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Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey
Brian Sibley


Authorised and fully illustrated insight into the life and career of the award-winning director, from his childhood film projects up to King Kong, together with Jackson's revealing personal account of his six-year quest to film The Lord of the Rings.Once, Peter Jackson was a name unknown to all but a small band of loyal fans and fellow film-makers. Now he is the newest member of Hollywood's elite fellowship, with his name on the most successful movie trilogy of all time.Written with Jackson's full participation, this extensive biography, illustrated with never-before-seen photos from Jackson's personal collection, tells the inside story of how a New Zealander became Hollywood's hottest property – from the early cult classics, through Academy Award™-winning success with Kate Winslet's Heavenly Creatures, the abandoned King Kong remake, and the filming of The Lord of the Rings, a project which was abandoned two years into pre-production, rejected by most of the other studios and then picked up by New Line Cinema in the biggest gamble in film history.Drawing upon interviews with fifty of Peter Jackson's colleagues and contemporaries, author Brian Sibley paints a portrait of a true auteur, a man gifted with single-minded determination and an artist's vision. Jackson himself is both revealing and insightful about his entire film-making life, from his first childhood steps filming in Super 8 to the grand realisation of his life’s dream: King Kong.Together, these joint narratives provide a truly unique and compelling insight into one of the finest cinematic minds at work today.









Peter Jackson

A Film-maker’s Journey

Brian Sibley











HarperCollinsEntertainmentAn Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers




Table of Contents


Cover Page (#u5b518789-dd38-53da-a4be-7f60f6e3c400)

Title Page (#u7ef727ea-562c-52da-bb61-165cdec37f33)

PREFACE (#u67ae7c02-8109-56d1-b831-4bedbde27c04)

PROLOGUE (#ucfa9cddf-d853-5588-bbcc-61f5983ff22d)

1 MODEL BEGINNINGS (#u44988fac-aee6-552d-ba97-3501ac1ebadc)

2 GETTING SERIOUS (#u9a60847e-f52a-57d8-a6f6-8ab6add5af14)

3 A MATTER OF TASTE (#u297cdee9-b766-5e48-8c65-97330903c006)

4 SPLATTER AND SPLUPPETS (#u81dc155f-7690-55f5-9f1e-aa5371bb3e7d)

5 ISSUES OF LIFE AND DEATH (#ub796bc0e-8e3e-5b4b-bf66-edee3412bc16)

6 CHEATS, SPOOKS, HOBBITS AND APES (#u596fb2bc-75e7-52ec-9587-695c541a1490)

7 QUEST FOR THE RING (#u5242c211-c9b3-5ead-b000-2e9b660ac96a)

8 THREE-RING CIRCUS (#u6795c833-5c3e-5725-831d-7b52369a8cc6)

9 RING-MASTER (#u5c9f736f-2773-5abf-939a-b969fa162af2)

10 RETURN TO SKULL ISLAND (#ua9a9e030-ce7b-5f95-8e61-0fe28884aeb5)

Epilogue ‘One More For Luck!’ (#u566914d8-4f11-57e0-82e2-ec5fd23ef86d)

Index (#u67a123b2-9290-526c-b920-9f442f004b57)

Acknowledgements (#u2f9fc348-7cd4-5333-a921-1a1a702a2f71)

By the same author (#u3d1751fc-be86-55da-89b4-85c700aa8b97)

Copyright (#u37e669bc-f2ff-56f1-9223-944c99cad344)

About the Publisher (#u37059d42-27e6-5540-a066-916a5e02affd)




PREFACE (#ulink_d3ab2176-9597-508e-a358-3f2edd523ff1)


‘How on earth did this guy ever come to be making The Lord of the Rings?’

That is a question that has been asked many times over the past few years. The person asking it, on this occasion, is the person about whom it is asked – Peter Jackson…

‘Most fans of The Lord of the Rings’, he says, ‘are probably not that familiar with my earlier films, so they may have the impression that I popped up out of nowhere and was suddenly directing this huge movie-project. But, from my perspective, I certainly didn’t pop up out of nowhere. If I had, I never would have been equipped to direct The Lord of the Rings!’

Peter Jackson is about to give me another interview for this book. Our conversations – scattered across five years – have taken place on movie-sets, in editing suites, via telephone from opposite ends of the earth and at opposite ends of the day, in his home in New Zealand and in various hotels during moments snatched between attending scoring sessions, giving media interviews and going to (or coming from) award ceremonies…

For this interview we are in London’s Dorchester Hotel and Peter and his partner Fran Walsh are en route to what will turn out to be their grand-slam night at the Oscars.

We are having another conversation about this book and, specifically, how it should be described. Is it, for example, a ‘biography’? Frankly, that is not a definition with which Peter is altogether easy: it smacks, perhaps, too much of ego, suggests a sense of self-importance that is not quite to his taste…

Certainly there must be biographical elements, but they ought to serve a specific end, which is to answer that question: ‘How did this relatively unknown guy from New Zealand, whose previous career seems to have been predominantly concerned with making splattermovies, end up directing a literary ‘Holy Grail’ like The Lord of the Rings?’

The short answer – the longer version will be found in the pages which follow – is that, throughout his childhood and adolescence, Peter Jackson was unwittingly auditioning to make The Lord of the Rings. His hobbies and interests – passionately, even obsessively, pursued – were consistently preparing the man for the task. And those preparations were to continue when he began his professional film-making career.

‘It was,’ he says, ‘a hard slog to get as far as making The Lord of the Rings and it only happened because, for the ten years before, I had made movies and learnt enough about film politics to give me the skill base I needed to tackle this particular project. Ten years of film-making – if you count the little amateur ones I made as a child, thirty years of film-making. People may or may not have seen, or even know of, those films, but that is almost beside the point, because it was the experience of facing the often seemingly overwhelming odds involved in making them – creatively, technically, politically – that really equipped me to face the enormous challenges that were involved in filming The Lord of the Rings.’

Once that has been understood, the tale of the Kiwi who got to make a movie based on one of the most popular books in the world is less fluke than inevitability.

True, for every ambition there was a disappointment, for every dream, a nightmare. But one of Peter Jackson’s commonly underestimated attributes is his pragmatism. Yes, he is a perfectionist, an idealist; but he is also a down-to-earth realist: someone who – for better or worse, and regardless of accolades or criticisms – sees life as it is and then does his level best to handle it in whatever way seems most desirable – but always with the proviso that if it doesn’t work out, then it is time to re-think, to adapt and survive…

A combination of vision, talent, confidence, boundless enthusiasm and unswerving tenacity – together with a reasonable helping of sheer, unadulterated good luck – brought Peter Jackson to a point where he was directing the biggest, most ambitious film project in the history of cinema. And this then sustained him through the fourteen months of principal photography, during which that project – one film but at the same time three films – was brought to the screen.

‘This book,’ Peter said in one of our earliest conversations, ‘should not be a mere re-run of the story people have read in the magazines and newspapers. Nor should it be just a “nuts-and-bolts” account of making three complex films. It must be a frank “insider” look into the workings and politics of film-making – both independently and within the Hollywood system.’

And, of course, to answer that question ‘Why Peter Jackson?’ along with other intriguing questions, not least among them: ‘Why, having made the phenominally successful The Lord of the Rings, did he then decide to devote his energy to a remake of a 1930s movie about a giant gorilla?’ and ‘Why did it take him quite so long to get around to doing it?’

But that’s more than enough about questions. Time for some answers…

Brian Sibley





PROLOGUE (#ulink_e4a9758e-74ae-5c1f-ba90-d55779a83ee2)

Where is Peter Jackson?


