Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  ‘Congratulations to the perpetrators,’ enthused one supporter, ‘it was the best New Zealand entertainment in ten years!’ Another wrote, ‘We could only marvel at the work and ingenuity that went into this huge, hilarious practical joke

  …’ Forgiveness, where it was given, was granted with enthusiasm and smiles: ‘I was indeed shattered to hear the next day that the documentary was all a hoax–but what a hoax! If Colin McKenzie and his brilliance never existed, then Peter Jackson created magic for me. I believed it implicitly, and loved every minute of this film. Bravo Peter and cohorts! What a journey into fantasy, which absolutely fascinated…’

  Had they but known, Peter Jackson’s journeying ‘into fantasy’ had only just begun. ‘What a hoot!’ wrote one delighted viewer. ‘If anyone will go down in Kiwi, nay in world cinematic history, it will be this innovative film-maker…’

  But who did they mean, exactly? Colin McKenzie or Peter Jackson?

  In the closing moments of Forgotten Silver, the TV audience attended an event that had allegedly been held on 3 September 1995. A cinema marquee announced ‘Colin McKenzie’s “SALOME” GALA PREMIERE’. Inside, an excited audience (who had actually been filmed during the Wellington Film Festival) listened as Lindsay Shelton of the New Zealand Film Commission (and the man who, since Bad Taste, had been involved with selling Jackson movies overseas) told them: ‘There has never been a movie which has taken so long between conception and completion. And I predict that there has never been a movie, which has given a first night audience such a voyage of discovery, as you are about to embark on now…I am greatly honoured to introduce the World Premiere of Colin McKenzie’s Salome…’ At the ending of the film as the image of the dying Salome irised away into blackness, the audience rose to its feel to acclaim the masterpiece–the first movie epic to be filmed in New Zealand.

  A little over eight years later, on 1 December 2003, in the very same cinema–the Embassy, Wellington–another audience would stand to acknowledge the genuine World Premiere of a genuine epic filmed in New Zealand: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

  When, in 1994, Universal Pictures had announced that Peter Jackson was going to be making a film for Robert Zemeckis in New Zealand, Peter had told the Sunday Star Times: ‘It’s a little bit of Hollywood coming to New Zealand. It’s not me going to Hollywood, that’s something I’ve always resisted. I just love making movies here

  A fun moment of different movies crossing paths. Kate and Mel were with us in New York doing press for Heavenly Creatures while we were meeting Michael J. Fox to discuss The Frighteners script.

  and there’s no logical reason to change that.’

  The Frighteners was variously described, as ‘a supernatural black-comic thriller’, and ‘a ghost story that takes so many twists and turns you begin to believe anything is possible. And everything is scary…’

  Zemeckis had agreed to the film being shot in New Zealand, but he had put forward a megastar for the lead role of Frank Bannister, the dubious psychic investigator –Michael J. Fox, who had starred as Marty McFly in Zemeckis’ Back to the Future trilogy.

  Michael J. Fox was a far bigger name than I ever imagined would be in the film. Frankly, I had expected The Frighteners to be a low-budget horror film and that we would be casting unknown actors, but that really wasn’t what Bob had in mind at all.

  Zemeckis sounded out Michael and it was agreed that Peter would meet up with the star at the Toronto Film Festival in Canada, where Heavenly Creatures was being screened following its triumphant premiere in Venice.

  I met and chatted with Michael in a hotel in Toronto and then he had to jump in his car to go off to the screening of Heavenly Creatures. As he left, I remember he said, in a funny, jokey kind of way, ‘Well, I’ll meet you afterwards–and I hope I like it!’ I thought, ‘I hope he does!’ Anyway, we met up again afterwards and he’d really loved the film, thought it was fantastic and asked a lot of questions about it and about the real life events. From that meeting in Toronto, he was on board for The Frighteners.

  Trini Alverado, who had recently played one of the ‘little women’ in the Susan Sarandon/Winona Ryder version of Louisa May Alcott’s novel, was cast as the recently widowed Dr Lucy Lynskey–a character giving a name-check for Creatures’ actress Melanie Lynskey, who would make a cameo appearance in the film. The cast was also to include Dee Wallace Stone who, apart from being Elliott’s ‘mom’ in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, had made the first two of several horror movie appearances in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes and Joe Dante’s The Howling.

  The leads were joined by two legends: John Astin and Jeff Combs. Astin (the father of the future Sam Gamgee) had starred as Gomez, head of The Addams Family in the cult TV comedy series based on Charles Addams’ ghoulish cartoons for The New Yorker. Astin was cast as The Judge, one of Bannister’s spirit cohorts, a world-weary, Wild West gunslinger. As for Combs, he was already one of Peter’s screen heroes because of his performance as Herbert West, the scientist fascinated by regenerative experiments who is the eponymous ‘hero’ of the seminal zombie movie Re-Animator. Now he was to play unhinged FBI Agent Dammers, an eye-rolling, tic-twitching, haemorrhoid-suffering performance that is both hilarious and sinister.

