Читать книгу Anything You Can Imagine - Ian Nathan - Страница 10

The English Patient was dying. Saul Zaentz had pleaded with the studio that they were in the process of forging art. He had protested at their shortsightedness. And he had resorted to good old-fashioned brinkmanship. They were only weeks from shooting, but 20th Century Fox were not backing down. Fox had bought the English language rights to this expensive adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker prize-winning novel for a not inconsiderable $20 million (the full budget was $31 million, including $5 million of Zaentz’s own money) and were insisting it have a marquee female lead.

Accepting Ralph Fiennes as the hero — if such a straightforward term could be applied to the emotionally fraught and morally elusive weft of Ondaatje’s novel — already spoke of a due deference to artistic over commercial merit. This was, they knew, a prestige project. Fiennes was so very English — although his character turns out to be Hungarian.

The Second World War romantic epic came endowed with a tricky structure. It told a story within a story, gradually regaled to Juliet Binoche’s free-spirited nurse, and us, by a burn-ravaged Fiennes languishing within the gorgeous grounds of a Franciscan monastery somewhere in the Tuscany countryside. His tale will sweep us all back to a Sahara on the brink of war where spies and cartographers muster and a great love affair ensues, all simmering in a grand manner not seen since the imperial heyday of David Lean. The kind of film, everyone kept saying, no one made anymore.

When it came to Fiennes’ romantic opposite – the fragile, conflicted, swan-like Katharine Clifton – Fox were thinking of Demi Moore, in the spring of 1995 box office gold following Indecent Proposal and Disclosure. Zaentz and his so very English director, Anthony Minghella, whose determination to steer his own artistic choices mirrored that of Peter Jackson’s, had set their heart upon Kristin Scott Thomas — more traditionally beautiful, more icy and layered.

Bill Mechanic, who was then president of Fox, later promised on his life that the Moore rumours were untrue. Minghella maintained that ‘Demi’s name was always mentioned’.

Whatever the case, the fractious production had reached an impasse. Actually, that was no longer true.

Fox had pulled the plug.

Rallying round the desperate project, already encamped in the desert, two of Minghella’s closest allies, director Sydney Pollack and producer Scott Rudin, put in a call to Harvey Weinstein, the influential co-founder and co-chairman, with his brother Bob, of the independent film powerhouse Miramax.

‘Harvey just stepped in and financed it one hundred per cent,’ confirms Jackson, who has been recounting the story as a matter of significant background.

Cynical Hollywood commentators, of which there are many, suspected that Miramax was already well aware the project was faltering, with Harvey ready and waiting for it to collapse so he could swoop in and save the day.

Akin to Zaentz, this was exactly the kind of project that fitted Harvey’s view of himself as both Hollywood player and indie king, as well as the philosophy of Miramax as a film company: sophisticated, literary, but with mainstream potential, and Oscar-worthy, always Oscar-worthy. Spinning gold on behalf of the inevitable awards campaign for The English Patient, Miramax’s gifted publicists spread a tale of the White Knight who saved great art from studio defilement.

Nominated for twelve Oscars (including one for Kristin Scott Thomas), winner of nine, and making $231 million around the world, The English Patient cemented Harvey’s reputation. By the mid-1990s, he was the new Selznick, but operating from New York headquarters beyond the borders of Hollywood. He wasn’t the kind of studio boss who would demand Demi Moore. He understood the needs of filmmakers. He could manage big, important films outside of the studio system. He also understood the marketplace and how to reach an audience. He could finesse, and he could bully. His methods, often cutting and re-cutting problem films — landing him the nickname ‘Harvey Scissorhands’ — he insisted were always at the service of the film. This was how, alongside Bob, he maintained Miramax’s great duality: cash and kudos.

Not that it was all about literary adaptations. If Minghella was his longing, romantic Sméagol side, then Quentin Tarantino, who wanted to storm the barricades of such strait-laced tradition as The English Patient, let alone The Lord of the Rings, was his expletive-spitting Gollum.

Between Miramax’s multiple personalities, you can also trace Harvey’s attraction to Jackson: the young Kiwi embodied that very schism. He was the director of Bad Taste, Meet The Feebles and Braindead, giddy gore hound and natural wit, predisposed never to abide by the Hollywood playbook. But then he would produce something as finely tuned as Heavenly Creatures.

It is often claimed that the two poles of Jackson’s filmmaking pedigree are what made him so ideal for adapting Tolkien.

The English Patient had finally wrapped production in 1996 when Jackson called his long-standing manager Ken Kamins and casually asked him to find out who might own the rights to The Lord of the Rings. For a certain fee, databases can be consulted. In the litigious universe of Hollywood, it is essential to cover your back. Jackson had assumed they must be with Disney or Spielberg or Lucas. ‘They would all be locked up, as they say,’ he admits. ‘And we wouldn’t have a chance. So we really went into this with no expectations at all.’

Kamins didn’t take long to discover that thirty years after buying them from UA, the rights to both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings still resided with Zaentz. He might not be a Spielberg or a Lucas, but this wasn’t necessarily good news. Having had his fingers burned so badly with the Ralph Bakshi debacle, Zaentz had closely guarded the rights ever since.

It wasn’t as if since Bakshi no one had returned to the idea of adapting one of the most popular books of the twentieth century in the intervening years; they had simply come up against the Black Gates of Zaentz’s resistance.

If by some miraculous chance he was to agree, says Jackson, word came back that he would want to be attached to it. ‘That is just the way he was. He was a producer himself. But he tended to say no. He had done his Tolkien thing, it was a huge disaster for him, and he had lost a lot of money by the sound of it. He just didn’t want to know about it.’

They needed a backstairs route to the rights — a secret way into Zaentz, a chance to try and persuade him. And although he didn’t know it yet, Jackson already had the perfect guide. In fact, that guide was impatiently waiting for the director to call.

Within the parameters of a first-look deal he had recently struck with Miramax, Jackson was contractually bound to first test the waters on any new idea with Harvey Weinstein. And this was a staggeringly ambitious plan.

‘The idea was to do The Hobbit as one movie, then two movies of The Lord of the Rings,’ says Jackson. ‘Still as a package: you make The Hobbit by itself, if it is successful you then get to do The Lord of the Rings films back-to-back. A three-film thing.’

