Читать книгу Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey - Brian Sibley - Страница 8

The ‘Situations Vacant’ column of Wellington’s Evening Post wasn’t the most promising place for a would-be film-maker to be looking for an opening, but Peter Jackson needed a job…

On that evening, in 1978, when Peter and his father returned from the unsuccessful interview at the National Film Unit, the Jackson family went through the Evening Post newspaper to see what employment opportunities were on offer.

We found an advertisement for a vacancy at the newspaper itself – as an apprentice photoengraver. I didn’t have a clue what a photoengraver was, but it had the word ‘photo’ in it and that was good enough for me. At this point, I wanted to take anything so I could, at least, start earning some money. I also think if I’d failed to get this job, my parents would have sent me to university, so a job interview was arranged. I was as nervous as all hell – it’s weird the things you remember, but the night before my interview I saw The Sound of Music for the first time. In the movie, Maria sings a song about being confident – and I sat there in the dark, being totally inspired by this damn song. The next day, I walked into the interview carrying the sound of Julie Andrews’ voice in my head! I also took Dad to this interview as well – and, thank God, I got the job!

I was amazed at what it felt like to be earning money: my first week’s pay cheque was for NZ$77. I couldn’t believe it: all I had to do was turn up there and every week somebody would give me $77! After sixteen years of pocket money, it opened up a lot of possibilities!

The apprenticeship required Peter to attend a twelve-week course at the Auckland Technical Institute (now the Auckland Institute of Technology), which had originally been founded in the 1890s by the local Working Men’s Club to run evening classes in teaching various trades. By 1978, when Peter began his studies, the ATI was a full-time establishment running courses in engineering, commerce, fashion technology, printing, art and design.

At the concourse bookstall on Wellington railway station, the 17-year-old Peter Jackson decided to buy a chunky paperback to while away the twelve-hour rail journey to Auckland that lay ahead. The book was The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.

He was prompted to buy this particular volume because the cover featured tie-in art from the first – and only – part of animator Ralph Bakshi’s aborted attempt to bring Tolkien’s epic to the screen. Years later, millions of people would start reading the same story because the book carried images from the Jackson film trilogy…

Peter had gone to see Bakshi’s film with high expectations, having seen the director’s earlier foray into the fantasy genre, Wizards, in company with Pete O’Herne and Ken Hammon. ‘It was screened at a cinema in town,’ recalls Ken, ‘and, as soon as we got out of school, we had to run to catch the train into Wellington, run to the picture house to be in time for the screening and then, afterwards, run all the way back to the station to catch the train home. It was a typical Jackson expedition!’

Wizards was the latest animated film from the renegade director who had already outraged Seventies moviegoers with his adult-rated Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic and Coonskin. A bizarre post-apocalyptic vision set in a world of elves, dwarves and good-and-bad-wizards with strong parallels to Middle-earth, Wizards now seems like an audition for Bakshi’s ill-fated attempt at The Lord of the Rings, which was yet to come.

I saw Bakshi’s Rings when it first came out and, at the time, I hadn’t read the book. As a result, I got pretty confused! I liked the early part – it had some quaint sequences in Hobbiton, a creepy encounter with the Black Rider on the road, and a few quite good battle scenes – but then, about half way through, the storytelling became very disjointed and disorientating and I really didn’t understand what was going on.

However, what it did do was to make me want to read the book – if only to find out what happened!

Sitting on the ‘Silver Fern’ train from Wellington to Auckland, he began to do just that…

Being mad about movies and fascinated by the whole business of film-making – especially special effects – I kept saying to myself, ‘This book could make a really great movie!’ Of course, it never even occurred to me that I could make it – I didn’t even fantasise about making it! That would have been ridiculous: after all, I was just a 17-year-old, apprentice photoengraver, so there was no romantic moment that had me sitting on the train thinking, ‘One day, I will make a film of this book!’ Such a thought would have been totally crazy.

But I did think, ‘I can’t wait for somebody to make this movie! My real fantasy would have been a Ray Harryhausen version of The Lord of the Rings – because that’s what I really want to see! Years later, a moment came when it felt like, since nobody else seemed to be going to make it, I would simply have to make it myself! But that was way off in the future…

In fact, although people probably have this impression of me as having been a geeky Tolkien-reader as a kid, the truth is I didn’t read the book again until the idea of making the film came up – eighteen years later.

Ken Hammon recalls that it took Peter some time to wade through the full 1,000-plus pages of Tolkien’s book: ‘We ribbed Pete about it so much that it became something of an on-going joke: ‘Have you finished reading The Lord of the Rings yet?’ we’d ask. Now, I guess the joke’s on us, because whenever I hear Pete talking about the film, he clearly knows Tolkien’s writings inside out and back to front. Not only that, but I remember telling Pete that the “unreadable book” would make an “unwatchable film”, but he sure as hell disproved that theory!’

Meanwhile, back in 1978, Peter excelled at his studies at Auckland Technical Institute. As he was to report in a funding application to the New Zealand Film Commission, a few years later: ‘I served my three-year term, gaining the highest marks out of fifty students for both Trade Certificate and Advanced Trade Certificate.’ To which he added, ‘I mention this not to boast, but to show that I do try my best at anything I take on.’

Peter was to spend seven years working at the Evening Post and as he jokingly reflects:

It’s reassuring to know that I’ve always got a career in photoengraving to fall back on if I ever need it!

Photoengraving is the process by which images are engraved onto zinc or magnesium plates to be used on a press for printing photographs and images in newspapers. The metal plate is coated with a substance called a ‘photo-resist’, which is both photosensitive and yet resistant to acids. Strong ultraviolet light is then shone through a photographic negative causing those parts of the image through which the light has passed to harden. The image is then developed, using a solvent to wash away the unhardened parts of the image on the photo-resist. The metal plate is next placed in a bath of acid that dissolves those areas of metal that have been exposed and creates a plate from which a positive image can then be printed.

The process at the time was pretty primitive, and as the lowly apprentice, it was my job to etch the magnesium plates in big sulphuric-acid baths that, afterwards, had to be drained and scrubbed-out by hand. There were no real safety precautions and I’d lose the skin off my fingers and have my T-shirts go into holes and fall apart from the effects of the acid!

About a year into Peter’s apprenticeship, the Evening Post merged with Wellington’s daily paper the Dominion Post and Rob Lewis (‘Mr Lewis’ to the apprentice lads) became manager of the process department for the combined papers. Peter Jackson was one of Mr Lewis’s employees and he still has clear memories of the young man who was already trailing clouds of glory as ‘Apprentice of the Year’: ‘Peter was a delight. He was a little shy or, more accurately, someone with a certain

Rob Lewis, my boss in the Evening Post process department, standing on the left. Mr. Lewis was a little fearsome at first, and certainly a boss who commanded respect – but looking back, his idea to feature my home-made gorilla suit in a newspaper story kicked off a series of incidents and meetings that changed my life. I love the way fate weaves its complex, unpredictable path.

quietness about him; that said, he could also be full of fun and mischief. There was no question that he was good at his work – very good, although he clearly had his own agenda, his own road to run. With two daily papers and a Sunday edition to print each week, I always needed people to take on overtime and Peter was always the one person it was difficult to get to do overtime – not because he was a reluctant worker, but because he had other things to occupy his spare time – like making movies!’

Mr Lewis is not entirely accurate – there were periods when I’d desperately do as much overtime as I could squeeze in, to pay for ever-growing film-making costs!

Indeed, despite the demands of the day-job, Peter still retained his filmic ambitions, one of which was to emulate a particular effect created by Ray Harryhausen in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, the film that had provided so much of the inspiration for The Valley. One of the most ingenious sequences in the film was that in which the actor playing Sinbad had a sword-fight with an animated skeletal warrior. It was a brilliant set-piece and the precursor to a tour de force scene in the later Jason and the Argonauts in which the crew of the Argos engage with an entire army of battling skeletons.

I really wanted to try and do the types of movie tricks Ray had done: I wanted to film a sword-fight, with a human (me!) sword-fighting an animated skeleton. You had to film the live-action human first – a shadow-sword-fighting – rear-project it on a small screen and shoot a stop-motion model in front of it.

I built a little skeleton in cardboard with a wire ‘armature’ – that’s what animators call the poseable skeleton inside a stop-motion puppet, so this was a skeleton inside a skeleton! This figure was going to be my opponent in the scene I wanted to film.

Even though I didn’t have any of the equipment which Ray Harryhausen would have used to create his effects, I was still determined to try and make this work using just my Super 8 camera, so I shot some animation tests with the skeleton, copying the moment when one of them breaks out of the ground in Jason and the Argonauts. I was then forever attempting to figure out a way of projecting an image of me onto a screen so that I could put the skeleton in front, animate it in synchronisation with the film and photograph the combined images. I tried various experiments, but the results were terrible!

While I was trying to solve the logistics, I carried on filming the live-action half of the sequence. I made myself a Sinbad costume, dressed up in it and went with Pete O’Herne down onto the Pukerua Bay beach to film the live-action side of the fight among the rock-pools.

I plotted a sword-fight routine where I was battling with this imaginary skeleton. There were to be several shots of me – as Sinbad – fighting desperately, swinging the sword round and then, at the end of the fight, the climactic moment was me being knocked backwards off the rock and falling into the sea with a splash!

At the beginning of the day, we looked around for a safe place where I could fall back into the water, found one that was good and deep and started shooting…

Pete O’Herne recalls filming among the rocks, operating the camera to immortalise Peter’s performance: ‘I remember Peter saying that he wanted to do a skeleton sword-fight like the one in Sinbad or Jason and the Argonauts, so, of course, I went along to help out. That was how it was in those days; it was just what we did. We were always going to be there, hanging out, doing stuff…It never occurred to me to say, “Hey, Pete, hope you don’t mind, but I really want to hang around with some other guys…” I didn’t question it. It was, “OK, so what are we up to this weekend?” And it was fun, good fun.’ Except, on this particular weekend, it was also wet! ‘We shot versions of the sword fight for best part of a couple of hours, with me in the water almost up to my waist and pretty much drenched. Then the accident happened…’

Peter has his own painful memories of that day…

After several hours of shooting me sword-fighting with an invisible skeleton, we reached the point at which I had to hurl myself backwards, as if knocked into the water by the skeleton. I splashed into the water – and suddenly felt a sickening pain as something whacked against my spine.