  The cast adapted well to filming in New Zealand and Peter slipped effortlessly into directing performers used to the ways of big American studios. However, despite feeling a kinship between the lifestyle of New Zealand and that of his native Canada, Michael J. Fox suffered from bouts of homesickness:

  Michael was in New Zealand for the best part of six months and he missed his family–especially since he and his wife had had twins not long before he started on The Frighteners. They came to visit him once during the course of the shoot and he took trips back

  An ardent Re-Animator fan getting gifts from Herbert West himself in the guise of Jeff Combs (above). John Astin shooting his six-guns in The Frighteners (below). A great gentleman and, after working with Sean and his daughter Ally in The Lord of the Rings, I can now say I’ve directed three generations of the Astin family.

  home whenever we could schedule him a week off.

  He was very funny and generous and because he was missing his twins, he came to adopt our son Billy, who was only a few months old, almost as a surrogate child! He’d often come round to play with him– and even change his nappies!

  A 130-day shoot was scheduled for The Frighteners, reflecting the fact that it was going to be a project that would prove demanding in every aspect of its production.

  Richard Taylor and colleagues at Weta embarked on eighteen months of intensive work, building several miniature settings to help convincingly relocate Wellington to North America, devising an animatronic ghost-dog that, at one point steals The Judge’s perpetually loose lower jaw (‘The dog’s running away with my face!’), and an elaborate costume for The Gatekeeper, a supernatural winged being who guards the cemetery but who was eventually cut from the final edit of the film.

  There were also the complex make-up requirements for Frank Bannister’s ghostly associates. Rick Baker, whose work was much admired by Richard and Peter, advised on the design of the particularly demanding make-up for The Judge, whose ghostly shape is in an advanced state of decomposition. ‘The ghosts,’ Peter observed at the time, ‘are not just special effects, they’re key characters in the film who happen to be dead.’

  The Frighteners ceaselessly juggled the conflicting emotions of amusement and fear and, in its most terrifying moments, featured a startling representation of that harbinger of death, the Grim Reaper: a cloaked, faceless figure (a forerunner of the Black Riders of Mordor) whose appearances are a prelude to literally heart-stopping moments for his unfortunate victims.

  Experiments in the creation of the Reaper included both a costumed performer and a rod puppet, operated underwater in order to create an ethereal, floating effect. Eventually, however, Weta opted for digital graphics that would enable the spook to slip and slide over the rooftops
with fluid ease and to streak along roads in pursuit of speeding vehicles.

  Two funny guys, Jim Fyfe and Chi McBride, who played Stuart, Bannister’s ghostly assistant, and Cyrus in The Frighteners.

  By using computer graphics, I think we gave the Reaper an interesting feel with the inky-black quality we were able to give to his robes. It was one of my regrets on The Lord of the Rings that we weren’t able to create the Ringwraiths in a similar way. We considered it, but realised in the end that with nine Ringwraiths and so many shots in which they had to appear it would have put too great a burden on a team that already had to create a great many effects for the film. It’s very hard to make people wearing black clothes look really scary and ultimately it only works because of the sound effects and camera angles. If we had been able to do them in the same way that we did the Reaper in The Frighteners I think we would have achieved a look that would have been more creepy, sinister and menacing.

  ‘Watching what was happening throughout the making of Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners,’ notes Costa Botes, ‘it was clear that Peter had taken another of his giant strides forward. He’d nudged Weta into buying their first computer, George Port had taught himself how to scan film and manipulate it using the software available and, suddenly, they had a special effects facility.’

  Nevertheless, the effects for The Frighteners were to place heavy demands on George Port and his growing, but still small, group of technician-artists who were now installed in the recently acquired studio premises in Weka Street and were getting to grips with some of the newest Silicon Graphics hard- and software. Completing effects work on Jack Brown Genius had delayed some of the essential gearing-up process for the new feature and a few vital effects shots for Forgotten Silver had been farmed out to a small Wellington effects company called Pixel Perfect, many of whose artists would later join Weta Digital.

  ‘The Frighteners became an immense laboratory,’ says Ken Kamins, ‘and the film really defined the expansion of Weta: the way they went about it was that you could create an ad hoc effects company by leasing equipment from Silicon Graphics and then going to unemployed animators throughout the world and enticing them to come to New Zealand. Yet they would still have an economically viable studio because Weta, at that point, didn’t have the overhead charges of an Industrial Light and Magic, Digital Domain or any of the other big effects houses in the USA.’

  The staggering escalation rate of Weta’s contribution to Peter Jackson movies is fascinating. The Return of the King in 2003 would contain a staggering 1,691 special effects shots (which was double the number in The Two Towers) and yet Weta’s beginnings, just eleven years earlier, had been by comparison incredibly modest. There were a mere forty effects shots in Heavenly Creatures while Jack Brown Genius, a year later, contained 150 shots. The Frighteners dramatically accelerated that figure to some 500 effects, including glowing ‘auras’ to surround the ghosts and the ability for malevolent spirits to reach out of walls and ceilings to grab and clutch at the living.

