Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

A few years later, in 1973, Peter made a more ambitious war-movie, featuring some of the same troops as had appeared in his earlier film. One volunteer (or conscript!) was fellow pupil at Pukerua Bay School, Pete O’Herne: ‘I remember running around wearing a German helmet

Pukerua Bay Primary School. I was always a very well behaved child, terrified of authority. I’m the fourth boy from the left on the second to highest row. On the top row, third from the right, is a friend who went on to help me with all my childhood films and starred in Bad Taste under the name Pete O’Herne.

and there being quite a few effects-shots because part of the action took place on a mine-field – we had a warning notice with a skull-and-crossbones on it and the words “ACHTUNG – MINE!” – all of which required a setting bigger than Mr and Mrs Jackson’s garden, so we went on to location to Porirua and filmed some of the sequences on the council rubbish-tip!’

Pete O’Herne had a really good sense of humour and we both liked movies – and the same type of movies! Pete was always one of those friends at school who was really happy to help and when you’re trying to make films as a kid that’s a real bonus!

Obviously there’s a limit to what you can do as a moviemaker if you’re on your own and I didn’t have brothers and sisters that I could stick in front of a camera. So I was always trying to hook up with people who would be interested in film-making and in helping me try to make them. Pete was not only into films he was also nearly always available at weekends. Like me, Pete wasn’t exactly the sporting-type, which was a really good thing because when you’re trying to get kids to help you make a film, Sport is Enemy Number One! You’re in school all week, so you want to shoot on Saturday and that is the one day on which the guys in the rugby and soccer teams are going to be far too busy to be messing about with films!

Most of Peter’s early experiments with film were attempts at creating effects, rather than in demonstrating any embryonic talent as a director. Pete O’Herne recalls: ‘I’d often ring Peter up on a Friday night and say, “What are you doing, tomorrow?” and he’d always be up to something or other and would ask if I wanted to go down the valley with him and try out this or that special-effect that he was working on. Every weekend, more or less, we were in and out of each other’s homes, doing crazy things together. I always think of Peter as wearing an old duffle coat that would eventually become a kind of trademark that folk would rib him about. And the pockets of this coat were always bulging with heaps of stuff for his various experiments.’

Like virtually everyone who has operated a camera since the invention of cinematography, Peter Jackson particularly enjoyed playing with the simple effect created by time-lapse photography: shoot; stop; change something in front of the camera and shoot again. Hey presto! You have an appearance, a disappearance or some magical transformation. Although Peter was yet to make the discovery, time-lapse – using a camera to trick the eye into seeing the impossible – is also the basic principle behind the stop-motion animation that had enabled King Kong to grapple with the prehistoric creatures on Skull Island. Initially, however, Peter’s films were confined to live-action subjects that, whilst simple in their approach, were inevitably time-consuming for participants…

Most of what I shot didn’t amount to more than odd little test films, like a time-lapse record of a longish car journey; there were no sophisticated structures or stories. But then, within a year, I saw King Kong and the gorilla really sealed my destiny. I knew nothing about stop-motion animation: I’d never heard of Willis O’Brien before I saw King Kong and I had yet to see any of Ray Harryhausen’s films, but I began finding out how it was done and started experimenting…

I was in the Boy Scouts and, on the morning after I’d seen King Kong, we went on a hike through the bush and I took the camera and got the Scout troop to do this thing where I would get them to stand still, shoot a few frames, then get them to move and stand still again and shoot a few more frames, so that it looked as if they were sliding along the ground. I remember being a real pain because, instead of hiking, I had them acting in stop-motion all the way to the camp!

Perhaps I was drawn to stop-frame animation because I realised that it was one way in which I could attempt to make movies on my own. So I made little Plasticine models of dinosaurs and filmed them as best I could, achieving one or two rather crude animation effects.

The chief problem was that stop-motion is achieved by filming a single frame of film, adjusting the puppet or model, taking another single frame and so on until the finished footage, when shown, creates the illusion that something inanimate is moving.

