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

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…

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