‘Where is Peter Jackson? That’s what people are asking. It is 25 November 2003, and the Embassy Theatre in Wellington is re-opening its doors for the first time after a $4.66 million refurbishment that has been the price demanded by civic pride since New Zealand is to host the World Premiere of The Return of the King, the third and final part of the phenomenally successful movie trilogy, The Lord of the Rings.

That premiere is to take place at the Embassy in a week’s time and a gigantic figure of the Witch-king astride his Nazgûl steed is perched on the roof in readiness to welcome a deputation of hobbits, dwarves, elves, warriors and wizards, not to mention the world’s media and thousands of devoted Rings fans who are already converging on the city.

Wellington is gearing itself up for a celebration that will be unlike any other movie opening in the history of cinema. It is about a great deal more than just the picture that will be screened on the night of 1 December 2003. It is about a new sense of national identity, about a Kiwi – an idiosyncratic little fellow lacking the facile suavity usually associated with moviedom – who has taken on Hollywood at its own game, produced a cinematic phenomenon and, at the same time, made the world aware of New Zealand as somewhere more than just a place that has a famous rugby team and which exports quantities of butter and lamb.

On this particular night, the great and the good of Wellington are gathering at the Embassy in order to witness the rebirth of a movie palace that, when it had originally opened – in 1924, under the name of the ‘de Luxe’ – was hailed as one of the finest theatres ‘south of the line’. Now, after its costly facelift, it is ranked as being worthy of hosting a movie premiere which in Hollywood may be ten-a-cent any night of the week, but which here will be a historic event.

The film that is to be shown to the audience privileged to have a sneak peak at the Embassy’s revitalised Twenties opulence is a tale of two girls who retreat into a shared world of fantasy and then commit a shockingly violent crime. Made in 1994, Heavenly Creatures was based on the true story of the Parker/Hulme murder case that, forty years earlier, had rocked New Zealand society. Heavenly Creatures was Kate Winslet’s movie debut and the fourth feature film to be directed by Peter Jackson.

Some of the guests drinking champagne and nibbling canapés are wondering whether the acclaimed director is going to turn up to the event; those aware of Peter’s well-documented reputation for avoiding public appearances will be very surprised if he does. But the truth about what Peter is actually doing on this evening, instead of attending the bash at the Embassy, provides a pin-sharp focus on the Jackson character.

So, where is Peter Jackson? Peter Jackson is watching a movie; it’s not one of his own, but an old movie: in fact, 70 years old.

Peter is screening this old movie for an audience that includes animators, model-makers, visual-effects artists and a group of Hollywood executives with whom Peter will be working on his next film.

The screening is being held this evening because the print of this old movie has been flown in from Los Angeles and is only available for the next twenty-four hours…

The cinema where it is being shown makes the art deco Embassy look positively dull. Wall-sconces in the shape of torch-bearing rat-monkeys from Braindead and bronze decorations of assorted grotesques from Meet the Feebles are typical features of the viewing theatre at Weta Workshop. The ceiling is a night-sky of electric ‘stars’, while ‘windows’ on either side open on to sunlit vistas of a Tolkienesque landscape: murals of towers and turrets against a range of blue snow-capped mountains.

The lights go down, the curtains open and the titles roll: a radio mast on top of a turning globe, the dot-dot-dash-dot Morse-code signifying ‘A Radio Pictures’, a swell of dramatic movie music (the work of the great Max Steiner) and the black-and-white block-capital letters of the title:




KING KONG


Made in 1933 by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, the film gives first credit not to the stars Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong and Bruce Cabot, but to Chief Technician, Willis H. O’Brien, and his team of special-effects artists who aided him in the creation of Kong and the prehistoric realm of which Kong is king.

The film begins: a New York quayside at night, snow and fog and the looming hulk of the SS Venture. On board, Captain Englehorn turns to world-renowned explorer and film-maker, Carl Denham, and asks what the authorities would be likely to make of ‘these new gas bombs of yours’. Opening a box, the captain takes one out – a hand-grenade the size of a small football. ‘According to you,’ continues the captain, ‘one of them is enough to knock out an elephant.’

Two rows in front of me, Peter Jackson holds up an identical gasbomb. ‘This is it!’ he calls out over the soundtrack. ‘This is one of the original props!’

This is Peter Jackson’s favourite film. He has more posters and memorabilia connected with King Kong than any of the other films and vintage TV shows that he has adored since boyhood. However, he has never seen the film projected onto a cinema screen. Until now…

No wonder then that having this rare chance to see the picture again – not on TV or video, but up there on the big screen where a star as big as Kong truly belongs – and to watch it holding an actual artefact that was used in the film is, in comparison with viewing Heavenly Creatures at the Embassy, a simply unmissable opportunity.

This is the film that made Peter Jackson want to make movies. Savouring the pleasure of this evening: watching, once more, as the great ape rampages through the tropical jungle of Skull Island and the concrete jungle of New York City, Peter knows that – after the hoopla and circus of that imminent world premiere – he too will be setting out in pursuit of that monstrous, heroic, romantic creature known as ‘Kong: the Eighth Wonder of the World…’





1 MODEL BEGINNINGS (#ulink_38bdc424-0121-59a0-bb7d-2a28fe815a9f)


The date: Sunday 2 March 2003. The Place: Universal Studios, Los Angeles.

Peter Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh, are in town for the Directors Guild Awards. While in the City of Angels, they are due to meet with Stacey Snider, President of Universal Pictures, and assorted movie executives in order to reach a decision on whether or not they will be signing to make King Kong. The Fates, perhaps, have already decided the outcome of this meeting since Peter’s opening remark is, quite simply, that of a passionately devoted film fan: ‘This may not mean anything to you,’ he tells those present, ‘but today, 2 March, is the seventieth anniversary of the opening of the original 1933 film, King Kong. Our meeting is taking place, seventy years since King Kong opened – to the day!’

The date: Sometime in 1971. The Place: Pukerua Bay, an idyllic seaside community on the Kapiti Coast, just over 18 miles north of the New Zealand capital, Wellington.

The 9-year-old Peter Jackson is watching a movie on television. It doesn’t matter that the family only has a black-and-white TV set because the film is in black-and-white and old. It had been made in the golden age of Hollywood when film-publicist’s hyperbole knew no bounds. It was, moviegoers in 1933 were told, the ‘Strangest Story






Pukerua Bay – my parents bought a tiny cottage there after their wedding, and that’s where I lived for my first twenty-six years. Our house was perched on the top of cliff above the sea. A great place to grow up.

Ever Conceived by Man! Out-thrilling the Wildest Thrills! Out-leaping the Maddest Imaginings!’

Cavalier film-maker Carl Denham picks up pretty blonde Ann Darrow, down on her luck on the streets of depression-racked New York, and whisks her off to an exotic, dangerous world of primal fantasies. ‘It’s money and adventure and fame,’ Denham promises her. ‘It’s the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o’clock tomorrow morning…’

It was also, if she had but known it, an excuse to re-live, with variations, a scenario borrowed from an old fairy-tale: ‘It’s the idea of my picture,’ Denham confides to first mate Jack Driscoll. ‘The Beast was the tough guy. He could lick the world. But when he saw Beauty, she got him. He went soft. He forgot his wisdom and the little fellas licked him…’

Ann Darrow and Kong re-enact an eighteenth-century fable in a contemporary twentieth-century setting, featuring, in its climactic sequence, what was, at the time, the newest icon of human endeavour and achievement: the 102-storey-high Empire State Building, completed only two years before King Kong was made.

