Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  Not only that, but funding a hoax was obviously a suspect proposition both for television networks and the Film Commission. Then, after several negative responses, New Zealand on Air, the state television service, invited submissions for a series of one-off TV dramas, to be sponsored by the Montana winery.

  Forgotten Silver was one of 150 proposals submitted for consideration and, no doubt helped by the fact that Heavenly Creatures had confirmed Peter Jackson as a film-maker of the ‘right kind of films’, was accepted as one of the dramas for the Montana Sunday Theatre season.

  The timing, however, was really not good since The Frighteners was finally about to go into pre-production with a Hollywood star name, Michael J. Fox, in the lead role.

  And it was like, ‘Oh my God! Holy s***! I can’t do this. I can’t make it…I’ve got no time!’ We were about eight or nine weeks away from actually starting shooting The Frighteners. But there was also the realisation that my involvement had helped get the idea accepted and that if I now pulled out, they’d drop Forgotten Silver and take someone else’s idea. So, we worked out a way, divvying up the responsibilities between us, with Costa directing all the interview material while I shot the original footage for Colin McKenzie’s ‘lost’ movies.

  First, however, a completed script was required. Costa prepared a draft and then each evening for a month he would meet with Peter and Fran after they had been doing advance preparation for The Frighteners: ‘We’d go through the script page by page and exhaustively rewrite and rewrite. A heck of a lot of work went into the screenplay: three drafts, all superimposed on each other. A lot of the ideas in the finished films had their beginnings with me but were all inspiringly tousled up by Pete and Fran. If you looked at the draft script you wouldn’t see a single page that wasn’t heavily worked over. Pete’s big contribution to the whole thing was the sense of drama: he kept saying over and over that it had to be dramatic, it had to have a flow and a shape, it had to be engaging dramatically; that it didn’t matter how clever we were with individual gags, if we didn’t give it an overall shape it was going to be a one-joke idea.’

  The films-within-the-film involved a number of genres: ranging from the cinema-vérité of the war documentary (filmed on the beaches of Gallipoli, of course) to the knockabout, custard-pie nonsense of slapstick comedies and the biblical epic so beloved by the early film-makers and which, in Colin McKenzie’s case, took as its theme the story of Salome.

  Working together, Costa, Peter and Fran came up with ever more ludicrous twist and turns, such as having Colin McKenzie make the first ever film with synchronised sound but have him choose as a subject a story about China so that, although the characters were all talking, no one watching the film understood a word of what they were saying! Then there were entanglements with a gang of Mafiosi (the Palermo Brothers, named after the Sicilian capital and location of a historic Mafia summit) and the authorities in Stalinist Russia, who agreed to finance McKenzie’s ailing production of Salome on the understanding that it was reworked to exclude religion and promote communist ideology!

  But there were moments of deep emotion and tragedy that leavened the gags and added to the story’s credibility: Colin McKenzie’s despair at his repeated failures, the death of his wife (and leading lady) Maybelle in childbirth and Colin’s own death trying to save a wounded soldier in the Spanish Civil War, filmed by his own fallen camera…

  Fran was really hot on this: all the time she would be saying to Costa and me, ‘It’s got to be emotional; you can’t just show documentary stuff and think you’ve done a good job, you actually have to turn it into something that makes the audience care about Colin McKenzie, moves people–perhaps even to tears.’

  Initial fears about the cost of making Forgotten Silver were quickly confirmed: the available budget was NZ$400,000 but a first pass at the budget showed it needing a figure of $1 million. As Costa remembers, they decided to go over the figures again: ‘We thought, “What could we do it for if we forget the true cost of paying people, if we do deals, ask people to do it for a little bit less? But it was still over NZ$700,000. So then we did another pass on the basis of hardly any of us getting paid and just doing it for love and it was still sitting around $620,000…’

  Peter and Costa met with Caterina de Nave, Executive Producer of the ‘Montana Sunday Theatre’ series, and put the figures on the table but, seemingly, there was nothing to be done. The Film Commission couldn’t contribute more money and the relevant committee at New Zealand on Air weren’t due to meet for some time; whereas for Peter it was crunch-time: he had to confirm his involvement with Forgotten Silver and start work or it would be time to begin filming The Frighteners and the moment would have passed. But Caterina de Nave couldn’t give them an answer and, at that point, the realisation dawned that ‘the project was dead in the water.’

