Cameron and I built a couple of smaller models of Gear Homestead for different shots. Here I am with the smaller models in front of the half-scale house. The filming of Bad Taste was entering its final days.
My last day filming Bad Taste – it was actually a night shoot and we finished about 3am. We shot in some old farm buildings and there were no showers. I actually drove myself home – about two hours away – looking exactly like this. The whole way home I was praying that I wouldn’t get stopped by the police!
says Jamie, ‘but who knew what would happen afterwards? Peter Jackson might go on to other things or he might just drop away. At the time, the impetus was simply to get the movie finished! Peter had a great deal of self-belief, but Bad Taste, as it then existed, was pretty rough round the edges so I took over the editing: tidying it up and tightening it up; showing Peter where it didn’t work, where things jarred or flagged and where continuity didn’t match.’
After his first viewing of the film, Jamie had identified one or two places where the pacing would be improved if a shot could be extended for a few seconds. ‘I really needed to see what Peter had edited from the film, so I asked him if I could see his other material: the trims and out-takes, anything he had shot that wasn’t in the cut. He kept saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, they’re at home somewhere…I’ll bring them in.’ The following day, Peter arrived with a huge paper rubbishbag which he dumped on the floor. It was filled with a great mass of bits and pieces of twisted, tangled film, all stuck together with tape.’
Jamie had the off-cuts and out-takes spliced together and assembled into a rough order, and rescued a number of useful bits and pieces from the jumble: ‘I felt that, being a splatter movie, we needed to push it along and that anything at all extraneous had to go. Peter often clung to shots that he wanted to use but which were holding up the film and, in a good-spirited way, I’d have to try and coax him into letting go of stuff that he really didn’t need.’
Jamie Selkirk, who still edits Peter’s films, admits that not a lot has changed over the years: ‘Every movie I’ve ever cut for Peter has been too long – it’s just got trickier as the budgets have got bigger! Very often, Peter will write a scene in one line, such as “Minas Tirith – the battle begins…” One line on paper; fifteen minutes on film! And, no matter how much he shoots, he always cuts together all the scenes he’s shot before making any decisions about what finally stays and what goes. We’ve spent a lot of time cutting a lot of footage that I knew wouldn’t end up in the picture, but Peter’s feeling is that it must be put in first; it’s how he works, how he crafts a film.’
Back in 1987, by the time it had been edited, Bad Taste had cost $17–18,000 of Peter’s money
My cat Timmy poses with four years’ worth of Bad Taste film. This was the original negative, which I had stored under my bed. By the time we made our final prints of the movie, some reels were damaged by mould, which proved very difficult to remove. A couple of shots in the finished movie even have mould stains on them. Sometime soon I’ll do a digital clean-up of the movie and finally repair the damage from my sloppy storage!
and $15,000 of Film Commission money, which Jim Booth contributed to the project in instalments. To complete post-production with a vocal soundtrack, effects and music and a blow-up of the 16mm film to a 35mm print was expected to cost in the region of a further $200,000. This was far too large a sum to be slipped to the film-maker out of some discretionary fund. ‘For that money,’ Jim told Peter, ‘you will have to screen the movie for the board of the Film Commission.’ It was another nerve-wracking experience, worse even than screening his raw footage for Jim Booth, because, if the board refused to approve the funding, then Bad Taste was unlikely to ever be completed.
All the members of the Film Commission board were sitting there, seeing Bad Taste for the first time. This, of course, was Jim’s plan: show them the film in its most polished state; don’t let them see it in the state that he saw it in, but let them view it as a finished cut so that it feels more like a proper movie…
David Gascoigne’s memory of meeting Peter the first time is of someone who was ‘pleasant, fun and imaginative but who also had a level of magical persuasiveness! I liked him but “liking” isn’t enough, I thought there was evidence of real ability.’
Lindsay Shelton agrees: ‘Over the years, the question has often been asked, “How could the Film Commission have ever invested in a splatter movie?” Actually, it’s easily answered: they were backing talent; they took a look at what was on offer and decided that this was a talent that they wanted to assist. And they were right.’
‘They were a bit shocked by the footage,’ says Peter, ‘but I think they saw that there was a film there…’ As David Gascoigne recalls: ‘Seeing the footage was a cathartic experience! Of course some members were concerned or had reservations – being dependent on public money, the board had to consider how the film would be viewed on the political landscape, because if you offend too many politicians then you won’t get any more money and that hurts the industry. Happily, despite some nervousness, the board approved the post-production funding without significant dissension.’
A major issue in post-production was the vocal performances of the cast. It was the view of some that ‘The Boys’ needed to be dubbed by professional actors and it was an issue that Peter had tackled in his original nineteen-page approach to the Film Commission:
‘If needs be, me and the others will go out and tape all the sound effects, use our voices and compose and record our own music (a couple of the guys are in bands) BUT I don’t really want to do that. The sound plays such an important part in this film (many times I’ve said to the others, “Don’t worry if it doesn’t look too great, the sound will carry it through,”) so I want to make sure that it is as best a job as can be done under the circumstances. I would like to hire two or three professional sound recordists and editors and I’d like to get professional actors to provide the voice characterisations…’
In the event, Tony Hiles convinced everyone that The Boys should dub their own voices and, though initially a little apprehensive, they quickly mastered the technique and provided strong vocal performances that now seem an essential ingredient of the film’s ‘home made’ appeal. Only Lord Crumb, the head alien, who had been played by Doug Wren, one of Peter’s older colleagues at the Post and an amateur actor, was dubbed by a real actor, Peter Vere-Jones, a man with the fully rounded tones of an old-school thespian. Vere-Jones also served as voice-coach to The Boys, who treated the whole experience with characteristic level-headedness, especially any attempt to get them to open the vowels and enunciate correctly! Mercifully, The Boys (who refused to join the actors’ union) stayed completely themselves and the contrast that they provided to Vere-Jones’ plummy old alien is one of the joys of Bad Taste.
Everyone was in agreement about the importance of finding the right film score for Bad Taste. At first, Peter had thought he might be able to incorporate numbers by his favourite group, The Beatles, and former work colleague and fellow fan, Ray Battersby, remembers Peter talking about using the group’s 1964 number, ‘I’ll Get You’ (‘So I’m telling you, my friend,/That I’ll get you, I’ll get you in the end,/Yes I will, I’ll get you in the end’) over the closing credits. Rights and permissions made this proposal impossible, although The Beatles did manage a ‘guest’ appearance in the film. When the ‘brain-dead’ Derek
LEFT: As Jamie laboured away on the final edit, the cast had to rerecord all our dialogue. Here, Pete O’Herne and I try to match our lip movements from a few years earlier. Brent Burge did our final sound mix for Bad Taste. Recently, Brent did a brilliant job