Unfortunately, the Super 8 Movie Camera I had didn’t have a facility to allow you to shoot a single frame of film at a time. The best that I could do was to squeeze the trigger for the shortest possible interval and hope for the best. Inevitably, the camera would fire off at least two or three frames of film, which meant that the movements of my dinosaurs were always jerky and unconvincing.

The camera was incredibly crude and the focus was bad, but I think of all my early attempts at filming as being – if nothing else – valuable experiments…

Pete O’Herne recalls those experiments: ‘We were in our last year at primary school when Peter embarked on another zany film project. He got some of the kids involved and they’d all have little bits to do on the film and he even persuaded one of the teachers, Mr Trevor Shoesmith, to take part. Peter was such an enthusiast and his enthusiasm was infectious: he had a great deal of self-motivation and he passed that motivation on to others. He was also persuasive: he’d come up with some mad idea and we’d all find ourselves pitching in and taking part because we knew it would be fun. This particular epic was entitled Ponty Mython and was Peter’s ode to what,

As I became interested in stop-motion following the screening of King Kong, I tried building puppet animators. Here is a stop of Kong and a Triceratops, filmed on a table top in the living room. I had no lights, so the sun would drift around over time, creating time lapse shadows during the hours it would take me to animate.

by then, was his favourite television show.’

Monty Python’s Flying Circus landed on the unsuspecting viewers of BBC television in October 1969 to the accompaniment of a strident blare of brass-band music, the crushing descent of an animated foot and irreverent blowing of what in English slang is referred to as ‘a raspberry’. The circus troupe were five young writers and performers – John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and the late Graham Chapman – who set about revolutionising British comedy with the help of ingeniously quirky animations by American cartoonist, Terry Gilliam.

Over a period of five years Monty Python developed from an alternative (and decidedly subversive) late-night show that outraged and offended the easily-shocked into, firstly, an essential cult-classic and then, eventually, into a much-loved British institution. As a result of the Flying Circus, an entire generation grew up for whom comedy was defined by such phrases as, ‘Is this the right room for an argument?’, ‘Nudge, nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean!’ and the allpurpose, sketch-changing ‘And now for something completely different’ along with spam, flying sheep, silly walks, lumberjacks and a dead parrot.

What surprises Peter Jackson is not that Monty Python’s Flying Circus should have left its mark on his nascent creativity, but that he ever got to see it in the first place…

The one thing that, to this day, I’ve never quite fathomed out is how I was ever allowed to stay up late on a Sunday night and watch a programme like Monty Python’s Flying Circus! Although Dad loved comedy and had a great sense of humour, when it came to Python, he would sit through an entire show and never laugh.

I was not sure, initially, that I ever laughed out loud – partly because there were all kinds of innuendos that I probably didn’t pick up on, but also because it was so bizarre and off-beat: it was the weirdest comedy show ever and I had never seen anything like it in my life.

Because I saw the Flying Circus at just the right age – I was 11 or 12 years old and just starting to form adult sensibilities – it had a profound influence on the way in which my sense of humour developed. Monty Python taught me to love the ludicrous and love the extreme.

When, during my last year at primary school, we had to do a school project with our friends I decided that I was going to make a film. Getting together with some of my chums we put together a script. It was entitled, somewhat derivatively, Ponty Mython!

Heavily influenced – pretty much totally influenced – by Flying Circus it comprised skits from the TV series along with some of our own. I even tried to create some Terry Gilliam-style animations using cut-out pictures from magazines.

Ponty Mython ran for about twelve minutes and contained a sequence in which one of our teachers, Mr Shoesmith, was shown walking along with an umbrella and then suddenly exploding.

I had cut the film, substituted Mr Shoesmith with a homemade bomb – made from firecrackers and flour – which I then detonated so that it looked like he had blown up!