  ‘I went into a kind of mourning for the project,’ remembers Costa. ‘I had nothing to go on to and that was very hard. But the thing that hurt the most was that I wasn’t going to see this character, Colin McKenzie. For the first time in my career I’d worked on something where I knew the character inside out, I’d imagined everything about him and suddenly it wasn’t going to happen, he wasn’t going to come alive.’

  Then, after a day and a night of misery, Costa received an early morning telephone call from Caterina de Nave to say that she had talked her committee into an early meeting at which they approved the NZ$620,000 budget. ‘They would never have done that if it wasn’t for Peter,’ reflects Costa; ‘they wanted the 8001b gorilla so badly they were prepared to bust through all manner of bureaucratic protocol, step outside their meeting times and then give us 50 per cent more budget than the other films in the series.’

  It was clearly the time for any remaining doubters in the arts and media of New Zealand to forget the spilt blood and scattered brains, the bloody deeds with chainsaws and power mowers: the enfant terrible was now an award-winning film-maker.

  ‘Forgotten Silver exists,’ says Costa, ‘because of Peter. I came up hook, line and sinker with a lot of the original material but, creatively, the project would not be what it is without Pete and certainly in practical terms it wouldn’t even be a project without him; he’s absolutely, totally embedded in that film.’

  Regarding Peter’s gift for extending the budget (and not just on Forgotten Silver), Richard Taylor comments: ‘Pete knows the movie he wants to make. People aren’t necessarily willing to put up the money for that movie, so he begins with the knowledge that he has to settle initially for the movie that they have the money to pay for. But, as the process goes on, he cleverly generates such passion and enthusiasm for what he has envisaged, that he is able to draw them further along on the journey until they are so caught up in what he wants to do that they agree to fund the project at a higher level than they had ever expected.’

  Over-arching all the many historical and movie-making gags in Forgotten Silver was the sustaining story of Peter and Costa’s quest to discover the truth about Colin McKenzie. It would begin with Peter explaining how he had first uncovered a cache of old films in a shed at the bottom of the garden of an elderly neighbour of his parents in Pukerua Bay and conclude with finding the lost city of Colin McKenzie: the giant sets originally built for Salome and which–like DeMille’s Ten Commandments sets in the California sand dunes–had lain undiscovered for decades.

  Two further elements would contribute to the veracity of the storytelling: firstly Nick Booth, son of the late Jim Booth, undertook historical research into the period and events referred to in the script, following which further rewrites used this material to add authentic embellishments, often supported by genuine archive film.

  Secondly, there needed to be a cast of interviewees to add veracity to the proceedings–all of whom needed to be able to lie with total conviction! The first contribution came from Kiwi star, Sam Neill. Early in 1995, the actor invited Peter to take part in a documentary that he was making on the history New Zealand film, ca
lled Cinema of Unease.

  I told Sam, who I had never met before, that he could interview me as long as I could interview him for our film! He said, ‘Sure,’ so I then said, ‘And by the way, Sam, ours is a very low budget picture, so can I use your crew and your camera gear when you come round?’ And, fortunately, he still said, ‘Sure…’!

  Before he became an actor, Sam Neill had worked at the New Zealand Film Unit, so he invented a story about an old guy whom he had met there: a technician who was a bit damaged by all the chemicals he’d had to handle, but who actually remembered working with Colin McKenzie.

  According to Sam, the technician was Stan Wilson, a former vaudeville comic who, as ‘Stan the Man’, travelled the country delivering a series of well-aimed custard pies–including one into the face of the New Zealand premier–all of which were covertly filmed by McKenzie using a candid camera concealed inside a suitcase and exhibited as actuality-slapstick comedies.

  So I did the interview with Sam Neill, then swung his own camera back on him, and that ‘swapsie’ was the first thing that we ever shot for Forgotten Silver.