So the initial desire had been to adapt Tolkien’s books in chronological order, beginning with his first, younger-orientated Middle-earth novel: Bilbo, the Dwarves, and dislodging a fire-breathing squatter.

‘I could tell on the phone he was really excited right away,’ recalls Jackson, not yet knowing that this conversation would change his life.

The English Patient may not have yet been released but Minghella had wrought classical wonders with the strange book. Another attention-grabbing, epic production based on a tricky literary source, as directed by another of his self-styled discoveries, played right into Harvey’s view of himself as a promethean, David O. Selznick type for a modern Hollywood.

‘Who’s got the rights?’ he asked.

‘Well, it’s not going to be easy, Harvey,’ Jackson warned him, ‘because it is this guy called Saul Zaentz.’

Jackson laughs. ‘Harvey was the man who had saved The English Patient. We were talking to the right guy.’

If you put it in a script it would sound corny and contrived. No one would believe a word of it, but then so much of Jackson’s career has been decreed by what you would call fate.

Says Kamins, ‘It’s the big theme for him. He has always believed that fate was going to point him in the right direction.’

Jackson’s manager cannot think of a single conversation in all the time he has represented him where they have sat down and discussed what he should or shouldn’t do with his career. ‘Peter sort of functions by his own compass — that fate will deal him the right set of cards. And in this particular instance maybe more than any other, he was proven completely right.’

There are things that can be seen with the naked eye when you’re trying to achieve something in the motion picture marketplace and there are the things that lie hidden. You can’t ever see what’s going on behind the boardroom doors. The business decisions, the politics and agendas, the history, or the simple expediency that can come with good timing: all those invisible but significant factors that allow you to be able to do the unexpected. Otherwise known as fate.

‘Saul?!’ Weinstein boomed, his thick New York vowels reverberating down the transpacific line, more excited still by the chance to demonstrate the extent of his magical largesse: the beneficent Harvey, fulfiller of wishes. ‘I’ll call him straightaway. He owes me a huge favour.’

*

Print the legend, and the inception of Jackson’s great adventure occurred on an unspecified morning while The Frighteners was in post-production. He and Fran Walsh had got chatting about how to follow up their spectral comedy-horror. In spring 1996 things were moving for Jackson: he was now working on a Hollywood stage, with Hollywood budgets at his disposal, and to a large extent still on his own terms and staying put in New Zealand. More than ever, they needed to maintain their momentum.

‘So how about a fantasy film?’ proposed Jackson. Something like Ray Harryhausen once made, the spectaculars he had been whelped on: no irony, but a cornucopia of fantastic beasts. Only they would use the growing digital capabilities of their own visual effects company, Weta, to conjure them up rather than the chronically slow minutiae of stop-motion. Perhaps, Jackson suggested, something more classically swords and sorcery than the Arabian Nights or Greek myth that had been Harryhausen’s metier. He searched the air for an equivalent …

‘Something like The Lord of the Rings.’

At that point, he had still only read it the once, when he was eighteen. It was simply what sprang to mind.

‘Well,’ Walsh replied, ‘in that case why not do The Lord of the Rings?’

Except it didn’t go like that. Not exactly. The reality behind the decision to attempt Tolkien was a lot more complicated and painful. The river of fate had many twists and turns to negotiate.

*

In the 1950s, Kamins, eldest of four New Yorker brothers, always played the dutiful son and did whatever he was told. This was the reason Jackson’s manager so loved the Marx Brothers of Duck Soup and Horse Feathers. He longed for their utter sense of anarchy, their disrespect for authority.

‘They managed to play by their own set of rules, which I never could,’ he says wistfully.

Short-haired and snappily attired (the opposite of his client), with a calm, observant, thorough manner, Kamins is a Hollywood man without the pretension. He sees the world keenly through his rimless spectacles. From his hardwood-floored, glass-walled, art-adorned eyrie that gazes down upon Sunset Boulevard, he has been Jackson’s eyes and ears in the movie-town since 1992. It is also easy to see why the Kiwi director has remained loyal to his Hollywood minder. Kamins is no mere facilitator or dealmaker; he is a great storyteller, who parses the madness of the film industry with wisdom and wry humour, and stood in the eye of the hurricane of the trilogy’s storm-tossed beginnings. There were times when the future of the project depended on Kamins’ gift for talking down dragons.

He openly admits the books had meant very little to him. ‘They were not, like, seared on my soul. I mean, I knew of them. But I was in no manner, shape or form an aficionado, or a hardcore fantasy fan for that matter.’

Rather than King Kong, Kamins is a ‘Godfather-fanatic’. Film class at college had introduced him to films like The Grand Illusion, Klute and Rio Bravo. That is where his tastes lay. He believed in his client’s project without it having to be a religious experience.

Out of college, Kamins had climbed onto the lower rungs of the film industry, reaching the nascent home entertainment business at RCA Columbia at exactly the time his mentor Larry Estes began backing low-budget film productions, laying off theatrical and television rights while retaining the video rights.

Under that paradigm they backed Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, which had caused a stir at the Sundance Film Festival. Every independent theatrical distributor had come running in. They ended up making a deal with Harvey Weinstein.

Using this business model, home video specialist LIVE Entertainment would back Reservoir Dogs and begin Tarantino’s journey toward the sun. Another promising indie named New Line Cinema also began to see significant profits care of its home entertainment investments.

It was while at the now defunct talent agency InterTalent, a few rungs higher in his career, that Kamins’ boss, Bill Block, couldn’t get a ticket to the Batman Returns premiere. Tim Burton’s shadowy superhero sequel was the seen-to-be-seen-at golden ticket of the week. In his frustration Block had glanced over the many invites, requests and pleas for representation yet to be cleared from his desk and a letter caught his eye. It came from an attorney. ‘Hey, I have this client. He’s going to be in LA. He’s holding a screening of his new movie.’

Block walked down the corridor and into Kamins’ office. ‘I’m going to this screening and you’re coming with me.’

It was called Braindead.

Jackson was stopping in Los Angeles on his way back from Cannes, where he had been endeavouring to sell the distribution rights to his great ode to the flinging of viscera. The film that a mesmerized Guillermo del Toro once claimed made ‘Sam Raimi look like Yasujiro Ozu’. While in town, Jackson was hosting a screening at the Fine Arts Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard. Despite clashing with the big-budget antics of The Penguin and Catwoman, every agency in town was sending someone.

