Читать книгу Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey - Brian Sibley - Страница 9

‘All of a sudden, out of the gloom, leaped this damn great gorilla!’ Bob Lewis, manager of the processing department of Wellington Newspapers, was minding his own business, passing the camera darkrooms, when he found himself unexpectedly confronted by an enormous ape. Convincing though it looked – and it was scarily authentic – the simian attacker was, in fact, only a man in a costume. At the time, he was just Peter Jackson, one of the paper’s photoengravers; later, however, he would become Peter Jackson, film director, whose movie projects would include a remake of that classic monster-movie, King Kong.

Peter had begun making the gorilla costume whilst recuperating from the operation on the pilonidal cyst that had developed following his accident amongst the rock-pools, whilst playing Sinbad. Made of rubber and covered in hair, the ape suit was a highly impressive piece of work. One day, ‘for fun’ he decided to wear it into work. His first ‘victim’ was his manager, Bob (‘Mr’) Lewis: ‘I guess Peter thought,

TOP RIGHT: My finished gorilla suit. It was never used in a movie but it started a series of life-changing events. bottom right: Building my gorilla suit in my bedroom. It was made from carved foam and glued together with carpet glue and latex. I was sleeping in a cloud of fumes every night. I think every Famous Monsters-inspired kid who has experimented with building monsters has similar stories to tell. I’m sure it alarmed my parents, who must have been copping the fumes as well since our house was so small.

“Let’s see if we can give the boss a fright,” and he certainly succeeded because I must have jumped a foot in the air!’

News of Peter’s escapade percolated up to the journalists on the Evening Post, who decided it would make a fun story. Staff photographer, Ian Mackley, snapped Peter in costume, emerging from the bushes onto the roadside near his home in Pukerua Bay. The photograph, which included a passing car (with presumably a seriously baffled driver!) eventually ended up on the front page of the Post under the headline ‘PETER THE APE MAKES THEM GAPE’!

This startling image happened to catch the eye of Paul Dulieu, a props buyer on a television series entitled Worzel Gummidge Down Under. Based on the characters in Barbara Euphan Todd’s popular books about ‘The Scarecrow of Scatterbrook Farm’, the series had originated on British television in 1979. Written by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall (of Billy Liar fame) Worzel Gummidge starred former ‘Dr Who’, Jon Pertwee, as the scarecrow and Una Stubbs as Aunt Sally, his temperamental inamorata.

In 1986, Worzel was given a new lease of life ‘down under’ with Pertwee and Stubbs reprising their roles in two twelve-episode series. A two-part story in the first series (‘Two Heads Are Better Than One’ and ‘Worzel to the Rescue’), involved a sinister character called The Traveller, some spooky voodoo-rituals and a couple of zombie-scarecrows – an appropriate storyline to have involved Peter Jackson!

As a result of the photograph in the Post, this guy Paul Dulieu called me up and asked if I would be interested in making a couple of rubber voodoo dolls that were required for the scenes in which the Traveller enslaves Worzel. Later, they were required to burst into flame when Worzel’s guardian, The Crowman, rescues the scarecrow and releases him from the enchantment.

I couldn’t believe it! This was my first contact with real film people and it was the most exciting moment for me. I remember Paul Dulieu coming to our house and meeting my mum and dad. He asked me: ‘How much do you want for these things?’ I was rather nervous: I’d never talked about money with anyone like that – in fact, I’d never done anything where anyone was prepared to pay me! – so I really didn’t

A key moment in my life. My first encounter with ‘professional’ film-making was these little latex voodoo dolls I made for Worzel Gummidge Down Under. They came directly from my gorilla suit being featured in the newspaper, and in turn led to me meeting a whole series of people who would change my life, both professionally and personally.

know what to ask. In the end I said something like: ‘Oh, about $25…’ And he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a big wad of notes and peeled off a hundred bucks and said: ‘Now, look, here’s a hundred dollars – I’ve got this money so you might as well take it!’

That was the first professional income I ever earned from films…

Paul Dulieu invited Peter to visit the set of Worzel Gummidge Down Under, which was on location in the Hutt Valley, and so he drove down to take a look at what was going on. That visit would result in several significant encounters, the first of which was with Costa Botes, a name that Peter immediately recognised from having read his regular film reviews in The Dominion.

I was a little starstruck when I met the unit’s Third AD. This lowly position is the guy who stops traffic between takes, but I knew his name from his Dominion reviews. When Costa asked what I was doing and I said: ‘Oh, I’ve been making a movie…’ I told him how I’d shot seventyfive

One of the first results of my gorilla building was my parents offering to build a workshop for me under the house. Dad and I built it together – that’s the workshop on the lower right – and my parents got a nice patio out of it too

minutes of footage and had asked the Film Commission for financial help but had been turned down, that it was all rather depressing but that I was still boxing on, trying to finish the film. He seemed genuinely interested and actually asked if he could see the footage. I was a little nervous, since I’d been reading his film columns for a few years. It was one of those memorable moments – my first visit to a real movie set, and somebody wants to see my film.

I also noticed a pretty young woman sitting in the corner of a greenhouse talking about the script with Bruce Phillips, the actor who played The Crowman. I didn’t know who she was or what her job was, and I didn’t even get to meet her on that day, but I’ll always remember the fact that she made a striking impression on me, with her long black hair.

She was Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall’s New Zealand Script Consultant on the first Worzel Gummidge series and her name was Frances F. Walsh.

Costa recalls: ‘My first impression of Peter was of a rather bedraggled, shaggy-looking guy, wearing an awful cardigan (like Starsky used to wear in Starsky and Hutch) and a backpack. I hadn’t heard Peter’s name, but I had read something in the local film journal, Onfilm, about a bunch of loonies shooting a movie out at Pukerua Bay.’

The coverage in Onfilm had been a piece of publicity that Peter had managed to get for Bad Taste at a time when the group were feeling somewhat less than buoyant:

It was tough going on Bad Taste: we’d been shooting for years and had failed to get any official support. I thought it would provide a morale-booster for everybody if we were mentioned in what was a film industry journal. So, I wrote to Onfilm, told them what we were doing and sent them some photos and they printed a cool little story. It was the first ever bit of press about the making of Bad Taste – suddenly the fact that this movie was in production was ‘official’!

It also represented the first official announcement of the ‘film company’ making Bad Taste. Once Peter had started filming on 16mm, the exposed footage had to be sent off to the laboratory to be developed, accompanied by a form that had a space for the name of the production company. Filling in the form to go with the first reel of film, Peter had to make a decision: did he leave that part of the form blank or did he pick a name for himself?

I didn’t want anything that sounded too pretentious or self-important, like ‘Imperial Pictures’, so I decided to come up with something that sounded really dumb! I settled on the stupid name, ‘WingNut’.

The inspiration came from…a rabbit! Mike Minett had a pet rabbit which he had named ‘Wingnut’, because its big floppy ears had reminded him of the flared sides – or ‘wings’ – with which you loosen or tighten a wingnut. Apart from its literal meaning, ‘a wingnut’ has also long been a slang expression for a person with sticking-out ears or someone whose behaviour is a bit crazy or off-the-wall. In any event, Mike took Wingnut the rabbit into work to give it to his boss to take home and keep. Sadly, a few weeks later, the rabbit had an encounter with a ferret from which it didn’t survive. But, happily, its name is now memorialised as one of the most successful film production companies in the world!