  Costa Botes and Sue Rogers who, following Jim’s death, was producing the film felt that Sam’s interview gave legitimacy to the McKenzie story; shortly afterwards another opportunity to solicit contributions presented itself when the nominations for the 1994 Academy Awards were announced and included one for Peter and Fran for Best Original Screenplay for Heavenly Creatures.

  Fran was in the final stages of her pregnancy with our first child, Billy, and wasn’t going to be allowed to make the trip, so I was going to have to fly to the ceremony alone. But I thought, ‘This is the perfect opportunity to grab a couple of interviews about Colin McKenzie.’

  So, I thought I’d start with Harvey Weinstein: we’d just done our first-look deal with Miramax, so we were all part of the family. I called Harvey up and even though this wasn’t anything to do with Miramax, he agreed to do an interview.

  Peter’s next call was to Rick Baker, who he had met at Sitges and who was a near-neighbour of the Hollywood critic, film historian and television

  With Fran, just before I left to attend the 1995 Oscars. This is our office at home, where we’d write scripts sitting side by side at the computer.

  personality, Leonard Maltin. Rick agreed to approach Leonard, and Peter soon had the internationally known movie commentator lined up for an interview. With a film crew booked in Los Angeles, Peter flew off for his first Oscar ceremony.

  Being nominated for the Oscar was a huge thrill–one that exceeded even the thrill of the nominations for The Lord of the Rings. It was the first time and felt absolutely unbelievable.

  It was very exciting: it was the year that Bob Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump won Best Picture and we were going to be making The Frighteners for Zemeckis. The Shawshank Redemption was also up for Best Picture, which was the feature debut of Frank Darabont, who I’d got to know on my first trips through Hollywood. It was the year of Pulp Fiction–which eventually beat Heavenly Creatures in the Best Screenplay category– and Quentin Tarantino had been another friend we had made at Sitges when he was just this kid with a film called Reservoir Dogs…

  Peter had been hoping to get Tarantino to join the Colin McKenzie ‘talking heads’ but, having just won an Oscar, he was caught up on an endless party schedule and Peter never managed to get him in front of the camera. As for the interview with Harvey Weinstein, that was set up for an incredibly early time on post-Oscar morning.

  I’d rung Harvey the day before and asked what time I should show up, and he looked in his appointment book and he said he’d do it at some ungodly hour–like half past six in the morning–and I said, ‘Harvey, it’s the Oscars the night before, are you really going to be up by half past six?’ Next morning I arrived with the crew and he was not only up but proved a wonderful bullshit artist!

  After interviewing Harvey, Peter dashed off to the TV studio where Leonard Maltin broadcast and had an hour with someone who proved a supreme storyteller: the lies fell from Leonard’s lips like pearls of truth! Peter describes him as ‘a wonderful showman’, as anyone who sees him delivering his shameless deceptions in Forgotten Silver will agree. His interviews, says Costa, are ‘perfect gold’. It was appropriate that when The Return of the King had its Hollywood premiere in 2003, the person conducting the interviews for the telecast was Leonard Maltin.

  Back in Wellington, cast and crew were assembled in order to shoot the ‘discovered’ film footage, with Heavenly Creatures’ cinematographer, Alun Bollinger, behind the camera, and the authentic looking ‘archive’ photographs and film stills that were taken by Chris Coad and then mixed in with genuine period photographs including pictures of Costa’s wife’s great-grandfather and family.

  The young man chosen to play Colin McKenzie was given the part in compensation for an earlier missed opportunity: Thomas Robbins was a Christchurch actor who had been cast for a role in Heavenly Creatures that was eventually cut from the finished film. The sequence featured a teenage social and dance attended by Juliet Hulme, at which–through a series of parental connivances–a young lad, Colin, had been delegated to dance with Juliet in the hope of awakening her to masculine charms as an antidote to her intensifying relationship with Pauline Parker. Colin’s overtures– being a somewhat nervous lad–were unsuccessful and, as Peter puts it, Juliet ‘chewed him up and spat him out.’ Unfortunately for Thomas Robbins, the scene was cut from the final edit for pacing reasons.