I even remember details of my first-ever movie budget: four rolls of Super 8 film at $3 NZ a roll to buy and process; total cost $12 NZ. We screened it at school over several lunch times – it always got a big cheer when Mr Shoesmith exploded! – and we charged 10 cents admission. We made exactly $12! No going over-budget, but no profit either! But at least we broke even…

Monty Python would continue to be a powerful influence on Peter and his love of ‘splatter that would eventually inspire his first commercial movies, was really borne out of a sketch from the third season of Flying Circus. Called ‘Sam Peckinpah’s “Salad Days”’, it imagined what might have happened if the American director of such uncompromising movies as The Wild Bunch and the then recently-released Straw Dogs had made a film of Julian Slade’s Fifties musical Salad Days.

The result is an English country house-party that unexpectedly turns into a fevered gore-fest. Beginning innocently enough with someone playing a piano on a lawn and lads in blazers and flannels and girls in pretty frocks frolicking about to the music, things start going wrong when the bright young things embark on a game of tennis: someone is hit in the eye with a tennis-ball; a girl gets a racquet embedded in her stomach; another person’s arm is ripped off; the piano-lid drops, severing the pianist’s hands and causing fountains of blood to erupt from the stumps. Finally, the piano collapses in slow-motion, crushing everyone to death and the grisly debacle concludes with a shot in which, as the script tastefully puts it, ‘a volcanic quantity of blood geysers upwards.’

It was Python at its most outrageous: defiantly unapologetic, even down to the on-screen ‘Apology’: THE BBC WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO EVERYONE IN THE WORLD FOR THE LAST ITEM. IT WAS DISGUSTING AND BAD AND THOROUGHLY DISOBEDIENT AND PLEASE DON’T BOTHER TO PHONE UP BECAUSE WE KNOW IT WAS VERY TASTELESS, BUT THEY DIDN’T REALLY MEAN IT AND THEY DO ALL COME FROM BROKEN HOMES AND HAVE VERY UNHAPPY PERSONAL LIVES…’

I remember watching that episode on TV and being absolutely gobsmacked. Quite simply, it was the most extraordinarily funny thing that I’d ever seen. That sketch did more to steer my sense of humour towards over-the-top bloodletting than any horror film ever did! My splattermovies – Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead – owe as much to Monty Python as they do to any other genre. It is about pushing humour to the limit of ludicrousness, the furthest and most absurd extreme imaginable – so extreme that the only possible response to it is to laugh because there is nothing else left to do!

In 1975, Peter moved on to secondary education, attending Kapiti College, located north of Pukerua Bay at Raumati Beach, where he demonstrated an exceptional aptitude for maths, a complete lack of skill (or interest) in sport and where he was variously perceived by his peers, some of whom have described him as being painfully shy with an awkward stammer, as a boy who was so retiring, remote and self-effacing that he went all but unnoticed by teachers and fellow pupils. Others, who shared his passionate excitement for movies, saw beyond the shyness and the occasional stutter and found him an entertaining, intriguing, slightly eccentric character.

‘You would never have called Peter “a leader of men”,’ says one friend, ‘and yet we all followed him around! He came up with ideas, schemes and enterprises and we went along with them, took part, got involved. People have said he was reserved and lacking in self-confidence and he could, sometimes, give that impression – he rarely made vocal contributions in class – but he had massive self-confidence in his ideas and abilities. In that sense, you would not describe Peter as modest. I believe he always knew that he was going to be special, that he would have a charmed life…’

To his close mates, Peter was often the joker: pulling stunts and gags. ‘He was totally lunatic!’ remembers Pete O’Herne. ‘We went into town one day and we got off the bus in Wellington and, as soon as it had driven away, Peter suddenly said, “Oh my God, Pete, where’s your bag?” I start panicking, thinking, ‘I’ve lost my bag! I’ve left it on the bus…’ And then I realised, for Christ’s sakes, that I’m actually holding the bag in my hand! And there’s Peter, laughing like hell!’