Kamins was impressed at the inventive use of effects in what was clearly a ‘modestly budgeted’ horror film. He certainly had never seen a hero lawnmower his way through a zombie horde. Indeed, it was the film’s sense of humour that spoke to him. The director was winking at the audience, egging them on. ‘Can you believe this level of madness?’

Kamins was reminded of the Marx Brothers.

‘I think that Peter unwittingly tapped into that same sense of anarchy,’ he says. ‘“I’m going to do things my own way. I’m going to challenge norms.” And I don’t know that I even understood it that clearly at the time. But it resonated for me.’

There was a spate of lunches for Jackson that week. Held at jazzy, star-spotted joints like Spagos or Chasens where the would-be agents reeled off a blur of inane advice. Oh, you should do a Friday the 13th. Oh, you should do a Tales from the Crypt. Oh, you should do a Freddy movie. All they could see was Braindead the horror movie, Jackson the New Zealand Sam Raimi.

Theirs was the last lunch of the week. And Kamins took a revolutionary approach. ‘I remember asking him, “Well, what do you want to do?” And he said, “Well, Fran and I are working on this project about matricide. About these two girls growing up in New Zealand, a true story …”’

It was called Heavenly Creatures.

The next week, Kamins’ phone rang. Jackson’s chirpy voice came on the line: ‘Fran and I have had a chat. We would like you to represent us.’

Kamins wasn’t the first agent-manager of Jackson’s career. Shortly after finishing Meet the Feebles, he had ventured to Los Angeles and found representation with a good-sized agency and a very good lawyer in Peter Nelson, who has stayed the course to this day (and would be another important figure in the many, many negotiations to come). Nelson had sent out the invitations to the Braindead screening with the objective of landing Jackson fresh representation. As he put it, the previous agency had ‘fallen asleep’.

Speaking to Jackson over lunch, Kamins was impressed by how purposeful and business-like was this young director. ‘For somebody who did not grow up here, but who clearly was a fan of movies and had aspirations to be a filmmaker, I was struck by how not-awed he was by the town. He had a fearlessness or a blindness to the reality of what he was walking into. All of which seemed to serve him really well.’

*

Heavenly Creatures changed everything. Heavenly Creatures got Jackson out of the horror ghetto where Hollywood would be happy to confine him. ‘Oh, he makes those low budget splatter movies that have some humour in them.’ Typecasting, Kamins could see, that didn’t project ‘a vision that he could do bigger films’.

Disney had offered him a supernatural rom-com called Johnny Zombie, which he wisely turned down. It was made by Bob Balaban as My Boyfriend’s Back in 1993, and swiftly forgotten thereafter.

He had so much more to him than Bad Taste.

Jackson followed Braindead by winning the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice Film Festival. Head of the jury David Lynch had quickened to a queasy portrait of small-town murder where schoolgirls turned out to be the perpetrators not the victims. There were further festival awards to follow at Toronto and Chicago, and nine New Zealand Film and Television Awards.

‘There was a sophistication to Heavenly Creatures,’ says Kamins proudly. ‘This was not a horror film in the traditional sense.’

Tellingly, in terms of the influence Walsh has had on the trajectory of both their careers, it had begun as her passion project. Jackson hadn’t even heard of the real-life murder case, and worried at first that the story was too grim to make a satisfying film.

In 1952, two New Zealand schoolgirls, more than a little emotionally maladjusted, fell into an intense friendship that spilled into a mania for one another. Their relationship was like an addiction. Threatened with separation, they conspired to literally dash the brains out of one of their mothers with a brick. For all the bloody mayhem of his career, this remains the most disturbing sequence Jackson has ever filmed. The shift in mood and moral accountability from Braindead is astonishing. They had shot in the footsteps of the actual scene of the crime in Christchurch’s Victoria Park. In truth, a few hundred feet further along the wooded path after Jackson had become unnerved by a lack of birdsong at the exact murder scene.

The Pauline Parker-Juliet Hulme case shook the stiff veil of propriety that 1950s New Zealand had inherited from Britain. In fact, it tore it down. This was the scandal of its day, portrayed in lurid, tabloid details by the excited papers and true crime accounts; there was even a novel. Author Angela Carter had written a screenplay inspired by the events called The Christchurch Murder, which Walsh had read. When she and Jackson were developing the idea, two rival film projects were already underway: one produced by Dustin Hoffman, the other to be directed by fellow New Zealander Niki Caro (Whale Rider).

What makes the Jackson-Walsh script so evocative is the decision to concentrate on the friendship rather than the sensationalist furore of the court case. They were two schoolgirls, barely sixteen, with hints of lesbianism to their unnatural bond — until 1973 homosexuality was still considered a mental malady in New Zealand. However, Hulme (who as an adult was later revealed to be crime author Anne Perry) flatly denied this was so.

Jackson and Walsh strove to interpret what lay behind this dangerous dependency. Individually, Parker and Hulme may have grown into functioning members of society. Together some moral constraint went missing, as if they were spurring each other on, waiting for one or the other to say no.

Scrupulous in their research, Jackson and Walsh burrowed like detectives into the cuttings and court transcripts; dialogue was lifted verbatim from Pauline’s florid diary entries.

‘The way they worked together was an incredible thing to see,’ said Melanie Lynskey, who as dumpy, brooding Pauline witnessed the Jackson-Walsh double act at first hand. It was a true creative partnership, the distinctions of writer and director far less defined than the credits suggest.

Here was a clear signal of the maturity they would bring to Tolkien: the concentration on character, the unhurried but intent building of story and the way in which the camera became a participant in their fantasies. The Parker-Hulme friendship also crossed class boundaries, a theme explored to a more positive outcome with Frodo and Sam.

Here too was Jackson and Walsh’s growing felicity for casting. Neither had done any significant acting, and this would be an astonishing exercise in sustained hysteria. Walsh discovered Lynskey at a Christchurch high school near to where the real girls first met. She was looking for someone who in any way resembled Pauline.

‘This girl really loves acting,’ her teacher had said, pointing out Lynskey. ‘She puts on plays that nobody wants to see.’

