However, what it did do was to make me want to read the book – if only to find out what happened!
Sitting on the ‘Silver Fern’ train from Wellington to Auckland, he began to do just that…
Being mad about movies and fascinated by the whole business of film-making – especially special effects – I kept saying to myself, ‘This book could make a really great movie!’ Of course, it never even occurred to me that I could make it – I didn’t even fantasise about making it! That would have been ridiculous: after all, I was just a 17-year-old, apprentice photoengraver, so there was no romantic moment that had me sitting on the train thinking, ‘One day, I will make a film of this book!’ Such a thought would have been totally crazy.
But I did think, ‘I can’t wait for somebody to make this movie! My real fantasy would have been a Ray Harryhausen version of The Lord of the Rings – because that’s what I really want to see! Years later, a moment came when it felt like, since nobody else seemed to be going to make it, I would simply have to make it myself! But that was way off in the future…
In fact, although people probably have this impression of me as having been a geeky Tolkien-reader as a kid, the truth is I didn’t read the book again until the idea of making the film came up – eighteen years later.
Ken Hammon recalls that it took Peter some time to wade through the full 1,000-plus pages of Tolkien’s book: ‘We ribbed Pete about it so much that it became something of an on-going joke: ‘Have you finished reading The Lord of the Rings yet?’ we’d ask. Now, I guess the joke’s on us, because whenever I hear Pete talking about the film, he clearly knows Tolkien’s writings inside out and back to front. Not only that, but I remember telling Pete that the “unreadable book” would make an “unwatchable film”, but he sure as hell disproved that theory!’
Meanwhile, back in 1978, Peter excelled at his studies at Auckland Technical Institute. As he was to report in a funding application to the New Zealand Film Commission, a few years later: ‘I served my three-year term, gaining the highest marks out of fifty students for both Trade Certificate and Advanced Trade Certificate.’ To which he added, ‘I mention this not to boast, but to show that I do try my best at anything I take on.’
Peter was to spend seven years working at the Evening Post and as he jokingly reflects:
It’s reassuring to know that I’ve always got a career in photoengraving to fall back on if I ever need it!
Photoengraving is the process by which images are engraved onto zinc or magnesium plates to be used on a press for printing photographs and images in newspapers. The metal plate is coated with a substance called a ‘photo-resist’, which is both photosensitive and yet resistant to acids. Strong ultraviolet light is then shone through a photographic negative causing those parts of the image through which the light has passed to harden. The image is then developed, using a solvent to wash away the unhardened parts of the image on the photo-resist. The metal plate is next placed in a bath of acid that dissolves those areas of metal that have been exposed and creates a plate from which a positive image can then be printed.
The process at the time was pretty primitive, and as the lowly apprentice, it was my job to etch the magnesium plates in big sulphuric-acid baths that, afterwards, had to be drained and scrubbed-out by hand. There were no real safety precautions and I’d lose the skin off my fingers and have my T-shirts go into holes and fall apart from the effects of the acid!
About a year into Peter’s apprenticeship, the Evening Post merged with Wellington’s daily paper the Dominion Post and Rob Lewis (‘Mr Lewis’ to the apprentice lads) became manager of the process department for the combined papers. Peter Jackson was one of Mr Lewis’s employees and he still has clear memories of the young man who was already trailing clouds of glory as ‘Apprentice of the Year’: ‘Peter was a delight. He was a little shy or, more accurately, someone with a certain
Rob Lewis, my boss in the Evening Post process department, standing on the left. Mr. Lewis was a little fearsome at first, and certainly a boss who commanded respect – but looking back, his idea to feature my home-made gorilla suit in a newspaper story kicked off a series of incidents and meetings that changed my life. I love the way fate weaves its complex, unpredictable path.
quietness about him; that said, he could also be full of fun and mischief. There was no question that he was good at his work – very good, although he clearly had his own agenda, his own road to run. With two daily papers and a Sunday edition to print each week, I always needed people to take on overtime and Peter was always the one person it was difficult to get to do overtime – not because he was a reluctant worker, but because he had other things to occupy his spare time – like making movies!’
Mr Lewis is not entirely accurate – there were periods when I’d desperately do as much overtime as I could squeeze in, to pay for ever-growing film-making costs!
Indeed, despite the demands of the day-job, Peter still retained his filmic ambitions, one of which was to emulate a particular effect created by Ray Harryhausen in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, the film that had provided so much of the inspiration for The Valley. One of the most ingenious sequences in the film was that in which the actor playing Sinbad had a sword-fight with an animated skeletal warrior. It was a brilliant set-piece and the precursor to a tour de force scene in the later Jason and the Argonauts in which the crew of the Argos engage with an entire army of battling skeletons.
I really wanted to try and do the types of movie tricks Ray had done: I wanted to film a sword-fight, with a human (me!) sword-fighting an animated skeleton. You had to film the live-action human first – a shadow-sword-fighting – rear-project it on a small screen and shoot a stop-motion model in front of it.
I built a little skeleton in cardboard with a wire ‘armature’ – that’s what animators call the poseable skeleton inside a stop-motion puppet, so this was a skeleton inside a skeleton! This figure was going to be my opponent in the scene I wanted to film.
Even though I didn’t have any of the equipment which Ray Harryhausen would have used to create his effects, I was still determined to try and make this work using just my Super 8 camera, so I shot some animation tests with the skeleton, copying the moment when one of them breaks out of the ground in Jason and the Argonauts. I was then forever attempting to figure out a way of projecting an image of me onto a screen so that I could put the skeleton in front, animate it in synchronisation with the film and photograph the combined images. I tried various experiments, but the results were terrible!
While I was trying to solve the logistics, I carried on filming the live-action half of the sequence. I made myself a Sinbad costume, dressed up in it and went with Pete O’Herne down onto the Pukerua Bay beach to film the live-action side of the fight among the rock-pools.
I plotted a sword-fight routine where I was battling with this imaginary skeleton. There were to be several shots of me – as Sinbad – fighting desperately, swinging the sword round and then, at the end of the fight, the climactic moment was me being knocked backwards off the rock and falling into the sea with a splash!
At the beginning of the day, we looked around for a safe place where I could fall back into the water, found one that was good and deep and started shooting…
Pete O’Herne recalls filming among the rocks, operating the camera to immortalise Peter’s performance: ‘I remember Peter saying that he wanted to do a skeleton sword-fight like the one in Sinbad or Jason and the Argonauts, so, of course, I went along to help out. That was how it was in those days; it was just what we did. We were always going to be there, hanging out, doing stuff…It never occurred to me to say, “Hey, Pete, hope you don’t mind, but I really