Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  Talking to Peter Jackson just a few days after he had completed work on The Lord of the Rings, he had remarked apropos of moving on to King Kong: ‘The notion of taking on one film and one film only seems pretty luxurious to me at the moment. Of course it’s never easy to make a good movie, but technically and logistically anything has got to be easier than doing three incredibly complicated, three-hour movies! It was an endurance test and I never want to make another three-hour movie in my life! They are really tough, way longer than films should be and ought to be and bring with them all sorts of added pressures to justify the running time: make them entertaining and stop people getting bored and feeling uncomfortable about sitting still for so long…

  ‘Not only that, but with three hours comes a great many special effects and every aspect of the production – sound, editing, music – has to do twice what a regular hour-and-a-half-long film would be doing. The whole thing compounds into this massive, tiring, stressful event…

  ‘So, hopefully Kong will be two hours long and comparatively straightforward…’

  And was it?

  In some ways it was and in some ways it wasn’t! Nothing is ever easier than what went before, because you’re always trying to put as much into the film as you can to make it as good as you can and we always put in 150 per cent. Nothing will ever be quite as hard as The Return of the King because of the sheer expectation that was resting on that film and the complexity of having to weave the different story threads together at the climax of the film. But Kong was technically tough and, although it’s a shorter film, it has as many effects shots as The Return of the King, so I’d rather not use the word ‘easy’ in any way about Kong! The tunnel was shorter, so we got to see the light a little quicker – but that didn’t make it any less dark and scary!

  I know that when we were going to do King Kong ten years ago it was

  Once the cameras start rolling I focus on my monitors, which show me what’s being filmed. I try to imagine I’m seeing it play on a huge cinema screen – and give notes if, for whatever reason, it’s not feeling quite right.

  the scariest mountain to climb; way bigger than The Frighteners, which I had just finished and was totally intimidating. The version of Kong that we have finally made is far more ambitious than what we were planning then but, because we have done all these things before and now know how to do them, the project didn’t feel anywhere near as daunting.

  Of course, it had its moments. The shoot was no less intense. The one side of film-making that I like the least is the actual shooting of the film, because you are carrying a lot of the stress of the day: having to make the day’s schedule and stay in budget, and that doesn’t really get any easier the more times you make movies.

  So there wasn’t any less stress but there was an atmosphere of calm confidence in which we were able to take everything that we’d learned and, hopefully, have taken what we can do a step further. Just as we’ll try to do in making our next film…

  What sets King Kong apart from any film that Peter has ever made – or will ever make – is its unique status as the film that set him on course to become a film-maker. To have revisited that film, to have set out on his own search for Skull Island and once there to have sought out Kong and brought him back to our world for us to wonder and marvel at is, perhaps, the most extraordinary achievement in a career to date already crowned with achievements.

  I always thought of the Cave-troll in The Fellowship of the Ring as being the fulfilment of my Ray Harryhausen ambitions of wanting to do a fantasy film and have humans battling with a monster.

  But Kong, even more than The Lord of the Rings, is the ultimate fulfilment of what I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid because, in many respects, King Kong is the ultimate fantasy film; and because in this film more than any other I have been able to devise and develop these amazingly visual encounters with the fantastic.

  I simply wanted to make a new version of the story that I would enjoy if I went to the cinema to see it!

  That’s the standard that I try to apply to everything I do: I want to make movies that I’d like to watch…

  Epilogue

  ‘One More For Luck!’

  ‘I’m still having the dreams!’ Peter Jackson is speaking to me in August 2005, on the day after the final pick-up for King Kong. ‘I’ve had lots of director nightmares recently.’ It seems that the dreams that plagued his nights throughout the shoot of The Lord of the Rings have not gone away.

  In the dreams, Peter is lying in bed surrounded by a film crew demanding to know what to do next and without his having any idea what they are supposed to be filming.

  ‘I had them again last night,’ he goes on. ‘I was dreaming that I was in the middle of doing Kong stuff and things were going wrong. Then, on top of that, I dreamed that Cate Blanchett and Liv Tyler had shown up! And it’s not what you think! I knew I had to shoot an Elven sequence for The Lord of the Rings – I didn’t know why or what it was – just that Liv and Cate had arrived in my dreamland and were waiting for me to tell them what to do. And I simply didn’t have a clue…These stress-related dreams are so strong that they stay with me for an hour or two after I wake up. I arrive at the Kong editing room, still feeling Elvish tension!’

  I have a memory of observing Peter Jackson on another last day of pick-ups…Friday 18 July 2003, the final day of pick-ups for The Return of the King.

  On the studio soundstage are the ruins of Osgiliath…Crumbling masonry: a ruination of once-elegant buildings; colonnades of broken arches and smashed columns; statues toppled into dust; twisted iron grilles; uprooted trees; a mass of littered debris – charred wood, empty barrels, wooden dishes and pewter tankards. Everything covered in dust; everything is spattered with blood…

  An enormous fan, twenty feet in diameter, wafts drifts of smoke around the set…

  Above the set: rows of lamps, gantries and shiny aluminium air-con ducts.

