclair when American script guru, Robert McKee, had made a flying visit to New Zealand and shaken up their ideas about film-making. Costa had missed the seminar, but had listened to tapes and talked with Peter and pored over the copious notes which Fran had made during the three-day course.
‘What McKee offered in a nutshell,’ says Costa, ‘was the whole mystery of how you write a feature film: why some films work and others don’t; why you can find yourself halfway through a script and it’s turned into a ghastly, inescapable maze…There are no simple answers, but experiencing McKee’s seminar helps you go back to basics and ask yourself the right questions, at the very least gives you a vocabulary with which you can talk to other writers.’
Costa began talking to Peter about a script he had started writing and for which Jim Booth, then still the Executive Director of the New Zealand Film Commission, had advanced a small amount of development funding. This was the script for The Warrior Season, a gold-rushera Kiwi ‘Western’. Costa and Peter collaborated on a couple of drafts of the scripts and came up with ‘great action stuff–really good gravy –with really unexpected and interesting little twists and turns’, although Costa was already aware that Peter’s career was set on another trajectory. ‘That’s one of the most useful experiences of my professional life: sitting in a room, writing a script with Peter. His whole process was so fertile; he’d constantly be coming up with all kinds of ideas, and I was just aware of this little figure miles in front of me and of me going, “Jesus, how do I keep up with this guy?” Working with Peter brought me up to a whole different level, but I’d constantly feel left behind by him: he’s out of the box; he’s way, way ahead…’
Working on Costa’s script for The Warrior Season led to another collaboration and one that would result in a classic piece of film-making about film-making…
The inspiration sprang out of a British television documentary which Costa had seen in 1977. Entitled Alternative 3, it set out to investigate the so called ‘brain-drain’ of scientific talent which, it had previously been assumed, was caused by scientists leaving Britain for more lucrative jobs overseas. Alternative 3 presented the alarming discovery that many of the scientists seemed to have actually vanished off the face of the planet as part of a plan by the world’s governments to protect the best brains against an inevitable coming destruction of humankind. ‘Alternative 3’ was an intellectual ‘Noah’s Ark’ possibly located on Mars!
The documentary was, in fact, what is now commonly called a ‘mockumentary’, a genre popularly epitomised by Woody Allen’s Zelig and the 1984 classic, This is Spinal Tap. However, in 1977, the term ‘mockumentary’ had not yet been coined and Alternative 3 made a powerful impression on Costa, demonstrating how dangerously easy it can be to blur the line between film’s ability to present fact and fiction and what happens when the documentarian decides to tell lies…
Costa remembers: ‘The Alternative 3 programme and the impact it had sat in my brain like a dormant seed until years and years later, about 1990. I was fishing round for ideas and I thought it would be great to create something of my own along the lines of Alternative 3. I came up with two ideas, one involving UFOs, and the other one recreating the life of a fictional forgotten film-maker which would also involve creating his movies.’
At the suggestion of George Port, Costa discussed the idea with Peter, whose immediate reaction was that a film investigating the lost legacy of a non-existent New Zealand film pioneer was ‘a fantastic idea’. They quickly came up with a name for their forgotten movie-maker –Colin McKenzie: ‘Colin’ borrowed from Costa’s father-in-law and ‘McKenzie’ added by Peter as sounding like a good Scottishbedrock New Zealand name!
I thought we wanted the most innocuous, normal name we could come up with, something very plain and ordinary. I was thinking about the sort of names that All Blacks are called and ‘Colin McKenzie’ sounded like a Kiwi-bloke kind of name!
Costa already had several ideas for elements of the story, such as linking McKenzie’s career to a real life Kiwi hero by having his lost films include footage of pioneer aviator Richard Pearse making a flight in a heavier-than-air craft in March 1902, nine months before the Wright Brothers’ history-making flight at Kitty Hawk. Peter told Costa that he needed ‘something else’ and instantly added an ingenious embellishment of his own:
I had recently read a story in the paper that really intrigued me about a group of cinema archaeologists who had gone out into the Californian desert and uncovered ancient artefacts recovered from buildings that looked like they dated from antiquity, but which were actually Cecil B. DeMille’s movie sets for the 1923 silent version of The Ten Commandments.
The City of the Pharaohs, 720 feet wide and 120 feet high, had been dismantled at the end of the shoot and, on DeMille’s orders, had been buried in the sands of the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes. Peter immediately began to speculate on the idea of there being remains of an epic movie set hidden deep in the New Zealand bush. ‘I thought it was a fantastic image,’ says Costa. ‘I couldn’t get over the idea of us setting out with machetes and hacking our way through the jungle and finding another lost city, this time the set of a biblical epic to rival those of DeMille and D. W. Griffiths–but built in New Zealand!’
Costa suggested the title Forgotten Silver (a reference to silver nitrate used in the manufacture of film stock) and Peter recalls trying to hitch Colin Mackenzie’s story to another project that had been lying undeveloped for a few years:
Remember the mythic, never-gotten-off-the-ground television show, Uncle Herman’s Bedtime Whoppers, the ridiculous idea with the funny name that had part of the inspiration for Meet the Feebles?. At some stage during the long window following the completion of Heavenly Creatures, I got another phone call from Bryce and Grant Campbell suggesting that we really ought to try t
o get Uncle Herman’s Bedtime Whoppers up and running and asking if I had any ideas.
I mentioned the idea of a spoof documentary about a New Zealand film pioneer who does amazing work and invents all this pioneering cinema stuff but can’t make it happen because he just doesn’t have the ability to follow through or somehow manages to get it not quite right. I pitched it over the phone, but I could hear that Bryce and Grant really weren’t buying it…
Undaunted, Peter and Costa began elaborating Colin McKenzie’s story. ‘I sat down and wrote an initial document,’ remembers Costa, ‘a short summary of everything we knew about Colin McKenzie and all the ideas we’d come up with, not concerning myself with narrative, just putting down ideas for gags. Then we’d play about with it, tossing it around, throwing it backwards and forwards. We talked with Jim Booth, who was really sick at the time but who thought it was a fantastic idea–I remember him lying in bed and saying something really nice: that this was one of the few things that had really cheered him up lately. Jim encouraged us to carry on with it, but the real problem was that what we were talking about was so ambitious and expensive–big special effects, big crowd scenes–there seemed to be no reasonable chance of our ever getting sufficient funding to make a short film on that scale.’