But the appeal of King Kong – in 1933 or 1969 – is that its heroes and heroine forsake the world of today to go in search of a place where mysteries and wonders can exist without explanation or rationalisation. The SS Venture steams away from the steel-and-concrete civilisation of New York City and heads for a location not found on any map or chart: a land that time forgot filled with palaeontological nightmares; a carnival freak-show of savages and monsters; Skull Island…

And what did it mean to the young boy watching this story unfold to the orchestrated snarl and gnash of dinosaurs, the enraged bellowings of a great ape and the endless, ear-piercing screams of a woman in peril? Peter recalls…

It was around nine o’clock, one Friday night when I first saw King Kong. I remember being totally swept away on this great adventure! The ingredients of this film were everything that I loved! Like any kid, I was intrigued by the notion of lost places, uncharted islands – King Solomon’s Mines, The Lost World – and the idea that, on such an island, there might exist some colossal, unknown beast.

And what absolutely made it for me wasn’t just that there was a huge, terrifying gorilla that carried the girl away in his hand: it was that when the guys go after them into the jungle, they find what? Dinosaurs! It was just so great!

It is a very simple story, but one that is loaded with strong, potent, poetic themes: beauty and the beast, love and death – ‘It wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.’ Even today I am moved – often to tears – by the end of the film; but the real moment of emotion is not actually Kong falling off the Empire State Building and crashing to his death on the sidewalk below, it is the moment where, knowing that he is going to die, he carefully puts Ann down, makes sure that she is safe, regardless of what happens to him.

Ask me today what I think of King Kong and I will tell you that it is one of the most perfect pieces of cinematic escapism. If you had asked me as a child, I would have said that it was everything that I imagined an adventure story should be. Kong was, quite simply, a ripping yarn! More than that, it created a totally believable fusion between the real and the fantastic. The story is set in this world, not in some outrageous, outlandish Other Place. Then, in introducing a giant gorilla and dinosaurs you make that leap from the real to the fantastical.

That has always been my aim as a film-maker: you have to believe in order to become involved with the story and to care about its protagonists. That is why, when we approached the filming of The Lord of the Rings, I was determined – no matter how many trolls, balrogs and fell-beasts we might encounter – that the world in which they exist would be real – just as I’m sure it was real for J. R. R. Tolkien.

King Kong was important because it showed me the power of movies to make you experience things that are outside what you could ever experience in your daily life. I came to love the fact that film had that potential; and, in a way, it has been what has defined every film that I’ve ever made.

That is the legacy I owe to King Kong and it is one of the reasons why I have so long wanted to make my own film version of the story. I want to re-tell that tale for a modern movie audience. I want them to discover the excitement of travelling to Skull Island…




Skull Island…


It was right there, just across the water from where Peter Jackson grew up. He saw it every day from the living-room window in his parents’ home at Pukerua Bay.

The local name for the long grey misty hump of an island that rose out of the sea was Kapiti Island but, as Peter’s childhood friend Pete O’Herne remembers, even if it were not the Skull Island, then at least it might be a place of potential adventures of the kind offered by Kong and other legendary movies: ‘We always thought it was possible; that maybe, if we could only get over there, get past the krakens that were probably living in the waters around its shores, that we’d find a fantasy island inhabited by monster crabs and other strange creatures.’ Peter Jackson also recalls the lure of the island:

I remember a lot of fun things from my childhood. Pukerua Bay was a great place to grow up because it was a very small town but it was also surrounded by bush and forests; there were steep hills and deep gullies; there were the beaches and the rocks and the ocean and, only five miles away – but totally inaccessible – a mysterious, fantasy island…

We would always wonder what was on that island. It wasn’t simply down to juvenile fancy, because there were many stories and legends about Kapiti: tales of the Maori chieftain, Te Rauparaha, leader of the Ngati-Toa tribe in the 1800s, who had established a ‘pa’ – a fortified Maori settlement – on the island.

There were melodramatic, bloodthirsty rumours of cannibalistic rituals and secret tunnels and caves filled with the skeletal remains of Maori warriors. As kids we never bothered about what was true and what wasn’t, we believed it all! And we dreamed of, one day, getting a boat and going over there and exploring. How bizarre that, years later, when the ship we were using to film King Kong started taking on water and beginning to sink, we ended up having to land on Kapiti Island, the Skull Island of our young fantasies.

Peter Robert Jackson was born in Wellington hospital on 31 October 1961. It was Halloween: although, at the time and for many years after, that appellation had little significance in a British Commonwealth country. Halloween was, after all, a strange, sinister, American festival…

Many New Zealanders celebrated, instead, Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November in commemoration of the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Although popularly known as ‘Firework’ or ‘Bonfire’ Night it occasionally took on other names – ‘Mischief Night’ or ‘Danger Night’ – that hinted at links to that other holiday with its spooks and masks and trick-or-treating…

But, as it happened, Halloween wasn’t a wildly inappropriate date on which to be born. For Peter Jackson would not only fall under the spell of the fiends, monsters and extra-terrestrials of Hollywood and the comic-books, but would, eventually make his name and his reputation as a film-maker with movies about aliens, zombies and vampires – a true child of Halloween, Walpurgisnacht, the Day of the Dead…

Peter is a first-generation ‘pakeha’, a New Zealander of European descent; his parents, Joan and Bill, having met in New Zealand after separately emigrating there in the early 1950s.






My dad is the first child on the left, with two of his four brothers. Both my parents came from five-child households, yet I was an only child. My dad loved Charlie Chaplin movies and encouraged my love of silent comedy. He always said his father looked like Chaplin and would get people yelling ‘Hi Charlie’ at him. I can see why in this photo from the early Twenties. My granddad died at a comparably young age in 1940 – my dad always said it was due to his war injuries.

William Jackson had been born in 1920 in Brixton, South London; Joan Ruck, his wife to be, was also born in 1920 near the Hertfordshire village of Shenley; both of them were drawn to New Zealand – as were many others in the years immediately following the Second World War – in response to a tantalizing scheme in which the New Zealand Government offered free or assisted passage to single men and women, under the age of 36, looking to make a fresh start.

‘Emigrate to New Zealand for a NEW way of life,’ read a typical advertisement in a London newspaper of 1949. ‘Good Jobs…Good Pay…Good Living…New Zealand has a place for YOU in her future development.’

When Bill Jackson set sail on the Atlantis in 1950, his motivation for leaving home and family was less to do with good jobs and good pay as with his affection for a girl who wanted to emigrate from Britain. Bill, who had been working with a division of the travel agency, Thomas Cook, organised the girl’s passage and decided to go along too. The romance ended before ever the ship docked in Wellington, but Bill never regretted his journey to the other side of the world.

Bill became a government employee working for the post office – the deal on assisted passages required the émigré to sign a two-year work contract – found accommodation in Johnsonville, a few miles out of Wellington, and joined the Johnsonville Football Club, into which he later enlisted two other British lads who had recently arrived in New Zealand: Frank and Bob Ruck.

In 1951, the Ruck brothers’ sister, Joan, came to Wellington,






The only hint of any film or theatrics in my family’s background came through my mother, who was a member of the local amateur dramatics club in her home village of Shenley in Hertfordshire, England. Here’s Mum in some melodrama from what looks like the late 1940s.

together with their mother, for what was originally intended to be a six-month visit. After years of war-time rationing and post-war privations, the ‘good living’ promised in those immigration advertisements ensured that an eventual return to Shenley soon ceased to be an option for the future.

