Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

PROLOGUE

Where is Peter Jackson?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KING KONG

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 MODEL BEGINNINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skull Island…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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