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

That was the first time in my life I had ever heard the term ‘special-effects’ and I’ve never forgotten the moment that I heard it or who said the words to me. I was 6.

Another early memory of going to the movies was having to stand up while they played ‘God Save the Queen’, which was accompanied by a film of the Changing of the Guard, the Trooping of the Colour or some such ceremony. I’ve never forgotten my cousin Alan winding me up by telling me that if I didn’t stand up, one of the guardsmen would come down and arrest me!

Years later, when I made Braindead, I decided to pay tribute to that vivid memory by beginning the film with the National Anthem and footage of Her Majesty. We had to go through a great deal of red tape to get approval and I can only assume that, somewhere along the line, we must have failed to give them a synopsis of the movie!

Apart from these odd excursions, cinema-going wasn’t a huge part of Peter’s first seven or eight years. The major influences that were to fire his interests and transform them into the passions that would play a part in shaping his future career came, in the first instance, not from the movies, but from television.

It was 1965 and I was 4 years old when television entered my life. We had been on holiday, and while we were away the TV had been delivered. We returned to find a huge cardboard box in the lounge, and I recall Dad unpacking it and lifting out what would now seem a terribly old-fashioned Philips black-and-white, single-channel television and a set of four legs that had to be screwed on underneath.

It’s difficult for today’s generation to realise just what an impact television had on our lives when we were first exposed to it. I

The arrival of our first television set was my first exposure to escapism – Thunderbirds was screening and I fell in love with model-making, storytelling and fantasy.

initially encountered almost all my adult enthusiasms through ‘the box’.

We used to get all those great old British Fifties black-and-white war movies that my father and I really loved such as Ice-Cold in Alex, Sink the Bismarck, and The Wooden Horse. Dad also loved old silent comedies: I can remember him roaring with laughter at Charlie Chaplin movies, till tears were streaming down his face.

I enjoyed Chaplin, although I wouldn’t describe myself as a fan, but watching his films and those of Laurel and Hardy led me to Buster Keaton and I am most certainly a Keaton fan: I love the dead-pan sense of humour that earned him the nickname ‘Stone Face’, and I really admire his eye for sight-gags and his immaculate sense of timing, particularly the split-second perfection of his stunt-work. I’ve seen all of Keaton’s movies and consider his 1927 picture, The General, to be a work of pure genius. Along with King Kong, The General is among my all-time favourite movies.

Set during the American Civil War, Keaton plays a brave but foolhardy train engineer in the Confederate South, whose beloved locomotive – The General of the title – is hijacked by Yankee troops from the North. Although Keaton was making a comedy-chase movie, it is completely authentic in terms of its period setting. The texture of the world Keaton creates in the film is detailed and realistic and that is something that I always strive to do with my movies.

Keaton was doing comedy while we – with Rings and Kong – have been doing a fantasy; but I honestly believe that even if you are showing outrageous things on the screen – in our case giant spiders, walking trees and huge gorillas or, in Keaton’s case, incredible routines with runaway steam-trains – as long as everything is grounded in a believable environment then it will have greater intensity and more poignancy.

When, years after first seeing The General, I was making Braindead, I’d often try to imagine what sort of gags Buster Keaton would have come up with if – bizarre concept though it is – he had ever made a splatter movie! There’s one particular scene in Braindead that illustrates this perfectly: the hero, Lionel Cosgrove is desperately trying to escape from the zombies; he’s running like crazy and he suddenly realises that he hasn’t actually gone anywhere because the floor is so slippery with zombie-blood that he is just running on the spot! That’s a Keatonish kind of gag.

Old movies aside, the most memorable and influential programme that I remember watching on TV, was undoubtedly Thunderbirds. I loved it! I was a complete, total and absolute fan!

For a generation of youngsters in the Sixties the clarion call: ‘5…4…3…2…1…Thunderbirds are GO! ’ was a weekly prelude to fifty minutes of thrill-laden adventures. First aired in 1965, Thunderbirds was the work of pioneering British puppet film-maker, Gerry Anderson, who had already excited young television viewers with such futuristic series as Fireball XL5 and Stingray.

Set in the year 2026, Thunderbirds featured the heroic deeds of International Rescue, a family of fearless action heroes located on a secret island in the Southern Pacific and headed by former moonpilot, Jeff Tracy. The Tracy boys – Scott, John, Virgil, Gordon and Alan – tackled dangerously impossible missions, often pitting their wits against arch-villain and master of disguises, The Hood.

International Rescue had a fleet of fantastic vehicles – rockets, supersonic planes and submersibles – and were aided by the bespectacled boffin, Brains; the chicest of secret agents, Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward and Parker, a former safe-cracker who gave up a life of crime to become Lady Penelope’s butler and chauffeur of her pink Rolls Royce, FAB 1.

The puppets, operated by near-to-imperceptible strings, were given verisimilitude by the use of a technique called ‘Supermarionation’ which used electrical pulses to create convincingly synchronised lipmovements. Thunderbirds married a centuries-old entertainment – the puppet show – with Sixties, state-of-the-art technology; the results were impressive and made compelling viewing.

Many years later, Peter would have the opportunity to meet puppetmaster Gerry Anderson, and in 1997 made an unsuccessful bid to direct a live-action movie version of Thunderbirds (a project that eventually went elsewhere and made a poor critical showing). But in 1965, he was – like millions of other kids – just another devoted young fan…

I loved the big spaceships and was excited by the rescues and the dramatic storylines that now seem incredibly melodramatic! Of course, I knew it wasn’t real; I knew they were puppets and that fascinated me: I wanted to know how they were made and operated.

I remember wanting to make models of the Thunderbirds crafts and buying plastic clip-together model-kits that were around at the time and which I incorporated into my games. Like lots of kids, I had Matchbox toys of various vehicles and I created International Rescue-style scenarios in the garden: cutting a road in the side of a dirt bank that was just big enough for some truck to fit on and then it would be half-hanging over the edge and Thunderbirds would have to come to the rescue!

Setting-up those little backyard dramas with my toys was when ‘special-effects’ really entered my awareness: I knew that was what I’d seen done in Batman: The Movie and that it was what Gerry Anderson was now doing in Thunderbirds; from that point on, I started to have a real interest in special-effects.