Joan got a job at a hosiery factory in the city and whilst attending Saturday matches at the Johnsonville Football Club where her brothers played, met and struck up an acquaintanceship with one of their British mates – Bill Jackson.

Bill and Joan’s friendship blossomed and two years later, in November 1953, they were married and moved to Pukerua Bay, purchasing a small holiday home. The single-storey, two-bedroom house was small, but had a wide uninterrupted view overlooking the ocean and the rugged splendour of the Kapiti coastline.

Taking its name from the Maori word for ‘hill’, Pukerua was founded on the site of a Maori community. Along the side of the hills, which drop sharply to the sea, snakes the precarious track of the Paraparaumu railway line out of Wellington. The area is virtually as unspoilt today as it was fifty years ago, with its wooded and heather-covered slopes; its equitable climate, facing north and protected from the cold south winds by the hills of the Taraura Ranges; and its glorious sunsets that, in the late afternoon, turn sea and sand to gold.






Mum and Dad both emigrated to New Zealand separately and met in Johnsonville.

The year after their marriage, Bill Jackson got a job as a wages clerk with Wellington City Council. Loyal, dedicated and hardworking, he remained an employee of the Council until his retirement, by which time he had risen to the position of paymaster.






After years of my parents trying to have a baby, I finally turned up in 1961. For whatever reason, Mum and Dad couldn’t produce a brother or sister for me.

Born in 1961, Peter was a late child of Joan and Bill’s marriage, and complications during the confinement meant that he was destined to be an only child.

Being an only child and not having anyone else to bounce ideas off, you have to create your own games with whatever props come to hand. You find that you create your fun and entertainment in your own head, which helps to exercise the mind and trains you to be more imaginative…

As an only child – as well as being long-awaited and, therefore, much treasured – Peter was also the sole focus of his parents’ love, care, attention and encouragement. Without sibling companionship or competitiveness, Peter instinctively related to an older generation and, in particular, one that mostly comprised veterans of the 1939–45 war. Peter’s youthful imagination was excited by the overheard reminiscences of his elders and the stories that they told a youngster eager for tales of dangers and heroisms.

The Second World War was the dominant part of their most recent lives. Mum would tell me lots of stories about her life: the air-raids and doodlebugs and her experiences working as a foreman in a De Havilland aircraft factory where they built the Mosquito bomber which was largely made out of wood and was known as the ‘Timber Terror’.

My father didn’t talk as much about his wartime experiences, as I






I grew up with Grandma Emma as the matriarch of the family. She taught me to love card games and was a wonderful cook. In her younger years, she was a cook for an upper-class family in London. Upstairs, Downstairs was her favourite show – it was the world she came from. Here she is holding me as a baby. She lived to be 98 and died just as I was making Bad Taste.

would now have liked…He had served with the Royal Ordnance Corps in Italy and, before that, on the island of Malta. This was during the grim years of 1940–43 when German and Italian forces lay siege to the British colony that was of such crucial importance to the war in the Mediterranean and which, as a result, suffered terrible hardships.

Dad spoke about some of what he had seen, but he never really dwelt on the bad things; although he did talk about his time on Malta when, due to enemy blockades and the bombing of supply-ships, the entire island was starving for a period of months and his body-weight dramatically dropped to around seven stone.

He told me the story of the SS Ohio, the American tanker that, in August 1942, was carrying vital fuel to Malta for the British planes when it was attacked by German bombers and torpedoes. Without a rudder, with a hole in the stern, its decks awash and in imminent danger of splitting in two, the tanker was eventually strapped between two destroyers and towed towards the island. Dad was one of the soldiers on the fortress ramparts of the capital, Valetta, when – at 9.30 on the morning of 15 August 1942 – the Ohio finally, and heroically, limped into Malta’s Grand Harbour.

I also heard about the arrival by aircraft-carrier of the first Spitfires in October 1942 and how the 400 planes based at Malta’s three bombsavaged airfields, instantly began an air-defence of the island, flying daily sorties to repel attacks from the German Luftwaffe and the Italian Regia Aeronatica that were based in Sicily.

Enemy aircraft, which were not used to being opposed, were in the regular habit of flying in and beating the hell out of the island – they made some 3,000 air-raids in just two years. On the first raid after the Spitfires had arrived, Dad remembered how he and many others had chosen not to go into the shelters but to stay outside and watch as the bombers roared in across the sea to be greeted by a swarm of Spitfires and the cheers of an island full of people who could, at last, fight back.

But the stories that most excited me – and which led to what has been a life-long interest in the First World War – were those my father would relate about his father, William Jackson Senior. My grandfather joined the British army in 1912 and, when war broke out two years later, was one of the comparatively few professional soldiers amongst the legions of raw conscripts. He went through many of the major engagements of WWI: on the Western Front at the Battle of the Somme; at Tsingtao in China and at Gallipoli, where he was decorated with the DCM (Distinguished Conduct Medal), the oldest British award for gallantry and second only to the Victoria Cross.

The story of the heroic, but ill-fated, struggle on the beaches of the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli is one of the most dramatic conflicts of the First World War. The combined Allied operation to seize the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, staged in 1915, was a tactical disaster and the price paid by both sides in terms of lives lost and injured was disastrous: more than 140,000 Allies and over 250,000 Turks killed and wounded.

My grandfather served in the British Army, in the South Wales






My dad in Malta, 1941. He served in the British Army during the Siege of Malta, suffering the constant bombing and starvation along with the rest of the population. My mother worked at DeHavilland’s aircraft factory, building the Mosquito fighter bombers. I was in the generation who grew up with ‘the War’ a constant undercurrent in our household.






My dad’s father, William Jackson. He was a professional soldier and served in the South Wales Borderers from 1912 to 1919. He went through just about every major battle of the First World War, was mentioned in dispatches for bravery several times, and won the second highest medal, the DCM, at Gallipoli.

Borderers, but I now live in a country where the bravery and tragic losses of the Anzac forces (over 7,500 New Zealand deaths and casualties) are still remembered and annually commemorated. One day, that story should be told on film.

Of course, Peter Weir made a film in 1981 that was set in Gallipoli and starred Mel Gibson; but it was essentially an Australian

view of the conflict. In New Zealand, memories and stories of Gallipoli still hold such a potent place in the history of our country that they deserve to have a good movie made about them. It is not a project that I am pursuing at the moment, but, maybe, one day…

Peter Jackson may well, one day, make a war film – perhaps even one about Gallipoli…In 2003, wandering around Peter Jackson’s Stone Street studios, I came across an extensive scale model of a beach with rising hills. This might easily represent the tortuous terrain of ravines, spurs and ridges that confronted the Australian and New Zealand troops that landed at what is now known as Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915, and where, within the first day’s engagement with the Turks, one in five New Zealanders became casualties of war.

In the same building as the scale model of the beach, sculptors from Weta Workshop were carving the enormous wings, tails and assorted body parts that would eventually be assembled into the huge sculptures of the Nazgûl fell-beasts destined to decorate Wellington’s Embassy and Reading theatres for the premiere of The Return of the King: a reminder that J. R. R. Tolkien, himself a veteran of the Somme, had originally suggested that a suitable title for the third part of The Lord of the Rings would be ‘The War of the Ring’. So, in a sense, Peter Jackson has already made a war-movie, albeit set in the fantasy realm of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

If and when Peter makes a film based on some twentieth-century wartime event (and it seems inconceivable that he won’t) it will simply be a fulfilment of an ambition that dates back to his debut film, made in 1971 – when he was 8 years old!

