Today, Peter Jackson would probably agree (although his films have tended to allow for a greater degree of script flexibility than other directors); at the time, however, the film featured few dialogue scenes and his approach was one of shooting from a storyboard of mental images: ‘There has never been a script,’ he would tell the New Zealand Film Commission after fifteen months of filming. ‘There has simply been no need for a script. I have gone to the locations with every shot, every angle in my head. I just direct the others according to my plan.’
The process by which Roast of the Day grew – or, to use a better word, mutated – into what would eventually become the cult movie, Bad Taste, is a intriguing, often bewildering, saga of plot developments and restructurings the full, intricate complexity of which are probably only of interest to the most devoted Bad Taste fans and are already chronicled on a variety of internet web-sites.
Suffice it to say, as Craig Smith puts it, that ‘once Pete got the bit
At one point I started drawing caricatures of my Evening Post workmates, including a self-portrait (bottom left).
between his teeth – he just kept throwing more and more ideas into it.’
‘It just kept going,’ recalls Pete O’Herne, ‘building and building until for some of us – though probably not for Peter – it all started to blur!’ Twists and turns developed, details and gags were added and, says Ken Hammon, with no script, there was an inevitable tendency ‘for simple sequences to end up much more elaborate than planned.’
I kept shooting, shooting, every weekend and then I’d go into the Evening Post to do my job all week long and I’d be sitting there, bored, thinking up ideas for the next weekend’s filming. It was a classic ‘make it up as you go along’ situation – and I had all week to make it up, before the next weekend’s shooting would happen. That thinking time always led to my coming up with something new that I’d get excited about and, in that way, the story kept expanding.
Progress, however, was intermittent and entirely driven by what I could afford from my weekly pay packet. I would save up several hundred dollars in order to buy four or five rolls of film, we’d shoot for a day and use them all up and then I’d realise that I couldn’t afford to process the film, so I’d have to put them in the fridge until I’d get my next wagecheck and could afford to put the film into the lab for processing. But having to pay the lab-bill meant that I then wasn’t able to buy any film for the following week, so I’d lose another weekend’s filming and would have to wait for another pay-cheque in order to buy some more rolls of film.
Nevertheless, new sequences continued to be shot at a variety of locations around Pukerua Bay, including the historic Gear Homestead in Porirua, which served as the cannibals’ mansion. An elegant, whitepainted, clapboard house with a colonnaded veranda, the Homestead had been built in 1882 by New Zealand tycoon James Gear whose
Gear Homestead near Porirua served as the main location for Bad Taste. My parents knew the caretakers and they kindly gave us free access during the weekends when there weren’t weddings in the garden, which was the principal use of the old dwelling.
fortune had come from the Gear Meat Preserving and Freezing Company – an appropriate sponsor for Roast of the Day!
Gear Homestead was administered by the local council but Peter’s father happened to know the caretakers and arranged for ‘the boys’ – as Peter and his friends were referred to in the Jackson household – to shoot there on ‘three or four occasions’, although, by the time the film was completed, the number of filming days in or around the house had risen to a figure closer to thirty or forty!
Roast of the Day briefly became Sapien Alfresco before acquiring a new working-title of Giles’ Big Day. A major development in the plot occurred when the cannibals became invading aliens hoping to make earth a source of fast food for the people of their planet who were otherwise forced to live on guinea-pigs! Then the S.A.S. suddenly burst onto the scene. When making The Lord of the Rings, Peter would discover that a member of his cast – Christopher Lee – was a former member of the 22nd Regiment, the Special Air Service (Motto: ‘Who dares Wins’), but he had long been fascinated by stories about the exploits of the S.A.S. and they soon had a key role to play in Giles’ Big Day.
The SAS appearance in Bad Taste is directly linked to the siege of the Iranian embassy in London, which occurred while we were making the movie. I saw the TV images of these guys storming the building and put them in the movie!
Peter came up with the idea of a bunch of balaclava-wearing S.A.S operatives storming the house and rescuing Giles who was gently marinating in a barrel of herbs and vegetables with an apple stuck in his mouth! However, there was a twist: although the S.A.S. seem to be helping Giles to escape from the alien-cannibals and are seen killing
RIGHT: This is the original Mark One design for the Bad Taste aliens. In the midEighties, American Werewolf in London had come out with Rick Baker’s brilliant transforming latex ‘change-o-heads’. I tried to copy that with these designs, which were based on the idea that the S.A.S. rescuers would actually transform into aliens. Everything, including plot and designs, got overhauled following Craig’s exit from the project.
his captors, it is nothing more than a cruel joke since the rescuers eventually turn into aliens who have simply been enjoying themselves by ‘playing with their food’!
The involvement of the S.A.S. required additional cast and, in addition to Pete O’Herne, Peter Jackson enlisted the help of two work colleagues at Wellington Newspapers: Mike Minett and Terry Potter. ‘The rest of us,’ recalls Mike, ‘were into sex, drugs and rock-and-roll but Peter was just this nice, adorable guy who loved his mum and dad and was really into making movies.’
‘I really liked Peter,’ says Terry Potter, ‘I liked his sense of humour.’ Legend has it that a sign appeared in the process department of Wellington Newspapers that read: ‘Who needs drugs when you’ve got Peter Jackson?’ There were the occasional practical jokes – paper bats in the darkrooms, larks with home-made tarantulas – but those who knew Peter at the time recall him not so much as an ‘outright funny guy’ as someone with an engagingly quirky way of looking at things: an off-the-wall take on life seen in the Monty Python TV shows and the surreal films of The Beatles, whose music he adored.
Peter’s love of The Beatles was shared by another Post colleague, Ray Battersby (with whom he later planned to make a TV documentary on The Beatles’ visit to Wellington), and Mike Minett who, as a member of a local rock band – ‘almost everybody belonged to a band in those days’ – had taped his own versions of some Beatles numbers on his four-track recorder: ‘Pete heard them and spent several lunch breaks – while the rest of us were sitting around playing cards – attempting to add the vocal track. He was enthusiastic and knew all the lyrics but, unfortunately, couldn’t sing for shit!’
Years later, when the Howard Shore soundtrack for The Fellowship of the Ring was being recorded at London’s Abbey Road Studios, Peter and Howard along with Recording Engineer John Kurlander (who had worked on the Beatles’ Abbey Road album) and Associate Producer, Rick Porras, paid homage to the iconic coverimage of the 1969 album by posing for a photograph while striding across the famous nearby zebra-crossing. But long before that, as we shall see, The Beatles would have a fleeting connection with Bad Taste…
Mike after a hard night out on the town. I had to be careful with my camera angles on that day. Something very similar happened years later on LOTR with Viggo Mortensen, except that was due to an encounter