There were also occasional trips to see a live taping of a TV comedy show: ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ laughs Pete, ‘there we’d be in the audience – these guys from the loony-left, of the school of Python – watching some normal, mainstream comedy show that really just couldn’t do it for us! So, Peter and I would start hee-hawing away, making up the loudest, silliest, high-pitched laughs and crazy demented sounds. Then we’d watch the show on transmission and spot ourselves on the soundtrack which was easy because we were always way over the top for the kind of jokes in the show.’

If the antics of the Monty Python team were shaping Peter’s sense of humour, he was also still in the thrall of the film fantasists. He had already discovered the American publication, Famous Monsters of Filmland that had been founded in 1958, three years before he was born and which was generally regarded by sci-fi, fantasy and horrorgeeks worldwide as being the bible on all forms of movie-monsterlife.

In the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Peter read about the work of veterans Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price as well as the Sixties stars of Hammer’s House of Horror, Peter Cushing and the man who would one day play Saruman the White, Christopher Lee. Behind-the-scenes features on the making of some of the great monster classics, fuelled his interest in special-effects while revelations about the tricks-of-the-trade of stop-frame animation and, in particular, the work of Willis O’Brien and the team who created King Kong deepened his appreciation for the movie-magic behind the Eighth Wonder of the World.

In homage to Kong, Peter had toyed with attempting a possible ape movie of his own, building a gorilla puppet (using part of an old fur stole belonging to his mother), constructing a cardboard Empire State Building and painting a Manhattan skyscape for the backdrop.

Peter’s first original monster was constructed around a ‘skeleton’ made from rolled-up newspapers and was what he describes as ‘a crazy hunch-back rat’ – a forerunner, perhaps, of the rabid rat-monkey that wreaks havoc in Braindead.

More simian life forms were to exert their influence when Peter saw the 1968 movie, Planet of the Apes. The first – and unarguably the best – of a series of ape pictures, Planet was no conventional monster-movie. Based on a novella by Pierre Boulle, it had a satiric script, a seminal Sixties ‘message for mankind’, a compelling central performance from Charlton Heston and – for the period in which it was made – cutting-edge make-up effects that convincingly turned Roddy McDowall and others into assorted chimps, gorillas and orangutans.

I saw Planet of the Apes on TV and was blown away by it. I loved the special make-up effects but I also loved the story. I was already a fan of King Kong – although my fascination is not really with apes and gorillas so much as with a couple of great movies that both happen to have apes in them!

Nevertheless, both films, though they approach it in a very different way, have an intriguing theme in common: that the gap separating humans from apes is far less than we might like to suppose!

It wasn’t long before Peter Jackson was sculpting and moulding ape-masks and involving his friend Pete O’Herne in the process. Pete, who still proudly owns and displays highly competent prototypes for their handiwork – albeit now incredibly fragile – recalls, ‘Peter’s imagination was such that if something impressed him, he had to try and do it for himself – filming, sculpting, whatever – and if Peter was doing it, you’d want to do it, too! We’d seen Planet of the Apes and I went round to his house the following week and he had a model head and was working on a face mask: sculpturing it in Plasticine, freehand – not using drawings or photographs but creating this thing in three-dimensions, from his own mind. Of course, I’d think, “I’ll give that a go as well…” So I did!’

The process, as Pete remembers was time-consuming and expensive on pocket-money budgets: ‘Peter found this latex rubber in a hardware store; it came in little bottles that cost about $8 each. Once we’d sculpted the faces, we’d just get little paint brushes and paint it onto the Plasticine; then we’d have to leave it to dry and then paint on another coat and so on until you’d built it up layer by layer into a skin of a reasonable thickness to work as a mask. Then we’d paint them and stick on hair that we’d chop off old wigs! Peter’s mother always helped out at school fetes and jumble sales and she’d always be on the look out for suitable stuff that we could use for costumes and

I enjoyed sculpting in plasticine, and this was an early goblin design.

make-up. The trouble with the latex was that it reeked of ammonia – a sickening, vomit-making smell!’

