Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

скачать книгу бесплатно


If the antics of the Monty Python team were shaping Peter’s sense of humour, he was also still in the thrall of the film fantasists. He had already discovered the American publication, Famous Monsters of Filmland that had been founded in 1958, three years before he was born and which was generally regarded by sci-fi, fantasy and horrorgeeks worldwide as being the bible on all forms of movie-monsterlife.

In the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Peter read about the work of veterans Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price as well as the Sixties stars of Hammer’s House of Horror, Peter Cushing and the man who would one day play Saruman the White, Christopher Lee. Behind-the-scenes features on the making of some of the great monster classics, fuelled his interest in special-effects while revelations about the tricks-of-the-trade of stop-frame animation and, in particular, the work of Willis O’Brien and the team who created King Kong deepened his appreciation for the movie-magic behind the Eighth Wonder of the World.

In homage to Kong, Peter had toyed with attempting a possible ape movie of his own, building a gorilla puppet (using part of an old fur stole belonging to his mother), constructing a cardboard Empire State Building and painting a Manhattan skyscape for the backdrop.

Peter’s first original monster was constructed around a ‘skeleton’ made from rolled-up newspapers and was what he describes as ‘a crazy hunch-back rat’ – a forerunner, perhaps, of the rabid rat-monkey that wreaks havoc in Braindead.

More simian life forms were to exert their influence when Peter saw the 1968 movie, Planet of the Apes. The first – and unarguably the best – of a series of ape pictures, Planet was no conventional monster-movie. Based on a novella by Pierre Boulle, it had a satiric script, a seminal Sixties ‘message for mankind’, a compelling central performance from Charlton Heston and – for the period in which it was made – cutting-edge make-up effects that convincingly turned Roddy McDowall and others into assorted chimps, gorillas and orangutans.

I saw Planet of the Apes on TV and was blown away by it. I loved the special make-up effects but I also loved the story. I was already a fan of King Kong – although my fascination is not really with apes and gorillas so much as with a couple of great movies that both happen to have apes in them!

Nevertheless, both films, though they approach it in a very different way, have an intriguing theme in common: that the gap separating humans from apes is far less than we might like to suppose!

It wasn’t long before Peter Jackson was sculpting and moulding ape-masks and involving his friend Pete O’Herne in the process. Pete, who still proudly owns and displays highly competent prototypes for their handiwork – albeit now incredibly fragile – recalls, ‘Peter’s imagination was such that if something impressed him, he had to try and do it for himself – filming, sculpting, whatever – and if Peter was doing it, you’d want to do it, too! We’d seen Planet of the Apes and I went round to his house the following week and he had a model head and was working on a face mask: sculpturing it in Plasticine, freehand – not using drawings or photographs but creating this thing in three-dimensions, from his own mind. Of course, I’d think, “I’ll give that a go as well…” So I did!’

The process, as Pete remembers was time-consuming and expensive on pocket-money budgets: ‘Peter found this latex rubber in a hardware store; it came in little bottles that cost about $8 each. Once we’d sculpted the faces, we’d just get little paint brushes and paint it onto the Plasticine; then we’d have to leave it to dry and then paint on another coat and so on until you’d built it up layer by layer into a skin of a reasonable thickness to work as a mask. Then we’d paint them and stick on hair that we’d chop off old wigs! Peter’s mother always helped out at school fetes and jumble sales and she’d always be on the look out for suitable stuff that we could use for costumes and

I enjoyed sculpting in plasticine, and this was an early goblin design.

make-up. The trouble with the latex was that it reeked of ammonia – a sickening, vomit-making smell!’

The Planet of the Apes style film for which these masks were made never progressed beyond some footage of Pete O’Herne in an even more elaborate full-head mask made with a foam-latex product, which Peter Jackson purchased from a supplier in Canada and which he would bake in his mother’s oven. ‘It rose like a cake,’ says Pete, ‘but it also stank to high heaven!’ Existing photographs showing Pete wearing the gorilla head and a costume inspired by those worn by the ape soldiers in the film indicate a remarkable level of competence, although the setting – a domestic garden with a carousel clothes dryer – add a bizarre dimension!

Although the ape film project never got beyond the idea stage, who could have guessed that the young man who was so fired up by Planet of the Apes that he created his own gorilla masks, would years later, as a professional film-maker, come near to adding a new title to the Apes franchise? Instead, Tim Burton re-made the original, and cinema audiences were denied the opportunity of seeing what Peter Jackson would have done with the theme of ape superiority.

Now into his teens, Peter was broadening his knowledge of film with books about movies and moviemakers although, ironically, the students’ Film Club at Kapiti College – which seems to have been run by a smug, self-perpetuating oligarchy – repeatedly declined to accept the young Peter Jackson into membership.

Undaunted, Peter pursued his interest in cinema alone or with friends like Ken Hammon, a fellow pupil at Kapiti College, who shared his love of movies, was a fan of Famous Monsters of Filmland and was, conveniently, another non-sportsman! Both boys had film projectors and were spending their pocket money buying 8mm copies of various movies.

One of the first films in Peter’s collection was, unsurprisingly, King Kong, but he also owned prints of the original vampire movie Nosferatu and Lon Chaney’s versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. Ken broadened the repertoire with such titles as D.W. Griffith’s silent epic, Intolerance, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Howard Hawks’ gangster movie, Scarface and the Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps.

Other 8mm films were hired from a low-profile, illegal operator in the Wellington suburb who was able to supply such assorted delights as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing which, Ken recalls, ‘freaked us out’, and Tobe Hooper’s 1974 seminal tale of murder and cannibalism, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Publicised in America with the poster slogan ‘Who will survive – and what will be left of them?’, Chain Saw Massacre was, for many years, banned in several countries including New Zealand so its illicit availability on hire was especially irresistible to the young film fans.

‘We humped four cans of film back home,’ says Ken, ‘watched the first reel, which was so psychologically unnerving that we were seriously rattled! I remember saying to Pete, “Are you really sure you want to watch the rest?” At the time we were hardly overexposed to such thrillers, so they inevitably made an impression.’ It was an

My Uncle Bill visited us from England in 1976, and bought me my long-wished-for copy of King Kong in Super 8. In the days before video, projecting in Super 8 was the only way to actually own a movie and watch it again and again. Kong got played a lot in my bedroom!

impression that, for Peter Jackson, would endure, as is testified to by the gorier sequences in Bad Taste and Braindead.

In company with Ken and Pete O’Herne, or sometimes on his own, Peter was now regularly travelling into Wellington – or anywhere else that had a cinema and was within commuting distance – in order to catch the latest movie releases or fleeting screenings of vintage films.

I saw American World War II movies for the first time – The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes – and a film, made in 1970, about a much earlier war, Waterloo.

Waterloo was the work of Russian director, Sergei Bondarchuk, and starred Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington and Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte. It inspired an interest in that period of time which has remained with me across the years. I collected – and still collect – toy-soldiers, including a number representing various Napoleonic troops.

What I loved about Waterloo were the uniforms and the big formations of soldiers. Filmed in the Soviet Union, Bondarchuk had used the Russian army as extras on the battlefield – 20,000 of them! I was impressed at seeing such a huge number of people on screen, but was also frustrated because the real Battle of Waterloo involved almost 140,000 soldiers, so I remember watching these 20,000 extras and thinking, ‘God! What would it be like to see the real battle?’ That’s why I wanted to create these formidable-looking armies in The Lord of the Rings which, with the aid of computers we were able to achieve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There always is. Your job is to find it…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the event, Fate played a different card…