Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey. Brian Sibley

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       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 СКАЧАТЬ