For the superior, pretty fantasist, Juliet — who had lately arrived from England — Jackson had plucked an unknown British girl from Reading from 600 hopefuls. Kate Winslet had been working in a delicatessen when the call came.

‘I’ll never forget it as long as I live … I actually fell on my knees,’ she admitted. Within four years Winslet would be one of the most famous faces on the planet, star of James Cameron’s Titanic.

Here too is the promise of a cinematic New Zealand being unveiled: the unique light; the vast, primordial landscape; and the confidence with which the local crew rose to the challenges set before them by their ambitious director.

Perhaps most significantly, Jackson would inaugurate a new digital division of his and Richard Taylor’s special effects house, Weta (named after a local cricket-like bug¹), in order to create the abstract world of the girls’ flowering imaginations. Key to understanding Hulme and Parker’s descent into murder is the film’s ability to slip inside the sickly dreamspace of their conjoined imaginations. A similar sympathy for the devil would be applied to the depiction of Gollum (over which Walsh would have a significant influence).

Between them, the girls invented their own fantasy world. Borovnia would become more meaningful than reality: they traced royal lineages back over the centuries and wrote melodramatic adventure stories set within its colourful bounds, thirteen novels’ worth. They dreamed of having them adapted into big Hollywood movies starring tacky 1950s heartthrob Mario Lanza. Movie mad, we catch them watching Orson Welles in The Third Man, and Jackson does a brief rendition of noir in its honour. The resonances — and ironies — are there for all to see.

It was a film about the dangers of losing yourself inside a fantasy world.

Weta was still a single unit at this time. Taylor’s workshop would make the rubber suits for the actors playing the ‘living’ versions of the Plasticene Borovnians the remarkable girls sculpted. Led by George Port, who had worked with Jackson since Meet the Feebles, Weta also ambitiously pursued a series of digital effects shots inspired by the groundbreaking work of Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. ‘What the Hell,’ was Jackson’s attitude, ‘let’s try.’ Their computer graphics department boasted a solitary Silicon Graphics SGI computer and a scanner. Which thankfully came with an instruction manual. By post-production on The Two Towers, Weta Digital would boast the largest amount of processing power in the Southern Hemisphere.

There are fewer CGI shots in Heavenly Creatures than is generally recognized. Taylor takes it as a compliment that his prosthetics are mistaken for CGI. The true digital shots were localized to Christchurch’s Port Levy morphing into a too-colourful, too-exquisite ornamental garden, complete with giant butterflies.

Extraordinary for 1994, these digital effects now appear charmingly antiquated, but that somehow makes them more fitting for the strange climate of the film. Jackson was using visual effects to express emotions.

‘And all for a three-and-a-half-million dollar budget,’ announces Kamins proudly. Behind him on his office wall there is a framed poster of Heavenly Creatures, with the girls leaping into a pristine lake, a film that remains not only an early marker of Jackson’s prowess, but a minor classic in its own right.

New Zealand might be a long way from Hollywood, and leagues further from New York, where Miramax resided in the hip Lower Manhattan neighbourhood of Tribeca. However, word soon reached Harvey that this was a significant film. There was a scramble to pick up the American rights, and Miramax’s bullyboy sprang into action, elbowing aside competitors and making entreaties to Jackson. Miramax’s Vice President of Acquisitions, David Linde, was despatched to Wellington to see an early cut. Blown away both by the film and the young director, he reported back to Harvey that something major was growing in New Zealand. Linde has remained a good friend to Jackson ever since.

Harvey, wielding his considerable clout, swiftly acquired Heavenly Creatures for distribution and negotiated a prestigious berth for its world premiere — opening The Venice Film Festival.

Being picked up by Miramax had distinct advantages. Founded in 1979 by the two brothers from Buffalo, brash in manner but brilliantly acute in business, it had risen to prominence through films as diverse as My Left Foot; sex, lies and videotape; and Reservoir Dogs. It would rise yet further on the glories of Pulp Fiction and The English Patient to come. Bob Weinstein handled the genre side of the business through the Dimension label, but both brothers always had their say.

The disadvantage was the Weinstein temperament. When things were sunny, all was well. Cross them, particularly Harvey, often over things that ordinarily appear reasonable or, at least, professional, and he would rain down his righteous (or not) fury. It was also a prime negotiating tactic. This was, of course, long before multiple accusations of sexual harassment and worse would bring about an ignominious downfall for the mighty Harvey, sending shockwaves across Hollywood. At this time, he was merely viewed as an industry bully boy.

In 1993, flushed with success, the brothers sold Miramax to Disney for $75 million. They would remain at the helm, with the power to greenlight a film up to the significant figure of $15 million. Any higher and they would require the consent of Disney’s hierarchy. Inevitably, the brothers would come to chafe against such restrictions.

After a lauded run at the box office, and with the assistance of Harvey’s golden touch at the Academy, Heavenly Creatures was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

‘Boom!’ declares Kamins. ‘The whole perception changed the second the film got nominated. I mean, everything changed — perceptually. Now I got my calls returned and the speed with which I got them returned changed; the kinds of conversations that we were having. Everything shifted. Not even in ways that sort of guided a specific path, but just atmospherically it all felt different.’

Smartly, as well as agreeing a deal to distribute Heavenly Creatures in America, Harvey had insisted on pinning down Jackson to a first-look deal with Miramax. While offering an avenue for any new film idea he might have, it would soon feel like he was tied to Weinstein’s often inflexible apron strings, who now had a prize, Oscar-nominated asset.

Jackson would never bind himself to a studio again. ‘It was sort of a strange thing where they would pay some overheads: an office and some people we could hire. In exchange for that they get first refusal on any script we wanted to do. If they say no that’s fine, you can take it somewhere else. Also if you get offered something you are allowed to go and take it. It is not like an old studio contract where you are locked into MGM.’

He would ultimately never make a film with Miramax.

*

First Jackson met Robert Zemeckis, and together they made The Frighteners, a warped comedy-horror about a spiritual conman (played by Back to the Future’s Michael J. Fox) who can actually behold ghosts. It was to be Jacksons’ first studio picture. Universal were attracted to a commercial-sounding mash-up of Ghostbusters, the Elm Street movies and this New Zealand hotshot revealing a knack for visual effects.

