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

The story of the heroic, but ill-fated, struggle on the beaches of the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli is one of the most dramatic conflicts of the First World War. The combined Allied operation to seize the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, staged in 1915, was a tactical disaster and the price paid by both sides in terms of lives lost and injured was disastrous: more than 140,000 Allies and over 250,000 Turks killed and wounded.

My grandfather served in the British Army, in the South Wales

My dad in Malta, 1941. He served in the British Army during the Siege of Malta, suffering the constant bombing and starvation along with the rest of the population. My mother worked at DeHavilland’s aircraft factory, building the Mosquito fighter bombers. I was in the generation who grew up with ‘the War’ a constant undercurrent in our household.

My dad’s father, William Jackson. He was a professional soldier and served in the South Wales Borderers from 1912 to 1919. He went through just about every major battle of the First World War, was mentioned in dispatches for bravery several times, and won the second highest medal, the DCM, at Gallipoli.

Borderers, but I now live in a country where the bravery and tragic losses of the Anzac forces (over 7,500 New Zealand deaths and casualties) are still remembered and annually commemorated. One day, that story should be told on film.

Of course, Peter Weir made a film in 1981 that was set in Gallipoli and starred Mel Gibson; but it was essentially an Australian

view of the conflict. In New Zealand, memories and stories of Gallipoli still hold such a potent place in the history of our country that they deserve to have a good movie made about them. It is not a project that I am pursuing at the moment, but, maybe, one day…

Peter Jackson may well, one day, make a war film – perhaps even one about Gallipoli…In 2003, wandering around Peter Jackson’s Stone Street studios, I came across an extensive scale model of a beach with rising hills. This might easily represent the tortuous terrain of ravines, spurs and ridges that confronted the Australian and New Zealand troops that landed at what is now known as Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915, and where, within the first day’s engagement with the Turks, one in five New Zealanders became casualties of war.

In the same building as the scale model of the beach, sculptors from Weta Workshop were carving the enormous wings, tails and assorted body parts that would eventually be assembled into the huge sculptures of the Nazgûl fell-beasts destined to decorate Wellington’s Embassy and Reading theatres for the premiere of The Return of the King: a reminder that J. R. R. Tolkien, himself a veteran of the Somme, had originally suggested that a suitable title for the third part of The Lord of the Rings would be ‘The War of the Ring’. So, in a sense, Peter Jackson has already made a war-movie, albeit set in the fantasy realm of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

If and when Peter makes a film based on some twentieth-century wartime event (and it seems inconceivable that he won’t) it will simply be a fulfilment of an ambition that dates back to his debut film, made in 1971 – when he was 8 years old!

The first movie I ever made, which I acted in and directed, was shot on my parents’ Super 8 Movie Camera. I dug a trench in the back garden, made wooden guns and borrowed some old army uniforms from relatives. Then I enlisted the help of a couple of schoolmates and we ran around fighting and acting out this war-movie – or, more accurately, something out of a war-comic – full of action and high drama! In order to simulate gun-fire from my homemade machine-gun, I used a pin to poke holes through the celluloid – frame by frame – on to the barrel of the gun in order to create a burst of whiteness when the film was projected. My first special-effect – and without the aid of digital graphics!

Peter’s earliest recollection of going to the movies was a visit, several years before, to one of Wellington’s cinemas to see a film now long forgotten – and, frankly, deservedly so: Noddy in Toyland. Made in 1957, four years before Peter was born, it had obviously taken its time in reaching the cinemas of New Zealand!

Directed by MacLean Rogers, whose filmography of over eighty titles included many pictures featuring popular radio and musichall stars including the famous ‘The Goons’, Noddy in Toyland was simply a filmed performance of a musical play for children by Enid Blyton.

Based on Blyton’s popular children’s books about Noddy and his friend Big Ears, the author had constructed a rambling and tortuously complicated plot featuring, in addition to the denizens of Toyland,

I remember my childhood as being reasonably idyllic, with lots of family vacations in our Morris Minor. Although I was an only child, I was never lonely – we had a wonderful extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins, most of whom had followed the family migration to New Zealand.

characters from her other books, including The Magic Faraway Tree and Mr Pinkwhistle.

The photography was pedestrian, the stage business dull and laboured – especially without the enthusiastic audience of cheering kids that it doubtless enjoyed in theatres – and the only tenuous link between Noddy’s exploits and the films of Peter Jackson is an encounter with some ‘naughty goblins’ but who, in their baggy tights, were a far cry from the malevolent, scuttling creatures that swarm through the Mines of Moria. Nevertheless, to the young Peter, it was a remarkable film.

I was highly entertained by Noddy in Toyland; it was the first movie that I ever saw and, although I’ve never seen it since, I remember thinking it was pretty amazing!

Seeing a film when I was very young was a big event: we didn’t have a cinema in Pukerua so a trip to ‘the pictures’ meant a car or train journey into Wellington. My parents seldom took me into the city, so the occasional visits to the cinema were rare and special treats and the few films that I saw at this stage of my life tended to make a big impact on my youthful imagination – even if they really weren’t very good!

One such was Batman: The Movie, the 1966 spin-off of the high-camp TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward, which I saw with my cousins, Alan and David Ruck. I remember being fascinated by the scenes where Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson leapt on to the ‘bat-poles’ behind the secret panel in Wayne Manor in order to reach the Bat-cave. They started their descent wearing ‘civilian’ clothes but, by the time they’d reached the Bat-cave, they were miraculously kitted out in their Batman and Robin outfits.

My cousins were a few years older than me and therefore less impressionable, but I thought that it was just about the most astonishing thing I had ever seen. After the screening, we went back to Alan and David’s house in Johnsonville and I can still remember standing in their dining room and asking, ‘How did they do that? How could they have changed their clothes so fast ?’ and my cousin David turning to me and saying, ‘Oh, that’s just special-effects.’