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

If the antics of the Monty Python team were shaping Peter’s sense of humour, he was also still in the thrall of the film fantasists. He had already discovered the American publication, Famous Monsters of Filmland that had been founded in 1958, three years before he was born and which was generally regarded by sci-fi, fantasy and horrorgeeks worldwide as being the bible on all forms of movie-monsterlife.

In the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Peter read about the work of veterans Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price as well as the Sixties stars of Hammer’s House of Horror, Peter Cushing and the man who would one day play Saruman the White, Christopher Lee. Behind-the-scenes features on the making of some of the great monster classics, fuelled his interest in special-effects while revelations about the tricks-of-the-trade of stop-frame animation and, in particular, the work of Willis O’Brien and the team who created King Kong deepened his appreciation for the movie-magic behind the Eighth Wonder of the World.

In homage to Kong, Peter had toyed with attempting a possible ape movie of his own, building a gorilla puppet (using part of an old fur stole belonging to his mother), constructing a cardboard Empire State Building and painting a Manhattan skyscape for the backdrop.

Peter’s first original monster was constructed around a ‘skeleton’ made from rolled-up newspapers and was what he describes as ‘a crazy hunch-back rat’ – a forerunner, perhaps, of the rabid rat-monkey that wreaks havoc in Braindead.

More simian life forms were to exert their influence when Peter saw the 1968 movie, Planet of the Apes. The first – and unarguably the best – of a series of ape pictures, Planet was no conventional monster-movie. Based on a novella by Pierre Boulle, it had a satiric script, a seminal Sixties ‘message for mankind’, a compelling central performance from Charlton Heston and – for the period in which it was made – cutting-edge make-up effects that convincingly turned Roddy McDowall and others into assorted chimps, gorillas and orangutans.

I saw Planet of the Apes on TV and was blown away by it. I loved the special make-up effects but I also loved the story. I was already a fan of King Kong – although my fascination is not really with apes and gorillas so much as with a couple of great movies that both happen to have apes in them!

Nevertheless, both films, though they approach it in a very different way, have an intriguing theme in common: that the gap separating humans from apes is far less than we might like to suppose!

It wasn’t long before Peter Jackson was sculpting and moulding ape-masks and involving his friend Pete O’Herne in the process. Pete, who still proudly owns and displays highly competent prototypes for their handiwork – albeit now incredibly fragile – recalls, ‘Peter’s imagination was such that if something impressed him, he had to try and do it for himself – filming, sculpting, whatever – and if Peter was doing it, you’d want to do it, too! We’d seen Planet of the Apes and I went round to his house the following week and he had a model head and was working on a face mask: sculpturing it in Plasticine, freehand – not using drawings or photographs but creating this thing in three-dimensions, from his own mind. Of course, I’d think, “I’ll give that a go as well…” So I did!’

The process, as Pete remembers was time-consuming and expensive on pocket-money budgets: ‘Peter found this latex rubber in a hardware store; it came in little bottles that cost about $8 each. Once we’d sculpted the faces, we’d just get little paint brushes and paint it onto the Plasticine; then we’d have to leave it to dry and then paint on another coat and so on until you’d built it up layer by layer into a skin of a reasonable thickness to work as a mask. Then we’d paint them and stick on hair that we’d chop off old wigs! Peter’s mother always helped out at school fetes and jumble sales and she’d always be on the look out for suitable stuff that we could use for costumes and

I enjoyed sculpting in plasticine, and this was an early goblin design.

make-up. The trouble with the latex was that it reeked of ammonia – a sickening, vomit-making smell!’

The Planet of the Apes style film for which these masks were made never progressed beyond some footage of Pete O’Herne in an even more elaborate full-head mask made with a foam-latex product, which Peter Jackson purchased from a supplier in Canada and which he would bake in his mother’s oven. ‘It rose like a cake,’ says Pete, ‘but it also stank to high heaven!’ Existing photographs showing Pete wearing the gorilla head and a costume inspired by those worn by the ape soldiers in the film indicate a remarkable level of competence, although the setting – a domestic garden with a carousel clothes dryer – add a bizarre dimension!

Although the ape film project never got beyond the idea stage, who could have guessed that the young man who was so fired up by Planet of the Apes that he created his own gorilla masks, would years later, as a professional film-maker, come near to adding a new title to the Apes franchise? Instead, Tim Burton re-made the original, and cinema audiences were denied the opportunity of seeing what Peter Jackson would have done with the theme of ape superiority.

Now into his teens, Peter was broadening his knowledge of film with books about movies and moviemakers although, ironically, the students’ Film Club at Kapiti College – which seems to have been run by a smug, self-perpetuating oligarchy – repeatedly declined to accept the young Peter Jackson into membership.

Undaunted, Peter pursued his interest in cinema alone or with friends like Ken Hammon, a fellow pupil at Kapiti College, who shared his love of movies, was a fan of Famous Monsters of Filmland and was, conveniently, another non-sportsman! Both boys had film projectors and were spending their pocket money buying 8mm copies of various movies.

One of the first films in Peter’s collection was, unsurprisingly, King Kong, but he also owned prints of the original vampire movie Nosferatu and Lon Chaney’s versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. Ken broadened the repertoire with such titles as D.W. Griffith’s silent epic, Intolerance, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Howard Hawks’ gangster movie, Scarface and the Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps.

Other 8mm films were hired from a low-profile, illegal operator in the Wellington suburb who was able to supply such assorted delights as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing which, Ken recalls, ‘freaked us out’, and Tobe Hooper’s 1974 seminal tale of murder and cannibalism, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Publicised in America with the poster slogan ‘Who will survive – and what will be left of them?’, Chain Saw Massacre was, for many years, banned in several countries including New Zealand so its illicit availability on hire was especially irresistible to the young film fans.

‘We humped four cans of film back home,’ says Ken, ‘watched the first reel, which was so psychologically unnerving that we were seriously rattled! I remember saying to Pete, “Are you really sure you want to watch the rest?” At the time we were hardly overexposed to such thrillers, so they inevitably made an impression.’ It was an