Peter Jackson

It Came From Pukerua Bay!

By Hugh Young

Written for New Zealand Geographic magazine in 1998 as part of an unpublished article on Pukerua Bay.

A whole genre of movies had its gruesome genesis in Pukerua Bay. Peter Jackson, an only child (born on Hallowe’en, 1961), grew up in a modest cottage on the clifftop. His parents, Joan and Bill, tried to make up for the lack of siblings by spending extra time with him, and Joan bargained: “You don’t touch my things and I won’t touch yours.” The bargain lasted (though Peter was sorely tempted by Joan’s cake-mixture) and when toy villages grew in the living room they stayed for days. Little Peter was afraid of spiders (he still is), and would cover frightening pictures in storybooks with his hands. He read Enid Blyton and Narnia books and found Pukerua Bay an ideal place to act out their fantasies.

“I remember my childhood as being an incredibly happy time, and I think a lot of that was due to my living in Pukerua Bay. You could go down to the beach and imagine that you were in Narnia or in an English village with the Secret Seven or the Famous Five, getting up to mysterious things. Pukerua Bay had a wealth of interesting little places for kids to play. I used to be able to lose myself. We had favourite places in bush or down banks all over the place and each one had a separate mood to it: it was like a huge adventure playground. We used to get up to spooky stuff in the Boy Scouts, like treasure hunts after dark, all around the Bay.”

One Christmas the family were given a simple 8mm Kodak movie camera. Peter took it over and was soon making short films of the cat – and the headmaster – vanishing. His hero was special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen, and he began experimenting with stop-motion animation (moving models a smidgen by hand between frames), but the Kodak could not take single frames and the first results were dismal. Eventually he was able to animate a skeleton, a tribute to Harryhausen’s classic battle between a human and seven skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts.

Peter began co-opting friends into his films. The Valley, their entry in a high school film contest sponsored by TV’s Spot On, with a cyclopean monster disposing of 19th century goldminers in the nearby Waimapihi gorge, was highly commended — for its special effects. “It was like a prehistoric world, you could almost expect to see dinosaurs there.” His interest in horror and models came together and he made several more short movies.

A job in a Wellington paper’s photo-lithography department took him into the city and exposed him to its bookshops. There too, he recruited the cast and crew of his first feature, Bad Taste. It took four years of spare time work. Bill Jackson added a workshop to the house for Peter to build the models. Joan cooked up blue custard to serve as alien

vomit. One cast member had time to marry a born-again Christian and drop out of Sunday filming, divorce, and rejoin the team. (Be unborn-again? It seems somehow appropriate.)

The new genre was comedy-splatter. He reassured his mother, “Don’t worry, Mum, there’s a laugh with every drop of blood.” What New Zealander could fail to laugh at the deep symbolism of a sheep exploding? Or of a movie almost literally made with binder-twine and number eight wire – and showing it? A Steadicam, the balanced shoulder-mount that has revolutionized hand-held filming, would have cost $40-50,000: Peter made his own for about $20.

The fight scenes, where the hero’s brains spill out, were filmed on the cliffs below Rawhiti Road. The monsters’ heads were baked in Joan Jackson’s oven, their size and shape determined by the dimensions of its door. She cooked up cans and cans of baked beans and spaghetti for the cast and crew on Sundays, filming days. Even so, Peter had to work overtime on Saturdays to earn the $17,000 the film cost to make.

Bad Taste was well received at Cannes in 1987 and sold to ten countries in six days, but Peter Jackson’s greatest reward was being invited to a special effects festival at Hamburg to be guest of honour jointly with Ray Harryhausen.

Meet the Feebles, an all-puppet splatter parody of The Muppet Show, followed, but his heart was in his next feature with a human (more or less) cast, Brain Dead, about zombies. This too took four years.

Peter’s next film was to be Blubberhead, a ghosts and dragons fantasy using stop-motion animation, to cost $10 million. Instead, he made Heavenly Creatures, about the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case in Christchurch, introducing Kate Winslett, who has gone on to greater fame, which gained an Oscar nomination for its screenplay*.

Then followed the highly computerised The Frighteners with Michael J. Fox, and now the quarter-billion budgeted, literally cast of thousands, Lord of the Rings.

*To which HY made a minor contribution, pointing out that the expressions “gunk”, “Third World” and “one-to-one relationship” were not yet used in 1954 when the film was set, and Peter removed them. “Gunk” became “muck”.

On Photographing Peter Jackson

By Neil Penman

Upon arriving at the Jackson residence at Pukerua Bay, I mentioned to Peter that this would be the first time that I have ever directed a Director.

“No problem” he replied, “I will do just as you say.” And so it proved to be.

Upon setting up my equipment, Peter’s Mother examined him and said, “Just look at your hair!” darted off to the bedroom and produced a comb. Despite protestations from Peter she proceeded to sort things out in that department amidst much merriment!

Once a Mother, always a Mother.