Unfortunately, as we had been shooting for several hours, the tide had dropped a couple of feet – something that hadn’t occurred to me – so when I took my spectacular stunt dive I crashed onto a sharp rock that was now just below the surface of the water. I was in instant agony, but somehow managed to get home. Some time later, however, I developed a pilonidal cyst, caused by the trauma to the lower vertebrae, and ended up being admitted to hospital for surgery.

After the operation, I was off work on convalescence for two or three weeks. This was valuable time, not to be wasted, so I started chopping up foam rubber and began work on building a full gorilla suit which would later play an unexpected, but life-changing role in my future career…

As for the skeleton fight, I never did manage to solve the technical problems involved and it remained a sadly unfulfilled ambition. But what I just love about such things is that a few years ago, Ray Harryhausen visited our house in Wellington and he opened this little box, produced his original stop-motion skeleton puppet to show us…And I couldn’t help thinking that there I’d been, as a kid, animating skeletons and falling off rocks because I’d seen Ray’s movies and now here he was in my home with an original model from one of those films!

It is simply the greatest thing in the world when those kinds of circles turn and connect. Little moments that connect me to the kid I was, and remind me of the kid I still am.

The accident temporarily forestalled Peter’s plans to make his Sinbad adventure and it was destined to be one of many juvenile projects that would never see completion.

I was always thinking of ideas that were ambitious, technically complex films and all I had was a little Super 8 camera that couldn’t shoot sound. So I’d always be disappointed by the results and eventually abandon one project and start work on something else. This pattern of being unable to make something within my means – and most of all original – became something I was conscious of and which started to worry me.

Among the discarded Jackson ventures of the late Seventies was a short experiment loosely inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and John Carpenter’s Halloween in which an unseen intruder – the camera films from the intruder’s point-of-view – enters a house and shoots a terrified old man. Filmed in the Jackson home (with Pete O’Herne in heavy make-up as the elderly victim) the exercise was shot in a single, continuous take.

Another uncompleted project later came to be referred to as Coldfinger although, at the time, it was known simply as ‘The James Bond Thing’.

The first Bond movie I saw was Roger Moore in his debut performance, Live and Let Die, in 1973. Shortly afterwards, The Roxy cinema in Wellington ran interesting (if slightly unlikely) double-bill featuring the WWII movie, The Dam Busters along with the first-ever James Bond film, Dr No, starring Sean Connery. Then, in 1974, I saw the film that confirmed me as a huge Bond fan: The Man with the Golden Gun with Roger Moore in his second outing as Agent 007 and my favourite actor from the Hammer horror movies, Christopher Lee, as Francisco Scaramanga. A fabulous villain, Scaramanga had, supposedly, been born in a circus as the son of a Cuban ringmaster and a British snake-charmer and had, as a distinguishing feature, a third nipple or, as Bond refers to it, ‘a superfluous papilla’!

I loved The Man with the Golden Gun! I just had to keep going back to the cinema to see it. It was the first film that I saw four times in one week (the next would be David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai), and it made such an impact that I even tried to take photos of it. I had a camera that used to take slides, so I smuggled it into the cinema and during some of my favourite moments in the film – like when the car jumps over the bridge – I’d whip out my camera and snap off some pictures.

It’s hard for anyone to understand who wasn’t living in the time before videos but, unlike now, we weren’t able to watch just about any movie that’s ever been made whenever we wished. Videos and DVDs have profoundly changed movie-watching: when I was young, a film came to the local cinema for one week only – it was on and then gone; only a handful of cinemas ever showed double-bill revivals and our single-channel TV station in New Zealand didn’t get films for years and years. So, once a film had played, you were unlikely to see it again in under a decade.

Film fans had to content themselves with collecting images in magazines and books, buying soundtrack recordings of film scores (or illicitly record them yourself as I had done with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad) collecting toys and merchandise – anything to keep hold of the memories. That’s why I tried to grab a few souvenir photos of The Man With the Golden Gun but, needless to say, when I got them developed I found that they were all completely blank!

Catching old movies on sporadic re-release meant, in the case of Bond movies, seeing the films out of chronology and with a central character alternately played by Sean Connery and Roger Moore. Ken Hammon recalls going with Peter to a screening of Connery’s 1971 final foray into the world of Bond, Diamonds Are Forever: ‘It was also around this time that Pete hired a copy of the fourth movie in the series, Thunderball (“Here Comes the Biggest Bond of All!”), and screened it at school over two lunchtimes, advertised by a Jacksondrawn poster of Sean Connery who, by now, was probably Pete’s favourite action hero.’

The dynamic, thrill-packed opening which became the hallmark of every Bond film was something that would inform Peter’s later approach to The Lord of the Rings and in particular the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring.

I’ve always been a believer in the James Bond approach, which is to blow people away in the first five minutes of the film, which buys you that little bit of story set-up time during your first act. You shift people from the state of mind they’re in when they enter the cinema, and very quickly try to ensnare them into the world of your movie. The prologue in Fellowship served two functions: it got a lot of the back-story information out of the way at the beginning of the film, which would otherwise have had to explain by Gandalf in Bag End; but we also wanted the prologue to be more than just information and having the battle scenes – even though I now feel that they were rather rushed and not as good as they should have been – provided something spectacular and visceral to rip people out of whatever frame of mind they’re in when they enter the cinema. If people sit there and their jaws drop open and they go ‘Wow!’ then you’ve got them, you’re in control.

As for Peter’s youthful attempt at filming something in the Bond style, all that ever made it onto celluloid were two fight-sequences with Peter playing his hero in his father’s dinner-suit and with, says Ken Hammon, ‘a ton of face make-up to make him look like Sean Connery – only ten inches shorter!’ Bond’s first fight, set amongst those perilous rocks at Pukerua Bay was with Ken playing a villain who almost succeeds in garrotting the special agent with a fishing line – until the ever-resourceful 007 removes his bow-tie which handily converts into a flick-knife.

The second fight with another baddie (played by Andrew Neale, another of those gold prospectors in The Valley) was shot on the Jackson balcony overlooking the Kapiti coast. The scene took up an entire day’s shooting and yet not a frame of footage was ever to be seen: the film had been incorrectly loaded and although the camera was whirred away as if filming, it was, in fact, doing nothing of the sort. Before a re-shoot could be scheduled, Andrew Neale had left New Zealand and so the scene was later recreated with Pete O’Herne playing the villain.

The Bond project was another destined to remain unfinished, but Peter Jackson never lost his love of the film incarnations of Ian Fleming’s special agent. A colleague on the Evening Post, Ray Battersby, has a photograph of Peter posing in his bedroom with a cinema foyer standee of Bond from the 1987 film The Living Daylights. Since the cardboard cut-out had a removable head, the photograph shows Peter Jackson substituting for the actor who had just taken on the role of Bond, Timothy Dalton.

As a child, Peter Jackson’s bedroom was full of model cars and aircraft-kits. Today, he owns the real things – not just an Aston Martin, but also several vintage planes from the First World War. The toys it seems have just got bigger…

My hobbies and interests are exactly the same now as they were when I was 12 – they are essentially no different. Most people develop their hobbies when they’re young; certainly I don’t have any hobbies that I’ve taken up as an adult. For me, everything is an extension to what has gone before. Owning a WWI airplane is just a continuation from buying and building Airfix plastic kits when I was a kid; I’ve just been lucky enough now to have earned sufficient money to move on to fullsized planes. It’s really just the same old hobbies! I still have Super 8 footage of WWI dogfights I shot when I was about 10 years old.

As Peter’s childhood friend, Pete O’Herne remarks: ‘Peter hasn’t changed one bit. If he had $10 he’d go and buy himself a model of a Spitfire. If he’s got a million dollars, he’ll just go buy the bigger version. Why not? That’s exactly what any of us would do!’

Maybe so, but all of these things – becoming a professional film-maker or owning an Aston Martin – were distant, if not impossible, dreams for the young Peter Jackson in 1979. However, it wasn’t long before Peter was demonstrating his technical ambitions by not only upgrading his movie equipment to a Super 8 camera – with sound –

This shot really captures the spirit and feel of The Curse of the Gravewalker, filmed amongst the old graves at a local cemetery. I’m playing the swash-buckling zombie-hunting hero, as Pete O’Herne goes for my jugular. Pete’s make-up would be done in my bedroom and then Mum or Dad would drive us to the cemetery and leave us there most of the day.

but also by aspiring to produce wide-screen images by shooting in CinemaScope.

CinemaScope had come hot on the heels of various movie innovations in the early Fifties – including 3-D and Cinerama – aimed at wooing American TV audiences back into the picture-houses. The system debuted with the 1953 religious epic, The Robe, advertised as ‘The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses’, and CinemaScope (along with such successors as VistaVision, Superscope, Todd-AO and Technirama) quickly became the way to view movies, especially big-budget musicals, westerns, war movies and costume dramas.

In 1953 a mere five CinemaScope titles were released, during the following year, that figure rose to thirty-seven films including 20,000

LEFT: The smallest stage I’ve ever used. Dad’s first car was a Morris Minor and he carefully built the garage with just enough space to squeeze in and out of the drivers’ door. Here, Pete and I are shooting a scene with Clive Haywood, another of my production stalwarts from the Evening Post process department. In those days, photo-litho plates came in wide flat cardboard boxes, and I used to lug piles of these home each week. Cardboard was my main building material for everything – here the boxes have been painted grey, sprinkled with beach sand and used to line the garage.

Leagues Under the Sea, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Prince Valiant, Bad Day at Black Rock, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Three Coins in the Fountain. Within a decade, wide-screen movies were less a novelty, more the norm and, for a young man with a taste for cinematic spectacle, what he calls ‘the huge letterbox-shaped CinemaScope image’ couldn’t fail to appeal.

