The Bolex camera was light and easy to handle. It was spring loaded so all you had to do was wind it up and you were then ready to shoot up to thirty seconds of 16mm footage. A second-hand Bolex was a rare find in New Zealand and it was exactly what I needed if I was to make real progress with my film-making. I could abandon the Super 8 footage we’d shot on Gravewalker and start something new. There was only one problem: the price ticket on the Bolex was for $2,500 NZ, not a small sum today and, in 1982, a fortune. Two-and-a-half grand! There was no way that I could have saved that kind of money from my job on the paper.
I raced home and I begged my parents if they could possibly lend me the money. They gave me a loan – which I don’t think I ever repaid! – and I rushed back to the shop and bought the camera. The feeling of holding it – owning it – was incredibly, unbelievably exciting! That kind of support from your parents is so important, and that loan was the most significant thing my mum and dad did to help me become a film-maker. When I won the Oscar for Best Director, I did what has become almost a joke – thank my parents. But for me, just saying their names – Joan and Bill Jackson – on Oscar night had a personal meaning to me that nobody could ever really understand.
It wasn’t long, however, before Peter realised that using a 16mm camera would necessarily involve serious on-going financial commitments. One reason for the initial popularity of 8mm film was that developing the film stock, using what is called a ‘reversal’ process, gave a positive print (rather than a negative) that could be immediately projected and viewed – which was ideal for the home-movie enthusiast. The drawbacks for anyone with serious film-making ambitions were that, without a negative, any attempt at editing film was fairly irrevocable and, whilst a negative could be made from the print, doing so involved serious loss of quality.
In comparison, film shot on a 16mm camera could either use filmstock that employed a similar ‘reversal’ process to 8mm or film that could be developed using a ‘negative/positive’ process resulting in a ‘master’ negative from which a print could be struck in order for the film to be edited. Then, once the edit had been complete, the negative itself would be cut to match and prints of the finished film would be struck.
Super 8 cartridges, giving you three minutes of film each cost three to four dollars. To get the equivalent three minutes on 16mm, I discovered, would cost twenty times as much! It was a painful realisation that every time I loaded a 100-foot roll of film it was going to cost $100 to buy the negative and make a print. This was serious money: I couldn’t just muck around with this camera, popping-off shots without thinking. From the get-go I really had to have a plan!
So I bought one roll of film and shot some trial footage in order to learn how the camera worked: finding out about speed controls and how to read light-metres and set exposures. There was a lot to learn – all the things that I’d not had to even think about with the Super 8 cameras. That was a $70 experiment, but I was determined that when I bought the next roll of film, I wasn’t going to waste more money on ideas that didn’t lead anywhere. I decided I was going to make a little ten-minute film: something short and entertaining that I could hopefully enter into festivals.
That, however, wasn’t quite how it would work out…
Roast of the Day is what it was going to be called and it was a nice little Jacksonish joke: Giles Copeland, a young man employed by a food-processing company, drives into a sleepy little New Zealand town and begins a door-to-door collection of envelopes for an annual charity-appeal organised by his employers.
Giles’ firm uses its sponsorship of the nationwide famine-relief appeal as a blatant public relations exercise and employees are promoted or demoted depending upon the amount they manage to solicit from the public.
Giles, a formerly not-too-successful collector, has been given the ‘wop-wops’ run of small coastal towns miles from anywhere and it his last chance to show what he can do…It just so happens that collection-day is 31 October – Peter Jackson’s birthday but, more to the point, Halloween!
Although Giles manages to collect a number of envelopes pinned to the doorframes of the houses, the town seems unaccountably – even eerily – deserted. Then he notices ‘a scruffy, bearded, tramp-like character’ eating a squashed possum off the road. On spotting Giles, this unsavoury character becomes a homicidal lunatic, producing a bayonet and lurching menacingly towards him. Only just succeeding in making a getaway in his car, Giles stops at a large mansion – hoping to pick up an envelope ‘bulging with green ones’ – only to find that he has stumbled into the den of cannibal-aliens-in-human-form for whom he is destined to provide first-hand famine-relief as their ‘roast of the day’.
The services of Ken Hammon were once again enlisted and Ken, who at this time was working for a housing association in Porirua, inducted a work-colleague, Craig Smith, into the project to play Giles. In fact, Craig was another former Kapiti College student, although in
Bad Taste shoot – Day One, 27 October 1983. At this point in time I thought we would be shooting for a few weeks to make a ten-minute short called Roast of the Day. One of my photoengraving mates, Phil Lamey, was there helping with the camera, along with Craig Smith and Ken Hammon.
a different year to Ken and Peter. ‘My only memory of Peter at school,’ recalls Craig, ‘was when the television programme, Spot On, launched its contest for young film-makers and I went to one of the classrooms where you could pick up a leaflet and entry-form. Peter happened to be there and when he heard me ask for the form, he said, “Ah-ha! Competition!” That’s the last we saw of each other until I got involved in Roast of the Day.’
Craig was deemed a positive asset to the production by virtue of the fact that, unlike most of the cast-members of Peter’s earlier films, he was an accomplished amateur actor with aspirations to enter the profession: ‘At school I’d appeared in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (my portrayal of Pharaoh is still being talked about today!) and I’d also been in several productions by the local repertory company, The Kapiti Players: I was the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, the Second Voice in Under Milk Wood and as for my Big Bad Wolf – well, all I can say is they loved me!’
Ken Hammon and Pete O’Herne were among the first members of the film crew when shooting began on 27 October 1983 in Makara, not far from Wellington, with a shot of Giles consulting a road sign. The signpost (complete with AA logos) had been made by Peter and looked sufficiently authentic to cause a memorable brush with the law. With the shot in the can, the team were taking down the sign when they were spotted by a public-spirited citizen who decided to report their act of vandalism to the local police!
Fortunately the crew were easily able to show that the sign was their own as opposed to public property, if only because of the clearly made-up destinations: in one direction, ‘Castle Rock’ (a place-name in a story in Stephen King’s comic-book, Creepshow, and the recently-released George Romero film of the same name); and, in the other direction, the place where, unwittingly, Giles was to meet his grisly end – ‘Kaihoro’, a tasteful little joke inspired by a Maori word meaning to ‘eat greedily’!
That was the beginning. But only the beginning…
Craig Smith reflects, ‘It had all seemed nice, clean, simple and easy: six weeks work tops and we were out of there. But, if there is no script, if it’s not locked down then – whether it’s a five-cent
A moment captured