This is Wingnut. For a few days he was kept as a pet in our photoengraving department at the newspaper. We made his pen from my favourite cardboard boxes. He disappeared as quickly as he arrived and I know little about him, but I stole his name for my film company.

The workshop coincided with work picking up on Bad Taste after Craig’s departure. Probably four or five months had gone by without any filming going on. For a while it felt like another project started but destined never to finish. The fact that I had never really finished a movie really concerned me and certainly fuelled my determination to complete Bad Taste, even though it had now changed from ten-minute short to feature film. Here I’m making a head cast in my new workspace, having decided I didn’t like the alien designs done a couple of years earlier.

Wingnut made his appearance at the Post around the time that I was trying to think of a name to fill in on the laboratory forms and ‘WingNut Films’ seemed nice and dumb! My only edict was to make WingNut one word with a capital ‘N’ in the middle.

The news item in the ‘Short Ends’ column of the August 1985 edition of Onfilm carried a photograph of a scene from Bad Taste being filmed on the cliffs at Pukerua Bay, with Pete O’Herne in front of the camera, Peter Jackson behind it and Dean Lawrie managing the soundrecording equipment. ‘WingNut Films,’ ran the text, ‘at work on Bad Taste, a sci-fi/horror 90-minute 16mm feature for the video market, described as “A mindless movie for the discerning armchair mercenary”

I met Costa Botes on the Worzel set, which led to a Bad Taste cameo for him and a lot of advice, assistance and introductions for me.

This is the photo I sent to OnFilm magazine, our local trade paper. At the time, I wanted to give the guys a morale boost, and seeing our project in print for the first time certainly made it seem real. By now, I had figured out and written a new storyline to use as much existing footage as possible.

…begun in October 1983 and worked on every Sunday since.’

The item gave details of those involved – billing Peter as producer, writer and director – and went on: ‘Although the team are all newcomers and part-timers working without pay, Jackson stresses it is not “some sort of Mickey Mouse home movie”, as it has already cost $10,000 (of their own money), and he estimates final budget at $30,000.’ This was the piece that had caught Costa Botes’ eye: ‘I remember laughing and thinking, “What is all that about?”’ Anyway, I got chatting with this guy who showed up on the Worzel Gummidge set – because when you talk to someone who is really into movies you almost always hit it off – and when he mentioned the fact that he was making a film at the weekends, I put two and two together and figured out that he was one of those loonies I’d been reading about!’

The film had continued to go through various ups and downs: there were precious film days lost due to bad weather and, for Peter, the frustration of having to compete with rival obligations on the part of some members of the team…

There was a social soccer club at the Evening Post and Terry Potter and Mike Minett, who were sporting guys, were members of the team. It was often the case that I couldn’t do any filming on a Sunday until the afternoon, because they’d be playing a match in the morning. That bloody soccer club was the bane of my life! I still remember one day, spent at Gear House, waiting for any of the guys to show up. I had the film gear, props and costumes. My parents dropped me off at 9.00am, and came back at 5.00pm to collect me. I was still sitting in the same spot. None of the guys had made it, and in the days before mobile phones I had no idea. I just sat there all day, waiting for anybody to show up, and no one did. I was almost in tears in the car driving home.

Various comings and goings, over the years, continued to ensure that the scenario for Bad Taste remained somewhat flexible. Terry Potter spent some time in Australia, but later returned to New Zealand and rejoined the project as, sometime during mid-1986, did the film’s original leading actor, Craig Smith, whose marriage had come to an end and who was now free of his dependency on alcohol, prescription drugs and religious convictions.

At the same time that Stephen Sinclair called me, we were welcoming Craig back into the Bad Taste team. His role as Giles had stayed in the film, although in an altered form, but he was game for anything. Here Cameron Chittock is strapping him into an alien costume.

‘When I decided to leave the team,’ says Craig, ‘the plan had been for Giles to die during the escape from Gear House and we filmed me being impaled on a tree branch. When, a year later, “the prodigal son” returned to the fold, the death scene was ditched – Peter cut away just before my impaling and Giles survived until the end of the film. I went back to doing all the jobs I had been doing previously, plus donning alien costumes from time to time – the only real change was that Giles was no longer the central character. I fitted back into the team as though I had never left and it’s a tribute to the boys that, even today, they don’t tease me about it and have made a point of never talking about it to anyone outside the group: it’s always been strictly between us – which shows what a very close-knit group we were and, in many ways, still are.’

In July 1986, following his chance encounter with Peter, Costa Botes arranged to view the Bad Taste footage on a Steenbeck film editor at the National Film Unit. Also present was the producer of Worzel Gummidge, Graham McLean, a former TV director whose credits included The Ray Bradbury Theatre, which had featured numerous moments of terror and suspense; he had also worked as an Assistant Director on a creditable New Zealand horror film, entitled The Scarecrow. Peter has never forgotten that day:

It was a little nerve-wracking…It was the very first time that anyone had seen anything from Bad Taste: I’d never screened it for the guys who were making it – I’d never even shown my parents – it wasn’t finished and it didn’t have an ending…

‘Peter arrived at the Film Unit,’ recalls Costa, ‘and produced a big roll of untidy looking film. We threw the reel onto the Steenbeck and sat and watched this extraordinary mishmash – at times quite brilliant, at times quite odd, but always kind of funny…I remember Graham’s response was a sort of astonished, “What the hell…?” The thing that struck me, however, was that, even though Peter was obviously struggling from a lack of resources, this guy was a very, very good film-maker with an amazing facility for putting together action sequences.’

Costa’s recollections of seeing this footage are significant, and a reminder to those who find it hard to make the link between Bad Taste and The Lord of the Rings, that film-making is, as Costa observes, as much about sensibility as it is about subject: ‘You often see amateur films that

My newly revised plot needed the addition of one new character, so Derek was born. I cast myself, having literally run out of friends who could help, and I licking my wounds after Craig left: I figured that at least I would always show up for filming each Sunday!

look amateur, play amateur and don’t go beyond the obvious. But Bad Taste is not like that and I could tell, even from the very early rough-cut, that it was clearly the work of a well-developed talent.

‘Above all, Peter’s sense of humour is what shines through. I only found out later that he was a great fan of silent comedy and of Buster Keaton in particular, and when you view Bad Taste with that in mind you can begin to join up the dots and see that you have a person who is very good with a camera creating comedy out of responsive materials. Peter will take a few bodies and a couple of props, set up a little bit of conflict, and come up with some really good jokes.’

At the end of the screening Costa and Graham McLean wanted to know what Peter was planning to do next: ‘Was he looking to finish it, we asked? Peter said that he was and then stammered out that he had tried to talk to the Film Commission, but they weren’t very interested. I just remember saying to him: “Then you’ve got to go back, you’ve got to actually show them this footage.”’

Fired by their advice, Peter decided to write another letter to the Commission’s Executive Director. Sue Rogers, partner of the late Jim Booth, remembers him talking about his continuing correspondence with the young Peter Jackson: ‘Jim always said that much of the credit for the fact that he finally backed Bad Taste was down to his assistant, Cindy Treadwell, who, whenever she brought a new Jackson missive into Jim’s office, would ask: “When are you going to do something to help this young man?” The fact that Cindy kept on at him encouraged him to encourage Peter.’

Ever since Peter’s riveting account of losing his central character and having to restructure the film previously known as Giles’ Big Day, Jim had tried to suggest (without making any absolute commitments) that the Film Commission door remained open to him: ‘I am very pleased to hear that you are still pushing on with the project,’ he wrote in one letter. ‘I hope you continue to do so and I look forward to seeing the film on the bench when you have an assembly.’ Another letter concluded: ‘I would like to say how much I admire your enthusiasm and dedication to the project and wish you all the best with its future development.’

