Buch lesen: «Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey»

1 MODEL BEGINNINGS

The date: Sunday 2 March 2003. The Place: Universal Studios, Los Angeles.

Peter Jackson and his partner, Fran Walsh, are in town for the Directors Guild Awards. While in the City of Angels, they are due to meet with Stacey Snider, President of Universal Pictures, and assorted movie executives in order to reach a decision on whether or not they will be signing to make King Kong. The Fates, perhaps, have already decided the outcome of this meeting since Peter’s opening remark is, quite simply, that of a passionately devoted film fan: ‘This may not mean anything to you,’ he tells those present, ‘but today, 2 March, is the seventieth anniversary of the opening of the original 1933 film, King Kong. Our meeting is taking place, seventy years since King Kong opened – to the day!’

The date: Sometime in 1971. The Place: Pukerua Bay, an idyllic seaside community on the Kapiti Coast, just over 18 miles north of the New Zealand capital, Wellington.

The 9-year-old Peter Jackson is watching a movie on television. It doesn’t matter that the family only has a black-and-white TV set because the film is in black-and-white and old. It had been made in the golden age of Hollywood when film-publicist’s hyperbole knew no bounds. It was, moviegoers in 1933 were told, the ‘Strangest Story

Pukerua Bay – my parents bought a tiny cottage there after their wedding, and that’s where I lived for my first twenty-six years. Our house was perched on the top of cliff above the sea. A great place to grow up.

Ever Conceived by Man! Out-thrilling the Wildest Thrills! Out-leaping the Maddest Imaginings!’

Cavalier film-maker Carl Denham picks up pretty blonde Ann Darrow, down on her luck on the streets of depression-racked New York, and whisks her off to an exotic, dangerous world of primal fantasies. ‘It’s money and adventure and fame,’ Denham promises her. ‘It’s the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o’clock tomorrow morning…’

It was also, if she had but known it, an excuse to re-live, with variations, a scenario borrowed from an old fairy-tale: ‘It’s the idea of my picture,’ Denham confides to first mate Jack Driscoll. ‘The Beast was the tough guy. He could lick the world. But when he saw Beauty, she got him. He went soft. He forgot his wisdom and the little fellas licked him…’

Ann Darrow and Kong re-enact an eighteenth-century fable in a contemporary twentieth-century setting, featuring, in its climactic sequence, what was, at the time, the newest icon of human endeavour and achievement: the 102-storey-high Empire State Building, completed only two years before King Kong was made.

But the appeal of King Kong – in 1933 or 1969 – is that its heroes and heroine forsake the world of today to go in search of a place where mysteries and wonders can exist without explanation or rationalisation. The SS Venture steams away from the steel-and-concrete civilisation of New York City and heads for a location not found on any map or chart: a land that time forgot filled with palaeontological nightmares; a carnival freak-show of savages and monsters; Skull Island…

And what did it mean to the young boy watching this story unfold to the orchestrated snarl and gnash of dinosaurs, the enraged bellowings of a great ape and the endless, ear-piercing screams of a woman in peril? Peter recalls…

It was around nine o’clock, one Friday night when I first saw King Kong. I remember being totally swept away on this great adventure! The ingredients of this film were everything that I loved! Like any kid, I was intrigued by the notion of lost places, uncharted islands – King Solomon’s Mines, The Lost World – and the idea that, on such an island, there might exist some colossal, unknown beast.

And what absolutely made it for me wasn’t just that there was a huge, terrifying gorilla that carried the girl away in his hand: it was that when the guys go after them into the jungle, they find what? Dinosaurs! It was just so great!

It is a very simple story, but one that is loaded with strong, potent, poetic themes: beauty and the beast, love and death – ‘It wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.’ Even today I am moved – often to tears – by the end of the film; but the real moment of emotion is not actually Kong falling off the Empire State Building and crashing to his death on the sidewalk below, it is the moment where, knowing that he is going to die, he carefully puts Ann down, makes sure that she is safe, regardless of what happens to him.

Ask me today what I think of King Kong and I will tell you that it is one of the most perfect pieces of cinematic escapism. If you had asked me as a child, I would have said that it was everything that I imagined an adventure story should be. Kong was, quite simply, a ripping yarn! More than that, it created a totally believable fusion between the real and the fantastic. The story is set in this world, not in some outrageous, outlandish Other Place. Then, in introducing a giant gorilla and dinosaurs you make that leap from the real to the fantastical.

That has always been my aim as a film-maker: you have to believe in order to become involved with the story and to care about its protagonists. That is why, when we approached the filming of The Lord of the Rings, I was determined – no matter how many trolls, balrogs and fell-beasts we might encounter – that the world in which they exist would be real – just as I’m sure it was real for J. R. R. Tolkien.

