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

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.