It was now time for Peter to knock on that door one more time:

‘We have finally got all the early scenes of Bad Taste filmed and edited,’ he now wrote to Jim. ‘In a couple of months we will start shooting the climax…I’m fairly happy with the results we’ve got. I think the seventy-five minutes could be tightened up a bit…and there are a few changes I want to make, but I won’t go into it now. I’ll wait until you’ve seen it and we can have a chat…’

Peter casually mentioned having done ‘a few little special effects things’ for the Worzel Gummidge series and that he had screened the film for Graham McLean and Costa Botes: ‘The comments and advice they gave were very helpful. I think the most pleasing thing was the fact that they found the gore to be very funny, especially Costa, who seems to have the same dark sense of humour as I do…’ Peter ended by saying that he was now looking forward to screening the footage for Jim: ‘You’ve already seen about half of it on the video, however, so much has been changed or tightened up since then that I’m sure you’ll agree that it is much improved…’

That screening eventually took place on the afternoon of 7 August 1986:

I had my first appointment with Jim Booth in the screening-room. I’d had a two-year, somewhat antagonistic, relationship with him but we’d never actually met. When we did, of course, I found he was a really nice guy! I screened the footage and he said: ‘Ah, now I get it! Now, I see what you’re doing! Okay…Let me have a think about it…’

Jim Booth reported his views on Bad Taste to several of his colleagues at the Film Commission. Deputy Chairman (later Chairman) of the Commission, David Gascoigne recalls Jim’s enthusiasm for finding a way to help Peter, if only because, unlike most aspiring film-makers who applied to the Film Commission for a grant, he had already demonstrated his initiative by starting to make the movie on his own. ‘Jim described what he had seen of the film,’ says David, ‘as being raw and rough, but also energetic, vibrant and, in an anarchic way, very funny. He knew, however, that several members of the board were conservatively inclined and unlikely to resonate with some of the images in the film.’

Another introduction via Costa was Stephen Sinclair. After meeting him and enlisting his help in painting sets for Bad Taste, Stephen called me out of the blue and pitched the idea of Braindead. He had developed it as a play but was keen to collaborate with me on a film. My world was suddenly becoming more interesting and exciting: it was a time I’d been dreaming about for fifteen years.

Indeed, Lindsay Shelton, the Commission’s then marketing director, remembers a general response from those to whom Jim described the plot of Bad Taste as being along the lines of ‘You must be joking! Are you seriously suggesting the Film Commission gets involved with this film?’ Another six weeks or so passed and Jim requested a further screening in order to get a report on whether the film could be technically released: ‘Our criterion for providing you with funds would be that we have some realistic chance of recouping that finance from sales.’ Jim also decided to get a second opinion, asking television producer and director, Tony Hiles, to assess Bad Taste’s commercial prospects.

Meanwhile, Costa Botes asked Peter if he could screen the film for a couple of friends who were scriptwriters. The screening was at a production office in Wellington where Costa was editing a short film of his own. When Peter arrived with his reel of Bad Taste under his arm, he was introduced to Costa’s friends: one was playwright, Stephen Sinclair, whose co-authored Ladies Night – about a bunch of unemployed guys who become strippers – had opened to considerable acclaim in 1987. Costa’s other friend was, at that time, Stephen’s partner. ‘I recognised her immediately,’ says Peter. ‘She was the girl with the long dark hair who I’d seen on the Worzel set.’

Fran remembers the impression Peter made on her when they finally met at the screening: ‘At first I thought he was Greek! Or perhaps Italian! He had sallow skin and dark hair. But his name was Jackson so he couldn’t be Greek or Italian! Frankly, I didn’t quite know what to make of him although I immediately took a liking to him: he was just a nice guy, a really nice, funny person; there wasn’t any pretence of any kind, no duplicity and no agendas.’

And what did Fran make of the film? ‘My first impression of Bad Taste was of its being completely uninhibited and unrestrained. True, it didn’t have any really usable sound – you could hardly hear what people were saying – but because it was such a visual piece it didn’t really matter! What was so extraordinary was that, despite having hardly any money, the guys hadn’t allowed that fact to stop them from doing what they wanted to do. That was really impressive and I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t getting supported by the industry.’

Recalling the screening, Costa says: ‘Fran and Stephen shared my own reaction to Bad Taste and to this lunatic fan-boy who had made

Through Costa, I met a great group of local film-makers and writers. I wasted no time in getting them to help me build and paint sets. That’s Fran Walsh in the middle, standing on the chair and wielding a paint brush.

Tony Hiles was wonderful at not only steering me through film-making politics but in rolling his sleeves up and getting stuck in. Here, he and Bryce Campbell ready a smokebelching miniature of Gear Homestead for take-off.

it. I think we all looked on him as a kind of lovely fool, a brilliant idiot, a uniquely talented savant who was capable of coming up with amazing ideas and images. But I have to be honest and say that I really had no inkling, at that point, that he would go on to create cinema with real maturity and depth. Not really. That only became obvious a little later…’

Bad Taste came a step closer to getting Film Commission support when, in September 1986, Tony Hiles submitted his assessment of Bad Taste to Jim Booth. Tony had met with Peter at an editing suite at a company called, appropriately, ‘Mr Chopper’, run by Jamie Selkirk who had worked on Worzel Gummidge and, years later, would pick up an Oscar for editing The Return of the King.

Tony’s first reaction to the film and the film-maker is interesting: ‘Something which impressed me was that whilst the film needed a lot of work, Peter understood that I required specific details and information and, unlike most new film-makers who usually talk too much over their film, he told me exactly – and only – what I needed to know.’

At the end of the screening Tony had decided that he was going to recommend Bad Taste and that he would offer to help produce the film. ‘I had to think carefully about whether to get involved in somebody else’s film, but Jim and I were good pals, and I was always interested in shaking the tree! Besides, how could you not choose to get involved with this crazy little film? I thought “The Boys” were great – I’d never seen such a loose pack of hopeless heroes in my life, but I really wanted to watch them on screen! Bad Taste was new, it was renegade…’

Tony would subsequently write, in defence of the project: ‘The rough-cut that I viewed and assessed was a fair reflection of a film-maker growing through the production process. Despite the shortcomings of the film itself, the story was there and, most important, there was a feeling of inventiveness and cinematographic understanding in Peter Jackson’s work. There were other reasons for my support for the film – it is a product of determination, humour and individualism – no formula stuff here, a thoroughly New Zealand film with strong appeal made by, potentially, a new feature director with a pleasantly nasty sense of humour.’

At the time of filing his assessment, Tony described Bad Taste in the following terms: ‘Potentially, this film could be the Ultimate Low-Budget A+ Splatter and Squelch Movie. So far it has been shot and cut with such an OTT sense of humour and style that it could become a steady earning cult movie – but work needs to be done and it will soon be time for a little professional supervision to move the product economically to completion.’

The ‘school report’ assessment of Peter that followed was particularly revealing for the picture it gives of him at the time: ‘I think Peter Jackson deserves encouragement for his determination and skills. He is a very good special fx maker and, in addition, displays good basic skills in camera operation and editing. Given the constraints under which he has been working, including a re-cut after the departure of his hero, he has already shown himself to be resourceful and dedicated…’

I built a steadicam camera mount using plans from a US home movie magazine, CineMagic. Like the crane, it was a point, shoot, hope for the best device, but ended up working quite well.