Fox’s Frank Bannister begins to realize the Northern Californian coastal town of Fairwater (actually Lyttleton in New Zealand) where he plies his supernatural scams is also being terrorized by an undead serial killer in the guise of the Grim Reaper — a killer only he can see. The visual effects requirements were bold: Bannister would interact with a trio of quirky, translucent ghosts, as pliable as cartoons, as well as the Reaper figure, which flits across town like a runaway kite (and not dissimilar in appearance to Ringwraiths). It would take six months to complete, with scenes being shot in duplicate to insert the ribald ghosts. Jackson’s Sitges friend Rick Baker would provide the rotting-corpse make-up for the dread departed.

Sprawling and tonally uncertain, yet still underappreciated, The Frighteners tends to be forgotten in the journey between the early splatters to the coming of age with Heavenly Creatures, which is seen to segue straight into Middle-earth. If anything, it is viewed as a backwards step in the direction of the rabble-rousing days of those early horror movies.

To Jackson’s mind, here lies the true point of transition to The Lord of the Rings. Without it spans a different career, one that might have made him less global, but no less valuable; making films with more of a New Zealand spirit like Jane Campion. But Jackson’s instincts were always toward the commercial.

The project had begun life out of desperation. With Heavenly Creatures still awaiting the go-ahead, Jackson and Walsh were badly in need of some work. ‘They needed to make some money,’ clarifies Kamins.

Jackson had sounded urgent on the phone. ‘We need a writing job. What’s out there?’

Fortuitously, Kamins had been in a staff meeting where he had heard about Zemeckis’ involvement in Joel Silver’s portmanteau Tales from the Crypt movie. Different directors would provide their own segments of horror, and Zemeckis, he was told, was still in need of a screenplay. Springing into action, Jackson and Walsh worked up a two-page outline based on an idea they’d had while walking to the shops for milk, the story of a conman who is in cahoots with ghosts. Zemeckis was intrigued. At that stage, he hadn’t even realized Jackson was a director; he just figured they were these quirky writers from New Zealand.

‘I tell you what,’ said Zemeckis, ‘you go write the screenplay, I’ve got to make this movie called Forrest Gump.’

‘Well, that’s fine,’ replied Jackson, ‘because we have this movie we’re going to make called Heavenly Creatures.’ They would work on The Frighteners script while shooting their matricidal drama – the two being closer in theme than is immediately apparent.

Then fate got involved: Forrest Gump became an Oscar-winning phenomenon and Zemeckis lost his taste for a Tales from the Crypt movie. Now very much aware of Jackson as a director, Zemeckis suggested he direct it as a standalone film, which he would produce for a budget of $26 million.

‘The Frighteners matters for two key reasons,’ says Kamins. ‘Number one: it allowed for the build-up of Weta Digital conceptually, which had been a very small unit on Heavenly Creatures. The Frighteners would require over 500 visual effects shots, even at that budget, and Peter had the vision to say, “We can create a bigger visual effects company.”’

Jackson’s plan was typically practical, typically New Zealand: they would lease more computers from Silicon Graphics, then hire out-of-work animators from all over the world, people who were just sitting at home, and double their weekly salaries to come to New Zealand. The only overheads would be space. They would still be able to create visual effects shots much cheaper than ILM. And, sure enough, that’s what happened.

The Frighteners also matters, adds Kamins, because Zemeckis and his partner Steve Starkey would give Jackson and Walsh invaluable tuition on how to navigate the political waters that come with a studio project: ‘What they need to know and when; how to manage their expectations; when to get them excited about things; and when to hold back on information; how to keep them confident, but not in your hair.’

So coming full circle, as Weta were revealing their potential on the visual effects on The Frighteners, Jackson and Walsh’s thoughts turned to the future and the potential of making a fantasy film. However, one morning’s casual discussion was actually several weeks of brainstorming fantasy concepts. ‘It had been a long time since I had read The Lord of the Rings,’ admits Jackson. Fifteen years had now passed since he had waded through the Bakshi tie-in edition, and he really couldn’t remember it at all well.

Whatever ideas he came up with, Walsh and her watertight memory would shoot down: ‘No, no, no. You can’t do that — that’s just The Lord of the Rings.’

Jackson sighs. ‘You don’t want to be seen to be stealing stuff.’

His thought had been to do an original fantasy film, but at every proposal he made Walsh kept on repeating it like a mantra: ‘The Lord of the Rings … The Lord of the Rings … The Lord of the Rings.’

‘It was getting frustrating.’

When he was a teen, no more than sixteen, already displaying a rapacious hunger for filmmaking, Jackson set out to make a Super-8 Sinbad film. There was to be a scene of him fighting a stop-motion skeleton in the surf. He shot himself hip deep in Pukerua Bay swinging a homemade sword, but he never got round to putting in the skeleton. Which was down to the fact that, with the tide heading out, Jackson had dived straight onto an exposed rock. Severe bruising led to a pilonidal cyst which led to surgery. He also hadn’t quite yet figured out how to do stop-motion.

During the Bad Taste era, he had considered shooting a Conan-type film on 16mm at the weekends. ‘I never got any further than swords and monster masks,’ he admits. ‘I had never actually sat down and written a script.’

Truth be told, there was no specific, original sword ‘n’ sorcery concept he’d been yearning to make. It was simply that the genre appealed to his sensibility and offered the chance for Weta to keep expanding. So, why not The Lord of the Rings? Frodo’s enduring tale was the ne plus ultra of the genre. It was fantasy operating on an equivalent dramatic level to Heavenly Creatures.

According to prevailing Hollywood wisdom, fantasy, as a genre, was a joke. Jackson agrees. ‘I used to watch all the fantasy films. Things like Krull and Conan … Fantasy was one of those B-grade genres. No quality movies were ever made in the fantasy genre. Right from the outset The Lord of the Rings was always something different. You can’t think of Krull and The Lord of the Rings in the same sentence. While it was fantasy, in our minds it was always something quite different to that.’

And that was when they had put in the call to Kamins to find out who had the rights, and made their approach to Harvey. And even then things only grew more complicated.

The possibility of adapting Tolkien was soon to be one of three potential fantasy projects for Jackson.