The first movie I ever made, which I acted in and directed, was shot on my parents’ Super 8 Movie Camera. I dug a trench in the back garden, made wooden guns and borrowed some old army uniforms from relatives. Then I enlisted the help of a couple of schoolmates and we ran around fighting and acting out this war-movie – or, more accurately, something out of a war-comic – full of action and high drama! In order to simulate gun-fire from my homemade machine-gun, I used a pin to poke holes through the celluloid – frame by frame – on to the barrel of the gun in order to create a burst of whiteness when the film was projected. My first special-effect – and without the aid of digital graphics!

Peter’s earliest recollection of going to the movies was a visit, several years before, to one of Wellington’s cinemas to see a film now long forgotten – and, frankly, deservedly so: Noddy in Toyland. Made in 1957, four years before Peter was born, it had obviously taken its time in reaching the cinemas of New Zealand!

Directed by MacLean Rogers, whose filmography of over eighty titles included many pictures featuring popular radio and musichall stars including the famous ‘The Goons’, Noddy in Toyland was simply a filmed performance of a musical play for children by Enid Blyton.

Based on Blyton’s popular children’s books about Noddy and his friend Big Ears, the author had constructed a rambling and tortuously complicated plot featuring, in addition to the denizens of Toyland,






I remember my childhood as being reasonably idyllic, with lots of family vacations in our Morris Minor. Although I was an only child, I was never lonely – we had a wonderful extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins, most of whom had followed the family migration to New Zealand.

characters from her other books, including The Magic Faraway Tree and Mr Pinkwhistle.

The photography was pedestrian, the stage business dull and laboured – especially without the enthusiastic audience of cheering kids that it doubtless enjoyed in theatres – and the only tenuous link between Noddy’s exploits and the films of Peter Jackson is an encounter with some ‘naughty goblins’ but who, in their baggy tights, were a far cry from the malevolent, scuttling creatures that swarm through the Mines of Moria. Nevertheless, to the young Peter, it was a remarkable film.

I was highly entertained by Noddy in Toyland; it was the first movie that I ever saw and, although I’ve never seen it since, I remember thinking it was pretty amazing!

Seeing a film when I was very young was a big event: we didn’t have a cinema in Pukerua so a trip to ‘the pictures’ meant a car or train journey into Wellington. My parents seldom took me into the city, so the occasional visits to the cinema were rare and special treats and the few films that I saw at this stage of my life tended to make a big impact on my youthful imagination – even if they really weren’t very good!

One such was Batman: The Movie, the 1966 spin-off of the high-camp TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward, which I saw with my cousins, Alan and David Ruck. I remember being fascinated by the scenes where Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson leapt on to the ‘bat-poles’ behind the secret panel in Wayne Manor in order to reach the Bat-cave. They started their descent wearing ‘civilian’ clothes but, by the time they’d reached the Bat-cave, they were miraculously kitted out in their Batman and Robin outfits.

My cousins were a few years older than me and therefore less impressionable, but I thought that it was just about the most astonishing thing I had ever seen. After the screening, we went back to Alan and David’s house in Johnsonville and I can still remember standing in their dining room and asking, ‘How did they do that? How could they have changed their clothes so fast?’ and my cousin David turning to me and saying, ‘Oh, that’s just special-effects.’

That was the first time in my life I had ever heard the term ‘special-effects’ and I’ve never forgotten the moment that I heard it or who said the words to me. I was 6.

Another early memory of going to the movies was having to stand up while they played ‘God Save the Queen’, which was accompanied by a film of the Changing of the Guard, the Trooping of the Colour or some such ceremony. I’ve never forgotten my cousin Alan winding me up by telling me that if I didn’t stand up, one of the guardsmen would come down and arrest me!

Years later, when I made Braindead, I decided to pay tribute to that vivid memory by beginning the film with the National Anthem and footage of Her Majesty. We had to go through a great deal of red tape to get approval and I can only assume that, somewhere along the line, we must have failed to give them a synopsis of the movie!

Apart from these odd excursions, cinema-going wasn’t a huge part of Peter’s first seven or eight years. The major influences that were to fire his interests and transform them into the passions that would play a part in shaping his future career came, in the first instance, not from the movies, but from television.

It was 1965 and I was 4 years old when television entered my life. We had been on holiday, and while we were away the TV had been delivered. We returned to find a huge cardboard box in the lounge, and I recall Dad unpacking it and lifting out what would now seem a terribly old-fashioned Philips black-and-white, single-channel television and a set of four legs that had to be screwed on underneath.

It’s difficult for today’s generation to realise just what an impact television had on our lives when we were first exposed to it. I






The arrival of our first television set was my first exposure to escapism – Thunderbirds was screening and I fell in love with model-making, storytelling and fantasy.

initially encountered almost all my adult enthusiasms through ‘the box’.

We used to get all those great old British Fifties black-and-white war movies that my father and I really loved such as Ice-Cold in Alex, Sink the Bismarck, and The Wooden Horse. Dad also loved old silent comedies: I can remember him roaring with laughter at Charlie Chaplin movies, till tears were streaming down his face.

I enjoyed Chaplin, although I wouldn’t describe myself as a fan, but watching his films and those of Laurel and Hardy led me to Buster Keaton and I am most certainly a Keaton fan: I love the dead-pan sense of humour that earned him the nickname ‘Stone Face’, and I really admire his eye for sight-gags and his immaculate sense of timing, particularly the split-second perfection of his stunt-work. I’ve seen all of Keaton’s movies and consider his 1927 picture, The General, to be a work of pure genius. Along with King Kong, The General is among my all-time favourite movies.

Set during the American Civil War, Keaton plays a brave but foolhardy train engineer in the Confederate South, whose beloved locomotive – The General of the title – is hijacked by Yankee troops from the North. Although Keaton was making a comedy-chase movie, it is completely authentic in terms of its period setting. The texture of the world Keaton creates in the film is detailed and realistic and that is something that I always strive to do with my movies.

Keaton was doing comedy while we – with Rings and Kong – have been doing a fantasy; but I honestly believe that even if you are showing outrageous things on the screen – in our case giant spiders, walking trees and huge gorillas or, in Keaton’s case, incredible routines with runaway steam-trains – as long as everything is grounded in a believable environment then it will have greater intensity and more poignancy.

When, years after first seeing The General, I was making Braindead, I’d often try to imagine what sort of gags Buster Keaton would have come up with if – bizarre concept though it is – he had ever made a splatter movie! There’s one particular scene in Braindead that illustrates this perfectly: the hero, Lionel Cosgrove is desperately trying to escape from the zombies; he’s running like crazy and he suddenly realises that he hasn’t actually gone anywhere because the floor is so slippery with zombie-blood that he is just running on the spot! That’s a Keatonish kind of gag.

Old movies aside, the most memorable and influential programme that I remember watching on TV, was undoubtedly Thunderbirds. I loved it! I was a complete, total and absolute fan!

For a generation of youngsters in the Sixties the clarion call: ‘5…4…3…2…1…Thunderbirds are GO!’ was a weekly prelude to fifty minutes of thrill-laden adventures. First aired in 1965, Thunderbirds was the work of pioneering British puppet film-maker, Gerry Anderson, who had already excited young television viewers with such futuristic series as Fireball XL5 and Stingray.

Set in the year 2026, Thunderbirds featured the heroic deeds of International Rescue, a family of fearless action heroes located on a secret island in the Southern Pacific and headed by former moonpilot, Jeff Tracy. The Tracy boys – Scott, John, Virgil, Gordon and Alan – tackled dangerously impossible missions, often pitting their wits against arch-villain and master of disguises, The Hood.

