In Peter’s first letter to the Film Commission, he had written of his musical ambitions for the film: ‘Above all I want a good musical soundtrack. That is the most important thing of all. A soundtrack that carries the film along, smoothing over the rough bits, providing a mirror to what the people are seeing, amplifying the different moods the film contains. Mike and Terry (our two band members) may well be able to come up with something good: they play rock music, and one of my pet hates is a rock soundtrack. Mike had a go at some mood music with his electric guitar and various gizmos a couple of months ago, and it wasn’t bad, but I’d love a more orchestral-sounding score if I could get it. A good example of what I like are Brian May’s two Mad Max soundtracks – overly loud, overly dramatic.’
The first that Wellington composer, Michelle Scullion, heard of the project was an intriguing telephone call: ‘Tony Hiles said that he was working on a project with a young guy who was making his first
feature. All he said about it was that it was “unusual,” that it might be my kind of thing and suggested that I have a look. So, I had a look…’
Tony and Peter screened half an hour of edited footage for Michelle on a Steenbeck machine in Jamie Selkirk’s editing suite. ‘That first ever meeting,’ says Michelle, ‘I remember lock, stock and barrel, clean as a whistle, clear as a bell! Peter had messy hair, quite a stammer and a certain coyness about him. The film was incredibly wacky and even though the acting wasn’t brilliant, it was honest and had an innocent “boys own adventure” charm.’
There was no sound, but Peter and Tony provided an aural sound score to the movie, creating the effects with mouth noises! ‘I was in hysterics; hooting; tears running down my face! It grabbed me and reminded me of going to the local “bug-house”, as a kid, to watch giant versions of John Wayne and Donald Duck when, if anyone messed around or made too much noise, the film would be stopped and we’d be told if we didn’t quieten down we’d all be sent home!’
At the end of the screening Tony asked if Michelle wanted to work on the film. ‘Of course I wanted to work on it! Not because I wanted to work on a feature film – it was to be my first – but because I wanted to work on this film!’
Michelle did her research: ‘When I work with a film-maker, I want to get into their mind, know what they’re thinking of in relation to the score. Peter told me he was a great fan of The Beatles and would have loved to use Beatles songs on the soundtrack; I also discovered that he was a fan of James Bond, so I went off and watched about nine Bond films and some zombie splatter movies that Peter lent me
I was worried about copyright issues involved in using an existing image of The Beatles, so I painted these myself. I’m not a great artist but the silliness of it all gets the laugh I was after. For a long time I harboured a dream of including one or two Beatles songs on the Bad Taste soundtrack, but that could never have happened.
Three key collaborators in Bad Taste – from the left, editor Jamie Selkirk, producer Tony Hiles and composer Michelle Scullion. Concentrating on the newspaper crossword at that moment, they were the perfect team to help me when I needed it.
from his collection! I felt that what it needed to be was a big score, plenty of full-on, wall-to-wall music and – thinking “blokes”, “cars”, “guns” – went off on a misguided “heavy metal” tangent, before changing course to a more “classical” approach.’
As the score developed and began to be recorded, Michelle was intrigued by Peter’s intuitive grasp of the process: ‘Peter sat on my shoulder the whole time. He may have lacked musical vocabulary, but he had all the words necessary to explain the shape and the emotion of what he wanted. I was surprised that someone so new to the film business could do that, but he was not only smart, he was an incredibly quick learner: each step was just another thing to be taken in by his huge sponge-brain that soaks up experience and uses it; in turn, I learned to go with him and let him guide me…’
Reflecting on Peter’s subsequent career, Michelle Scullion says: ‘I won’t jump on the bandwagon and say I knew then that he was a film-making genius, but I will say that it was clear that he was totally dedicated and had ambition. Bad Taste may have started out as a weekend “guerrilla film-making” project, but I don’t believe that it was ever truly a hobby in Peter’s mind.’
The score for Bad Taste was richly varied to match the moments of insidious menace and relentless pursuit; for the scene where the aliens feast from a bowl of regurgitated pea-green ‘gruel’, Michelle wrote a subdued jazz score with a muted trumpet: dinner music for chuck-eating; while the climactic battle scene had all the energy of a full-on, rock-and-roll number.
In July 1987, as Michelle was completing her score and the sound effects were being added, a rough-cut of the near-completed film was screened for the New Zealand Film Commission. Internal reports reveal a mixed reaction that veers between arch condescension and blatant dislike. Seeing Bad Taste, it seems, had left its audience with something of a bad taste…
The film was disparagingly described as ‘a backyard 16mm feature film made by Peter Jackson, a former employee of the Evening Post Circulation Department’. Whilst ‘its very explicitness should ensure that it can earn some money from the grosser end of the international video market’ it was thought to lack ‘style and verse’ and suffer from various weaknesses including ‘minimal acting talent and characters who are unsympathetic and crude.’ The report went on: ‘The film includes a lot of misjudged humour, which could be enjoyed by the crassest of audiences, but very probably not, because much of the dialogue is incomprehensible, especially so for anyone outside New Zealand.’
Jim Booth defended the project, saying that ‘viewing a film with only an unedited dialogue track (and no atmosphere or effects sound) is an unusual experience and perhaps gives a false impression of the finished film’, but it was left to Tony Hiles to ride to the defence of the project on which he had been serving as Consultant Producer.
In a document sent to the Film Commission entitled ‘Bad Taste: Report on an Experience’, Tony presented not only a vindication of the support which had been shown towards Bad Taste, but a moving, often prophetic testimony of belief in Peter and his incipient talent:
I worked with Sue Rogers on the Bad Taste poster design. I always liked the image of the alien jabbing his finger up, and had attempted to shoot it myself several times. This is a shot I did at the end of my parents’ garden. Eventually a professional photographer, Rob Pearson, came onboard and shot the final memorable image on the coast at Moa Point near Wellington Airport. Cameron Chittock was wearing the alien costume.
‘I see him as an amiable mixture of Steven Spielberg and Woody Allen – he is creative, inventive, a good actor and he loves film. However, I do not see him as some sort of messiah. He has a hell of a lot to learn – his comprehension of story and scene structure is limited, as is his ability to utilise his time and that of his co-workers in a fully economic fashion. But these things will change, as he learns fast…’
Countering murmurings that the Commission ought to insist on more changes being made to the film, Tony continued, ‘Bad Taste is an individual film with both the strengths of a film-maker with talent and the weakness of a film-maker with limited experience – and that is exactly why Bad Taste essentially works and should be left alone to work in that way.
‘Bad Taste is more than a New Zealand film, more than a regional film, it is a Pukerua Bay film.