  It was hard: there were a lot of shots and very few people doing them. None of those 500 effects shots were particularly difficult, but we’d never done anything like it before and we were still finding our way. Fortunately Bob Zemeckis was incredibly patient and understanding.

  This is what the set of The Frighteners looked like when we filmed the ghost scenes. Spending all day surrounded by blue or green screens turns you slightly bonkers.

  And we got through it and the quality of the shots was generally pretty good. And looking at the film now it is difficult to think how we would have done some of the effects–let alone made them as dynamic as we did–without the use of computer graphics.

  For Peter, The Frighteners was a significant, yet curious, venture: it was his first Hollywood movie and it had come about almost, it seemed, by accident.

  I’d never had much to do with American studios or producers before. Jim’s death had an emotional impact and it also left me freewheeling because I hadn’t just lost a friend, I had lost a producer–for a while, I didn’t quite know what to do.

  Remembering this period, Richard Taylor says, ‘Pete was reeling from the tragedy of losing Jim and his emotions were in something of a turmoil. This was the first major project he was doing without him and I think Forgotten Silver had distracted him a little from his normal incredible clarity of vision. Without Jim at the helm, it took Pete quite a time to regain not so much his confidence as his normal drive. There was a real necessity to get through this film, to see it made and finished so that we could move on to other things. I felt we didn’t do our best work for Peter, but we were very fortunate because having Bob Zemeckis as a producer was very good for all of us.’

  It was an unexpectedly ‘organic’ process: beginning with us thinking we would be working for Bob Zemeckis as writers with him as director but then, eventually, ending up directing the film and working with him as a producer.

  I really loved working with Bob and I’m glad that my first introduction to Hollywood film-making was with him because he allowed me to stay in New Zealand and he protected me and let me make the film my way.

  Bob was extremely ‘hands-off’: he came down here once to visit during the shoot for about a week and then he came again to have a look at a first cut and that was really the only contact that we had with him during the making of the film. I found him very respectful of us as film-makers: he suggested one or two things, but he always said, ‘This is your film…’ He did exactly what a good producer should do: he really supported us and helped make it all happen.

  The film featured an evocative score by a fantasy composer with an impeccable pedigree: Danny Elfman (Ghostbusters, Edward Scissorhands and Batman) and the film’s design was by Grant Major with art direction by (Jackson-team newcomer) Dan Hennah: two men who would, later, make a highly significant contribution to The Lord of the Rings and King Kong.

  As The Frighteners went into post-production, and despite the pressures they were facing, the perennial question arose: what to do next? The idea that eventually surfaced came as a direct result of the developments with Weta digital.

  I was lying in bed one Sunday morning, talking to Fran, reading the newspaper and having a cup of tea, and we were kind of excited about the computer effects that we were currently doing for The Frighteners.

  It was obvious after Jurassic Park that you could do the most amazing things with computers but The Frighteners was the first time of seeing, first hand, exactly what computers were capable of. We were very much aware that our future projects were, ideally, going to include computer effects–at least in the short term in order to get Weta on its feet.

  We’ve always had this hope that, one day, Weta will be able to survive by doing other people’s films so that Fran and I can have some time off, but, back then, we were very conscious of having thirty-five computers and that, after The Frighteners, the machine had to be kept fed.

  On this particular morning we were asking ourselves what kind of

  I just noticed that I’m wearing exactly the same shirt in all these Frighteners photos–oops! Here I am wearing the shirt on set with our son Billy.

  films we could do with computers? What hasn’t been done? And I said to Fran, ‘You know, the genre, that’s never really been done well–not for a long time–is the fantasy genre…’

  For as long as he had been making movies professionally, Peter had always had in the back of his mind a desire to make a fantasy film. After all, it had been King Kong, Planet of the Apes, Jason and the Argonauts, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and other movies that had made him want to become a film-maker. Not only that, but some of his earliest film experiments as a youngster had been fantasies: an attempt to make his own version of King Kong, the Spot On competition entry, The Valley, and his version of Sinbad that he’d been trying to make when he fell and hurt his back. Science fiction and horror films were already using computer technology–there was no shortage of spaceships, aliens, robots and din
osaurs, but fantasy films of the kind made by Ray Harryhausen that had so excited Peter as a boy had really fallen out of favour with the movie-going public.

  I argued that if fantasy wasn’t that popular then that was because it wasn’t being done properly. A certain type of fantasy movie in particular –the sub-genre usually known as ‘Sword & Sorcery’–is one that I don’t think has ever been done very well. Why? Mainly because they don’t respect the audience enough or they aim at too young an age group, or because they’re just plain silly, gaudy and over-designed!

  I think fantasy is really one of the last movie genres to be conquered. I mean everybody’s seen several great westerns, great musicals, great thrillers, great horror movies, but there have not been that many been great fantasy films.

  That’s why it is the last genre of cinema that is open to improvement. Every time anyone sets out to make a genre movie, somebody has already made one that’s better: if you film a war movie, you’ll always be compared with All Quiet on the Western Front, which was made seventy years earlier. You are always in the shadow of greater films that have gone before–with the exception of fantasy movies.