Comparing him to one of the success-stories of New Zealand film, Geoff Murphy (who would later serve as Peter’s second unit director on The Lord of the Rings), Tony Hiles described him as ‘one of those people who will make films whether he gets any help or not.’

He went on: ‘I find his attitude worth encouraging – he has plans to get into special effects for film and does not appear to have superbig ideas about himself – a refreshing change from the usual starryeyed tyro who thinks the world owes him a living, or at least enough money to make a film.’

The appraisal ended with a couple of caveats: ‘There is a lot of untangling to be done and it won’t be that quick – but I’m sure it’s worth the effort, especially initially, as this will allow us to find out enough about him to know whether it’s worth continuing.’ And on the subject of money: ‘I recommend that any Film Commission investment is stage by stage, drip-fed, keeping the project reasonably lean and hungry, otherwise it could go all over the place, just like the aliens’ brains…’

Tony Hiles’ evaluation was to prove the turning-point in Peter’s career: it reinforced Jim Booth’s impression and provided independent evidence that would help convince the board of the Film Commission when the time came to approve investment in the film.

At the end of his report, Tony wrote: ‘I look forward to continued involvement with this Sheep-offal Saga.’ He had already warned Peter that the Commission might ask him to oversee the film’s progress to completion and when Jim Booth wrote to Peter, on 6 October 1986, with the news that the Film Commission was ‘now definitely interested in assisting you to complete the movie’, he added, along with requests for budgets, that the Commission wanted to appoint Tony as a consultant. In reply, Peter indicated that he was ‘very happy with the idea of working with Tony,’ although, as Tony pragmatically observes, ‘If I’d been a one-legged gorilla he’d have probably still said, “Yes!”’

In his letter to Peter, Jim Booth wrote: ‘Once again, I would like to congratulate you on your energy and the results obtained to date. A most commendable effort.’ Peter’s response was suitably expressive of his obvious gratitude:

‘Many thanks for the consideration that you have been giving to my movie over recent weeks. As you can imagine, I was delighted to receive your letter…I realise that my project doesn’t follow the normal pattern or accepted procedures, or whatever. The Film Commission’s support in spite of that makes me all the more grateful and, I should add, determined to produce something really worthwhile…

‘The next six months are going to be a great learning experience for me, far better than going to film school, and at the end of it we’ll have a finished film. I’m looking forward to all the learning, and I’m also looking forward to working within a set budget and schedule, a discipline I’ve never needed before.

‘So thanks again for the faith you have shown in me. I won’t let you down.’

After signing off – ‘Kind regards, Pete Jackson’ – he added an engaging, and suitably tantalising, postscript: ‘If you liked the movie so far, then don’t go away. The best is still to come!’

For a while, Bad Taste had a very different climax, featuring a chase scene on alien hover vehicles (this was 1985, so I was no doubt inspired by Return of the Jedi). I built this model of Craig and hover car at about half scale. Eventually the idea was scrapped and a new ending devised when the NZ Film Commission came onboard.

Following Tony Hiles’ recommendation, Jim Booth began dripfeeding the continuing production of Bad Taste with a payment of $5,000 made from the director’s discretionary fund and therefore not requiring the approval of the full board of the Film Commission. Jim acquainted David Gascoigne with what he had done and, a little while later, mentioned that he was intending to advance another $5,000. This, as Jim was well aware, was bending the rules, which allowed the director to spend only a maximum of $5,000 per picture, as opposed to making repeated payments on the same project, which would normally have required approval by the board.

‘I was knowingly complicit,’ admits David, ‘because it was a case of Jim having a good idea – he was a great believer in (with capital letters) Having Good Ideas! – and I not only didn’t intervene, I gave him tacit encouragement. Today it would be different, but then we were inventing a system of film support as we went along.’

As for Peter, he now reached an important decision about his future career:

I decided that if Jim was going to be able to give me these payments, then the moment had finally come to start working on the film full-time. So, I went into the Film Commission and picked up the cheque – made out to WingNut Films – for $5,000. It was the most money I had seen in my life; the following day I handed in my notice at the Evening Post.

I kept filming for the next six or seven months: I could only shoot at weekends because all my actors still had full-time jobs, but at least I was now able to build props, masks and two different scale-models of the Gear Homestead, which we had now decided was in fact the aliens’ spaceship and would have to take off at the end of the movie. Being able to devote all my time to the project meant that I was not only able to accelerate the schedule but also to step up the production values.

Peter had been introduced to Cameron Chittock, a Christchurch model-maker and puppet-builder who was attempting to break into the film industry. Cameron flew up to Wellington, visited Peter at his home in Pukerua Bay and showed him examples of his work.

Cameron was given a tour of the Peter Jackson workshop – a basement room that Peter and his father had dug out under the house and built by hand, and which Richard Taylor would later describe as ‘a Batman’s lair’! Cameron was staggered at the professionalism, and the sheer quantity, of the creations packed into the room, from Peter’s stop-motion puppets for The Valley through to the weapons, props and masks, which he had been building for Bad Taste. He also got his first glimpse of the film itself:

‘I loved it! It made me laugh: I’m not especially interested in horror movies or films with a lot of blood-and-guts, but I found Peter’s angle on the genre irresistible. The thing that really attracted me to him was his sense of humour and what you might call his outrageous behaviour on film – he had a rebellious streak in him and he attracted other rebels and provided the focus for a bunch of people in the film industry who were wanting to stir things up a bit!’

Recognising Cameron as someone who was not only skilled but who shared his own passion for special effects, Peter offered him the job of being his special make-up effects assistant. ‘I moved to Wellington, ’ remembers Cameron, ‘and, within a few days, was working twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week trying to keep up with Peter!’

Cameron’s early recollections of Peter accord with those of many who knew him at this early stage of his career: ‘If you didn’t know him, you might have thought him quite shy with people, even withdrawn, but as soon as you put a camera in his hands or gave him a paintbrush or bottle of latex to work with, he became incredibly confident and self-assured.’

Until he found accommodation of his own, Cameron lived with the Jackson family and has strong memories of Peter’s parents at this time when their son was embarking on his career as a professional film-maker: ‘The Jacksons were really delightful people. The moment you met them you realised that Peter had grown up with a very loving and hugely supportive home life. Mr Jackson was calm, warm and generous, a good-natured, jovial man whose company I really enjoyed. Mrs Jackson was very motherly, doing everything possible to make me feel at home and part of the family and clearly dedicated to supporting Peter, even though she couldn’t really relate to the weird movie he was busily making! Both parents were obviously happy that Peter had found what he wanted to do in life and were going to do everything they possibly could to help him achieve it.’

As the story began to circulate about the little amateur film that had been three years in the making and was still being filmed, various people began lending their help: Costa Botes met an unpleasant death as an alien; Tony Hiles appeared as the shadowy controller of the antialien unit ‘Coldfinger’ (a reuse of the punning name from Peter’s early, uncompleted James Bond spoof); while Stephen Sinclair and Fran Walsh wielded hammers and paintbrushes on the construction of a scale replica of Gear Homestead.

