‘The whole project is really based on taking a risk; Peter started taking the risk nearly four years ago and the Film Commission took its risk on Peter almost a year ago. Completing the exercise will prove that risks are worth taking.’
Bad Taste was completed and without any further demands for changes.
The song accompanying the end credits – as the survivors drive away into the sunset in Derek’s eccentric car – was composed and sung, not by The Beatles, but by Mike Minett with a backing group that included Fran Walsh and Michelle Scullion. It caught the renegade spirit not only of the Bad Taste Boys but also of the film and its director…
We’re gonna be winners, this time we will;
We’ve got a good team, unbeatable.
This time unite, we’ll be as one,
Our private army will never run.
The last Bad Taste photo, taken to promote Tony’s Good Taste documentary. In its own way, it sums up the spirit of the preceding four years quite well.
We’ve got the reason to believe,
We’ve got the power to succeed;
But the minute you let me down,
You’ll leave a bad taste in my mouth.
Let’s get the permission,
Let’s do it right,
License to kill,
License to fight.
We’re only Human,
We’re only Boys,
We’re only…Dispensable toys.
After four years, it was finally over. The little weekend hobbyist film had been given the necessary professional finish. The exhausting, occasionally tedious, week-in-week-out regimen had ended with a flourish of high-energy activity, an injection of much-needed cash and the involvement of people who worked in the real film industry. It was a moment that marked not just the completion of a moviemaking project, it was also the close of an era and that closure had different consequences for different people.
Of The Boys, one or two entertained the hope that they might have a role to play in future Jackson projects, but it was an unrealistic and unrealisable hope. The very qualities in Peter Jackson that had drawn others to him, had made them pitch in on the Bad Taste project and, more or less, stick with it for so long, had finally carried him out of their orbit. As participants in what would rapidly be considered a cult movie, they would acquire their own unique cult status: they were, and always will be, ‘The Bad Taste Boys’. Otherwise – despite having helped save the world from being consumed by aliens! – it was, for them, the end of the road. Most of them embraced their fate philosophically; one or two, perhaps, thought they were, in the words of the film’s closing song lyric, ‘only dispensable toys’.
Peter was, and still is, deeply conscious of his indebtedness to the group: ‘Bad Taste,’ he says, ‘was an endurance test. I have great admiration for the guys because they showed up week after week in order to help me get that film made.’ There would even be talk, over several years, of a sequel to Bad Taste being made and, five years on, WingNut Films would indeed present the New Zealand Film Commission with a proposal for a project to make two such sequels, back-to-back. It is a project, however, that has yet to get off the ground…
Reflecting on that ‘endurance test’ today, Peter sees several similarities between Bad Taste and The Lord of the Rings:
Both took four years to shoot and both employed the same film-making techniques. The way we made Bad Taste was not a bad way to make a film and that is why I adopted a similar approach to The Lord of the Rings. Neither was made using the principle: ‘Lock a script down, rush off and shoot it without any changes, cut it and release it.’ I don’t think a rule that says you get one crack at a script and that it never changes is a particularly smart way of making films. I prefer an approach that enables you to pause every now and again and say, ‘Yes, this is working okay, but I could really do with a scene that does this, I’d like to put in a sequence that does that, or I need to explain this a bit more…’ and you then go and shoot those things as we did with the pick-ups we filmed for The Lord of the Rings. Handcrafting a film has always appealed to me: refining, finessing, streamlining as we go along – it’s a process that started with Bad Taste.
For Peter, in 1987, completing Bad Taste was not so much an ending as a beginning. It was, as one observer puts it, now the moment for Peter to move on; he was now a professional film-maker; the talent would soon be recognised, the promise and the ambition fulfilled; it was time for him to step up to bigger challenges.
Although completed and delivered, the Film Commission decided not to show Bad Taste prior to screening it at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. Doubtful of the film’s ability to succeed, the policy was to hold back release in order to get the maximum publicity from any response at Cannes – however unlikely that might be! For Peter, the opportunity for Bad Taste to become a possible topic of conversation along the length of the Promenade de la Croisette, represented the hope that offers of other work might follow. There was, however, one snag…
The Cannes Film Festival takes place in May which, at the time I finished work on Bad Taste, was still several months away. I’d left my job, was unemployed and had no income. There was nothing to do, except wait…
Wait…and come up with new ideas!
Peter had become close friends with Stephen Sinclair and Fran Walsh following their introduction from Costa Botes. Two more of those film industry rebels who were attracted to Peter, they had given him encouragement on Bad Taste (as well as lending a hand when the scale replica of Gear Homestead needed painting) but, more importantly, the three of them were already working on a film script together. Throughout 1987, the final year of making Bad Taste, they were writing what would eventually become Braindead.
One day Stephen had pitched me an idea about a young man who lives at home with a domineering mother who turns into a zombie – that was the story. It had started life as an idea for a play (and would eventually be staged as Brain Dead: The Musical in 1995) but Stephen was also interested in developing the idea for a film with me as director. I thought it was a great idea; I’ve always thought that zombies are fantastic and I was, and still am, a huge zombie film-fan.
Zombie pictures are as old as popular cinema and Bela (‘Dracula’) Lugosi had starred in what was probably the first of the genre: White Zombie, made in 1933. Several cult zombie films had appeared in the Sixties and Seventies, including Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, but by the 1980s it had reached plague proportions with The Evil Dead, Re-Animator and many others. Indeed, during the two years from 1985 to 1987, over twenty zombie-themed films were released, many of them low- or no-budget pictures with such improbable titles as Night of the Living Babes and Bloodsuckers from Outer Space.
Braindead went through several drafts during 1987 and was budgeted as requiring in the region of $2.5 million, making it a relatively expensive project at that time. Peter, Stephen and Fran submitted an application for development finance to the New Zealand Film Commission:
‘Braindead is a zombie movie. It is also a parable about breaking away from family ties and emerging into adulthood. As a satirical tale of life in the suburbs, the film is a study of emotional repression and social propriety. There is an inversion of