For all of Harvey’s confidence in calling in a favour with Zaentz, it would take eight perilous months of negotiation for a deal to be struck. Zaentz had held the rights tight to his chest for three decades; whatever Harvey had done for him on The English Patient he wasn’t going to part with them lightly. Tribes of rival lawyers were making proposal and counterproposal, putting in calls, arranging meetings, filing memos, coming up with offers, rebuffing counteroffers, and charging by the hour. And Harvey showed zero inclination toward allowing Zaentz any active participation in his project.

Another problem was the weird, bifurcated rights situation surrounding The Hobbit. Harvey had endeavoured to go direct to MGM, which had purchased the crippled UA in the wake of Heaven’s Gate. Ironically, MGM was itself a studio in decline and in one of its many cycles of bankruptcy, reorganization and sale, nobody was about to give away one of its chief assets — even if they were only partial rights to The Hobbit.

‘The hell with it,’ cried Harvey, ‘let’s forget The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings is a better-known title anyway. Let’s just go right to The Lord of the Rings. Two movies shot back-to-back.’

Still, with no sign of an agreement with Zaentz being reached, Jackson was growing increasingly nervous. The clock was ticking on his Weta project, even his career. It was becoming increasingly clear they were going to have to make something else in the meantime.

‘I will never forget it,’ recalls Kamins, and true to his word he can remember the exact day: ‘Monday, April first, nineteen ninety-six, I went to a premiere of Primal Fear at Paramount. I come home and there’s a message from Peter on my answering machine. This is like eleven p.m. at night. And he never calls me at home that late.’

Jackson’s recorded voice carried a seriousness Kamins had heard only rarely. ‘I need to know what my next movie is by the end of the week, otherwise all these great people that I put together to do the visual effects for The Frighteners are going to leave …’

As is standard practice, six weeks before the end of any movie the freelance visual effects team — and any other department employed on a film-by-film basis — is entitled to start looking for their next job. The buzz had gotten around about the visual effects work on The Frighteners, and the more established effects houses were reaching out to the Weta team, trying to entice them back to LA.

Meanwhile, Kamins was maintaining a constant vigil for any opportunities for his client, as he puts it, playing ‘backstop’ on Jackson’s career. Given the mercurial nature of the film business, any director would be foolhardy not to have more than one plate spinning at a time. He swiftly engaged a strategy to push forward on any one of the projects he and Jackson had in various stages of development.

Besides The Lord of the Rings, two other noticeably non-Miramax movies were to emerge. Confirming that this was a defining period in Jackson’s life and career, each would have a significant influence on his future. That first-look deal with Miramax notwithstanding, Jackson headed to LA to begin discussing the alternatives. He didn’t see himself as acting in bad faith. The Lord of the Rings had been his priority, but despite Kamins urgent pressing of Miramax it showed little sign of being resolved.

‘So we spoke to Universal about King Kong,’ says Jackson, ‘and I did a lot of meetings with Fox about Planet of the Apes.’

A Planet of the Apes reboot had been jostling about in development for a number of years. Spreading its allegorical net to include the fear of atomic destruction and the civil rights movement, Franklin J. Schaffner’s biting, apocalyptic, 1968 Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston, could fairly be considered a classic (if not its diminishing sequels). Jackson certainly thought so — he has some original John Chambers’ prosthetics in his collection and once designed his own set of ape masks for another of his novice ventures into filmmaking, The Valley, which paid homage to the first film’s devastating ending.

By the early 1990s, 20th Century Fox were keen to revive the idea of a future where the evolutionary order has been upended and apes have subjugated humanity. Some big directors had toyed with the hair-brained mythology, with all its juicy metaphorical potential, amongst them Oliver Stone, Sam Raimi, Chris Columbus, Roland Emmerich and Philip Noyce.

Jackson and Walsh had initially become involved as screenwriters in 1992, before Heavenly Creatures, only for their concept to fall out of favour with a regime change at Fox. But in 1996, following another bloody succession at the helm of the studio, the project was back on the table with Jackson potentially directing.

Ever the traditionalist, central to Jackson’s enchanting simian vision was the return of actor Roddy McDowell, who had played the pro-human chimp Cornelius in the original. He’d even gone to lunch with the actor and producer Harry J. Ufland to pitch his concept. McDowell had been resistant to doing another Apes film: decades might have passed but he could still remember itching beneath those prosthetics. Unbowed, Jackson pitched him Renaissance of the Planet of the Apes. It was to be a continuation of the first line of movies, and the apes have had a flowering of their artistic ability. ‘Like Florence or Venice, the Ape World has gained artistic beauty,’ he explains. McDowell would play an aged Cornelius-type character, sort of a primate Leonardo da Vinci. McDowell was enthralled. ‘Count me in,’ he told them.

Amid this renaissance of ape culture, the gorillas would cover the police patrols, the chimps were the artists, and, Jackson laughs, ‘I was going to have a big, fat orangutan with all the jowls as the Pope. It was a satirical look at religion.’ Everywhere the camera turned we would see statues of apes; then in one twist a statue gets knocked over and beneath the marble, which turns out to be plaster, we glimpse a human face.

‘It is all a façade!’ enthuses Jackson, the old excitement returning. ‘And we were actually going to have a half-human, half-ape character too that Roddy’s ape character had in hiding, because he would be killed if the ape society found out that there was this hybrid. It was quite interesting …’

Re-pitching his idea (for which, working on spec, he and Walsh had never earned a cent) to Fox’s new studio heads, Peter Chernin and Tom Rothman, he was informed the studio were also in talks with James Cameron to produce and Arnold Schwarzenegger to star.

‘We got an offer from Planet of the Apes, aggressive up front,’ says Kamins. ‘Not on the back end, because they couldn’t afford it because of Jim and Arnold.’

Jackson and Walsh had their qualms: this would be a big studio film and prey to big studio interference. Their natural independence, the very way they worked, would come under intense pressure.

Still the mind boggles a little at the notion: Peter Jackson directing Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Planet of the Apes movie produced by James Cameron, set in a crumbling ape Renaissance shot in New Zealand …

Jackson wouldn’t meet Cameron until 2005. Getting along straightaway, the Kiwi found himself wondering what might have happened if they had said yes. Tim Burton would eventually step into the project in 2001 for a tepid reverse-engineered spin on the original 1968 film with Mark Wahlberg; although the prosthetics masks, created by Rick Baker, were fabulous.