Two more friends of Stephen and Fran’s joined the increasingly expanding group that was now pushing Bad Taste towards completion. Bryce and Grant Campbell were brothers who worked with special effects gear. They were dragged off to watch the footage already shot which, says Bryce, ‘felt about two and half hours long’ but which had

Around this time, Cameron Chittock had joined me and was very helpful in painting and building the alien bodies. I sculpted a new head, and baked the foam latex in Mum’s oven. I had to grind an inch off the mould so that it would fit.

the most extraordinary moments: ‘There was an interminable gun battle that must have run for almost forty-five minutes, but then an amazing shot of somebody having the top of his head blown off that was so unbelievably convincing that it made you wonder whether the guy who’d filmed it was some sort of homicidal maniac!’

In fact, Bryce and his brother took an immediate liking to Peter: ‘He was totally driven and somewhat reserved but, when you got to know him, you realised that he was this big, enthusiastic, superobsessed kid!’

The Campbell brothers were soon involved giving practical assistance to the project: Grant blew up a car (and a sheep) while Bryce helped with rain and wind effects and had a near-death experience with the model of the Gear Homestead/alien spaceship. At the point when the house ‘blasted off,’ the model was lifted up on a crane and smoke had to pour out from beneath like a rocket taking off: ‘I had a smoke machine and Peter built a contraption using a rubbish bin that was intended to collect the smoke and feed it to various outlets within the model. Unfortunately, the pressure built up and the container exploded and a big piece of wood came swishing down on Peter and me like a helicopter blade. Fortunately it missed!’

Reflecting on the support which people in the industry had shown towards Bad Taste, Tony Hiles wrote, ‘The response was extraordinarily gratifying and at either minimal or (usually) no charge we mustered labour, equipment and building sites…I think my colleagues supported the project because they saw it as…adventurous, risky, crazy, oddball, inventive, humorous and above all – fresh.

‘Certainly part of its freshness comes from its raw quality – the often amateurish camera-work is just the start – but I have always felt it is a film with great heart and great integrity. Whether you actually get off on spoof splatter and non sequitur ironic humour is irrelevant because there are a hell of a lot of people who do. It’s a risky film but that is one of its great strengths – it will, when complete, be appalling to some and brilliant to others but it will never be average or ordinary…’

While new footage was being filmed to strengthen the story and deliver a dénouement, Peter was working with Jamie Selkirk on editing Bad Taste into shape. ‘It was a fun project to be involved with,’

Cameron and I built a couple of smaller models of Gear Homestead for different shots. Here I am with the smaller models in front of the half-scale house. The filming of Bad Taste was entering its final days.

My last day filming Bad Taste – it was actually a night shoot and we finished about 3am. We shot in some old farm buildings and there were no showers. I actually drove myself home – about two hours away – looking exactly like this. The whole way home I was praying that I wouldn’t get stopped by the police!

says Jamie, ‘but who knew what would happen afterwards? Peter Jackson might go on to other things or he might just drop away. At the time, the impetus was simply to get the movie finished! Peter had a great deal of self-belief, but Bad Taste, as it then existed, was pretty rough round the edges so I took over the editing: tidying it up and tightening it up; showing Peter where it didn’t work, where things jarred or flagged and where continuity didn’t match.’

After his first viewing of the film, Jamie had identified one or two places where the pacing would be improved if a shot could be extended for a few seconds. ‘I really needed to see what Peter had edited from the film, so I asked him if I could see his other material: the trims and out-takes, anything he had shot that wasn’t in the cut. He kept saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, they’re at home somewhere…I’ll bring them in.’ The following day, Peter arrived with a huge paper rubbishbag which he dumped on the floor. It was filled with a great mass of bits and pieces of twisted, tangled film, all stuck together with tape.’

Jamie had the off-cuts and out-takes spliced together and assembled into a rough order, and rescued a number of useful bits and pieces from the jumble: ‘I felt that, being a splatter movie, we needed to push it along and that anything at all extraneous had to go. Peter often clung to shots that he wanted to use but which were holding up the film and, in a good-spirited way, I’d have to try and coax him into letting go of stuff that he really didn’t need.’

Jamie Selkirk, who still edits Peter’s films, admits that not a lot has changed over the years: ‘Every movie I’ve ever cut for Peter has been too long – it’s just got trickier as the budgets have got bigger! Very often, Peter will write a scene in one line, such as “Minas Tirith – the battle begins…” One line on paper; fifteen minutes on film! And, no matter how much he shoots, he always cuts together all the scenes he’s shot before making any decisions about what finally stays and what goes. We’ve spent a lot of time cutting a lot of footage that I knew wouldn’t end up in the picture, but Peter’s feeling is that it must be put in first; it’s how he works, how he crafts a film.’

Back in 1987, by the time it had been edited, Bad Taste had cost $17–18,000 of Peter’s money

My cat Timmy poses with four years’ worth of Bad Taste film. This was the original negative, which I had stored under my bed. By the time we made our final prints of the movie, some reels were damaged by mould, which proved very difficult to remove. A couple of shots in the finished movie even have mould stains on them. Sometime soon I’ll do a digital clean-up of the movie and finally repair the damage from my sloppy storage!

and $15,000 of Film Commission money, which Jim Booth contributed to the project in instalments. To complete post-production with a vocal soundtrack, effects and music and a blow-up of the 16mm film to a 35mm print was expected to cost in the region of a further $200,000. This was far too large a sum to be slipped to the film-maker out of some discretionary fund. ‘For that money,’ Jim told Peter, ‘you will have to screen the movie for the board of the Film Commission.’ It was another nerve-wracking experience, worse even than screening his raw footage for Jim Booth, because, if the board refused to approve the funding, then Bad Taste was unlikely to ever be completed.

All the members of the Film Commission board were sitting there, seeing Bad Taste for the first time. This, of course, was Jim’s plan: show them the film in its most polished state; don’t let them see it in the state that he saw it in, but let them view it as a finished cut so that it feels more like a proper movie…

David Gascoigne’s memory of meeting Peter the first time is of someone who was ‘pleasant, fun and imaginative but who also had a level of magical persuasiveness! I liked him but “liking” isn’t enough, I thought there was evidence of real ability.’

Lindsay Shelton agrees: ‘Over the years, the question has often been asked, “How could the Film Commission have ever invested in a splatter movie?” Actually, it’s easily answered: they were backing talent; they took a look at what was on offer and decided that this was a talent that they wanted to assist. And they were right.’

‘They were a bit shocked by the footage,’ says Peter, ‘but I think they saw that there was a film there…’ As David Gascoigne recalls: ‘Seeing the footage was a cathartic experience! Of course some members were concerned or had reservations – being dependent on public money, the board had to consider how the film would be viewed on the political landscape, because if you offend too many politicians then you won’t get any more money and that hurts the industry. Happily, despite some nervousness, the board approved the post-production funding without significant dissension.’

A major issue in post-production was the vocal performances of the cast. It was the view of some that ‘The Boys’ needed to be dubbed by professional actors and it was an issue that Peter had tackled in his original nineteen-page approach to the Film Commission:

‘If needs be, me and the others will go out and tape all the sound effects, use our voices and compose and record our own music (a couple of the guys are in bands) BUT I don’t really want to do that. The sound plays such an important part in this film (many times I’ve said to the others, “Don’t worry if it doesn’t look too great, the sound will carry it through,”) so I want to make sure that it is as best a job as can be done under the circumstances. I would like to hire two or three professional sound recordists and editors and I’d like to get professional actors to provide the voice characterisations…’

In the event, Tony Hiles convinced everyone that The Boys should dub their own voices and, though initially a little apprehensive, they quickly mastered the technique and provided strong vocal performances that now seem an essential ingredient of the film’s ‘home made’ appeal. Only Lord Crumb, the head alien, who had been played by Doug Wren, one of Peter’s older colleagues at the Post and an amateur actor, was dubbed by a real actor, Peter Vere-Jones, a man with the fully rounded tones of an old-school thespian. Vere-Jones also served as voice-coach to The Boys, who treated the whole experience with characteristic level-headedness, especially any attempt to get them to open the vowels and enunciate correctly! Mercifully, The Boys (who refused to join the actors’ union) stayed completely themselves and the contrast that they provided to Vere-Jones’ plummy old alien is one of the joys of Bad Taste.