International Rescue had a fleet of fantastic vehicles – rockets, supersonic planes and submersibles – and were aided by the bespectacled boffin, Brains; the chicest of secret agents, Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward and Parker, a former safe-cracker who gave up a life of crime to become Lady Penelope’s butler and chauffeur of her pink Rolls Royce, FAB 1.

The puppets, operated by near-to-imperceptible strings, were given verisimilitude by the use of a technique called ‘Supermarionation’ which used electrical pulses to create convincingly synchronised lipmovements. Thunderbirds married a centuries-old entertainment – the puppet show – with Sixties, state-of-the-art technology; the results were impressive and made compelling viewing.

Many years later, Peter would have the opportunity to meet puppetmaster Gerry Anderson, and in 1997 made an unsuccessful bid to direct a live-action movie version of Thunderbirds (a project that eventually went elsewhere and made a poor critical showing). But in 1965, he was – like millions of other kids – just another devoted young fan…

I loved the big spaceships and was excited by the rescues and the dramatic storylines that now seem incredibly melodramatic! Of course, I knew it wasn’t real; I knew they were puppets and that fascinated me: I wanted to know how they were made and operated.

I remember wanting to make models of the Thunderbirds crafts and buying plastic clip-together model-kits that were around at the time and which I incorporated into my games. Like lots of kids, I had Matchbox toys of various vehicles and I created International Rescue-style scenarios in the garden: cutting a road in the side of a dirt bank that was just big enough for some truck to fit on and then it would be half-hanging over the edge and Thunderbirds would have to come to the rescue!

Setting-up those little backyard dramas with my toys was when ‘special-effects’ really entered my awareness: I knew that was what I’d seen done in Batman: The Movie and that it was what Gerry Anderson was now doing in Thunderbirds; from that point on, I started to have a real interest in special-effects.

It was only when I started discovering what could be done with a camera that I began to think that I might be able to create my own.

The first movie camera I ever saw was a Super 8 camera belonging to my Uncle Ron, Dad’s brother, who would show up at family outings and get-togethers with his camera and shoot movies of us. The earliest movie image of me, shot when I was about 6 years old, shows me walking along a beach with some ice-creams.

Then, happily, my parents acquired a Super 8 Movie Camera! It had come from a neighbour and family friend, Jean Watson, who worked at the Kodak processing lab in nearby Porirua. One year, about 1969, Kodak brought out a really compact movie camera – it was about as simple as it got: just point-and-shoot – and gave their staff the opportunity to buy the cameras at discount. Jean decided to get a camera for my mum and dad, not because at that time I had exhibited any interest in movie-making, but because she thought that my parents might find it fun to be able to capture something of their son’s childhood on film. However, it didn’t take me long to commandeer the camera and, instead of acting out dramas with Matchbox cars and trucks, I was marshalling my friends and filming the Second World War in the back garden!

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.

Ken Hammon offers an interesting perspective on Jackson the young cineaste: ‘People always talk about Pete’s obsession with horror movies, his fascination with gore and splatter, but they overlook another of his early cinematic passions that would certainly inform much of his work on The Lord of the Rings. Pete adored the wide-screen, three-hour historical epics that proliferated in the Fifties and early Sixties: Quo Vadis, Spartacus, El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire and the like. He loved these sprawling films with their great battles and thirty years later started making them himself, here in New Zealand!’

I first saw Waterloo on its original release at the Embassy Theatre in Wellington and then, later, I dragged some friends along to see it when it popped up on a Sunday afternoon screening at a flea-pit of a cinema on the outskirts of the city suburbs which involved us in a train journey followed by a half-hour bus ride.

I remember that particular day quite vividly because I had badly cut my thumb that morning. This is the sort of child I was…I had been reading WWII Prisoner of War books and I was intrigued by how, when they were planning an escape, they forged identity papers to show the various inspectors on the trains as they tried to make their way back across Germany to Switzerland. I was particularly fascinated by stories of how they would make fake rubber stamps with which to authorise the forged documents by carving them from the rubber soles of their boots.

On this day, I’d decided to try this myself and was busy in my father’s shed in the back garden carving away at the rubber sole of an old shoe. The knife slipped and it nearly cut the top of my thumb off. It was a very deep cut, so bad that I still have the scar to this day. I should probably have gone to the hospital and had it stitched, but I wanted to go to the cinema to see Waterloo, which was only screening this one day. So I didn’t tell my parents about the wound – I just put a plaster on it and headed out the door. I remember how it throbbed like hell all the way to this terrible little theatre in the back of beyond, but that once I was there watching the film, I became so utterly absorbed in the action that I completely forgot the pain. As for the friends I dragged along to see it, I’m not sure that they appreciated it quite as much as I did!

If Waterloo and other movie epics were to provide a long-term inspiration for the cinematic scope later achieved in The Lord of the Rings, the desire to capture on film the elusive magic of fantasy realms was reinforced by seeing the work of a master-moviemaker whose pictures became an inspiration and a touchstone for Peter Jackson. That man was Ray Harryhausen.

A veteran stop-frame animator, Harryhausen was – and still is – a link with some of the greatest names in twentieth-century fantasy writing and film-making. Harryhausen’s friends include the legendary futurist Ray Bradbury and Forrest J. Ackerman, founding editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland. A writer, actor and collector, Ackerman, at one time, negotiated with J. R. R. Tolkien to make an animated film of The Lord of the Rings and, years later, would make a cameo appearance in Peter Jackson’s Braindead.

Ray Harryhausen had worked on the early animated films of key fantasy film director George Pal (The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine and many others) and, most significantly, was a direct link to Willis O’Brien, the special-effects wizard who was ‘father’ to King Kong, having served as first technician to O’Brien in 1949 on another Merian C. Cooper–Ernest B. Schoedsack gorilla movie, Mighty Joe Young. In terms of consummate skill in stop-frame animation – the ability to endow a puppet with emotions – Harryhausen was O’Brien’s unquestioned heir and his films made an immediate, and lasting, impression on the young Peter Jackson.

Some of cinema’s most exciting and technically accomplished animated sequences appear in films to which Ray Harryhausen contributed as a producer, writer and/or visual effects creator. In titles such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Mysterious Island, First Men on the Moon and the incomparable Jason and the Argonauts, Harryhausen’s fertile imagination conjured a cavalcade of dinosaurs, aliens and mythological creatures that entranced fantasy film fans over two and half decades.

Two films, that Peter saw around this time were The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, but it was a 1975 re-release of the first of Harryhausen’s Sinbad movies that proved a pivotal point in his movie-making aspirations. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, made in 1958, featured an amazing bestiary of inventive creatures, including a dragon, a goat-legged Cyclops, a two-headed Roc and a four-armed snake-woman!






As a 16 year old in 1977, I was the perfect age for Star Wars, and it led to a flurry of model making and filming with my Super 8 camera. Here are several models I made from cardboard and model parts, a copy of Gerry Anderson’s Space 1999 Eagle and a couple of original designs.

There’s something magical, captivating, about stop-motion animation that you can only really understand if you are…captivated by it! After being entranced by King Kong, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad really confirmed my dream of becoming a professional stop-motion animator. I wanted to make the same types of films as Ray Harryhausen. I loved the way his monsters and images flowed from his imagination and I couldn’t imagine a more enjoyable way to spend your life. King Kong was an old film, and Willis O’Brien was no longer alive, but for a wonderful period during my teenage years and beyond, these stop-motion artists like Harryhausen, Jim Danforth, Dave Allen and Randy Cook were my idols, doing exactly what I dreamed of doing as a career.

