Pete O’Herne had a really good sense of humour and we both liked movies – and the same type of movies! Pete was always one of those friends at school who was really happy to help and when you’re trying to make films as a kid that’s a real bonus!
Obviously there’s a limit to what you can do as a moviemaker if you’re on your own and I didn’t have brothers and sisters that I could stick in front of a camera. So I was always trying to hook up with people who would be interested in film-making and in helping me try to make them. Pete was not only into films he was also nearly always available at weekends. Like me, Pete wasn’t exactly the sporting-type, which was a really good thing because when you’re trying to get kids to help you make a film, Sport is Enemy Number One! You’re in school all week, so you want to shoot on Saturday and that is the one day on which the guys in the rugby and soccer teams are going to be far too busy to be messing about with films!
Most of Peter’s early experiments with film were attempts at creating effects, rather than in demonstrating any embryonic talent as a director. Pete O’Herne recalls: ‘I’d often ring Peter up on a Friday night and say, “What are you doing, tomorrow?” and he’d always be up to something or other and would ask if I wanted to go down the valley with him and try out this or that special-effect that he was working on. Every weekend, more or less, we were in and out of each other’s homes, doing crazy things together. I always think of Peter as wearing an old duffle coat that would eventually become a kind of trademark that folk would rib him about. And the pockets of this coat were always bulging with heaps of stuff for his various experiments.’
Like virtually everyone who has operated a camera since the invention of cinematography, Peter Jackson particularly enjoyed playing with the simple effect created by time-lapse photography: shoot; stop; change something in front of the camera and shoot again. Hey presto! You have an appearance, a disappearance or some magical transformation. Although Peter was yet to make the discovery, time-lapse – using a camera to trick the eye into seeing the impossible – is also the basic principle behind the stop-motion animation that had enabled King Kong to grapple with the prehistoric creatures on Skull Island. Initially, however, Peter’s films were confined to live-action subjects that, whilst simple in their approach, were inevitably time-consuming for participants…
Most of what I shot didn’t amount to more than odd little test films, like a time-lapse record of a longish car journey; there were no sophisticated structures or stories. But then, within a year, I saw King Kong and the gorilla really sealed my destiny. I knew nothing about stop-motion animation: I’d never heard of Willis O’Brien before I saw King Kong and I had yet to see any of Ray Harryhausen’s films, but I began finding out how it was done and started experimenting…
I was in the Boy Scouts and, on the morning after I’d seen King Kong, we went on a hike through the bush and I took the camera and got the Scout troop to do this thing where I would get them to stand still, shoot a few frames, then get them to move and stand still again and shoot a few more frames, so that it looked as if they were sliding along the ground. I remember being a real pain because, instead of hiking, I had them acting in stop-motion all the way to the camp!
Perhaps I was drawn to stop-frame animation because I realised that it was one way in which I could attempt to make movies on my own. So I made little Plasticine models of dinosaurs and filmed them as best I could, achieving one or two rather crude animation effects.
The chief problem was that stop-motion is achieved by filming a single frame of film, adjusting the puppet or model, taking another single frame and so on until the finished footage, when shown, creates the illusion that something inanimate is moving.
Unfortunately, the Super 8 Movie Camera I had didn’t have a facility to allow you to shoot a single frame of film at a time. The best that I could do was to squeeze the trigger for the shortest possible interval and hope for the best. Inevitably, the camera would fire off at least two or three frames of film, which meant that the movements of my dinosaurs were always jerky and unconvincing.
The camera was incredibly crude and the focus was bad, but I think of all my early attempts at filming as being – if nothing else – valuable experiments…
Pete O’Herne recalls those experiments: ‘We were in our last year at primary school when Peter embarked on another zany film project. He got some of the kids involved and they’d all have little bits to do on the film and he even persuaded one of the teachers, Mr Trevor Shoesmith, to take part. Peter was such an enthusiast and his enthusiasm was infectious: he had a great deal of self-motivation and he passed that motivation on to others. He was also persuasive: he’d come up with some mad idea and we’d all find ourselves pitching in and taking part because we knew it would be fun. This particular epic was entitled Ponty Mython and was Peter’s ode to what,
As I became interested in stop-motion following the screening of King Kong, I tried building puppet animators. Here is a stop of Kong and a Triceratops, filmed on a table top in the living room. I had no lights, so the sun would drift around over time, creating time lapse shadows during the hours it would take me to animate.
by then, was his favourite television show.’
Monty Python’s Flying Circus landed on the unsuspecting viewers of BBC television in October 1969 to the accompaniment of a strident blare of brass-band music, the crushing descent of an animated foot and irreverent blowing of what in English slang is referred to as ‘a raspberry’. The circus troupe were five young writers and performers – John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and the late Graham Chapman – who set about revolutionising British comedy with the help of ingeniously quirky animations by American cartoonist, Terry Gilliam.
Over a period of five years Monty Python developed from an alternative (and decidedly subversive) late-night show that outraged and offended the easily-shocked into, firstly, an essential cult-classic and then, eventually, into a much-loved British institution. As a result of the Flying Circus, an entire generation grew up for whom comedy was defined by such phrases as, ‘Is this the right room for an argument?’, ‘Nudge, nudge, know what I mean, know what I mean!’ and the allpurpose, sketch-changing ‘And now for something completely different’ along with spam, flying sheep, silly walks, lumberjacks and a dead parrot.
What surprises Peter Jackson is not that Monty Python’s Flying Circus should have left its mark on his nascent creativity, but that he ever got to see it in the first place…
The one thing that, to this day, I’ve never quite fathomed out is how I was ever allowed to stay up late on a Sunday night and watch a programme like Monty Python’s Flying Circus! Although Dad loved comedy and had a great sense of humour, when it came to Python, he would sit through an entire show and never laugh.
I was not sure, initially, that I ever laughed out loud – partly because there were all kinds of innuendos that I probably didn’t pick up on, but also because it was so bizarre and off-beat: it was the weirdest comedy show ever and I had never seen anything like it in my life.
Because I saw the Flying Circus at just the right age – I was 11 or 12 years old and just starting to form adult sensibilities – it had a profound influence on the way in which my sense of humour developed. Monty Python taught me to love the ludicrous and love the extreme.
When, during my last year at primary school, we had to do a school project with our friends I decided that I was going to make a film. Getting together with some of my chums we put together a script. It was entitled, somewhat derivatively, Ponty Mython!
Heavily influenced – pretty much totally influenced – by Flying Circus it comprised skits from the TV series along with some of our own. I even tried to create some Terry Gilliam-style animations using cut-out pictures from magazines.
Ponty Mython ran for about twelve minutes and contained a sequence in which one of our