Peter sent to a supplier in England for an anamorphic lens of the kind used for filming in CinemaScope. Based upon a technique pioneered in France in the late Twenties by the inventor Henri Chrétien, the lens worked using an optical trick called ‘anamorphosis’ which allowed an image twice the width of that captured by a conventional lens to be horizontally ‘squeezed’ onto film. When projected onto a screen using a similar lens, the image was ‘unsqueezed’ to provide dramatic, eye-stretching, cinematic experience. With his new camera and his anamorphic lens, Peter embarked on another movie project with Pete O’Herne and veterans from The Valley, Ken Hammon and, temporarily back in New Zealand, Andrew Neal.

We started work on what is sometimes referred now to as The Curse of the Gravewalker, although – like all my early experiments – it never really had a title. The film was shamelessly spawned by my adolescent love of the blood-spattered, over-the-top Gothic horrors from Hammer films which I started going to see on double-bills when I was in my late teens and one in particular, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, which I thought was really cool!

Unlike many pictures to emerge from what has been called ‘the studio that dripped blood’, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, made in 1974, did not star either of Hammer’s legendary stalwarts Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee, nor even the seductive Ingrid Pitt, who had sucked the blood of young heroes and quickened the pulse of young moviegoers in such pictures as The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula. Captain Kronos – billed as ‘The Only Man Alive Feared by the Walking Dead’ – was an ingenious attempt at combining the vampiric myth with the dash and derring-do of the swashbuckler.

Captain Kronos, played by German actor Horst Janson, is a master swordsman, late of the Imperial Guard (but flashing a blade forged from the metal of a crucifix), who seeks out and destroys the usual plague of ‘blood-thirsty’ vampires.

The film had a significantly open-ended conclusion, clearly paving the way for a possible series. However, Hammer never accorded Captain Kronos the opportunity for a hoped-for encore and it was left to a young man in Wellington, New Zealand, to take up the theme with his Grave Walker project.

Ken Hammon and Andrew Neal, played assorted vampires and met repeated deaths while Pete O’Herne portrayed their leader, ‘Count Murnau’, named after W.F. Murnau, the German director of the first ‘Dracula’ movie, Nosferatu. Not surprisingly, Peter Jackson cast himself as the hero, a fearless vampire-slayer going by the name of ‘Captain Eumig’ – a film-maker’s joke on the name of a well-known Austrian make of cameras and projectors.

As well as acting and directing, I created the make-up effects for the zombie-kind-of-undead-creatures. I was continually coming up with story ideas and shooting endless bits and pieces in the hope that I’d eventually end up with a feature-length film! The results still exist, albeit as a rather fragmentary thing running probably forty-five minutes to an hour and very roughly cut and glued together.

‘My strongest memory of the film,’ says Ken Hammon, ‘is of digging! We dug for corpses of the undead in an overgrown graveyard, in the woods around Pukerua Bay, in the Jackson’s backyard. The joke was, “OK, guys we need some more digging!” If Peter knew what the final outcome was supposed to be, I never heard it! Shot over a period of

When it came to needing actual graves, we wisely abandoned the cemetery and my parents found me a tiny spot in the middle of their carefully tended garden. Here, amongst the rows of carrots and spuds, I am happily going about my grave robbing duties. From the first trenches I dug when I was about 8 years old, I was constantly digging holes – either graves or trenches – in my parents’ garden.

Pete O’Herne under a headful of Plaster of Paris in my mum’s kitchen. Pete was playing a zombie in my Super 8mm epic Curse of the Gravewalker. A much softer material, alginate, is used by the professionals to make head casts. I didn’t know that then, and we all suffered through the hot, stifling, direct plaster moulding process. The pad in Pete’s hand is a safety measure, so that he can scribble a warning if he can’t breathe!

The result of the head cast, the severed head, is sitting on the cabinet behind Pete as I make him up for a day’s shooting on Gravewalker. The look of the zombies is very much inspired by the Hammer horror Plague of Zombies.

perhaps two years, it was, without doubt, the maddest project of them all! Pete’s homage to Hammer, filmed with an anamorphic lens gaffer-taped onto camera and then shown with the lens gaffer-taped onto the projector, but throwing this amazing great image that filled the entire wall of the Jackson living-room.’

Peter’s ambition was still that of an aspiring special-effects man as opposed to a director, and he was already devising ideas for using forced-perspective in a way not unlike that in which it would later be used in The Lord of the Rings. Ken remembers Peter plotting a scene that would feature adults in the foreground and school children (as adults) in the background in order to create an illusion of distance. Make-up experiments were, on an amateur scale, as ambitious as some of those that would be eventually created for the occupants of Isengard and Mordor – with as much discomfort for those involved! Pete O’Herne recalls: ‘Do you know how I’d spend my Saturdays and Sundays back then? I’d go round to Peter’s house and he’d say, “OK, mate, I’m going to put Plaster of Paris over your head today, and you’re going to have to breathe through drinking straws up your nostrils until it sets!” God knows how many nights I’d be coming home tearing bloody tissue-paper off my face; or, worst of all, trying to get latex rubber out of my eyebrows!’

Peter shot ‘day-for-night’ using a blue filter on the camera lens to give the impression that the film had been shot by the light of the moon when vampires might be expected to prowl. He also experimented with dry ice in order to create the obligatory misty atmosphere typically found in woods frequented by zombies. ‘We went down into the forest,’ recalls Pete O’Herne, ‘dug a pit and filled it up with dry ice so that I could lie in it and rise up out of the grave in a spooky way. The problem is that dry ice is comprised of CO², and if you’re going to be stupid enough to lie in a lot of it, you have to be very careful not to inhale! My only consolation was that Peter had already discovered the dangers through experimenting with dry ice in the bathtub at home!’

The making of Gravewalker was clearly an ad-hoc process and Peter was undoubtedly the engine driving the project; nevertheless, his approach was also – as it would often be on Rings – collaborative.

LEFT: Occasionally the holes were faked, as this interesting pair of shots reveal. I’m firing my zombie-killing crossbow into the bottom of a grave, and this was the way we faked it in our garage, which also doubled as a sound-stage on a number of occasions.

Ken Hammon recalls: ‘Peter was a spontaneous film-maker: open to other people’s ideas and not in the least protective of his own ideas – which probably sometimes accounts for the jagged rhythms of his first experiments.’ Despite all the work that went into the film, the results were, for Peter, disappointing…

Towards the end, I was getting kind of dispirited, because I was pouring a huge amount of effort into the project – making stuff for it, shooting it at the weekends – but, however much work I did, it never seemed to look quite how I saw it in my mind’s eye…

Pete O’Herne understands Peter’s frustration: ‘The problem was that the limited equipment available to us for effects meant that whatever we achieved fell short of what was going in Peter’s head. With The Curse of the Gravewalker he probably would have liked to have seen all those things he loved in the movies – the horse-drawn carriage galloping along in the dark, down an old road in a dense forest – and of course he had to make do with us guys, doubling up and playing all the parts and not being particularly good at it either. We couldn’t even manage decent fight sequences because there weren’t enough of us. With someone always having to operate the camera, just about every encounter was inevitably limited to one-on-one. So, I think Peter began to get bored by just how frustrating it was.’

Eventually, Peter reached the conclusion that, in their current form, his film experiments were going nowhere.

I realised that nobody was ever going to see the vampire film since Super 8 was a format that had no ability to be copied and no means of ever being professionally screened anywhere…What, I asked myself, am I ultimately doing all this for? I knew it was time to move on – to put the 8mm camera away and start filming on 16mm. I was going to have to figure out how to make films in a more professional format.

My twenty-first birthday cake, decorated by my mum.

In 1982, around the time that Peter’s ambitions were focusing on pursuing a more professional approach to film-making, he and Ken Hammon took a three-week trip to Los Angeles, his first close-up experience of the movie-Mecca – Hollywood.

The lads packed a lot into their time in ‘tinsel town’: going to horror and sci-fi conventions (at one of which they met Dave Prowse, the man under the Darth Vader mask in Star Wars) and attending a talk by Frank Marshall, an associate of Stephen Spielberg who had recently served as a producer on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Poltergeist and whose next few films would include The Goonies (the cast of which included the young Sean Astin), two more Indiana Jones titles and three Back to the Future movies.

Peter and Ken watched a taping of the then-popular TV comedy, The Dukes of Hazard. Although an interesting experience, it was a series that neither of them followed or particularly liked and Ken remembers their disappointment that the recording had not been of the contemporary show, Fantasy Island. Set on a mysterious island resort where any fantasy requested could be fulfilled, the show starred Ricardo Montalban as Mr Roarke, the island’s urbane, whitesuited host, and Hervé Villechaize as Roarke’s diminutive assistant, Tattoo.

‘We visited the set of Fantasy Island,’ says Ken, ‘but we were really frustrated that we weren’t able to see the show being recorded because it was unique in that it not only featured a former Star Trek villain – Montalban was Khan Noonian Singh in The Wrath of Khan – but also an ex-James Bond villain, since Villechaize had been Nick Nack, Christopher Lee’s side-kick in The Man with the Golden Gun. You have to remember that we were real movie-buffs!’

Neither Ken nor I had our driver’s licence – that’s a kind of necessity to be a real geek – and we somehow thought that everything in LA was

After my twenty-first birthday, Ken and I travelled to LA to attend a sci-fi convention. Getting an autograph from Dave ‘Darth Vader’ Prowse was a thrill, especially since he was also in some of my beloved Hammer horror movies.

within walking distance! We discovered that was not quite the case. We had absolutely no money to hire taxis or drivers.

They visited all the Hollywood tourists sites and several less well-known ones: ‘We took long foot tours,’ recalls Ken. ‘We walked miles and Peter never got lost, though he’d never tell me where we were going until we got there! One route march ended outside St Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank with Peter announcing, “That’s where Walt Disney died”!’