The Planet of the Apes style film for which these masks were made never progressed beyond some footage of Pete O’Herne in an even more elaborate full-head mask made with a foam-latex product, which Peter Jackson purchased from a supplier in Canada and which he would bake in his mother’s oven. ‘It rose like a cake,’ says Pete, ‘but it also stank to high heaven!’ Existing photographs showing Pete wearing the gorilla head and a costume inspired by those worn by the ape soldiers in the film indicate a remarkable level of competence, although the setting – a domestic garden with a carousel clothes dryer – add a bizarre dimension!

Although the ape film project never got beyond the idea stage, who could have guessed that the young man who was so fired up by Planet of the Apes that he created his own gorilla masks, would years later, as a professional film-maker, come near to adding a new title to the Apes franchise? Instead, Tim Burton re-made the original, and cinema audiences were denied the opportunity of seeing what Peter Jackson would have done with the theme of ape superiority.

Now into his teens, Peter was broadening his knowledge of film with books about movies and moviemakers although, ironically, the students’ Film Club at Kapiti College – which seems to have been run by a smug, self-perpetuating oligarchy – repeatedly declined to accept the young Peter Jackson into membership.

Undaunted, Peter pursued his interest in cinema alone or with friends like Ken Hammon, a fellow pupil at Kapiti College, who shared his love of movies, was a fan of Famous Monsters of Filmland and was, conveniently, another non-sportsman! Both boys had film projectors and were spending their pocket money buying 8mm copies of various movies.

One of the first films in Peter’s collection was, unsurprisingly, King Kong, but he also owned prints of the original vampire movie Nosferatu and Lon Chaney’s versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. Ken broadened the repertoire with such titles as D.W. Griffith’s silent epic, Intolerance, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Howard Hawks’ gangster movie, Scarface and the Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps.

Other 8mm films were hired from a low-profile, illegal operator in the Wellington suburb who was able to supply such assorted delights as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing which, Ken recalls, ‘freaked us out’, and Tobe Hooper’s 1974 seminal tale of murder and cannibalism, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Publicised in America with the poster slogan ‘Who will survive – and what will be left of them?’, Chain Saw Massacre was, for many years, banned in several countries including New Zealand so its illicit availability on hire was especially irresistible to the young film fans.

‘We humped four cans of film back home,’ says Ken, ‘watched the first reel, which was so psychologically unnerving that we were seriously rattled! I remember saying to Pete, “Are you really sure you want to watch the rest?” At the time we were hardly overexposed to such thrillers, so they inevitably made an impression.’ It was an

My Uncle Bill visited us from England in 1976, and bought me my long-wished-for copy of King Kong in Super 8. In the days before video, projecting in Super 8 was the only way to actually own a movie and watch it again and again. Kong got played a lot in my bedroom!

impression that, for Peter Jackson, would endure, as is testified to by the gorier sequences in Bad Taste and Braindead.

In company with Ken and Pete O’Herne, or sometimes on his own, Peter was now regularly travelling into Wellington – or anywhere else that had a cinema and was within commuting distance – in order to catch the latest movie releases or fleeting screenings of vintage films.

I saw American World War II movies for the first time – The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes – and a film, made in 1970, about a much earlier war, Waterloo.

Waterloo was the work of Russian director, Sergei Bondarchuk, and starred Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington and Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte. It inspired an interest in that period of time which has remained with me across the years. I collected – and still collect – toy-soldiers, including a number representing various Napoleonic troops.

What I loved about Waterloo were the uniforms and the big formations of soldiers. Filmed in the Soviet Union, Bondarchuk had used the Russian army as extras on the battlefield – 20,000 of them! I was impressed at seeing such a huge number of people on screen, but was also frustrated because the real Battle of Waterloo involved almost 140,000 soldiers, so I remember watching these 20,000 extras and thinking, ‘God! What would it be like to see the real battle?’ That’s why I wanted to create these formidable-looking armies in The Lord of the Rings which, with the aid of computers we were able to achieve.