Everyone was in agreement about the importance of finding the right film score for Bad Taste. At first, Peter had thought he might be able to incorporate numbers by his favourite group, The Beatles, and former work colleague and fellow fan, Ray Battersby, remembers Peter talking about using the group’s 1964 number, ‘I’ll Get You’ (‘So I’m telling you, my friend,/That I’ll get you, I’ll get you in the end,/Yes I will, I’ll get you in the end’) over the closing credits. Rights and permissions made this proposal impossible, although The Beatles did manage a ‘guest’ appearance in the film. When the ‘brain-dead’ Derek

LEFT: As Jamie laboured away on the final edit, the cast had to rerecord all our dialogue. Here, Pete O’Herne and I try to match our lip movements from a few years earlier. Brent Burge did our final sound mix for Bad Taste. Recently, Brent did a brilliant job designing the gorilla vocal sounds for our King Kong movie.

pursues the aliens in a bizarre-looking saloon car with an ‘upper deck’ (having been adapted for a disabled driver), the passengers in the front seats are life-size cardboard cutouts, painted by Peter, of The Beatles in their ‘Sgt Pepper’ outfits.

In Peter’s first letter to the Film Commission, he had written of his musical ambitions for the film: ‘Above all I want a good musical soundtrack. That is the most important thing of all. A soundtrack that carries the film along, smoothing over the rough bits, providing a mirror to what the people are seeing, amplifying the different moods the film contains. Mike and Terry (our two band members) may well be able to come up with something good: they play rock music, and one of my pet hates is a rock soundtrack. Mike had a go at some mood music with his electric guitar and various gizmos a couple of months ago, and it wasn’t bad, but I’d love a more orchestral-sounding score if I could get it. A good example of what I like are Brian May’s two Mad Max soundtracks – overly loud, overly dramatic.’

The first that Wellington composer, Michelle Scullion, heard of the project was an intriguing telephone call: ‘Tony Hiles said that he was working on a project with a young guy who was making his first

feature. All he said about it was that it was “unusual,” that it might be my kind of thing and suggested that I have a look. So, I had a look…’

Tony and Peter screened half an hour of edited footage for Michelle on a Steenbeck machine in Jamie Selkirk’s editing suite. ‘That first ever meeting,’ says Michelle, ‘I remember lock, stock and barrel, clean as a whistle, clear as a bell! Peter had messy hair, quite a stammer and a certain coyness about him. The film was incredibly wacky and even though the acting wasn’t brilliant, it was honest and had an innocent “boys own adventure” charm.’

There was no sound, but Peter and Tony provided an aural sound score to the movie, creating the effects with mouth noises! ‘I was in hysterics; hooting; tears running down my face! It grabbed me and reminded me of going to the local “bug-house”, as a kid, to watch giant versions of John Wayne and Donald Duck when, if anyone messed around or made too much noise, the film would be stopped and we’d be told if we didn’t quieten down we’d all be sent home!’

At the end of the screening Tony asked if Michelle wanted to work on the film. ‘Of course I wanted to work on it! Not because I wanted to work on a feature film – it was to be my first – but because I wanted to work on this film!’

Michelle did her research: ‘When I work with a film-maker, I want to get into their mind, know what they’re thinking of in relation to the score. Peter told me he was a great fan of The Beatles and would have loved to use Beatles songs on the soundtrack; I also discovered that he was a fan of James Bond, so I went off and watched about nine Bond films and some zombie splatter movies that Peter lent me

I was worried about copyright issues involved in using an existing image of The Beatles, so I painted these myself. I’m not a great artist but the silliness of it all gets the laugh I was after. For a long time I harboured a dream of including one or two Beatles songs on the Bad Taste soundtrack, but that could never have happened.

Three key collaborators in Bad Taste – from the left, editor Jamie Selkirk, producer Tony Hiles and composer Michelle Scullion. Concentrating on the newspaper crossword at that moment, they were the perfect team to help me when I needed it.

from his collection! I felt that what it needed to be was a big score, plenty of full-on, wall-to-wall music and – thinking “blokes”, “cars”, “guns” – went off on a misguided “heavy metal” tangent, before changing course to a more “classical” approach.’

As the score developed and began to be recorded, Michelle was intrigued by Peter’s intuitive grasp of the process: ‘Peter sat on my shoulder the whole time. He may have lacked musical vocabulary, but he had all the words necessary to explain the shape and the emotion of what he wanted. I was surprised that someone so new to the film business could do that, but he was not only smart, he was an incredibly quick learner: each step was just another thing to be taken in by his huge sponge-brain that soaks up experience and uses it; in turn, I learned to go with him and let him guide me…’

Reflecting on Peter’s subsequent career, Michelle Scullion says: ‘I won’t jump on the bandwagon and say I knew then that he was a film-making genius, but I will say that it was clear that he was totally dedicated and had ambition. Bad Taste may have started out as a weekend “guerrilla film-making” project, but I don’t believe that it was ever truly a hobby in Peter’s mind.’

The score for Bad Taste was richly varied to match the moments of insidious menace and relentless pursuit; for the scene where the aliens feast from a bowl of regurgitated pea-green ‘gruel’, Michelle wrote a subdued jazz score with a muted trumpet: dinner music for chuck-eating; while the climactic battle scene had all the energy of a full-on, rock-and-roll number.

In July 1987, as Michelle was completing her score and the sound effects were being added, a rough-cut of the near-completed film was screened for the New Zealand Film Commission. Internal reports reveal a mixed reaction that veers between arch condescension and blatant dislike. Seeing Bad Taste, it seems, had left its audience with something of a bad taste…

The film was disparagingly described as ‘a backyard 16mm feature film made by Peter Jackson, a former employee of the Evening Post Circulation Department’. Whilst ‘its very explicitness should ensure that it can earn some money from the grosser end of the international video market’ it was thought to lack ‘style and verse’ and suffer from various weaknesses including ‘minimal acting talent and characters who are unsympathetic and crude.’ The report went on: ‘The film includes a lot of misjudged humour, which could be enjoyed by the crassest of audiences, but very probably not, because much of the dialogue is incomprehensible, especially so for anyone outside New Zealand.’

Jim Booth defended the project, saying that ‘viewing a film with only an unedited dialogue track (and no atmosphere or effects sound) is an unusual experience and perhaps gives a false impression of the finished film’, but it was left to Tony Hiles to ride to the defence of the project on which he had been serving as Consultant Producer.

In a document sent to the Film Commission entitled ‘Bad Taste: Report on an Experience’, Tony presented not only a vindication of the support which had been shown towards Bad Taste, but a moving, often prophetic testimony of belief in Peter and his incipient talent:

I worked with Sue Rogers on the Bad Taste poster design. I always liked the image of the alien jabbing his finger up, and had attempted to shoot it myself several times. This is a shot I did at the end of my parents’ garden. Eventually a professional photographer, Rob Pearson, came onboard and shot the final memorable image on the coast at Moa Point near Wellington Airport. Cameron Chittock was wearing the alien costume.