They went to the rather better known Disney memorial, the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim where Peter was sufficiently delighted by the mix of fantasy and futurism to immediately decide to make a return visit on the following day, while the less-enamoured Ken opted, instead, for a day by the swimming pool.

The Hollywood trip was perhaps the final spur needed to goad Peter Jackson onto the course that would eventually determine his career. The dream factories that produced the films and television shows that he loved were now real places as opposed to being part of some remote other world on the other side of the globe. He returned to Wellington and his photoengraving job with his film-making ambitions strengthened.

One lunch break I happened to be walking past a photo-shop, next to the old Regent Theatre in town. The shop sold various second-hand movie-gear and I always stopped and looked in the window. On this particular day, I saw a Bolex 16mm camera with a big zoom lens. I’d read about them in magazines, but I’d never seen one before and now, suddenly, here was one sitting in the window of a Wellington shop. I was virtually trembling with excitement.

The Bolex camera was light and easy to handle. It was spring loaded so all you had to do was wind it up and you were then ready to shoot up to thirty seconds of 16mm footage. A second-hand Bolex was a rare find in New Zealand and it was exactly what I needed if I was to make real progress with my film-making. I could abandon the Super 8 footage we’d shot on Gravewalker and start something new. There was only one problem: the price ticket on the Bolex was for $2,500 NZ, not a small sum today and, in 1982, a fortune. Two-and-a-half grand! There was no way that I could have saved that kind of money from my job on the paper.

I raced home and I begged my parents if they could possibly lend me the money. They gave me a loan – which I don’t think I ever repaid! – and I rushed back to the shop and bought the camera. The feeling of holding it – owning it – was incredibly, unbelievably exciting! That kind of support from your parents is so important, and that loan was the most significant thing my mum and dad did to help me become a film-maker. When I won the Oscar for Best Director, I did what has become almost a joke – thank my parents. But for me, just saying their names – Joan and Bill Jackson – on Oscar night had a personal meaning to me that nobody could ever really understand.

It wasn’t long, however, before Peter realised that using a 16mm camera would necessarily involve serious on-going financial commitments. One reason for the initial popularity of 8mm film was that developing the film stock, using what is called a ‘reversal’ process, gave a positive print (rather than a negative) that could be immediately projected and viewed – which was ideal for the home-movie enthusiast. The drawbacks for anyone with serious film-making ambitions were that, without a negative, any attempt at editing film was fairly irrevocable and, whilst a negative could be made from the print, doing so involved serious loss of quality.

In comparison, film shot on a 16mm camera could either use filmstock that employed a similar ‘reversal’ process to 8mm or film that could be developed using a ‘negative/positive’ process resulting in a ‘master’ negative from which a print could be struck in order for the film to be edited. Then, once the edit had been complete, the negative itself would be cut to match and prints of the finished film would be struck.

Super 8 cartridges, giving you three minutes of film each cost three to four dollars. To get the equivalent three minutes on 16mm, I discovered, would cost twenty times as much! It was a painful realisation that every time I loaded a 100-foot roll of film it was going to cost $100 to buy the negative and make a print. This was serious money: I couldn’t just muck around with this camera, popping-off shots without thinking. From the get-go I really had to have a plan!

So I bought one roll of film and shot some trial footage in order to learn how the camera worked: finding out about speed controls and how to read light-metres and set exposures. There was a lot to learn – all the things that I’d not had to even think about with the Super 8 cameras. That was a $70 experiment, but I was determined that when I bought the next roll of film, I wasn’t going to waste more money on ideas that didn’t lead anywhere. I decided I was going to make a little ten-minute film: something short and entertaining that I could hopefully enter into festivals.

That, however, wasn’t quite how it would work out…

Roast of the Day is what it was going to be called and it was a nice little Jacksonish joke: Giles Copeland, a young man employed by a food-processing company, drives into a sleepy little New Zealand town and begins a door-to-door collection of envelopes for an annual charity-appeal organised by his employers.

Giles’ firm uses its sponsorship of the nationwide famine-relief appeal as a blatant public relations exercise and employees are promoted or demoted depending upon the amount they manage to solicit from the public.

Giles, a formerly not-too-successful collector, has been given the ‘wop-wops’ run of small coastal towns miles from anywhere and it his last chance to show what he can do…It just so happens that collection-day is 31 October – Peter Jackson’s birthday but, more to the point, Halloween!

Although Giles manages to collect a number of envelopes pinned to the doorframes of the houses, the town seems unaccountably – even eerily – deserted. Then he notices ‘a scruffy, bearded, tramp-like character’ eating a squashed possum off the road. On spotting Giles, this unsavoury character becomes a homicidal lunatic, producing a bayonet and lurching menacingly towards him. Only just succeeding in making a getaway in his car, Giles stops at a large mansion – hoping to pick up an envelope ‘bulging with green ones’ – only to find that he has stumbled into the den of cannibal-aliens-in-human-form for whom he is destined to provide first-hand famine-relief as their ‘roast of the day’.

The services of Ken Hammon were once again enlisted and Ken, who at this time was working for a housing association in Porirua, inducted a work-colleague, Craig Smith, into the project to play Giles. In fact, Craig was another former Kapiti College student, although in

Bad Taste shoot – Day One, 27 October 1983. At this point in time I thought we would be shooting for a few weeks to make a ten-minute short called Roast of the Day. One of my photoengraving mates, Phil Lamey, was there helping with the camera, along with Craig Smith and Ken Hammon.

a different year to Ken and Peter. ‘My only memory of Peter at school,’ recalls Craig, ‘was when the television programme, Spot On, launched its contest for young film-makers and I went to one of the classrooms where you could pick up a leaflet and entry-form. Peter happened to be there and when he heard me ask for the form, he said, “Ah-ha! Competition!” That’s the last we saw of each other until I got involved in Roast of the Day.’

Craig was deemed a positive asset to the production by virtue of the fact that, unlike most of the cast-members of Peter’s earlier films, he was an accomplished amateur actor with aspirations to enter the profession: ‘At school I’d appeared in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (my portrayal of Pharaoh is still being talked about today!) and I’d also been in several productions by the local repertory company, The Kapiti Players: I was the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, the Second Voice in Under Milk Wood and as for my Big Bad Wolf – well, all I can say is they loved me!’

Ken Hammon and Pete O’Herne were among the first members of the film crew when shooting began on 27 October 1983 in Makara, not far from Wellington, with a shot of Giles consulting a road sign. The signpost (complete with AA logos) had been made by Peter and looked sufficiently authentic to cause a memorable brush with the law. With the shot in the can, the team were taking down the sign when they were spotted by a public-spirited citizen who decided to report their act of vandalism to the local police!

Fortunately the crew were easily able to show that the sign was their own as opposed to public property, if only because of the clearly made-up destinations: in one direction, ‘Castle Rock’ (a place-name in a story in Stephen King’s comic-book, Creepshow, and the recently-released George Romero film of the same name); and, in the other direction, the place where, unwittingly, Giles was to meet his grisly end – ‘Kaihoro’, a tasteful little joke inspired by a Maori word meaning to ‘eat greedily’!

That was the beginning. But only the beginning…

Craig Smith reflects, ‘It had all seemed nice, clean, simple and easy: six weeks work tops and we were out of there. But, if there is no script, if it’s not locked down then – whether it’s a five-cent

A moment captured at work at the Evening Post – it was what we did to fill in the days!

movie or a million-dollar movie – anarchy ensues!’

Today, Peter Jackson would probably agree (although his films have tended to allow for a greater degree of script flexibility than other directors); at the time, however, the film featured few dialogue scenes and his approach was one of shooting from a storyboard of mental images: ‘There has never been a script,’ he would tell the New Zealand Film Commission after fifteen months of filming. ‘There has simply been no need for a script. I have gone to the locations with every shot, every angle in my head. I just direct the others according to my plan.’

The process by which Roast of the Day grew – or, to use a better word, mutated – into what would eventually become the cult movie, Bad Taste, is a intriguing, often bewildering, saga of plot developments and restructurings the full, intricate complexity of which are probably only of interest to the most devoted Bad Taste fans and are already chronicled on a variety of internet web-sites.

Suffice it to say, as Craig Smith puts it, that ‘once Pete got the bit

At one point I started drawing caricatures of my Evening Post workmates, including a self-portrait (bottom left).

between his teeth – he just kept throwing more and more ideas into it.’

‘It just kept going,’ recalls Pete O’Herne, ‘building and building until for some of us – though probably not for Peter – it all started to blur!’ Twists and turns developed, details and gags were added and, says Ken Hammon, with no script, there was an inevitable tendency ‘for simple sequences to end up much more elaborate than planned.’

I kept shooting, shooting, every weekend and then I’d go into the Evening Post to do my job all week long and I’d be sitting there, bored, thinking up ideas for the next weekend’s filming. It was a classic ‘make it up as you go along’ situation – and I had all week to make it up, before the next weekend’s shooting would happen. That thinking time always led to my coming up with something new that I’d get excited about and, in that way, the story kept expanding.

Progress, however, was intermittent and entirely driven by what I could afford from my weekly pay packet. I would save up several hundred dollars in order to buy four or five rolls of film, we’d shoot for a day and use them all up and then I’d realise that I couldn’t afford to process the film, so I’d have to put them in the fridge until I’d get my next wagecheck and could afford to put the film into the lab for processing. But having to pay the lab-bill meant that I then wasn’t able to buy any film for the following week, so I’d lose another weekend’s filming and would have to wait for another pay-cheque in order to buy some more rolls of film.

Nevertheless, new sequences continued to be shot at a variety of locations around Pukerua Bay, including the historic Gear Homestead in Porirua, which served as the cannibals’ mansion. An elegant, whitepainted, clapboard house with a colonnaded veranda, the Homestead had been built in 1882 by New Zealand tycoon James Gear whose

Gear Homestead near Porirua served as the main location for Bad Taste. My parents knew the caretakers and they kindly gave us free access during the weekends when there weren’t weddings in the garden, which was the principal use of the old dwelling.

fortune had come from the Gear Meat Preserving and Freezing Company – an appropriate sponsor for Roast of the Day!