  On set: an assistant in a baseball cap wanders by with an armful of swords. Technicians in blue hard-hats are mingling with Orcs and Gondorians, who are enjoying a truce between shots.

  Peter Jackson is wearing a jerkin with the legend on the back: ‘Day 133 May 23 2000’. That was the halfway point in making The Lord of the Rings, when the shoot was going to be 266 days before it went up to 274.

  Peter is directing John Bach playing Madril, senior officer in Faramir’s company of Rangers who is rushing through the ruins when he suddenly sees (though there’s nothing there yet) a swooping Nazgûl…

  ‘Alrighty!’ calls Carolynne Cunningham. ‘Here we go! And – roll sound. And action!’

  John Bach runs, ‘sees’ the Nazgûl and reacts…

  There’s another take: ‘Make more of ducking out of the way,’ directs Peter. ‘It’s a dodge, a weave…Get as much nimbleness as you can…And then you see this Nazgûl and you say, like, “Holy S***!”’

  Another take…

  ‘And cut!’ calls Peter. ‘Good! Good! Good! Just sell it a bit more, John…’

  John Bach says, ‘I was trying to make it subtle!’

  ‘Subtle?’ laughs Peter. ‘Who told you this was a subtle movie? Right! One more for luck…’

  Later, John Bach is now bloodied up, lying amidst the Osgiliath rubble with Lawrence Makoare (formerly Lurtz) standing over him in his second Rings monster persona, the grotesque Gothmog. A small hawk-nosed Orc played by Robert Pollock with the look of an eagerly vicious child, hangs on Gothmog’s words…

  ‘The age of Men is over,’ growls Lawrence through his Elephant Man prosthetic features; ‘the time of the Orc has come!’

  It is one of the last shots on the last day of the last film of The Lord of the Rings. Peter is charged up and firing on all cylinders.

  ‘As you look up at Lawrence,’ Peter tells John Bach, ‘the realisation dawns that you are not going to be taken prisoner and given medical attention. The Geneva Convention does not apply! Okay…One more for luck…’

  Art Director Dan
Hennah watches Peter in full flight. ‘That’s the essence of Peter Jackson,’ he says. ‘If Peter had a day off, you know what he’d be doing? Making a film!’

  Twenty-five months later, Peter is now talking about having a few days off.

  For the best part of nearly ten years the only projects we’ve had in our minds have been The Lord of the Rings and King Kong. It started with Kong and then it was Rings, and then it was back to Kong again. That’s a long, long time to only be thinking about two stories. And the one thing that Fran and I are now looking forward to the most is taking some downtime – our first in ten years – and think about projects that don’t involve hobbits or gorillas. We want to recharge the batteries, regenerate some brain cells and allow ourselves to dream for a while. Dreaming about possible movies is what I first started doing when I was 7 or 8. It’s the nicest and most enjoyable part of the process. I still feel like a 9-year-old with a Super 8 camera.

  Among the many ideas that are already in the collective Jackson – Walsh ideas bank, some date back to before the Great Ape and the One Ring took over their lives…even as far back as the original Jamboree with the Bad Taste Boys saving Wellington from alien attackers!

  Whatever project they were to choose to make, whenever they choose to make it, it will undoubtedly find a huge international audience waiting in line outside the cinema…

  Peter Jackson’s legal representative, Peter Nelson, recalls a conversation during the height of The Lord of the Rings’ success: ‘I remember Peter saying, “It is possible that this will be the highest level of audience achievement for any movie I’ll ever make…” I disagreed and told him, as I truly believe: “You are just beginning to acquire an audience!”’

  When I look at what I did with Kong, I recognise the same film-maker who made The Lord of the Rings. It has the same sensibilities – which is neither a good nor a bad thing necessarily, it’s just an observation, really. But there would be an expectation for my next movie to be in a similar epic style, and I honestly felt that I couldn’t face another big complex project – at least, not straight away. I’m sure I will do more of these sorts of films in the future, but not right now…

  I feel that I am in a very simliar place to when we finished Braindead. I had made three low-budget horror/black comedy films in a row and was just about to do a fourth one when we went off on a different tack and made Heavenly Creatures instead. Emotionally, I’m in a similar place right now. I recognise the feelings.

  It was while looking for such an opportunity that Alice Sebold’s best-selling novel, The Lovely Bones, caught and fired Peter and Fran’s imagination.

  The Lovely Bones, which has been described as ‘a heartbreaking page-turner’, virtually defies advances from a film-maker with its opening sentence: ‘My name was Salmon, like the fish: first name, Susie. I was 14 when I was murdered on December 6, 1973…’

  Sebold’s story of the rape and murder of a young girl and of the repercussions which her death has on her family and friends is narrated by the dead Susie, who observes the earthly world from her own personal heaven. Therein, as Peter acknowledges, lies the challenge of the book.

