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

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      LEFT: The smallest stage I’ve ever used. Dad’s first car was a Morris Minor and he carefully built the garage with just enough space to squeeze in and out of the drivers’ door. Here, Pete and I are shooting a scene with Clive Haywood, another of my production stalwarts from the Evening Post process department. In those days, photo-litho plates came in wide flat cardboard boxes, and I used to lug piles of these home each week. Cardboard was my main building material for everything – here the boxes have been painted grey, sprinkled with beach sand and used to line the garage.

      Leagues Under the Sea, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Prince Valiant, Bad Day at Black Rock, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Three Coins in the Fountain. Within a decade, wide-screen movies were less a novelty, more the norm and, for a young man with a taste for cinematic spectacle, what he calls ‘the huge letterbox-shaped CinemaScope image’ couldn’t fail to appeal.

      Peter sent to a supplier in England for an anamorphic lens of the kind used for filming in CinemaScope. Based upon a technique pioneered in France in the late Twenties by the inventor Henri Chrétien, the lens worked using an optical trick called ‘anamorphosis’ which allowed an image twice the width of that captured by a conventional lens to be horizontally ‘squeezed’ onto film. When projected onto a screen using a similar lens, the image was ‘unsqueezed’ to provide dramatic, eye-stretching, cinematic experience. With his new camera and his anamorphic lens, Peter embarked on another movie project with Pete O’Herne and veterans from The Valley, Ken Hammon and, temporarily back in New Zealand, Andrew Neal.

      We started work on what is sometimes referred now to as The Curse of the Gravewalker, although – like all my early experiments – it never really had a title. The film was shamelessly spawned by my adolescent love of the blood-spattered, over-the-top Gothic horrors from Hammer films which I started going to see on double-bills when I was in my late teens and one in particular, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, which I thought was really cool!

      Unlike many pictures to emerge from what has been called ‘the studio that dripped blood’, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, made in 1974, did not star either of Hammer’s legendary stalwarts Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee, nor even the seductive Ingrid Pitt, who had sucked the blood of young heroes and quickened the pulse of young moviegoers in such pictures as The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula. Captain Kronos – billed as ‘The Only Man Alive Feared by the Walking Dead’ – was an ingenious attempt at combining the vampiric myth with the dash and derring-do of the swashbuckler.

      Captain Kronos, played by German actor Horst Janson, is a master swordsman, late of the Imperial Guard (but flashing a blade forged from the metal of a crucifix), who seeks out and destroys the usual plague of ‘blood-thirsty’ vampires.

      The film had a significantly open-ended conclusion, clearly paving the way for a possible series. However, Hammer never accorded Captain Kronos the opportunity for a hoped-for encore and it was left to a young man in Wellington, New Zealand, to take up the theme with his Grave Walker project.

      Ken Hammon and Andrew Neal, played assorted vampires and met repeated deaths while Pete O’Herne portrayed their leader, ‘Count Murnau’, named after W.F. Murnau, the German director of the first ‘Dracula’ movie, Nosferatu. Not surprisingly, Peter Jackson cast himself as the hero, a fearless vampire-slayer going by the name of ‘Captain Eumig’ – a film-maker’s joke on the name of a well-known Austrian make of cameras and projectors.

      As well as acting and directing, I created the make-up effects for the zombie-kind-of-undead-creatures. I was continually coming up with story ideas and shooting endless bits and pieces in the hope that I’d eventually end up with a feature-length film! The results still exist, albeit as a rather fragmentary thing running probably forty-five minutes to an hour and very roughly cut and glued together.

      ‘My strongest memory of the film,’ says Ken Hammon, ‘is of digging! We dug for corpses of the undead in an overgrown graveyard, in the woods around Pukerua Bay, in the Jackson’s backyard. The joke was, “OK, guys we need some more digging!” If Peter knew what the final outcome was supposed to be, I never heard it! Shot over a period of

       When it came to needing actual graves, we wisely abandoned the cemetery and my parents found me a tiny spot in the middle of their carefully tended garden. Here, amongst the rows of carrots and spuds, I am happily going about my grave robbing duties. From the first trenches I dug when I was about 8 years old, I was constantly digging holes – either graves or trenches – in my parents’ garden.

      Pete O’Herne under a headful of Plaster of Paris in my mum’s kitchen. Pete was playing a zombie in my Super 8mm epic Curse of the Gravewalker. A much softer material, alginate, is used by the professionals to make head casts. I didn’t know that then, and we all suffered through the hot, stifling, direct plaster moulding process. The pad in Pete’s hand is a safety measure, so that he can scribble a warning if he can’t breathe!

      The result of the head cast, the severed head, is sitting on the cabinet behind Pete as I make him up for a day’s shooting on Gravewalker. The look of the zombies is very much inspired by the Hammer horror Plague of Zombies.

      perhaps two years, it was, without doubt, the maddest project of them all! Pete’s homage to Hammer, filmed with an anamorphic lens gaffer-taped onto camera and then shown with the lens gaffer-taped onto the projector, but throwing this amazing great image that filled the entire wall of the Jackson living-room.’

      Peter’s ambition was still that of an aspiring special-effects man as opposed to a director, and he was already devising ideas for using forced-perspective in a way not unlike that in which it would later be used in The Lord of the Rings. Ken remembers Peter plotting a scene that would feature adults in the foreground and school children (as adults) in the background in order to create an illusion of distance. Make-up experiments were, on an amateur scale, as ambitious as some of those that would be eventually created for the occupants of Isengard and Mordor – with as much СКАЧАТЬ