As a child, Peter Jackson’s bedroom was full of model cars and aircraft-kits. Today, he owns the real things – not just an Aston Martin, but also several vintage planes from the First World War. The toys it seems have just got bigger…
My hobbies and interests are exactly the same now as they were when I was 12 – they are essentially no different. Most people develop their hobbies when they’re young; certainly I don’t have any hobbies that I’ve taken up as an adult. For me, everything is an extension to what has gone before. Owning a WWI airplane is just a continuation from buying and building Airfix plastic kits when I was a kid; I’ve just been lucky enough now to have earned sufficient money to move on to fullsized planes. It’s really just the same old hobbies! I still have Super 8 footage of WWI dogfights I shot when I was about 10 years old.
As Peter’s childhood friend, Pete O’Herne remarks: ‘Peter hasn’t changed one bit. If he had $10 he’d go and buy himself a model of a Spitfire. If he’s got a million dollars, he’ll just go buy the bigger version. Why not? That’s exactly what any of us would do!’
Maybe so, but all of these things – becoming a professional film-maker or owning an Aston Martin – were distant, if not impossible, dreams for the young Peter Jackson in 1979. However, it wasn’t long before Peter was demonstrating his technical ambitions by not only upgrading his movie equipment to a Super 8 camera – with sound –
This shot really captures the spirit and feel of The Curse of the Gravewalker, filmed amongst the old graves at a local cemetery. I’m playing the swash-buckling zombie-hunting hero, as Pete O’Herne goes for my jugular. Pete’s make-up would be done in my bedroom and then Mum or Dad would drive us to the cemetery and leave us there most of the day.
but also by aspiring to produce wide-screen images by shooting in CinemaScope.
CinemaScope had come hot on the heels of various movie innovations in the early Fifties – including 3-D and Cinerama – aimed at wooing American TV audiences back into the picture-houses. The system debuted with the 1953 religious epic, The Robe, advertised as ‘The Modern Miracle You See Without Glasses’, and CinemaScope (along with such successors as VistaVision, Superscope, Todd-AO and Technirama) quickly became the way to view movies, especially big-budget musicals, westerns, war movies and costume dramas.
In 1953 a mere five CinemaScope titles were released, during the following year, that figure rose to thirty-seven films including 20,000
LEFT: The smallest stage I’ve ever used. Dad’s first car was a Morris Minor and he carefully built the garage with just enough space to squeeze in and out of the drivers’ door. Here, Pete and I are shooting a scene with Clive Haywood, another of my production stalwarts from the Evening Post process department. In those days, photo-litho plates came in wide flat cardboard boxes, and I used to lug piles of these home each week. Cardboard was my main building material for everything – here the boxes have been painted grey, sprinkled with beach sand and used to line the garage.
Leagues Under the Sea, Demetrius and the Gladiators, Prince Valiant, Bad Day at Black Rock, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Three Coins in the Fountain. Within a decade, wide-screen movies were less a novelty, more the norm and, for a young man with a taste for cinematic spectacle, what he calls ‘the huge letterbox-shaped CinemaScope image’ couldn’t fail to appeal.
Peter sent to a supplier in England for an anamorphic lens of the kind used for filming in CinemaScope. Based upon a technique pioneered in France in the late Twenties by the inventor Henri Chrétien, the lens worked using an optical trick called ‘anamorphosis’ which allowed an image twice the width of that captured by a conventional lens to be horizontally ‘squeezed’ onto film. When projected onto a screen using a similar lens, the image was ‘unsqueezed’ to provide dramatic, eye-stretching, cinematic experience. With his new camera and his anamorphic lens, Peter embarked on another movie project with Pete O’Herne and veterans from The Valley, Ken Hammon and, temporarily back in New Zealand, Andrew Neal.
We started work on what is sometimes referred now to as The Curse of the Gravewalker, although – like all my early experiments – it never really had a title. The film was shamelessly spawned by my adolescent love of the blood-spattered, over-the-top Gothic horrors from Hammer films which I started going to see on double-bills when I was in my late teens and one in particular, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, which I thought was really cool!
Unlike many pictures to emerge from what has been called ‘the studio that dripped blood’, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, made in 1974, did not star either of Hammer’s legendary stalwarts Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee, nor even the seductive Ingrid Pitt, who had sucked the blood of young heroes and quickened the pulse of young moviegoers in such pictures as The Vampire Lovers and Countess Dracula. Captain Kronos – billed as ‘The Only Man Alive Feared by the Walking Dead’ – was an ingenious attempt at combining the vampiric myth with the dash and derring-do of the swashbuckler.
Captain Kronos, played by German actor Horst Janson, is a master swordsman, late of the Imperial Guard (but flashing a blade forged from the metal of a crucifix), who seeks out and destroys the usual plague of ‘blood-thirsty’ vampires.
The film had a significantly open-ended conclusion, clearly paving the way for a possible series. However, Hammer never accorded Captain Kronos the opportunity for a hoped-for encore and it was left to a young man in Wellington, New Zealand, to take up the theme with his Grave Walker project.
Ken Hammon and Andrew Neal, played assorted vampires and met repeated deaths while Pete O’Herne portrayed their leader, ‘Count Murnau’, named after W.F. Murnau, the German director of the first ‘Dracula’ movie, Nosferatu. Not surprisingly, Peter Jackson cast himself as the hero, a fearless vampire-slayer going by the name of ‘Captain Eumig’ – a film-maker’s joke on the name of a well-known Austrian make of cameras and projectors.
As well as acting and directing, I created the make-up effects for the zombie-kind-of-undead-creatures. I was continually coming up with story ideas and shooting endless bits and pieces in the hope that I’d eventually end up with a feature-length film! The results still exist, albeit as a rather fragmentary thing running probably forty-five minutes to an hour and very roughly cut and glued together.
‘My strongest memory of the film,’ says Ken Hammon, ‘is of digging! We dug for corpses of the undead in an overgrown graveyard, in the woods around Pukerua Bay, in the Jackson’s backyard. The joke was, “OK, guys we need some more digging!” If Peter knew what the final outcome was supposed to be, I never heard it! Shot over a period of
When it came to needing actual graves, we wisely abandoned the cemetery and my parents found me a tiny spot in the middle of their carefully tended garden. Here, amongst the rows of carrots and spuds, I am happily going about my grave robbing duties. From the first trenches I dug when I was about 8 years old, I was constantly digging holes – either graves or trenches – in my parents’ garden.
Pete O’Herne under a headful of Plaster of Paris in my mum’s kitchen. Pete was playing a zombie in my Super 8mm epic Curse of the Gravewalker. A much softer material, alginate, is used by the professionals to make head casts. I didn’t know that then, and we all suffered through the hot, stifling, direct plaster moulding process. The pad in Pete’s hand is a