Gear Homestead was administered by the local council but Peter’s father happened to know the caretakers and arranged for ‘the boys’ – as Peter and his friends were referred to in the Jackson household – to shoot there on ‘three or four occasions’, although, by the time the film was completed, the number of filming days in or around the house had risen to a figure closer to thirty or forty!

Roast of the Day briefly became Sapien Alfresco before acquiring a new working-title of Giles’ Big Day. A major development in the plot occurred when the cannibals became invading aliens hoping to make earth a source of fast food for the people of their planet who were otherwise forced to live on guinea-pigs! Then the S.A.S. suddenly burst onto the scene. When making The Lord of the Rings, Peter would discover that a member of his cast – Christopher Lee – was a former member of the 22nd Regiment, the Special Air Service (Motto: ‘Who dares Wins’), but he had long been fascinated by stories about the exploits of the S.A.S. and they soon had a key role to play in Giles’ Big Day.

The SAS appearance in Bad Taste is directly linked to the siege of the Iranian embassy in London, which occurred while we were making the movie. I saw the TV images of these guys storming the building and put them in the movie!

Peter came up with the idea of a bunch of balaclava-wearing S.A.S operatives storming the house and rescuing Giles who was gently marinating in a barrel of herbs and vegetables with an apple stuck in his mouth! However, there was a twist: although the S.A.S. seem to be helping Giles to escape from the alien-cannibals and are seen killing

RIGHT: This is the original Mark One design for the Bad Taste aliens. In the midEighties, American Werewolf in London had come out with Rick Baker’s brilliant transforming latex ‘change-o-heads’. I tried to copy that with these designs, which were based on the idea that the S.A.S. rescuers would actually transform into aliens. Everything, including plot and designs, got overhauled following Craig’s exit from the project.

his captors, it is nothing more than a cruel joke since the rescuers eventually turn into aliens who have simply been enjoying themselves by ‘playing with their food’!

The involvement of the S.A.S. required additional cast and, in addition to Pete O’Herne, Peter Jackson enlisted the help of two work colleagues at Wellington Newspapers: Mike Minett and Terry Potter. ‘The rest of us,’ recalls Mike, ‘were into sex, drugs and rock-and-roll but Peter was just this nice, adorable guy who loved his mum and dad and was really into making movies.’

‘I really liked Peter,’ says Terry Potter, ‘I liked his sense of humour.’ Legend has it that a sign appeared in the process department of Wellington Newspapers that read: ‘Who needs drugs when you’ve got Peter Jackson?’ There were the occasional practical jokes – paper bats in the darkrooms, larks with home-made tarantulas – but those who knew Peter at the time recall him not so much as an ‘outright funny guy’ as someone with an engagingly quirky way of looking at things: an off-the-wall take on life seen in the Monty Python TV shows and the surreal films of The Beatles, whose music he adored.

Peter’s love of The Beatles was shared by another Post colleague, Ray Battersby (with whom he later planned to make a TV documentary on The Beatles’ visit to Wellington), and Mike Minett who, as a member of a local rock band – ‘almost everybody belonged to a band in those days’ – had taped his own versions of some Beatles numbers on his four-track recorder: ‘Pete heard them and spent several lunch breaks – while the rest of us were sitting around playing cards – attempting to add the vocal track. He was enthusiastic and knew all the lyrics but, unfortunately, couldn’t sing for shit!’

Years later, when the Howard Shore soundtrack for The Fellowship of the Ring was being recorded at London’s Abbey Road Studios, Peter and Howard along with Recording Engineer John Kurlander (who had worked on the Beatles’ Abbey Road album) and Associate Producer, Rick Porras, paid homage to the iconic coverimage of the 1969 album by posing for a photograph while striding across the famous nearby zebra-crossing. But long before that, as we shall see, The Beatles would have a fleeting connection with Bad Taste…

Mike after a hard night out on the town. I had to be careful with my camera angles on that day. Something very similar happened years later on LOTR with Viggo Mortensen, except that was due to an encounter with a surf board, not a fist!

Apart from his Beatlemania, the driving passion in his life was film. ‘He was always talking about movies,’ remembers Mike Minett. ‘It was movies, movies, movies!’

‘In the end,’ recalls Terry

Potter who admits to not being much of a cinemagoer before meeting Peter, ‘he talked us all into liking movies and, eventually into making movies. It started out with our lending a hand when he needed people to help with transport and carrying equipment: it really wasn’t that much hassle and, after a bit, we started enjoying it.’

‘There were times,’ says Mike, ‘when it was terminally boring. It would be: “Just ten minutes more…” “Not long now…” “Almost ready…” We’d be waiting and waiting till it was all boredom, boredom! Then, instead of just helping out as crew, we got the chance to be in front of the camera!’

Had they but known it, Terry and Mike along with Pete, Craig and Ken, were getting themselves involved in a project that, whilst bringing them none of the usual trappings associated with being film stars, would at least give them cult-movie celebrity status. Almost twenty years on, they are still occasionally recognised and asked for autographs; Pete and Mike, particularly, are in frequent e-mail correspondence with fans all over the world, and Terry Potter, when attending the premiere of The Two Towers, was introduced to ‘the Hobbits’ and was amused to be greeted with bows from the young stars who happen to be keen fans of Bad Taste.

Back in 1983, such goings-on would have been unimaginable. Most of the guys who helped Peter in pursuing his hobby thought of it as no more than that: a sometimes fun, sometimes boring way of spend a Sunday, hanging around with a few mates, playing at film-making and having a few beers at the end of the day.

However, what the story of the making of Bad Taste shows – and confirms again and again – is that Peter Jackson was already developing the talents, displaying the personal philosophy and demonstrating the stamina and tenacity that would equip him to tackle The Lord of the Rings and sustain him through its making.

‘Perhaps the most fascinating thing about this little amateur movie,’ says Craig Smith, ‘is the way in which Peter was developing his skills as a film-maker, as a special effects artist – even as an actor. It is the story of someone developing his craft from scratch and necessity…’

Over the best part of the next three years (specific datings are difficult due to the fragmentary nature of the way in which they worked and the inevitable haziness of people’s memories), Peter would succeed

A home-made camera crane perched on the cliffs above Pukerua Bay. I had no way of actually seeing what I was shooting, so I’d point the camera in the basic direction and hope for the best. I’d find out how successful the shot had been when I looked at the 16mm print.

in enthusing and involving work colleagues and friends (and often friends and relations of friends!) either as full- or part-time crew members or as ‘extras’ for those scenes involving the cannibal-cum-aliens.

Peter built his own camera equipment including tracks and a dolly for moving the camera along the ground and a home-made version of a ‘Steadicam’ – a spring-loaded, weight-counterbalanced camera harness designed to allow the filming of action scenes in cinema-vérité – which, at the time, would have cost upwards of $40,000 but which Peter constructed for just ‘twenty bucks’! He also made an aluminium crane, ‘put together like a giant Meccano set’, that allowed – more or less! – professional-looking crane-shots…

Once I’d mounted the 16mm camera on the end of the crane there was no way of looking through the lens, so I simply pointed in the general direction of the actors and hoped for the best! Actually, I discovered that if you used a wide-angle lens, then you’d generally get away with that sort of thing!

Peter also created the film’s props, including a convincing-looking arsenal of weapons made out of aluminium tubing, cardboard and wood and ‘largely held together with glue!’ He particularly relished the opportunity to create the alien make-ups that were, had the world but known it, forerunners of the armies of prosthetic grotesques that would, one day, march out of Weta Workshop and onto the battlefields of Middle-earth! The foam latex was whisked up in his mother’s food-mixer and baked in the family oven – the size of which was the only constraint on Peter’s imagination…

I sculpted the alien heads to a precise dimension so that I could squeeze them into the oven with about half-an-inch to spare – which is the evolutionary explanation for why the aliens all had somewhat flattened head shapes!

As Joan Jackson would later recall, ‘Peter would often take over the whole kitchen. I’d have a menu planned for dinner and we’d end up

This is the gang of photoengraving colleagues I rounded up for a scene in a crowded room. We shot it in one of the darkrooms after work on a Saturday. It was edited together with reverses of Craig in the barrel, which I shot in my parents’ garage. I used to buy old white shirts at the Salvation Army store and dye them blue – it was the cheapest alien wardrobe I could think of!

having sausages under the grill because Peter was using the oven!’

Peter’s diverse creativity and astonishing proficiency impressed those who knew him. Work colleague, Ray Battersby, who would briefly join the ranks of ‘Aliens 3rd Class’, recalls, ‘I was amazed at his confidence and authority on set. He was in total control, handling everything with complete aplomb. I should have known better than to have ever underestimated Peter, because he could turn his hand to just about anything: he was the Swiss army knife of creative ability!’

Not content with his various creative responsibilities off-screen, Peter had also written himself into the action as the ‘scruffy, bearded, tramp-like character’ with the bayonet that attacks Giles on his arrival in Kaihoro. As anyone who has ever seen Peter demonstrating to actors how a scene is to be played, there can be little doubt that had he been subjected to one or two different influences or have been given some alternative opportunities to express his imagination and creativity, he might easily have been drawn to a career in acting.

Week in, week out, on as regular a basis as possible, the guys got together and filmed. Around this time, Peter wrote, ‘I love writing, I love editing, I love dabbling in special effects, but organising everyone and getting out and filming is a real chore.’ Nevertheless he did and he got the other guys to do it, too.

‘After all these years,’ says Mike Minett, ‘we are all still talking about it and, of course, we always say what fun it was and how we all established this crazy, nutcase friendship…But we all had our lives and jobs and there were times when it was hard to get up on Sunday mornings – especially if it was cold or even raining – and go off filming. But Peter couldn’t afford not to film: he’d have got his pay-cheque and bought a few more reels of film. If he didn’t film, he’d get behind schedule. So, he had to do it – and we had to help him do it.’