King Kong was important because it showed me the power of movies to make you experience things that are outside what you could ever experience in your daily life. I came to love the fact that film had that potential; and, in a way, it has been what has defined every film that I’ve ever made.

That is the legacy I owe to King Kong and it is one of the reasons why I have so long wanted to make my own film version of the story. I want to re-tell that tale for a modern movie audience. I want them to discover the excitement of travelling to Skull Island…

Skull Island…

It was right there, just across the water from where Peter Jackson grew up. He saw it every day from the living-room window in his parents’ home at Pukerua Bay.

The local name for the long grey misty hump of an island that rose out of the sea was Kapiti Island but, as Peter’s childhood friend Pete O’Herne remembers, even if it were not the Skull Island, then at least it might be a place of potential adventures of the kind offered by Kong and other legendary movies: ‘We always thought it was possible; that maybe, if we could only get over there, get past the krakens that were probably living in the waters around its shores, that we’d find a fantasy island inhabited by monster crabs and other strange creatures.’ Peter Jackson also recalls the lure of the island:

I remember a lot of fun things from my childhood. Pukerua Bay was a great place to grow up because it was a very small town but it was also surrounded by bush and forests; there were steep hills and deep gullies; there were the beaches and the rocks and the ocean and, only five miles away – but totally inaccessible – a mysterious, fantasy island…

We would always wonder what was on that island. It wasn’t simply down to juvenile fancy, because there were many stories and legends about Kapiti: tales of the Maori chieftain, Te Rauparaha, leader of the Ngati-Toa tribe in the 1800s, who had established a ‘pa’ – a fortified Maori settlement – on the island.

There were melodramatic, bloodthirsty rumours of cannibalistic rituals and secret tunnels and caves filled with the skeletal remains of Maori warriors. As kids we never bothered about what was true and what wasn’t, we believed it all! And we dreamed of, one day, getting a boat and going over there and exploring. How bizarre that, years later, when the ship we were using to film King Kong started taking on water and beginning to sink, we ended up having to land on Kapiti Island, the Skull Island of our young fantasies.

Peter Robert Jackson was born in Wellington hospital on 31 October 1961. It was Halloween: although, at the time and for many years after, that appellation had little significance in a British Commonwealth country. Halloween was, after all, a strange, sinister, American festival…

Many New Zealanders celebrated, instead, Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November in commemoration of the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Although popularly known as ‘Firework’ or ‘Bonfire’ Night it occasionally took on other names – ‘Mischief Night’ or ‘Danger Night’ – that hinted at links to that other holiday with its spooks and masks and trick-or-treating…

But, as it happened, Halloween wasn’t a wildly inappropriate date on which to be born. For Peter Jackson would not only fall under the spell of the fiends, monsters and extra-terrestrials of Hollywood and the comic-books, but would, eventually make his name and his reputation as a film-maker with movies about aliens, zombies and vampires – a true child of Halloween, Walpurgisnacht, the Day of the Dead…

Peter is a first-generation ‘pakeha’, a New Zealander of European descent; his parents, Joan and Bill, having met in New Zealand after separately emigrating there in the early 1950s.

My dad is the first child on the left, with two of his four brothers. Both my parents came from five-child households, yet I was an only child. My dad loved Charlie Chaplin movies and encouraged my love of silent comedy. He always said his father looked like Chaplin and would get people yelling ‘Hi Charlie’ at him. I can see why in this photo from the early Twenties. My granddad died at a comparably young age in 1940 – my dad always said it was due to his war injuries.

William Jackson had been born in 1920 in Brixton, South London; Joan Ruck, his wife to be, was also born in 1920 near the Hertfordshire village of Shenley; both of them were drawn to New Zealand – as were many others in the years immediately following the Second World War – in response to a tantalizing scheme in which the New Zealand Government offered free or assisted passage to single men and women, under the age of 36, looking to make a fresh start.

‘Emigrate to New Zealand for a NEW way of life,’ read a typical advertisement in a London newspaper of 1949. ‘Good Jobs…Good Pay…Good Living…New Zealand has a place for YOU in her future development.’

When Bill Jackson set sail on the Atlantis in 1950, his motivation for leaving home and family was less to do with good jobs and good pay as with his affection for a girl who wanted to emigrate from Britain. Bill, who had been working with a division of the travel agency, Thomas Cook, organised the girl’s passage and decided to go along too. The romance ended before ever the ship docked in Wellington, but Bill never regretted his journey to the other side of the world.

Bill became a government employee working for the post office – the deal on assisted passages required the émigré to sign a two-year work contract – found accommodation in Johnsonville, a few miles out of Wellington, and joined the Johnsonville Football Club, into which he later enlisted two other British lads who had recently arrived in New Zealand: Frank and Bob Ruck.

