In fact, people had been making movies in New Zealand for sixty years, the first feature film being Hinemoa, a famous Maori legend brought to life, as the posters put it, ‘in animated form and 2,500 Feet of Glorious Photography’ and premiered in 1914. The same posters also declared that Hinemoa was part of ‘A New Industry in New Zealand’ and, indeed, during the silent era, a number of films were produced and distributed with considerable success: historical epics including The Mutiny of the Bounty and The Birth of New Zealand; knock-about, slapstick comedies and what Peter Jackson would call ‘ripping yarns’ such as the 1922 film My Lady of the Cave, a ‘Rattling Tale of Adventure on the New Zealand Coast, with a Love Story that Steals into your Heart like some Weird and Beautiful Melody.’
New Zealand-produced films appeared intermittently over the next two decades with occasional pioneers emerging – like the revolutionary animator of abstract film, Len Lye – and one or two Kiwi film-makers achieving success in Hollywood. Indigenous productions, however, eventually all but died out and New Zealand film languished until the arrival of a new wave of directors in the 1970s.
Significantly, at the time when Peter Jackson was beginning his juvenile experiments, the concept of film as a ‘New Zealand industry’ was to re-emerge with the success of such films as Roger Donaldson’s 1977 movie, Sleeping Dogs and The Wildman made in the same year, by Geoff Murphy, who over twenty years later would serve as Second Unit Director on The Lord of the Rings. Again in 1977, the New Zealand documentary Off the Edge, earned an Academy Award nomination.
The following year, in which Peter and his friends made The Valley, the New Zealand Film Commission was established, under Act of Parliament, with the remit ‘to encourage and also to participate and assist in the making, promotion, distribution, and exhibition of films,’ which made it an interesting time for an eager young film-maker to attempt to find a way into the business.
Peter’s first port of call was the National Film Unit that had been founded in 1941, following a visit from John Grierson, the legendary documentary film-maker and influential head of the National Film Board of Canada. The aim of the National Film Unit – in addition to providing the country’s only film processing laboratory and full post-production facilities – was the financing and production of travelogues and promotional films such as Journey of Three, a dramatised documentary aimed at encouraging immigration and which was released theatrically in Britain in 1950 and spurred many people of Peter’s parents’ generation to follow the example of the ‘new settlers’ which the picture depicted.
My parents rang the Film Unit and said that their son was very interested in film-making and might they have a position for him? Someone at the Unit offered to meet me and I took some of my models and went for an interview.
As an only child there were times when I would get terribly nervous and I was so anxious at the thought of going for a job at this big film-making place that I had Dad come with me and sit in on the interview. It turned out that they had nothing suitable to offer me, so I took my models and went home again…
Ironically, in 1990 the Film Unit was sold off to a subsidiary of New Zealand Television and when, ten years later, it came on the market, and would have otherwise passed to owners outside the country, I decided to buy and run the Film Unit. They knocked me back at my first job interview, and I ended up owning the place. Life is weird!
One or two of Peter’s friends remember him talking about the possibility of going to Britain in the hopes of finding work in the film industry there. ‘I don’t recall thinking about going to England then,’ says Peter, ‘but maybe I did. My mum’s brother, Uncle Bill, knew people who worked at Elstree Studios (just down the road from Shenley); one chap had worked on 2001 and other films in the Wardrobe Department and, years later, after I had made Bad Taste, Uncle Bill took me to meet him.’ It seems unlikely that a lad who needed his father to accompany him to an interview would have ever seriously contemplated travelling halfway round the world in search of a job. If he did, then it was probably no more than the fleeting thought of someone who desperately wanted to get into the film business but really didn’t know how that ambition might be achieved.
In the event, Fate played a different card…
The ‘Situations Vacant’ column of Wellington’s Evening Post wasn’t the most promising place for a would-be film-maker to be looking for an opening, but Peter Jackson needed a job…
On that evening, in 1978, when Peter and his father returned from the unsuccessful interview at the National Film Unit, the Jackson family went through the Evening Post newspaper to see what employment opportunities were on offer.
We found an advertisement for a vacancy at the newspaper itself – as an apprentice photoengraver. I didn’t have a clue what a photoengraver was, but it had the word ‘photo’ in it and that was good enough for me. At this point, I wanted to take anything so I could, at least, start earning some money. I also think if I’d failed to get this job, my parents would have sent me to university, so a job interview was arranged. I was as nervous as all hell – it’s weird the things you remember, but the night before my interview I saw The Sound of Music for the first time. In the movie, Maria sings a song about being confident – and I sat there in the dark, being totally inspired by this damn song. The next day, I walked into the interview carrying the sound of Julie Andrews’ voice in my head! I also took Dad to this interview as well – and, thank God, I got the job!
I was amazed at what it felt like to be earning money: my first week’s pay cheque was for NZ$77. I couldn’t believe it: all I had to do was turn up there and every week somebody would give me $77! After sixteen years of pocket money, it opened up a lot of possibilities!
The apprenticeship required Peter to attend a twelve-week course at the Auckland Technical Institute (now the Auckland Institute of Technology), which had originally been founded in the 1890s by the local Working Men’s Club to run evening classes in teaching various trades. By 1978, when Peter began his studies, the ATI was a full-time establishment running courses in engineering, commerce, fashion technology, printing, art and design.
At the concourse bookstall on Wellington railway station, the 17-year-old Peter Jackson decided to buy a chunky paperback to while away the twelve-hour rail journey to Auckland that lay ahead. The book was The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien.
He was prompted to buy this particular volume because the cover featured tie-in art from the first – and only – part of animator Ralph Bakshi’s aborted attempt to bring Tolkien’s epic to the screen. Years later, millions of people would start reading the same story because the book carried images from the Jackson film trilogy…
Peter had gone to see Bakshi’s film with high expectations, having seen the director’s earlier foray into the fantasy genre, Wizards, in company with Pete O’Herne and Ken Hammon. ‘It was screened at a cinema in town,’ recalls Ken, ‘and, as soon as we got out of school, we had to run to catch the train into Wellington, run to the picture house to be in time for the screening and then, afterwards, run all the way back to the station to catch the train home. It was a typical Jackson expedition!’
Wizards was the latest animated film from the renegade director who had already outraged Seventies moviegoers with his adult-rated Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic and Coonskin. A bizarre post-apocalyptic vision set in a world of elves, dwarves and good-and-bad-wizards with strong parallels to Middle-earth, Wizards now seems like an audition for Bakshi’s ill-fated attempt at The Lord of the Rings, which was yet to come.
I saw Bakshi’s