Craig Smith reflects, ‘I often ask myself what it was about Peter that made us all get involved and go along with his schemes. Peter was something of an oddball character, but then, the truth is, we were all oddball, nerdy fan-boys, hanging out together, going to movies and then trying to make a movie…But Peter had a knack for motivating people. I believe he felt completely secure in himself – he had inherent self-belief and was always totally focused – and those are qualities that attract other people like a magnet. That’s what kept hauling people in Sunday after Sunday.’

Jamie Selkirk, Peter’s long-time editor and co-director of Weta Workshop, sees him as employing a similar, if refined, technique today: ‘Peter has a great knack for starting people off with something that is little more than the germ of an idea. He gets people excited and committed, draws them in further by soliciting their input and then develops and embellishes the idea to a stage where they’re hooked! Then he can push them, because he knows that once they’ve made a creative and emotional investment, they are unlikely to quit until they can deliver something with which both Peter and they are totally happy.’

By the end of 1985, after a period of fifteen months, Giles’ Big Day had got substantially bigger…

I didn’t have any editing equipment, so I just shot and shot and shot and stacked the film away under my bed. Although I knew that it wasn’t finished, I was still, at the time, thinking in terms of a ten- to fifteen-minute film.

Eventually I took a week’s leave from work – I was only allowed three weeks off each year – went to the Film Unit and hired a little machine, called a Pic-sync editor, and a splicer for joining the cut footage and a pair of rewind arms so that I could manually wind back and forth through the film spools. I put the rewind arms on an old plank of wood, which I then clamped onto my parent’s dining-room table – for the week while I was editing, they had to eat off their laps in the lounge!

I had shot four hours of film and – by the end of the week – ended up with 55 minutes of edited footage. I was amazed, I’d no idea we had something that was almost already an hour long…There was a moment where I debated trying to cut it back down to the original ten- to fifteen-minutes, because I knew that there was always a possibility of showing a short movie at film festivals. On the other hand, no one would want a picture that ran for an hour – there was no market for it. It was a pivotal moment, but I figured, ‘I’ve only got another half an hour to go and I’ll have a full-length feature!’ So, all of a sudden, Giles’ Big Day was going to be a feature film…I was shocked, because I’d never even considered the idea until that point.

If the little amateur movie was now to run to feature-film length then clearly an injection of cash was required to make that possible. To date, Giles’ Big Day had cost $8,500 (of which Peter had invested $8,000 and Ken Hammon $500) and Peter decided to turn for help to the New Zealand Film Commission. The founding of the Commission, less than a decade before, had been based on a series of proposals written on behalf of the Cultural Branch of the Department of Internal Affairs by Jim Booth, later assistant director of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand and a man who was to play a significant role in the shaping of Peter Jackson’s career.

Jim Booth’s proposals were for a Film Commission that would be totally ‘market-orientated’ as opposed to the government-sponsored film-making undertaken by the National Film Unit (where, as a schoolleaver Peter had gone in search of employment) or the funding of experimental films, which was to be left to the Arts Council.

The Film Commission was to be run ‘strictly on an investment basis with an eye very firmly on the market’, investing in the production of films – for television and theatre – that, in addition to generating income, would provide ‘cinematograph expressions particular to New Zealand’ as opposed to what was seen as being a ‘largely unrelieved diet of films from foreign cultures.’ In addition it was hoped that such films would ‘do much to announce the existence of New Zealand to the world at large’.

Jim Booth, the author of these plans, had become Executive Director of the New Zealand Film Commission in 1983 and it was two years later – on 18th January 1985 – that a fifty-five-minute videotape and a nineteen-page document entitled Giles’ Big Day arrived on his desk from a ‘Peter Robert Jackson (copyright owner)’ who was applying for $7,000 ‘to assist the completion of filming on a low-budget 16mm Feature Film’. On the following page, the applicant refined that definition to ‘Ultra low budget,’ and went on: ‘I would be tempted to call it zero-budget if it hadn’t been for the fact that I’ve put $8,000 of my own money into it.’

It was to be the beginning of an exchange of correspondence that would eventually bring about a break-through in Peter’s long-held ambitions to be a film-maker, but which, again and again, demonstrate the extent to which the determination and tenacity that would become hallmarks of the Jackson personality were already firmly established.

Peter’s letters to Jim show him to have been a young man with strongly held views that he was not afraid of expressing, with belief in his skills and abilities – articulated with self-affirming confidence but also a total absence of arrogance – and with a positive, upbeat philosophy of life that was undimmed by momentary disappointment. The occasional typos and spelling errors have been corrected – ‘(excuse the mistakes)’ he added in pen at the bottom of the nineteenth page – the italics, where used, are my own.

By way of introduction, Peter offered the following self-portrait: ‘I am 23 years old and all I want to do is make movies. I’ve always been keen on films, especially ones of the fantasy/horror genres. Special

My bedroom in my early twenties, already starting to groan under the weight of geekdom books and videos.

effects have long been a fascination, ever since being exposed to Thunderbirds at the age of 5. All I wanted to be when I was a little boy was a special effects man. Fortunately I didn’t just dream, I grabbed Plasticine and started making monsters and masks when I was still at Pukerua Bay Primary School. It is this grounding that I’m finding so useful now…’

Of the film he was attempting to make, Peter wrote: ‘The movie is science-fiction/horror film with large doses of extremely black humour, some of which is quite tasteless. It is science-fiction but not in the connotations that most people have with that term (i.e. Star Wars, Doctor Who etc.) The horror is mainly in the gore field. We sacrificed potential “scariness” for humour at an early stage…’

As his mother would later report: ‘I didn’t think it would be quite so gory as what it is, but then as Peter said: “There’s a laugh with every drop of blood, Mum. There are laughs…” I know him very well, he’s always had a great sense of humour, I think that’s his forte, but he covered it with horror, too…’

Despite its laughs, Peter stressed that the story, had ‘its moments of suspense’ and was ‘aimed directly at the Monty Python/Animal House punters, as well as the standard sci-fi/horror buff. Someone who goes to Friday the 13th to enjoy eight inventive murders will have plenty to drool over in our film.’ Lest the concept of drooling over grisly deaths strike a wrong chord, he added a disclaimer of the kind usually displayed on films in connection with the treatment of animals: ‘Having said that, I must make the point that NO women get killed or threatened in the film.’ His point, and it is the redeeming feature of the eventual messiness that is Bad Taste, was that not only were its horrors tempered by humour, but that the film could in no way be accused of being exploitational.

Peter provided details of those involved in the project and what, to date, had been achieved. ‘Continually giving up Sundays over such a long period of time is a lot to expect of a fairly large group, and it is to everyone’s credit that interest and enthusiasm has hardly waned since the start. In fact it is stronger than ever now as in the last couple of months everyone has suddenly realised that it is GETTING SERIOUS.’

However, he went on to explain, he was now facing problems: the film contained a great many special effects and he simply did not have the time during the week to get everything made and ready for the following Sunday’s shoot and the other guys in the group couldn’t assist either because they didn’t live close enough to ‘pop around’, had wives and families to think about or lived in flats that didn’t have sufficient space to work. ‘Above all is the simple fact that the work is so complex and requires a knowledge of materials and techniques that takes a long time to develop, as well as a fairly high level of artistic skill.’

Lest the point hadn’t been clearly enough expressed, he added – using words that have a prophetic ring when one remembers the level of personal control exercised over every facet of the filming of The Lord of the Rings – ‘I also like to be in complete control of the look and quality of the stuff that goes on screen.’

One can only speculate on the picture of Peter Jackson which must have begun to form in the mind of Jim Booth, before he even reached ‘The Proposal’ which was for $7,000 to enable him to take four months unpaid leave and work on ‘the extensive make-up and visual effects that form the last thirty-five minutes of our already partially completed feature.’

The figure proposed comprised $4,200 for sixty rolls of film and $2,800 which would give him $175 a week for sixteen weeks: a sum that would be spent on board and keep to his parents and the purchasing of essential materials: ‘paint, timber, latex, fibreglass, and sundries like glue, screws, cables etc.’ Although it was apparently not possible to give a detailed breakdown of these costs, Peter, happily announced, ‘All I know is that $175 per week will be quite adequate to produce the goodies I’ve got in mind.’

About one thing, Peter was adamant: ‘A loan of the type that has to be repaid within twelve months, or whatever, is something I have no interest in. I have enough on my plate getting the film finished without having to worry about big debts…I realise that the whole financial aspect of producing a feature film is something I am going to have to face up to at some stage, with legal agreements, copyrights and everything else involved sorted out, but I want to shield myself from that side of things as much as possible until we have completed filming. It is far more important for me to concentrate on next Sunday’s camera angles, with as few distractions as possible.’

A detailed synopsis of the ‘Plot – Part One (filmed)’ ran to five pages while ‘Part Two (unfilmed)’ took up six pages, which really ought to have suggested that the action described was likely to run for somewhat longer than the promised thirty-five minutes! The action-packed conclusion of the film featured Giles making a crazy thrill-ride escape down the gully of a stream (inspired by a scene in Romancing the Stone), an elaborate sequence involving an alien spaceship, a flying ‘chair type thing’, and an encounter with a ‘vaguely humanoid creature’ that would have been brought to life with stop-frame animation. Called ‘the feared Troppe Marcher of Om’, it was described as ‘standing there, all seven feet and pointy teeth’! The dénouement saw Giles defeating the Troppe Marcher, destroying the aliens and their spacecraft and concluded with the revelation that even though he lost his job (having failed to collect sufficient charity

The vomit drinking scene. I had somebody help me mix the green gloop, which I’d prepared with food colouring, yoghurt and diced vegetables. I remember taking a look at it and suggesting to somebody it needed thickening up. Unbeknownst to me, they went into the garden and added handfuls of dirt – unbeknownst to them, I needed it to be consumed by our hungry aliens, so they all ended up drinking something similar to thick green mud. I had no idea why people complained about the horrible taste!

donations) ‘AT LEAST HE HAD THE SATISFACTION OF KNOWING THAT HE HAD SAVED THE WORLD.’