Many moons later, the legacy of the Apes would return to Jackson’s faraway kingdom. Following Weta’s industry-transforming breakthroughs not only with motion-capture but the filigree textures of digital fur through Gollum and then Kong, when Fox rolled the dice on the Apes saga once more with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, it was Weta who created the now stunningly lifelike digital simians, with Andy Serkis starring as the sentient chimp, Caesar.

*

Since the 1976 debacle, King Kong had remained in the keeping of Universal, the very studio where The Frighteners was about to be released sooner rather than later.

The plan had been to lean toward its horror credentials and release the undead comedy around Halloween in 1996. Despite Jackson’s best intentions to make a family film, The Frighteners had been landed with an adult R-rating (15 in the UK). In the meantime, however, Daylight was running late. Universal’s tunnel-bound Sylvester Stallone disaster movie, featuring a young Viggo Mortensen, had gone overschedule and was going to miss its 17 July release date.

Seizing the opportunity, Zemeckis called Jackson: ‘I want you to put together a short effects reel for me so I can take it into the studio.’ He intended to make a move to put The Frighteners into the more lucrative summer slot in place of the delayed Daylight.

When Weta’s visual effects proved to be on a par with ILM, Universal got excited and agreed to the July slot, and set about repositioning The Frighteners as a new visual effects extravaganza featuring Marty McFly!

Hollywood was becoming greatly intrigued. This wunderkind from over the ocean kept changing hats. First, he was the horror bandit, gorier even than Sam Raimi. Then he was the Weinsteins’ arthouse darling who brought such dark sensitivity to Heavenly Creatures. And now he was the new George Lucas, nurturing his own visual effects company.

‘So now the narrative’s starting to unfold very differently,’ says Kamins intently. Fox are making their overtures about Renaissance of the Planet of the Apes, The Frighteners is all of a sudden a summer movie and whispers of Jackson’s devotion to the great 1933 stop-motion marvel have reached Universal’s vice-president Lenny Kornburg. It was Kornburg who slyly tempted Jackson with his heart’s desire: ‘Would you have an interest in doing King Kong?’

What a moment of infinite possibility this must have seemed. And it would prove too good to be true. Yet, for a few weeks, Jackson had in front of him the chance of adapting Tolkien’s beloved bestseller, reviving Charlton Heston’s dystopian talking ape thriller, or remaking the film that had, in many ways, charted the course for his life. Which would, in fact, count as his second attempt to remake King Kong.

A twelve-year-old Jackson had constructed the Empire State Building out of cardboard boxes and turned a bed sheet into a cyclorama of New York that featured the Chrysler Building, Hudson River and assorted bridges for an aborted version of the classic. He still has the jointed model of Kong built from wire, foam rubber and a fox stole his mother no longer wore (at least, she didn’t now). When he finally came to remake King Kong in 2005, Jackson flew out the original 1933 eighteen-inch armature of Kong designed by Willis O’Brien and sculptor Marcel Delgado, along with its collector Bob Burns, to set in an act of quasi-holy symbolism.

Jackson was fired up by the possibility of any remake of King Kong, but his own? Astonishingly, given the company she kept, Walsh had never seen the original. An oversight that was swiftly put to rights, and she was convinced enough for the talks to intensify with Universal.

While the projects circled like 747s awaiting permission to land, Jackson’s long-time lawyer Peter Nelson drew up a pro-forma contract that could apply to any one of them. Together Nelson, Kamins and Jackson were determined to set the terms of engagement. There were two significant stipulations. Firstly, that a ‘considerable sum’ be guaranteed by the studio for research and development into special effects. Secondly, that Jackson become a ‘first dollar gross participant’ meaning he would receive a percentage of the gross earnings of the film — not the net profit, which according to the elusive magic of studio accounting seldom seemed to materialize. He would also get final cut.

By autumn 1996, still undecided over which pathway smelled fairest, Jackson and Walsh took a holiday, driving around the South Island, taking in the stunning scenery that would so readily lend itself to Middle-earth. ‘We decided that during this trip we would figure out which film we were going to make,’ he says, and, essentially at this stage, it was a choice of two. Waiting for The Lord of the Rings to be ‘absolutely nailed’ by Harvey was too risky, too frustrating. Unless there was a radical breakthrough in the Middle-earth standoff, it was a case of which ape movie?

‘Both Fox and Universal were happy for us to jump into one of their films.’ And for Jackson it was the personal connection that finally told. ‘We decided to do Kong.’

First, though, he had to let Harvey know.

Making the connection across the thousands of miles that lay between New York and the South Island, Jackson got straight to the point. ‘Harvey, we are not going to wait any longer, we are doing Kong.’

Harvey went straight to force ten, the betrayed producer: ‘THIS IS NOT HAPPENING! I AM NOT HEARING THIS! YOU’RE NOT TELLING ME THIS! YOU ARE NOT TELLING ME THIS!’

It was Jackson’s first taste of the Miramax head’s notorious spleen. But he knew well enough the stories of screaming fits that had reduced both M. Night Shyamalan and Uma Thurman to public tears and narrowly missed causing a fistfight with Quentin Tarantino.

Shaken, Jackson managed to remain calm.

‘Well, I am telling you this, Harvey. We’ll do it. Get the rights and after Kong we’ll come back and do Rings.’

The phone went dead.

Kamins, aware they were gambling with an important relationship, admits that Harvey was in his rights to be angry. And, with Harvey, angry always meant apoplectic. ‘He had already agreed, in fairness to him, to suspend and extend the period of our first-look deal so that Peter could go and make The Frighteners. We didn’t have a movie in development with Harvey when The Frighteners was proposed. And Harvey understood it was an opportunity for Peter. So we sort of stopped the clock on the deal and then added whatever time he spent on The Frighteners to the end of the deal. Now we’re coming to Harvey and we’re putting him in a situation where he effectively has to bid for Peter’s services on his next film. The only thing we wanted to do was The Lord of the Rings. And Harvey didn’t yet have the rights.’

Feeling guilty that the first-look deal with Miramax was proving fruitless, and conscious The Lord of the Rings was still dependant on Harvey, it was Jackson who devised a solution that might placate the Miramax chieftain’s ego. It would be a plan that would turn out to benefit Miramax in another, unexpected fashion. Jackson was on the ferry back to Wellington, crossing the often-turbulent waters of Cook Strait, when it occurred to him to see if he could convince Universal to allow Miramax to co-finance King Kong. Indeed, Universal were interested in striking a deal.

