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

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.’