‘Well that’s it!’ wrote Peter. ‘Can we do it? Yes, there is nothing there that I have not got figured out.’ However bizarre this application must read, its author sounded supremely confident and disarmingly candid:

‘I think I’ve summed the whole thing up fairly well. I’ve been honest and not tried to pretend we’re something we’re not. If you decide to support us you must realise that you’re dealing with amateur film-makers that do not fit into the standard guidelines and film production methods established in this country. I have not made any wild claims or boasts about the film’s prospects. Just how successful we have been…will be over to you to decide when you view the video.’

There was a ‘Last Word’, anticipating and answering any potential criticisms of Giles’ Big Day: ‘One subject I would like to touch upon is the question of “Is it culture?” Yes, it is. Cinema is an art form, and art is culture. I will get rather angry if people get on their high horse when this film comes out and moan about it not being a proper New Zealand Film, or that we “shouldn’t make these types of films here”. I’m a New Zealander and proud of it. I have every right to make whatever film I please and it is just as much a New Zealand Film as anyone else’s. If I like horror films then I’ll make horror films. If anyone objects then they should get off their bum and make their own film.’

‘I’ve just about typed myself dry…’ Peter concluded, but there was no doubting his conviction and commitment: ‘If you decide that you cannot support us the film will still be made. I will stay at work and continue to film in my spare time. I’ve committed far too much money to it, to back down now. The production of a feature film in your spare time is, as you can imagine, a mammoth undertaking especially while working full-time in another job that is also full of its own pressures and deadlines. I have said with pride many times that we’re making a movie “with no help from anyone,” but now the pressure is beginning to tell, and I’m worried that the quality of the film will suffer. And that would be the greatest pity of all.’

The six weeks Peter waited for a reply from the Film Commission must have seemed interminable. When it came it was disappointing. ‘We very much admire your enthusiasm, energy and dedication…’ wrote Jim Booth, ‘But (and it is a big “but”), we do not think that we can assist you financially with this project. In the end, neither the film as shot, or the effects, are up to the standard which would see the Commission obtain a return on its investment.’

Peter’s initial response seems to have been one of disillusionment. He wanted to know what, precisely, was wrong with the way in which the film had been shot – and was, not surprisingly, wounded by the slur on the quality of his precious special effects. Unable to bring himself to speak with Jim Booth in person – ‘He assumed the role of my nemesis and I was too scared to speak with him’ – Peter delegated Ken Hammon to make a telephone call to the Film Commission in order to get a more detailed critique. Three weeks later, Peter was ready to reply…

I realise now, looking back, that my stubbornness was evident even then, because I kept right on shooting my movie and bombarded Jim with another seven-page diatribe telling him how stupid the Film Commission were to have turned me down!

It was, actually, an eight-page diatribe! It began innocuously: ‘Thanks for your letter and the consideration that you obviously gave our proposal. As you can imagine, an air of disappointment was wafting about for a while, but it soon passed.’ Peter was also careful to keep open future lines of communication: ‘We are going to need plenty of help from the Film Commission in the next year, in terms of advice and information…’ (No mention, wisely, of money) ‘…so we would certainly like to keep you up to date with the project.’ Peter then added a defiant declaration of his intention to see the project through to completion: ‘After all, it will one day stand as a “New Zealand Feature”’.

Then the lecture began! Peter tackled Jim Booth’s reservations about the quality of the film. Giles’ Big Day, Peter said, was not intended to compete with Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon but with movies such as Fiend and Deadly Spawn: ‘Our sole aim…has been to produce an addition to the ever-growing range of zero-budget, schlock gore video tapes, proven video favourites worldwide… I’m not claiming our film to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I do think it will at least “stand out from the bunch”. It has pace that few of these films can match, good intelligent humour and the New Zealand locations give it a fresh look [that is] well away from American suburbia or log cabins.’

With every paragraph pounded out on the typewriter, Peter revealed his wide-ranging knowledge of cinema (his examples are of both Hollywood and New Zealand films) and his intimate understanding of a specific film genre that he clearly thought was unknown territory to Mr Booth of the Film Commission:

‘A film like Kramer vs. Kramer or Smash Palace must perform on many levels to succeed. The script must be excellent, the acting of a very high standard, the photography and sound completely professional. The stern gaze of the critics and public are on the film. If the acting is poor, or the direction sloppy, the whole thing falls apart and the film becomes a bit of a joke. With our type of horror gore film none of this really matters because the film is already a joke. Nobody takes them seriously, nor are they meant to. When I make this film, I’m saying to the audience: “Look, you know this is rubbish, and I know this is rubbish, so let’s just unhook our brains and enjoy ourselves. ” Of course, there are people who don’t see it like that, and they are either the people who hate horror films, or the critics who put the most pretentious or Freudian meanings to every scene…’

There followed a further two pages of close argument, drawing parallels with such movies as Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and other films that had proved to be ‘just as welcome in “art-house’ cinemas as in any video shop, showing that “sleazy gore films” can achieve a certain critical respect as well.’ To which comment he added, as a bracketed throw-way: ‘(Not that it really concerns me.)’

In Jim Booth’s letter, the Film Commission’s Executive Director had sought to explain how the Commission worked: ‘We operate in a manner similar to a merchant bank and we have to be as confident as possible that our funds have a chance of being recouped from the sale of the finished product…’

It was something that, by page six, Peter was ready to tackle head-on: ‘This business about the Commission being in it for the money. Frankly this came as a surprise to me, considering some of the films that you have been associated with in the past. I realise that things are pretty grim in the film industry at the moment, with government support for the Commission slipping away. I guess that you are faced with the prospect of largely supporting yourselves from investment returns etc., so I can understand your caution…’ Peter was, he now readily admits, an angry young man:

Using my parent’s typewriter on the kitchen table, I’d be sitting there, late into the night, writing these interminable letters, exacting my anger on the Film Commission for turning me down!

The letter continued: ‘We were not asking for, nor did we expect, charity…I really hope that in the future there will come a time when there is enough money to spare to give enthusiastic young film-makers a go, without the burden of expecting an immediate financial return.’

‘I certainly feel better,’ Peter confessed ‘having got all that off my chest!’ having done so, he felt free to adopt a slightly more conciliatory tone:

‘Reading back over what I have written, there are a couple of comments I think I should make. I’ve felt very awkward writing this, since there’s a danger of becoming precious, of sounding like a pupil lecturing the teacher. However, after spending every day for two years with this film constantly on my mind, not to mention the back-breaking work spent on it, I’m sure you will understand my determination to defend it where I think such defence is justified. You may not agree with the points I have made, but I hope it has given you a much better idea of exactly what we are aiming for. I have tried to make my comments as well balanced and constructive as possible.

‘The other point I want to make is that this is neither a “sour grapes” letter, nor a “Please Mr Booth, give us another chance” letter. I hope it has not given that impression. I’m a person that believes that everything happens for the best and the fact that we are on our own could well be advantageous for both us and the film…As things have worked out, I now have complete freedom to film what I want, with my own money, happy in the knowledge that I don’t have to put up with a lot of moans about “public money being spent on such shocking trash”.

‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘there will be complaints when the film comes out, but they can only help the box-office, since the horror film regarded as “notorious” are usually the more successful ones.’ Think of all that money you are passing up, he seems to be saying and then disarmingly adds, ‘There may have been a fair amount of flak coming the way of the Commission too, so it lets us both off the hook.’

Peter’s concluding remark betrays a dogged – almost defiant – belief in self-determining success: ‘I hope this letter has cleared up any misconceptions that you may have had about what we are trying to achieve…If you hear or read anything about us in the next year or so, then at least you will know what it’s all about.’

Jim Booth took ten days to reply and when he did it was, on the face of it, not particularly encouraging: he heard, though didn’t necessarily accept, the parallels with such films as The Evil Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and stood by his belief that the quality of what he had so far seen was simply not good enough, particularly in view of what he believed were increasing demands in the video market for ‘higher standards’.

Before signing off, however, Jim Booth offered the chance to reappraise the project with a non-committal suggestion that some future assistance might be forthcoming: ‘I am sure you are right when you say that the go-it-alone principle will be beneficial to achieving your aims and if we can look at the film when you have completed it to its full gory glory we can see whether we could help at post production stage.’

Reading this correspondence with hindsight, it is impossible to overlook a specific argument offered by Peter and responded to by Jim. ‘Something worth mentioning,’ Peter had written, ‘is the status that some films have as “cult films”. A cult film, particularly a cheap one, often becomes a huge financial success due to the repeat viewings from a group of hard-core fans. While I would be reluctant to make any such claims about Giles being “cult material”, I think it contains many of the elements of the cult film, and it stands up well to repeat viewings. Only time will tell…’

‘I’m afraid we often get the argument about “cult films”,’ replied Jim, ‘but they are in fact the very rare exception – the ones that get some kind of lucky break.’

He didn’t know it yet, but he was the very person destined to give Peter Jackson and his would-be ‘cult-film’ just such a lucky break – but not quite yet…

Signing off his letter, Jim Booth wrote, ‘No doubt we will be hearing from you at a later date.’ When he did hear, four months later in July 1985, it was in another lengthy letter (six pages this time) recounting the most extraordinary tangled tale: ‘As I promised last time,’

Peter began, ‘a further update on the progress we are making with our rather tasteless, low-budget 16mm feature…’

Peter Jackson was, without doubt, a born storyteller with a thriller-writer’s understanding of the power of suspense! ‘Just before I get into my stride,’ he went on, ‘ an apology for the overpowering typing…’ Indeed, unlike his previous epistles – in which the typing had a feint, almost ghostly, quality – the present letter was so inky that every ‘a’ and ‘e’ was no more than a blob! He duly explained, ‘New ribbon! (I think I might have got the wrong sort.)’