Miramax would come on as a fifty per cent partner on King Kong and Universal would take a fifty per cent stake in The Lord of the Rings. That would surely keep Harvey calm, Jackson reasoned. But Harvey, wheeler-dealer extraordinaire, pouted that Universal was getting two films out of the deal while poor Miramax was getting only one. He had his eye on another treasure; there was a property he coveted that had been languishing at Universal. It was a script by Tom Stoppard called Shakespeare in Love.

Three years hence, Shakespeare in Love would be nominated for thirteen Oscars, winning seven, including stealing Best Picture from under the nose of the favourite, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (which would have a major influence on Jackson’s battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings).

Jackson shakes his head. ‘To balance this deal up, so it was two for two as it were, he got Universal to give him, without any investment or involvement, the film that would win all these Oscars.’

He lets the irony slip into his voice. ‘We were tangentially responsible for getting Shakespeare in Love made.’

*

In the foyer of Weta Workshop, still located where Park Road swerves decisively to the right and becomes Camperdown Road, sits a stunning bronze maquette of King Kong wrestling a T-Rex. The two creatures are so tightly entwined you have to get up close to trace where gigantic gorilla ends and struggling dinosaur begins. It sits there as both a monument to the talents of those who work within these bountiful halls, greatly expanded over years of profitable world building, and a salutary symbol of what it is to wrestle with Hollywood.

Through the latter half of 1996, as Jackson and Walsh got to grips with the script for King Kong, months of research and development went into the visual effects that were going to bring Skull Island to fetid and thrilling life. Yet more artists and technicians had been brought in from all around the world to this far-off island to bolster the ranks of the sister divisions of Weta Workshop and Weta Digital. They were over six months into manufacturing.

The Workshop’s famously loquacious head Richard Taylor takes up the tale. ‘We already had some animatronic creatures sculpted, and it started to get wobbly. We could feel this undertow of uncertainty.’ He suggested to Jackson he make a sculpture of Kong fighting a Tyrannosaur (and Jackson was not skimping on dinosaurs), which they could use as a presentation piece to Universal to try and ‘invest in them how exciting the moment could be’. Over the following two weeks he sculpted the very piece that now sits outside his office. Five weeks later it arrived at Universal.

‘They were excited by it, and, needless to say, they actually put it in their front foyer,’ he reports.

Four weeks after that the film fell apart.

Taylor doesn’t hide the amusement in his voice. ‘And Peter, in true Kiwi form, asked for it back. And we got it back.’ And there it sits, a warning to all-comers: you need to be resilient in this game.

Looking back from the vantage of having finally made his version of King Kong in the wake of The Lord of the Rings, the undoing of their first attempt is viewed by Jackson and Taylor as a lucky escape; the river of fate taking another turn. Beginning again from scratch in 2004, Jackson dusted down the 1996 script. He didn’t like what he read. It was the tone. It was too flippant, too jokey.

‘We were desperately trying to write an Indiana Jones type of film. It was lightweight, a silly kind of Hollywood script.’ The Lord of the Rings had taught him that fantasy must be treated as if it was reality not a movie.

‘I think ultimately we weren’t prepared to do justice to such an incredible story,’ concludes Taylor.

But it was impossible to be philosophical at the time. It was heartbreaking.

Things had started to fragment with the release of The Frighteners. Zemeckis’ instincts hadn’t served him well. The reviews were uncertain, and the film felt too autumnal and spooky to sit comfortably in a summer wiped out by Roland Emmerich’s defiantly inane mega-B-movie Independence Day. The fact their opening weekend coincided with the start of the Atlanta Olympic Games hardly helped.

Jackson and Walsh learned a great lesson not only about marketing campaigns but how crucial was a film’s release date. Thereafter, they would maintain an influence on a film right through to the promotional popcorn bucket.

The Frighteners flopped, eventually taking a little under $30 million worldwide. According to the ruthless cause-and-effect of Hollywood physics, you’re only ever as good as your last film, and Jackson’s lustre was instantly tarnished. Virtually overnight, the conversation changed once more. Who was this guy again?

Still devotedly banging the drum for The Frighteners, Jackson had flown non-stop to London in early 1997 to do some promotional interviews— the international release date had been delayed to regroup after the film’s failure in America, not that it did any good — from there he would fly to Rome and proceed on a European tour.

When he reached his hotel room the phone was already ringing. It was Kamins.

‘They’re pulling the plug on King Kong.’

Universal’s change of heart wasn’t only due to the failure of The Frighteners. Disney were putting out a (as it turns out ghastly) remake of Mighty Joe Young, the King Kong copycat from 1949, and now the all-conquering Emmerich had announced that for his next trick he was planning to remake Godzilla. ‘And Universal didn’t want to do another monster movie,’ laments Jackson.

How could he stay where he was, promoting a film for the very studio that put his next film so abruptly into turnaround? Moreover, he now had twenty or thirty staff working on King Kong and no salary to pay them. He had to figure out how the hell they were going to survive. Weta was back on a knife-edge.

He booked himself on literally the next plane home.

‘It is the only time in my life I have ever done that,’ he laughs ruefully; although, nothing about it at the time felt funny. ‘I did not sleep at all as I was dealing with all of this. So I went there and back.’ Again.

Before leaving he called Walsh. ‘Don’t tell the guys. I will tell them when I get off the plane.’

Touching down at Wellington, the sleepless Jackson drove straight to Weta Workshop. He gathered the staff together and told them the film was no more. As always with the death of King Kong, tears were shed.

Harvey, true to form, was spitting mad. Only this time it was on Jackson’s behalf. Universal hadn’t told him — he heard the news via Kamins — and he was supposed to have a fifty per cent stake in the film. He let it be known to Jackson that, in his humble opinion, The Frighteners deserved a better fate, and had Universal and Zemeckis stuck to the Halloween release date he was sure it would have done far better.

Then he got into fighting mode. ‘We are going to do Rings. We are going to do Rings,’ he bellowed. ‘And they are not going to be involved.’

The whole half-and-half deal between Universal and Miramax was split asunder with the end of King Kong, but, says Kamins, ‘Harvey was just excited now to have Peter all to himself.’