In 1951, the Ruck brothers’ sister, Joan, came to Wellington,

The only hint of any film or theatrics in my family’s background came through my mother, who was a member of the local amateur dramatics club in her home village of Shenley in Hertfordshire, England. Here’s Mum in some melodrama from what looks like the late 1940s.

together with their mother, for what was originally intended to be a six-month visit. After years of war-time rationing and post-war privations, the ‘good living’ promised in those immigration advertisements ensured that an eventual return to Shenley soon ceased to be an option for the future.

Joan got a job at a hosiery factory in the city and whilst attending Saturday matches at the Johnsonville Football Club where her brothers played, met and struck up an acquaintanceship with one of their British mates – Bill Jackson.

Bill and Joan’s friendship blossomed and two years later, in November 1953, they were married and moved to Pukerua Bay, purchasing a small holiday home. The single-storey, two-bedroom house was small, but had a wide uninterrupted view overlooking the ocean and the rugged splendour of the Kapiti coastline.

Taking its name from the Maori word for ‘hill’, Pukerua was founded on the site of a Maori community. Along the side of the hills, which drop sharply to the sea, snakes the precarious track of the Paraparaumu railway line out of Wellington. The area is virtually as unspoilt today as it was fifty years ago, with its wooded and heather-covered slopes; its equitable climate, facing north and protected from the cold south winds by the hills of the Taraura Ranges; and its glorious sunsets that, in the late afternoon, turn sea and sand to gold.

Mum and Dad both emigrated to New Zealand separately and met in Johnsonville.

The year after their marriage, Bill Jackson got a job as a wages clerk with Wellington City Council. Loyal, dedicated and hardworking, he remained an employee of the Council until his retirement, by which time he had risen to the position of paymaster.

After years of my parents trying to have a baby, I finally turned up in 1961. For whatever reason, Mum and Dad couldn’t produce a brother or sister for me.

Born in 1961, Peter was a late child of Joan and Bill’s marriage, and complications during the confinement meant that he was destined to be an only child.

Being an only child and not having anyone else to bounce ideas off, you have to create your own games with whatever props come to hand. You find that you create your fun and entertainment in your own head, which helps to exercise the mind and trains you to be more imaginative…

As an only child – as well as being long-awaited and, therefore, much treasured – Peter was also the sole focus of his parents’ love, care, attention and encouragement. Without sibling companionship or competitiveness, Peter instinctively related to an older generation and, in particular, one that mostly comprised veterans of the 1939–45 war. Peter’s youthful imagination was excited by the overheard reminiscences of his elders and the stories that they told a youngster eager for tales of dangers and heroisms.

The Second World War was the dominant part of their most recent lives. Mum would tell me lots of stories about her life: the air-raids and doodlebugs and her experiences working as a foreman in a De Havilland aircraft factory where they built the Mosquito bomber which was largely made out of wood and was known as the ‘Timber Terror’.

My father didn’t talk as much about his wartime experiences, as I

I grew up with Grandma Emma as the matriarch of the family. She taught me to love card games and was a wonderful cook. In her younger years, she was a cook for an upper-class family in London. Upstairs, Downstairs was her favourite show – it was the world she came from. Here she is holding me as a baby. She lived to be 98 and died just as I was making Bad Taste.

would now have liked…He had served with the Royal Ordnance Corps in Italy and, before that, on the island of Malta. This was during the grim years of 1940–43 when German and Italian forces lay siege to the British colony that was of such crucial importance to the war in the Mediterranean and which, as a result, suffered terrible hardships.

Dad spoke about some of what he had seen, but he never really dwelt on the bad things; although he did talk about his time on Malta when, due to enemy blockades and the bombing of supply-ships, the entire island was starving for a period of months and his body-weight dramatically dropped to around seven stone.

He told me the story of the SS Ohio, the American tanker that, in August 1942, was carrying vital fuel to Malta for the British planes when it was attacked by German bombers and torpedoes. Without a rudder, with a hole in the stern, its decks awash and in imminent danger of splitting in two, the tanker was eventually strapped between two destroyers and towed towards the island. Dad was one of the soldiers on the fortress ramparts of the capital, Valetta, when – at 9.30 on the morning of 15 August 1942 – the Ohio finally, and heroically, limped into Malta’s Grand Harbour.

I also heard about the arrival by aircraft-carrier of the first Spitfires in October 1942 and how the 400 planes based at Malta’s three bombsavaged airfields, instantly began an air-defence of the island, flying daily sorties to repel attacks from the German Luftwaffe and the Italian Regia Aeronatica that were based in Sicily.

Enemy aircraft, which were not used to being opposed, were in the regular habit of flying in and beating the hell out of the island – they made some 3,000 air-raids in just two years. On the first raid after the Spitfires had arrived, Dad remembered how he and many others had chosen not to go into the shelters but to stay outside and watch as the bombers roared in across the sea to be greeted by a swarm of Spitfires and the cheers of an island full of people who could, at last, fight back.