Only then did he take up his story:

‘Hopefully you can recall the basic plans we had and the video that you saw containing the first hour for our movie, Giles’ Big Day. If you can’t, don’t worry since you may as well forget it anyway. In the last three or four months the whole thing has gone through a complete facelift, leaving the version you saw rather outdated. Before I detail the changes, I’ll briefly explain why it happened…’

It transpired that Peter had arranged to take two weeks leave from work in April, the month after receiving the Film Commission’s refusal of his grant application, in order to build the considerable number of models and props required for the final part of the film. ‘We mapped out a shooting schedule so I’d know what to make first and if I remember right we had hoped to have completed filming…around about now. However, it was not to be.’

On the Sunday before Peter was due to begin his leave, he had planned to take a location-recce with Ken Hammon and Craig Smith in order to block out the scenes. As Peter explained to Jim Booth, they never got around to making their trip…

‘Craig broke the news that he wasn’t very happy with the amount of gore in the film and could we please tone it down. On further discussion it became clear that it wasn’t exactly toning down he wanted, but the removal of all violence and gore! As you can imagine…this was a bit like saying, “You can film Ben-Hur so long as you don’t have

Craig’s departure from Bad Taste. He allowed himself to be ‘written out’ in a gory way. At the time, I just shot some random footage, having no idea how I would end up using it and how it would shape the finished movie. It was a big problem.

anyone wearing a toga!” Without the “good bits” we’d have a real turkey on our hands.’

The personal circumstances that had led Craig to this decision were less sudden than it must have seemed on that Sunday morning when he delivered his ultimatum. ‘At the time,’ says Craig, ‘it seemed like the right thing to do. I had serious health problems: I was hooked on prescription drugs, was drinking heavily and was pretty much f***** in the brain. After several months of some of the worst experiences, I became involved with some devout Pentecostalists who, as they saw it, were trying to drag me over to the light. Frankly, I was at war within myself and my involvement with the film came to seem like another of those things that I needed to change…’

To Peter, the announcement was little short of devastating:

This turn of events was a real bombshell to me. As I sunk back in my chair all I could see was eight grand, in used twenties, floating down in front of my eyes. My next fairly coherent thought was “Thank God we didn’t get the Film Commission grant”. We would have been in a very awkward position.

Peter and Ken attempted to ‘reason’ with Craig – ‘the discussion was full of deep and meaningful theology and the whole thing should have been broadcast on Credo’ – but it was to no avail. Eventually, they reached an understanding:

I explained to him that we had a bunch of really nasty aliens on our hands and they had to be disposed of somehow. What did he think would happen to religion if they were allowed to take over the world? He relented a bit and said that he would kill them on screen, so long as they were only shot. Pointy things like axes, knives and bayonets were a no-no, and chainsaws were Right Out! I tried to make him see that more gory methods of killing off the alien baddies gave us far more scope for humour, thereby making a joke of the film. Shooting them was dull and in many respects more cold-blooded. However, he was quite adamant.

In the end, it simply came down to a situation where an actor was trying to control what a writer/director does with his film. Even to a photoengraver like myself, that was pretty hard to take. However noble his motives may have been, I wasn’t going to allow him to censor what I wanted to do.

Recalling what was a difficult time, Craig Smith (for whom religion would later prove ‘a phase’ which he ‘got over’), says of Peter’s attitude: ‘I was, at the time quite sincere about my moral stand – on one occasion, I’d even dragged Ken along to a revival meeting out of serious concerns for his immortal soul! I honestly believe that Peter tried to understand where I was coming from and, remarkably in view of what had happened, remained a friend despite having left him with a serious headache.’ As Peter put it at the time: ‘I always have respect for other people’s beliefs, no matter what they are, so I couldn’t get too angry with Craig.’

In passing, Peter hinted that the blame for Craig’s decision might have been laid at the door of the Film Commission! ‘I think he took the rejection of our grant application a little harder than the rest of us,’ Peter told Jim. ‘The idea of another year or so of filming on a rejected movie must have been a little depressing for him and he may have opted for the easy way out. I don’t altogether blame him. At times I wish I had an easy way out as well! Still, whatever his motives, one thing was sure: he had a rotten sense of timing.’

Peter finally agreed to write Craig out of the film and Craig agreed to shoot for a couple more days in order to make sense of the plot changes – although, at that moment the director had to confess, he ‘didn’t even know what the plot of my own film now was!’ Worst of all was the frustration of ‘blowing two weeks leave just sitting around the house thinking.’ After all, as he wryly pointed out: ‘That was something that I could have done just as well at work or on the train!’

After taking several long walks over the hills above Pukerua Bay, ‘trying to get inspiration from somewhere’, Peter finally had it ‘all sorted out’. Giles would be killed during the escape from Gear Homestead and the S.A.S. men who had previously turned out to be aliens would no longer be either S.A.S. or aliens, but ‘a special task force set up to monitor and react to any U.F.O. activities’.

When, years later, the recasting of the role of Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings resulted in a lot of last-minute rescheduling, there were those who expressed surprise at Peter’s apparent calmness in the face of what was a major crisis. What they didn’t know was that he had been there before, but could at least console himself with the thought that, unlike Giles’ Big Day, he hadn’t already sixteen months of filmed footage in the can.

By the time he was writing to the Film Commission, Peter had cut ten minutes of footage to make sense of Craig’s scenes that couldn’t now be completed and had worked quite a few new ‘goodies’ into the scenario:

‘The very first scene has one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen in a film and a little later there are some appalling things done with a sledgehammer, however, I won’t go into details here. You’ll just have to wait with mouth-watering anticipation until I’ve got it edited! Despite the gore, I think people will accept it for the black comedy it is. I think both of the scenes that I mentioned above are very funny, but then I might be a trifle warped!’

I figured out a lot of my Bad Taste script problems during long lonely walks over these cliffs. I loved the wild landscape. We used to carry this crane and other equipment up the hills each weekend. Eventually we got sick of that and ended up hiding all the equipment in the bushes, hoping it would still be there whenever we returned in the next few weeks.

Despite the sorry saga he was reporting, Peter was clearly in good spirits: with Mike, Terry and Pete O’Herne, he had taken a week’s leave, during which time they hired a sound camera from the National Film Unit and – having ‘figured out how it worked’ – had, as Peter delightfully put it, embarked on their ‘first ever experience of shooting talking bits’!

The results of these experiments with sync-sound were, the director reported, ‘surprisingly…not TOO bad’! ‘Remember,’ he wrote, ‘that these guys had done all their previous acting wearing balaclavas and shooting people. In these early scenes they are unmasked, in civvies and have to act and talk at the same time!’

It also gave Peter a further opportunity to appear on screen: in addition to playing ‘Robert’, the bearded, bayonet-wielding cannibal-zombie-alien who first attacks Craig in Kaihoro, Peter (sans beard) was now also playing ‘Derek’, a nerdy, buck-toothed ‘alien-buster’, wearing spectacles and a school scarf and out to save the world from an invasion of ‘extraterrestrial psychopaths’. Peter’s comments (in the role of Derek) about himself (in the persona of the alien Robert) are an amusingly apposite piece of character description: ‘There’s something strange about him – like he’s got a screw loose or something…’

Whilst Craig’s sudden departure from Bad Taste is widely known to fans, Terry also asked to be written out. He was emigrating to Australia and couldn’t carry on, so I devised and shot an Ozzy death scene, which involved a basic impalement through the body with a metal spike. Several months later, Terry arrived back from an unhappy time in Oz and offered to rejoin the group. Fortunately things had not advanced that far in his absence, and I wrote him back in as if he’d never left!

Doubtless there were times when people, witnessing the filming of Bad Taste, must have thought that they all had a screw or two loose!

Playing two roles eventually

led to Peter engaging in a cliff-top fight with himself, perilously filmed above Pukerua Bay. As Peter would later tell the fan-site, The Bastards Have Landed (named from Bad Taste’s defining quote), whilst the scene was most certainly dangerous, the results were less spectacular than he had envisaged: ‘I was always disappointed with the footage, because it felt way more scary being there, than it looked on film!’

The fight – in which Peter was seen both bearded and clean-shaven – was shot in two sessions with the best part of a year between, rather as Elijah Wood and Sean Astin would eventually film their scene on the Cirith Ungol stairs in The Return of the King, while the fact that Ken Hammon was required to stand in for back-of-the-head-shots of Robert (or Derek as the case may be) meant that the sequence was filmed in a similar way to some of the scenes in The Lord of the Rings involving scale doubles. Unlike many moviemakers, whatever Peter Jackson asks or expects of an actor, the chances are he has sometime done something similar himself!

Nevertheless, the overall situation with Giles’ Big Day was scarcely any less serious than when Peter had first approached the Film Commission: several more months work, an investment of a further $3,000 and still only an hour of completed film. It was, he said, ‘a bit like running on a treadmill.’ That said, he was convinced that it had all worked out for the best.

‘Peter has always had confidence,’ says Ken Hammon, ‘he’s always been optimistic. He has an unwavering sense that things will always work out.’ Or as Craig Smith puts it: ‘Peter was always going to be a film-maker. Failure was simply not an option.’

Moreover, as Peter told Jim Booth, he considered the new version of the film as nothing short of an improvement:

‘The revamping of the film was a situation that was forced on me. I would like to say that I did it of my own choosing, but I can’t. It was the best thing that ever happened to the film. It made me look at the project from a different vantage point and it was only then that I saw it for what it was and was able to chop out the dead wood and inject new life into it. A valuable lesson has been learned.’

It had indeed and it was one not easily forgotten…

As for Craig Smith, he takes a similar line, albeit from a self-mocking perspective: ‘By taking my moral stand, it turned it into a damn sight better film. So, really, if it hadn’t been for me…!’

Only one issue remained – apart from the need for money – and that was the title: Giles’ Big Day was clearly no longer appropriate. ‘After much banging of our heads,’ wrote Peter, ‘we finally came up with the moniker Bad Taste. This seems to sum it all up rather well. It has a double meaning. Not only does it describe the aesthetic qualities of the film, but [also] works in with the main plot device of a bunch of aliens with a taste for human meat…The other name that we considered for a while was Dirty Creatures, but Bad Taste it will be.’

Bad Taste it was; and, when eventually completed, it would prove to be the film that launched the professional movie-making career of Peter Jackson.