  It’s something you hate doing–especially to a very enthusiastic young teenager who’s told all his family he is going to be in this movie and then, right on the eve of it coming out, learns that his scene has hit the cutting-room floor. So when we came to look for a Colin McKenzie, Fran and I decided we should give the role to Tom: partly out of guilt, but also because we knew he was a good actor and, very importantly, because we knew that if we were to sustain the spoof, his face had to be unknown to TV audiences.

  So convincing was his performance that, as Thomas recounts, he watched the finished broadcast with a group of mates who were oblivious to the fact that the Colin McKenzie on screen was their friend! Eight years later, Thomas Robbins would be seen in the opening moments of The Return of the King as Déagol grappling with Sméagol over possession of the One Ring.

  Two other member of the Forgotten Silver company to appear in Rings were Peter Corrigan (playing silent comic, Stan the Man) who would be seen in the extended version of Fellowship as Otho SackvilleBaggins and Sarah McLeod who was cast as actress Maybelle–Colin’s Salome and wife–and who would subsequently play the love of Sam Gamgee’s life, Rosie Cotton.

  Other industry interviewees were lined up–in addition to those Peter had already got on film–including veteran New Zealand film-maker John O’Shea. Beatrice Ashton, a neighbour and close friend of Fran’s aunt, assumed the role of Colin’s second wife, Hannah McKenzie, who while serving as a Red Cross nurse in Algiers had married the pioneer despite his being twice her age and their having only one night together before he went off to fight in the war! A retired headmistress, Beatrice’s phoney recollections of what her late husband had told her of his life and work were to provide the chronological and emotional cement to hold the story together.

  Now, however, it was clearly a race against time:

  We were terrified that Universal would find out about Forgotten Silver in case I was in breach of my contract by working on anything else. I guess I could have argued, since it was started long before we knew I would be directing The Frighteners, that technically it was already a work in progress. But we certainly hadn’t told them about it!

  Much had to be filmed and even though some of Colin Mackenzie’s films were only represented in extracts (or surviving snippets), they were complex to shoot: Richard Pearse’s flight (with a full-size replica plane and a model built by Richard Taylor); the Chinese ‘talkie’ (which also happened to be the first ‘kung fu’ movie!); the various ‘Stan the Man’ comedies and the wa
r footage in Gallipoli and Spain. There were also a great many scenes from Salome including John the Baptist preaching and getting arrested, the crowds in revolt and fighting with Roman soldiers, the Baptist in the dungeon and his eventual execution, as well as Herod and his entourage in the throne room, where Salome performs her beguiling ‘dance of the seven veils’ and, in the film’s final moments, is crushed to death.

  There was just one week in which to get all Peter’s ‘lost McKenzie film sequences’ shot before he was under contract to Universal and locked into pre-production on The Frighteners.

  By the second week of filming, things were beginning to get perilous. Universal sent a development producer named John Garbett down to New Zealand to represent the studio through the filming of The Frighteners. Looking back, Peter recalls thinking, ‘Holy Hell! How are we ever going to get through this?’

  Interior scenes for Salome were being shot at the studio and Costa Botes’ memory is that they managed to hold off John Garbett’s arrival with a story that there had been a serious–and highly dangerous –gas leak on the studio lot that was going to take three days to fix!

  There were also several major crowd scenes to be filmed–some of which were being shot at the Massey Memorial, a marble forum-like structure in memory of former Prime Minister William Ferguson Massey. Costa remembers: ‘I’d written four or five closely typed pages that was halfway between a script and a prose treatment–and had given them to Pete to have a look through and see whether any of the ideas–such as the people’s revolt which I’d added to the original story–might be a way of coming up with the sequence. The next thing I know, he’s on set directing with these seriously scrunched-up pieces of paper and saying, “I’d better not lose these, they are all I’ve got!” It was actually a very faithful adaptation of what I’d written. I hadn’t done a lot of writing for other people, so it was interesting for me to see a director taking these notions–which really weren’t all tied together and had some pretty big gaps in between–and making it work on film.’