‘I see him as an amiable mixture of Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen – he is creative, inventive, a good actor and he loves film. However, I do not see him as some sort of messiah. He has a hell of a lot to learn – his comprehension of story and scene structure is limited, as is his ability to utilise his time and that of his co-workers in a fully economic fashion. But these things will change, as he learns fast…’

Countering murmurings that the Commission ought to insist on more changes being made to the film, Tony continued, ‘Bad Taste is an individual film with both the strengths of a film-maker with talent and the weakness of a film-maker with limited experience – and that is exactly why Bad Taste essentially works and should be left alone to work in that way.

‘Bad Taste is more than a New Zealand film, more than a regional film, it is a Pukerua Bay film. For what it will ultimately cost, Bad Taste is an extremely low-budget film, which should return its investment if correctly marketed. I believe the actions and support of the New Zealand Film Commission to be an excellent example of how to assist and encourage a new film-maker.

‘The whole project is really based on taking a risk; Peter started taking the risk nearly four years ago and the Film Commission took its risk on Peter almost a year ago. Completing the exercise will prove that risks are worth taking.’

Bad Taste was completed and without any further demands for changes.

The song accompanying the end credits – as the survivors drive away into the sunset in Derek’s eccentric car – was composed and sung, not by The Beatles, but by Mike Minett with a backing group that included Fran Walsh and Michelle Scullion. It caught the renegade spirit not only of the Bad Taste Boys but also of the film and its director…

We’re gonna be winners, this time we will;

We’ve got a good team, unbeatable.

This time unite, we’ll be as one,

Our private army will never run.

The last Bad Taste photo, taken to promote Tony’s Good Taste documentary. In its own way, it sums up the spirit of the preceding four years quite well.

We’ve got the reason to believe,

We’ve got the power to succeed;

But the minute you let me down,

You’ll leave a bad taste in my mouth.

Let’s get the permission,

Let’s do it right,

License to kill,

License to fight.

We’re only Human,

We’re only Boys,

We’re only…Dispensable toys.

After four years, it was finally over. The little weekend hobbyist film had been given the necessary professional finish. The exhausting, occasionally tedious, week-in-week-out regimen had ended with a flourish of high-energy activity, an injection of much-needed cash and the involvement of people who worked in the real film industry. It was a moment that marked not just the completion of a moviemaking project, it was also the close of an era and that closure had different consequences for different people.

Of The Boys, one or two entertained the hope that they might have a role to play in future Jackson projects, but it was an unrealistic and unrealisable hope. The very qualities in Peter Jackson that had drawn others to him, had made them pitch in on the Bad Taste project and, more or less, stick with it for so long, had finally carried him out of their orbit. As participants in what would rapidly be considered a cult movie, they would acquire their own unique cult status: they were, and always will be, ‘The Bad Taste Boys’. Otherwise – despite having helped save the world from being consumed by aliens! – it was, for them, the end of the road. Most of them embraced their fate philosophically; one or two, perhaps, thought they were, in the words of the film’s closing song lyric, ‘only dispensable toys’.

Peter was, and still is, deeply conscious of his indebtedness to the group: ‘Bad Taste,’ he says, ‘was an endurance test. I have great admiration for the guys because they showed up week after week in order to help me get that film made.’ There would even be talk, over several years, of a sequel to Bad Taste being made and, five years on, WingNut Films would indeed present the New Zealand Film Commission with a proposal for a project to make two such sequels, back-to-back. It is a project, however, that has yet to get off the ground…

Reflecting on that ‘endurance test’ today, Peter sees several similarities between Bad Taste and The Lord of the Rings:

Both took four years to shoot and both employed the same film-making techniques. The way we made Bad Taste was not a bad way to make a film and that is why I adopted a similar approach to The Lord of the Rings. Neither was made using the principle: ‘Lock a script down, rush off and shoot it without any changes, cut it and release it.’ I don’t think a rule that says you get one crack at a script and that it never changes is a particularly smart way of making films. I prefer an approach that enables you to pause every now and again and say, ‘Yes, this is working okay, but I could really do with a scene that does this, I’d like to put in a sequence that does that, or I need to explain this a bit more…’ and you then go and shoot those things as we did with the pick-ups we filmed for The Lord of the Rings. Handcrafting a film has always appealed to me: refining, finessing, streamlining as we go along – it’s a process that started with Bad Taste.

For Peter, in 1987, completing Bad Taste was not so much an ending as a beginning. It was, as one observer puts it, now the moment for Peter to move on; he was now a professional film-maker; the talent would soon be recognised, the promise and the ambition fulfilled; it was time for him to step up to bigger challenges.

Although completed and delivered, the Film Commission decided not to show Bad Taste prior to screening it at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. Doubtful of the film’s ability to succeed, the policy was to hold back release in order to get the maximum publicity from any response at Cannes – however unlikely that might be! For Peter, the opportunity for Bad Taste to become a possible topic of conversation along the length of the Promenade de la Croisette, represented the hope that offers of other work might follow. There was, however, one snag…

The Cannes Film Festival takes place in May which, at the time I finished work on Bad Taste, was still several months away. I’d left my job, was unemployed and had no income. There was nothing to do, except wait…

Wait…and come up with new ideas!

Peter had become close friends with Stephen Sinclair and Fran Walsh following their introduction from Costa Botes. Two more of those film industry rebels who were attracted to Peter, they had given him encouragement on Bad Taste (as well as lending a hand when the scale replica of Gear Homestead needed painting) but, more importantly, the three of them were already working on a film script together. Throughout 1987, the final year of making Bad Taste, they were writing what would eventually become Braindead.

One day Stephen had pitched me an idea about a young man who lives at home with a domineering mother who turns into a zombie – that was the story. It had started life as an idea for a play (and would eventually be staged as Brain Dead: The Musical in 1995) but Stephen was also interested in developing the idea for a film with me as director. I thought it was a great idea; I’ve always thought that zombies are fantastic and I was, and still am, a huge zombie film-fan.

Zombie pictures are as old as popular cinema and Bela (‘Dracula’) Lugosi had starred in what was probably the first of the genre: White Zombie, made in 1933. Several cult zombie films had appeared in the Sixties and Seventies, including Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, but by the 1980s it had reached plague proportions with The Evil Dead, Re-Animator and many others. Indeed, during the two years from 1985 to 1987, over twenty zombie-themed films were released, many of them low- or no-budget pictures with such improbable titles as Night of the Living Babes and Bloodsuckers from Outer Space.

Braindead went through several drafts during 1987 and was budgeted as requiring in the region of $2.5 million, making it a relatively expensive project at that time. Peter, Stephen and Fran submitted an application for development finance to the New Zealand Film Commission:

‘Braindead is a zombie movie. It is also a parable about breaking away from family ties and emerging into adulthood. As a satirical tale of life in the suburbs, the film is a study of emotional repression and social propriety. There is an inversion of the usual sex role stereo-typing: Lionel, our hero, is trapped in a fraught domestic situation until he is rescued by Cathy, who offers him the chance of another life.

‘The splatter aspect of the film is highly stylised and tends more towards farce than naturalism. It is more in the style of Monty Python than Sam Peckinpah. Similarly, the characters should not be read as naturalistic. Lionel and Cathy are naïve innocents in a world populated by the bizarre and the grotesque.’