This was before video, so there was no way to own a copy of a movie. I remember smuggling a small cassette sound recorder into a screening of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad in a bag, and I taped the entire film. I would lie in bed at night, listening to this echoey, fussy sound recording – complete with audience rustling chippie-wrappers and coughing – and relive the visual excitement of the film in my head.

Such was the impact of the Sinbad film that it inspired my next film project that, unlike some of my earlier efforts that were always hampered by waning enthusiasm or even downright loss of interest – eventually saw completion. The necessary incentive came in the form of a Sunday afternoon television programme called Spot On that, in 1978, ran a children’s film-making contest for schools, so I teamed up with two school friends from Kapiti College, Ken Hammon and Andrew Neale, and another former cast member of my earlier films, Ian Middleton, and we started work on a short fantasy film.

As I now had a new camera which my parents had bought me for my previous birthday and as it had the much-desired facility for shooting single-frames, I was absolutely determined that our film would feature some elaborate sequences in stop-motion animation. Heavily indebted to the work of Ray Harryhausen, it was called The Valley.

Peter’s determination to experiment with stop-frame animation meant that the storyline of The Valley was essentially little more than a means to that end. The action concerns the adventures of four gold-prospectors – although, since there always had to be someone operating the camera, only three of the four could be ever seen on screen at one time!






Whilst trekking through the bush, the intrepid group conveniently blunder into a ‘space-time continuum’: a special effect achieved by pulling a pantyhose over the lens of the camera in order to create a ‘mist’. Undaunted at finding themselves in some, mythic ‘other age’, the foursome continue on their way only to encounter a couple of Harryhausen-inspired monsters, the first of which – a harpy-like creature – swoops down and carries off one of their number just as, years later, in The Return of the King, the Nazgûl fell-beasts would swoop down and snatch Gondorian soldiers from the battlements of Minas Tirith.

The winged assailant in The Valley (called a Trochoid, after a term used of a family of curves which they heard used in geometry class) solved a major problem facing the film-makers – namely their lack of acting ability! ‘None of us were very good actors,’ recalls Ken Hammon, ‘but Ian Middleton was arguably worse than the rest of us which is why he was the first to get killed off!’ As the Trochoid flew off with a puppet of Ian in its clutches, Ken demonstrated his own acting skills by providing a reaction shot on the demise of his comrade: though filmed






These are shots from The Valley, a film I made with friends at Kapiti College in 1978. I shamelessly copied Ray Harryhausen’s Cyclops for my villain. The Valley was shot in the rugged gorge that runs through the middle of Pukerua Bay. I think this shot of me and Ken Hammon is the first photo I have of me holding a movie camera. I met Ken at Kapiti and he became a good friend and one of the core members of the Bad Taste team.

without sound, Ken could clearly be seen to mouth a four-letter word.

The problem of having Peter on screen and behind the camera, led to his character taking a convenient tumble off a cliff, leaving Andrew Neale and Ken to deal with an attack by a close relative of the Cyclops in Seventh Voyage. In what is a superbly choreographed moment in the film, cutting back and forth between live action and animation: Ken stumbles, falls and is grabbed by the Cyclops; Andrew, seeing his friend’s plight – dangling by one leg from the monster’s fist – grabs a large branch and hurls it, javelin-style, at the creature; next, cut to the Cyclops, as the well-aimed branch finds its mark and plunges into the creature’s throat with an eruption of blood.

The scenario moves towards its climax with Andrew and Ken building a raft and taking to the water. Eventually, the travellers come in sight of ‘the Beehive’, Wellington’s parliamentary cabinet offices, not as they are today, but ruined and overgrown with vegetation. In a dénouement borrowed from Planet of the Apes (in which Charlton Heston discovers the remains of the Statue of Liberty and






My bedroom, circa 1979. My trusted Eumig projector is there along with some of the models I’d built for my films. Kong atop the Empire State Building was from an attempt to remake the film in Super 8, along with a few stop-motion puppets and masks I’d made.

realises that the monkey planet on which he has landed is, in fact, the earth in a future age) the two survivors in The Valley reach the conclusion that they have travelled forward not back in time! ‘Let’s be honest,’ says Ken Hammon, ‘it wasn’t anything to do with “homage” or “tribute” – we just stole stuff!’

With the live-action footage completed, the animation sequences were added and the film was edited by Peter and submitted to Spot On and, following a long wait, the programme began screening the winning films. Entries were supposed to run for three to five minutes but (like some of Peter Jackson’s later movies!) The Valley ran somewhat longer than expected and its almost twenty-minute duration may have contributed to its not being placed among the winners. The makers were, however, commended on what one of the judges – New Zealand film director, Sam Pillsbury – called ‘a really impressive piece of work’. He added that the film-makers’ storyline was ‘almost non-existent’, due to their being ‘more interested in techniques’, a somewhat grudging criticism that belied the fact that the film’s technical achievements were of an exceptionally high order for an amateur film made by 15 and 16 year olds.

The stop-motion animated sequences alone were a triumph and demonstrated not just a high degree of skill but also a determination to master one of the most time-consuming, concentration-intensive of all the film arts. Peter’s mother, recalling her son’s dedication, commented that he had ‘oodles of patience’ and that acute singularity of focus would remain one of the qualities to mark out his later professional productions.

Years later and just days after the exhausting final haul of delivering the final cut of The Return of the King, Peter spoke of his belief that it was always possible to ‘somehow figure something out’…

If I say ‘we’ll figure it out’, then I mean it; I’ve logged the problem in my mind and will take my share of responsibility. With each part of The Lord of the Rings there would always come a point in the year, usually the second half, when the studio began to think that they might possibly not have a movie to release. I always knew that such a situation would be a complete disaster and, therefore, could never happen.

You may have problems to solve but for every problem there is always a solution. It’s a positive-and-negative thing: you can’t have a problem without there being a solution.

There always is. Your job is to find it…

Despite not winning the Spot On competition, extracts from The Valley were screened on television – including the harpy carrying off Ian Middleton (complete with Ken Hammon’s expletive) and the fight with the Cyclops – and earned the makers a degree of notoriety among their schoolfellows. After all, to have got a violent, bloody action sequence (albeit with a mythical creature) and a four-letter word (albeit silently spoken) screened on national television was no mean achievement!

The success of The Valley was endorsed when (with an added soundtrack borrowed from Max Steiner’s score to King Kong) it went on to win a prize of $100 in a competition sponsored by the local newspaper, the Kapiti Observer.

For Peter Jackson, the real reward for having made The Valley would come many years later, when as an established film-maker he finally met his childhood hero, Ray Harryhausen, for the first time. There is an appropriate and satisfying synchronicity about a friendship between the man who worked with Willis O’Brien on a sequel to King Kong and the man who seems to have been destined to remake the original for a new generation of moviegoers.

When we first met, I found myself saying, ‘Ray, I want to thank you, because seeing The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts when I was a kid inspired me to make films, to be a stop-motion animator, to keep making my little Super 8 experiments. So, thank you…’

I sometimes think to myself how amazing it would be if, one day, somebody were to say something like that to me…

Perhaps it is already happening and in twenty years time, when I’m a 60 year old, some young film-maker will come up to me and say, ‘I saw The Lord of the Rings when I was 8 and it made me want to make films. Thank you…’

To feel that what I had done had made a significant difference to somebody’s life to the extent of inspiring that person to take up a career would really mean a lot to me…

For the 17-year-old Peter Jackson the thought of one day meeting his hero Ray Harryhausen, would have been a dream; the notion that he might eventually have a similarly inspiring influence on another generation of aspiring film-makers, unimaginable.