  When I read The Lovely Bones, I thought it was a wonderfully emotional and powerful story. Like all the very best kinds of fantasy, it has a solid grounding in the real world, so I felt immediately that it would make a fascinating film, but I also thought, ‘My God! This will be very hard to adapt…’

  There is the daring concept of having a central character who is basically only an observer of the events unfolding in the story, as well as the daunting concept of having to create Heaven as a real place that is, as Peter puts it, ‘ethereal and emotional but not hokey’. There have, of course, been dead narrators in movies before (Sunset Boulevard and American Beauty) as well as literally dozens of cinematic representations of Heaven, ranging from the black-and-white sanitised environment depicted in A Matter of Life and Death to the Technicolor landscape paintings in What Dreams May Come.

  Beyond the wonderful story and characters, the fact that The Lovely Bones is going to be very hard to make as a film is part of the appeal to me. That’s what interests me now – doing something that is challenging and very different to what I’ve done in the past.

  I hoping that, after a few months of quiet preparation, a different film-maker will make The Lovely Bones – at least he should feel like a different film-maker! I’d like there to be no real similarity between the Lovely Bones’ director and The Lord of the Rings or Kong film-maker. That’s part of the fun, and challenge, for me.

  What fascinated the press when the story broke in January 2005 that Sebold’s book was to be the next Jackson film, was the fact that there was no studio involved in the deal: ‘Putting his own bucks into Bones,’ said Variety, who were intrigued by the fact that the film-maker was investing his own money in obtaining the rights to the book and deferring any decisions about which studio he will work with until he, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens have a script with which they are happy and a detailed budget.

  Fran and I got the rights to The Lovely Bones ourselves, rather than go to a studio and ask them to get the rights on our behalf, because the studio would then want the script tomorrow and they would want to make the film straight away and it would be more pressure.

  So we’re looking forward to just doing things in our own time and I think it will be a better film because of that. We will develop the project: write the script we want to write, draw up a budget for it, and get very clear in our minds the film that we want to make before we go to anyone.

  Our dream is to wake up on 1st January 2006, having got through the Kong premieres and Christmas and not have a studio on the phone asking us when the next draft is going to be ready or when we’re going to start shooting!

  So, how will moviegoers respond to what is clearly – within popular understanding – not a typical or obvious Jackson movie. ‘Peter’s projects have branded themselves,’ says Peter Nelson, ‘and, for the rest of his career, any movie he makes will always be branded as “A Peter Jackson film” in a way that’s bigger and bolder than any other wonderful director’s movies. This will bring audiences to see films who might not otherwise have been attracted to a particular subject matter or genre. But, unlike any other director – with the possible exception of Spielberg – Peter, by his personal charisma, has also branded himself. His reputation as an auteur director is not just based on his movies, but based on his image, on what we know about him.’

  I have no desire for my name to become a brand. It kind of happens without you being able to control it, if you’re lucky enough to make a successful film. Have a good look at the credits for any of the Lord of the Rings movies, or King Kong. The one credit you will not see is ‘A Peter Jackson Film’. I refused to allow that, and never will. Movies are collaborations, and I would never make that kind of possessive claim on such a collaborative piece of work. I regret that we live in an age where film-makers are the object of such intense scrutiny. I’d have preferred it thirty or forty years ago, when directors stayed in the shadows.

  During the thousands of interviews that Peter conducted during the publicity-fest surrounding the release of The Return of the King, a journalist – seeking that elusive question that a much-interviewed subject has never been asked before – asked why the manufacturers of Rings toys hadn’t marketed a Peter Jackson ‘action-figure’? In response, Peter quipped, ‘Yes, it’s a pity they missed out on that – it would have sold better than Aragorn!’

  Despite the flippancy of this riposte, it is a fact that his representatives do get requests to license his image. While this is something that, characteristically, holds no appeal for Peter, it is an indication of the intense interest that exists in the man and his work, which is based on an international awareness of who he is – he is a ‘celebrity’ whose likeness is universally known in a way that one associates with movie stars rather than directors.

  ‘Part of it is the cause and effect of being a great le
ader,’ says Peter Nelson. ‘People want more access to him. As a result of The Lord of the Rings, there is a non-stop flood of fans who not only want to get close to him and get an autograph, they want to engage with him and have a few words – in many cases, many more words! There is a desire to know him, to have a relationship with him. That desire is a testament to what he conveys.’

  It is what has given him a status that, within the context of his homeland, sees him often light-heartedly referred to as ‘New Zealand’s national hero’ but which, in a global arena, is defined by a palpable sense of both admiration and affection.

  ‘People recognise a bit of him within themselves,’ says Philippa Boyens. ‘Peter is “their man”; he is the kid who loves movies – genuinely loves movies. His enthusiasm, excitement and passion are infectious – that’s what he puts into his films.’

  For as long as I can remember, I’ve been imagining movies. Imagining them is the fun part – capturing those fleeting images is tough. They’re aren’t any aspects of the process that I don’t enjoy – writing, filming, post-production, I’ve slowly taught myself how to savour it all. None of it’s boring, it’s all film-making. It’s all fun!

  That approach is certainly one that draws actors, craftspeople and technicians to work with him and, for a great many of them, keeps them working there.

  ‘Peter gets very excited about things,’ says Carolynne Cunningham, ‘and he really throws himself into those things. That’s what he’s always like and that’s what is so delightful about him. Essentially, Peter is a 40-year-old going on 9!’