We were very aware that, whilst we had a script, nothing was going to happen with Braindead before Bad Taste was screened in Cannes, but it was a strategic decision to have a prospective next project to capitalise on any attention that Bad Taste might pick up at the festival. Nevertheless, I was still faced by this five-month period of unemployment…

More plans were hatched at regular meetings at Fran and Stephen’s flat over a Chinese restaurant in Courtney Place, past which, years later, Peter would ride in the triumphant motorcade en route to the premiere of The Return of the King.

Cameron Chittock, who joined in many of these sessions, recalls: ‘Basically, we would get together and conspire to make evil projects!’ One of these dubious enterprises would eventually carry the unlikely tag line: ‘Sex, Drugs and Soft Toys’. While working on Bad Taste, Peter had coined the term ‘splatstick’ to describe something that combined the gory messiness of the splatter movie with knockabout laughs of a slapstick comedy. Now he was thinking of another combinationgenre by grafting the ever-appealing splatter movie with – a puppet film. The new idea was for a ‘spluppet movie’!

In the Seventies and Eighties puppets had achieved a new worldwide popularity through the work of Jim Henson, whose contribution to the American educational television series, Sesame Street, had led to the international hit TV series, The Muppet Show. The premise of a group of puppets producing and starring in a vaudeville show – with intriguing glimpses of backstage tantrums and traumas – not only made household names of Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Rowlf and the rest of the gang, it catapulted them into a series of big-screen adventures beginning, in 1979, with The Muppet Movie, which was followed by The Great Muppet Caper and The Muppets Take Manhattan.

With each of the Muppet feature films, the characters became increasingly liberated not simply from the confines of their puppettheatre home but also from their puppeteers, to the extent of finding it possible to take a cycle ride through London’s Hyde Park. It was a conceit that Peter and his ‘co-conspirators’ wickedly seized upon…

My initial idea was a very simple image: an all-singing, all-dancing Muppet-style TV show, except that back-stage there are no puppeteers taking puppets off their arms; the puppets are not puppets at all, they are real: they walk into the dressing-room, rip the tab off a can of beer, light up a cigarette and say, ‘God, that was a terrible show tonight!’ As for the show itself, that was just a piece of cheesy entertainment put on

Following the completion of Bad Taste in November 1987, there was an agonizing wait until the film was to be screened at Cannes in May 1988. I was unemployed, broke and still living at home, so I filled in the time writing Braindead with Stephen and Fran, and devising the idea for Meet the Feebles with Cameron. Eventually Cameron and I started building puppets to bring our ideas to life.

by these characters that have the same flaws and weaknesses as any human being.

Unlike the mild-mannered Muppets – whose frailties and idiosyncrasies are charmingly portrayed and utterly inoffensive – the Feebles, as the puppets in this version were to be called, were to be blatantly into anything and everything that was either illegal or immoral, or both! Although the name suggested that this devious, dubious bunch of crooks and perverts were somehow related to the clean-living characters created by Jim Henson, Peter never saw the idea as being a parody of The Muppet Show.

Essentially, the Feebles were satirising human greed and weakness; we were sending up human beings and human nature, not puppets themselves.

The original concept for using the Feebles had sprung out of a suggestion by Grant and Bryce Campbell for a possible late-night television show hosted by an elderly, cantankerous character called Uncle Herman who would tell a series of unlikely (even unsuitable) bedtime tales.

Uncle Herman’s Bedtime Whoppers, as we called it, was to be a series of outrageous one-off, half-hour films devoted to different subjects, featuring different actors and probably made by different film-makers. In fact, they’d have nothing in common other than being introduced by Uncle Herman. Talking with Cameron, Stephen and Fran, we decided that this puppet thing featuring the Feebles might be a good candidate for one of Uncle Herman’s Whoppers!

Stephen and Fran roped in another of their friends, writer, actor and cabaret comic, Danny Mulheron, who had directed Stephen’s satiric musical, Big Bickies and was collaborating with the playwright on an outrageous farce, The Sex Fiend. Described as possessing an ‘unstoppable curiosity and twisted perception of the world that is truly frightening and thoroughly entertaining,’ Danny was a suitably anarchic talent to be invited to join in the creation of the Feebles’ madhouse of mutated Muppets. Danny joined Peter, Stephen and Fran in writing the script as well as contributing lyrics for songs while Cameron Chittock began designing the stars of the show that was now being called Meet the Feebles.

Peter was feeling decidedly happy with life.

I thought, ‘This is fantastic! This is a five-month project that will keep me busy until May when I go off to Cannes and get the money for Braindead.’ We applied to the Film Commission for some funding – not much, $30–40,000 – convinced that it was a pretty much guaranteed certainty. After all, I had finished Bad Taste…True it hadn’t yet been released or sold anywhere, but they’d seen it and knew what I could do. They were hardly going to turn us down for an inexpensive half-hour TV show.

But they did. The Film Commission declined the application on the grounds that Peter had assumed would make them assist: Meet the Feebles was not a feature film project, but a one-off TV programme which was never going to have any sales in the film marketplace. The money requested might have been relatively small, but it was an unsound investment. The group explained that Feebles would be part of a TV series, but it was a series that had yet to be commissioned and funded.

We had a council of war and were very angry with this – as you always were in those days, whenever we got turned down or knocked back! Stephen, Fran, Cameron and me decided that we would fund it ourselves. It felt a bit like Bad Taste all over again, except that we were going to be doing it on a reasonably professional level: we were going to have a small crew, shoot it in a block and get it done. So we drew up a minimal budget of $25,000 and all chipped in equal shares. We put together a crew and Cameron and I started building puppets, getting together each day in the basement under his flat, chopping up foam and carving and sculpting these characters.

Characters like Bletch the Walrus, a lascivious impresario and, literally, a ‘cat-lover’; Arthur the Stage-manager, a cockney worm in a flat cap and jumper (knitted by Peter’s mum); Wynyard the Drug-and-war-crazed Frog with a perilous knife-throwing act; and the star of

Stephen and Fran came on board Meet the Feebles, not just as writers but also co-financing a self-funded Bad Tastestyle short film shoot. It was another case of everyone pitching in – here one of our puppeteers, Eleanor Aitkin, and Fran build sets for the forthcoming mini-production.

‘The Fabulous Feebles Variety Hour’: Heidi, a ‘gorgeous hunk of hippohood’, played by Danny Mulheron inside a huge, pink foam-rubber hippopotamus suit.

As is done with animated films, the Feebles’ dialogue was recorded prior to the beginning of filming so that the puppeteers would be able to perform to a pre-recorded voice-track. The vocal cast included Peter Vere-Jones, who had provided the voice for Lord Crumb in Bad Taste, as Bletch and Brian Sergent, who would later play Ted Sandy-man in The Lord of the Rings, as Wynyard the amphibious heroin addict, haunted by the horrors of Vietnam.

Unable to afford a studio in which to film, the group took over the upstairs rooms of a somewhat decrepit Victorian house in the Wellington suburb of Thorndon where Grant and Bryce Campbell were living. Not long before, the Campbells’ landlord had evicted a group of drunkards and derelicts and offered the vacated rooms to the brothers on the understanding that they clean up what was several years’ unsavoury mess. Peter took on the responsibility in return for permission to use the space as a studio for shooting Feebles.

Everyone was supposed to help, but I remember it was mainly me doing it! I cleared out piles of old newspapers and absolute filth too disgusting to talk about. I had buckets of bleach and I scrubbed and washed and mopped for days on end. Finally, I cleaned up three bedrooms, and a lounge, and a loo – and that became our Feebles