Nevertheless, in 1978, The Valley made an impact and not just among the pupils of Kapiti College but also with the principal. Towards the end of the school year, Peter Jackson and Ken Hammon were summoned to the principal’s office and offered a potential film commission: if the boys decided to return for a further year, it was suggested, there might be an opportunity for them to make an official film about the school.






My bed, where I slept the first twenty-six years of my life. My bedroom become my workshop and model-making room. Most of the time it was a lot more untidy than this!

‘The prospect really scared the hell out of us!’ recalls Ken, who hated college, ‘I felt it was like being asked to make a propaganda film about a concentration camp. So we just listened, said we’d give it our consideration and then got the hell out of there, as quick as we could!’ Peter also recalls the proposition:

On the one hand it was exciting, because someone was interested in our doing something as a result of seeing this film that had been on TV; on the other it didn’t fit in with my plans as I had already decided to leave at the end of that year. I didn’t want to be in school, I had passed my School Certificate and although I was University Entrance accredited, I had no interest in going to further education and, fortunately, my parents didn’t try to force me into doing so.

Responding to this comment by Peter, Fran Walsh remarks, ‘He says “fortunately” he didn’t have to go to university. I think, in some ways, it’s a shame he didn’t go; he’s very bright – one of the brightest people I’ve ever met – and would have been good at university and, had he gone there, might well have loved what it had to offer. As it was, he took another road, another path…Pete went to his own university; he went to his own film school; taught himself everything. It’s not everyone who can do that.’

It’s a view shared by friend and colleague, Costa Botes (with whom Peter would later make Forgotten Silver): ‘Peter would have done fine at university, but what he did, instead, was to immerse himself in his enthusiasms and, as a result, gave his talent a bit more of a run. Ultimately, if your destiny is to be a film-maker, then – regardless of your academic learning or your theoretical knowledge of film studies – you should always be trying to get in touch with your own innate talent and to follow that. It’s possible that university might have helped Peter get to where he is now a bit quicker, but he would have lacked the wisdom and experience he gained from just getting on and doing it.’

Moreover, says Costa Botes, university might have changed Peter Jackson as a person: ‘Intellectual success has made many a young man arrogant and insufferable. Instead, Peter has humbleness and a self-defensive sense of humour, which gives him more empathy, makes him a better human being. So I’m not going to argue with that one!’

Whilst Peter’s parents may not have sought to exert any pressure over his career choices, they nevertheless still entertained ambitions for their son.

Mum and Dad always hoped that I might get a job as an architect: at school I had been top of my form at technical drawing, I was good at it and passed my exams in it, but it wasn’t what I wanted to make my career. My parents probably hoped I’d pursue architecture as being something that I could fall back on if I didn’t make it in the movie business. I think they always thought that’s where I’d end up, but they never pushed me into it and always did everything that they could to support my film-making ambitions – it wasn’t their world, but I think they felt that if somebody has a passion to do something, then you try to encourage them not dissuade them.

Ultimately, I knew that I wanted to try and get a job in the film industry – to be a film-maker – and since I had this feeling that I was going to go on making films, I wanted to be able to afford better film equipment – a 16 mm rather than a 8 mm camera – but that was going to cost a few thousand dollars and I wasn’t going to be able to afford it unless I could start earning some money…

I was pretty much revved up and ready to get out in the world and move on, so I left school at the end of the sixth form and started the New Year in 1979 by looking for a job. However, since there had been no real film industry, as such, in New Zealand for many years, I knew that – regardless of my ambitions – I wasn’t going to be able to leave school and walk into a job working on movies.

In fact, people had been making movies in New Zealand for sixty years, the first feature film being Hinemoa, a famous Maori legend brought to life, as the posters put it, ‘in animated form and 2,500 Feet of Glorious Photography’ and premiered in 1914. The same posters also declared that Hinemoa was part of ‘A New Industry in New Zealand’ and, indeed, during the silent era, a number of films were produced and distributed with considerable success: historical epics including The Mutiny of the Bounty and The Birth of New Zealand; knock-about, slapstick comedies and what Peter Jackson would call ‘ripping yarns’ such as the 1922 film My Lady of the Cave, a ‘Rattling Tale of Adventure on the New Zealand Coast, with a Love Story that Steals into your Heart like some Weird and Beautiful Melody.’

New Zealand-produced films appeared intermittently over the next two decades with occasional pioneers emerging – like the revolutionary animator of abstract film, Len Lye – and one or two Kiwi film-makers achieving success in Hollywood. Indigenous productions, however, eventually all but died out and New Zealand film languished until the arrival of a new wave of directors in the 1970s.

Significantly, at the time when Peter Jackson was beginning his juvenile experiments, the concept of film as a ‘New Zealand industry’ was to re-emerge with the success of such films as Roger Donaldson’s 1977 movie, Sleeping Dogs and The Wildman made in the same year, by Geoff Murphy, who over twenty years later would serve as Second Unit Director on The Lord of the Rings. Again in 1977, the New Zealand documentary Off the Edge, earned an Academy Award nomination.

The following year, in which Peter and his friends made The Valley, the New Zealand Film Commission was established, under Act of Parliament, with the remit ‘to encourage and also to participate and assist in the making, promotion, distribution, and exhibition of films,’ which made it an interesting time for an eager young film-maker to attempt to find a way into the business.

Peter’s first port of call was the National Film Unit that had been founded in 1941, following a visit from John Grierson, the legendary documentary film-maker and influential head of the National Film Board of Canada. The aim of the National Film Unit – in addition to providing the country’s only film processing laboratory and full post-production facilities – was the financing and production of travelogues and promotional films such as Journey of Three, a dramatised documentary aimed at encouraging immigration and which was released theatrically in Britain in 1950 and spurred many people of Peter’s parents’ generation to follow the example of the ‘new settlers’ which the picture depicted.

My parents rang the Film Unit and said that their son was very interested in film-making and might they have a position for him? Someone at the Unit offered to meet me and I took some of my models and went for an interview.

As an only child there were times when I would get terribly nervous and I was so anxious at the thought of going for a job at this big film-making place that I had Dad come with me and sit in on the interview. It turned out that they had nothing suitable to offer me, so I took my models and went home again…

Ironically, in 1990 the Film Unit was sold off to a subsidiary of New Zealand Television and when, ten years later, it came on the market, and would have otherwise passed to owners outside the country, I decided to buy and run the Film Unit. They knocked me back at my first job interview, and I ended up owning the place. Life is weird!

One or two of Peter’s friends remember him talking about the possibility of going to Britain in the hopes of finding work in the film industry there. ‘I don’t recall thinking about going to England then,’ says Peter, ‘but maybe I did. My mum’s brother, Uncle Bill, knew people who worked at Elstree Studios (just down the road from Shenley); one chap had worked on 2001 and other films in the Wardrobe Department and, years later, after I had made Bad Taste, Uncle Bill took me to meet him.’ It seems unlikely that a lad who needed his father to accompany him to an interview would have ever seriously contemplated travelling halfway round the world in search of a job. If he did, then it was probably no more than the fleeting thought of someone who desperately wanted to get into the film business but really didn’t know how that ambition might be achieved.

In the event, Fate played a different card…




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