Peter has his own painful memories of that day…
After several hours of shooting me sword-fighting with an invisible skeleton, we reached the point at which I had to hurl myself backwards, as if knocked into the water by the skeleton. I splashed into the water – and suddenly felt a sickening pain as something whacked against my spine.
Unfortunately, as we had been shooting for several hours, the tide had dropped a couple of feet – something that hadn’t occurred to me – so when I took my spectacular stunt dive I crashed onto a sharp rock that was now just below the surface of the water. I was in instant agony, but somehow managed to get home. Some time later, however, I developed a pilonidal cyst, caused by the trauma to the lower vertebrae, and ended up being admitted to hospital for surgery.
After the operation, I was off work on convalescence for two or three weeks. This was valuable time, not to be wasted, so I started chopping up foam rubber and began work on building a full gorilla suit which would later play an unexpected, but life-changing role in my future career…
As for the skeleton fight, I never did manage to solve the technical problems involved and it remained a sadly unfulfilled ambition. But what I just love about such things is that a few years ago, Ray Harryhausen visited our house in Wellington and he opened this little box, produced his original stop-motion skeleton puppet to show us…And I couldn’t help thinking that there I’d been, as a kid, animating skeletons and falling off rocks because I’d seen Ray’s movies and now here he was in my home with an original model from one of those films!
It is simply the greatest thing in the world when those kinds of circles turn and connect. Little moments that connect me to the kid I was, and remind me of the kid I still am.
The accident temporarily forestalled Peter’s plans to make his Sinbad adventure and it was destined to be one of many juvenile projects that would never see completion.
I was always thinking of ideas that were ambitious, technically complex films and all I had was a little Super 8 camera that couldn’t shoot sound. So I’d always be disappointed by the results and eventually abandon one project and start work on something else. This pattern of being unable to make something within my means – and most of all original – became something I was conscious of and which started to worry me.
Among the discarded Jackson ventures of the late Seventies was a short experiment loosely inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange and John Carpenter’s Halloween in which an unseen intruder – the camera films from the intruder’s point-of-view – enters a house and shoots a terrified old man. Filmed in the Jackson home (with Pete O’Herne in heavy make-up as the elderly victim) the exercise was shot in a single, continuous take.
Another uncompleted project later came to be referred to as Coldfinger although, at the time, it was known simply as ‘The James Bond Thing’.
The first Bond movie I saw was Roger Moore in his debut performance, Live and Let Die, in 1973. Shortly afterwards, The Roxy cinema in Wellington ran interesting (if slightly unlikely) double-bill featuring the WWII movie, The Dam Busters along with the first-ever James Bond film, Dr No, starring Sean Connery. Then, in 1974, I saw the film that confirmed me as a huge Bond fan: The Man with the Golden Gun with Roger Moore in his second outing as Agent 007 and my favourite actor from the Hammer horror movies, Christopher Lee, as Francisco Scaramanga. A fabulous villain, Scaramanga had, supposedly, been born in a circus as the son of a Cuban ringmaster and a British snake-charmer and had, as a distinguishing feature, a third nipple or, as Bond refers to it, ‘a superfluous papilla’!
I loved The Man with the Golden Gun! I just had to keep going back to the cinema to see it. It was the first film that I saw four times in one week (the next would be David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai), and it made such an impact that I even tried to take photos of it. I had a camera that used to take slides, so I smuggled it into the cinema and during some of my favourite moments in the film – like when the car jumps over the bridge – I’d whip out my camera and snap off some pictures.
It’s hard for anyone to understand who wasn’t living in the time before videos but, unlike now, we weren’t able to watch just about any movie that’s ever been made whenever we wished. Videos and DVDs have profoundly changed movie-watching: when I was young, a film came to the local cinema for one week only – it was on and then gone; only a handful of cinemas ever showed double-bill revivals and our single-channel TV station in New Zealand didn’t get films for years and years. So, once a film had played, you were unlikely to see it again in under a decade.
Film fans had to content themselves with collecting images in magazines and books, buying soundtrack recordings of film scores (or illicitly record them yourself as I had done with The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad) collecting toys and merchandise – anything to keep hold of the memories. That’s why I tried to grab a few souvenir photos of The Man With the Golden Gun but, needless to say, when I got them developed I found that they were all completely blank!
Catching old movies on sporadic re-release meant, in the case of Bond movies, seeing the films out of chronology and with a central character alternately played by Sean Connery and Roger Moore. Ken Hammon recalls going with Peter to a screening of Connery’s 1971 final foray into the world of Bond, Diamonds Are Forever: ‘It was also around this time that Pete hired a copy of the fourth movie in the series, Thunderball (“Here Comes the Biggest Bond of All!”), and screened it at school over two lunchtimes, advertised by a Jacksondrawn poster of Sean Connery who, by now, was probably Pete’s favourite action hero.’
The dynamic, thrill-packed opening which became the hallmark of every Bond film was something that would inform Peter’s later approach to The Lord of the Rings and in particular the prologue to The Fellowship of the Ring.
I’ve always been a believer in the James Bond approach, which is to blow people away in the first five minutes of the film, which buys you that little bit of story set-up time during your first act. You shift people from the state of mind they’re in when they enter the cinema, and very quickly try to ensnare them into the world of your movie. The prologue in Fellowship served two functions: it got a lot of the back-story information out of the way at the beginning of the film, which would otherwise have had to explain by Gandalf in Bag End; but we also wanted the prologue to be more than just information and having the battle scenes – even though I now feel that they were rather rushed and not as good as they should have been – provided something spectacular and visceral to rip people out of whatever frame of mind they’re in when they enter the cinema. If people sit there and their jaws drop open and they go ‘Wow!’ then you’ve got them, you’re in control.
As for Peter’s youthful attempt at filming something in the Bond style, all that ever made it onto celluloid were two fight-sequences with Peter playing his hero in his father’s dinner-suit and with, says Ken Hammon, ‘a ton of face make-up to make him look like Sean Connery – only ten inches shorter!’ Bond’s first fight, set amongst those perilous rocks at Pukerua Bay was with Ken playing a villain who almost succeeds in garrotting the special agent with a fishing line – until the ever-resourceful 007 removes his bow-tie which handily converts into a flick-knife.
The second fight with another baddie (played by Andrew Neale, another of those gold prospectors in The Valley) was shot on the Jackson balcony overlooking the Kapiti coast. The scene took up an entire day’s shooting and yet not a frame of footage was ever to be seen: the film had been incorrectly loaded and although the camera was whirred away as if filming, it was, in fact, doing nothing of the sort. Before a re-shoot could be scheduled, Andrew Neale had left New Zealand and so the scene was later recreated with Pete O’Herne playing the villain.
The Bond project was another destined to remain unfinished, but Peter Jackson never lost his love of the film incarnations of Ian Fleming’s special agent. A colleague