I even remember details of my first-ever movie budget: four rolls of Super 8 film at $3 NZ a roll to buy and process; total cost $12 NZ. We screened it at school over several lunch times – it always got a big cheer when Mr Shoesmith exploded! – and we charged 10 cents admission. We made exactly $12! No going over-budget, but no profit either! But at least we broke even…
Monty Python would continue to be a powerful influence on Peter and his love of ‘splatter that would eventually inspire his first commercial movies, was really borne out of a sketch from the third season of Flying Circus. Called ‘Sam Peckinpah’s “Salad Days”’, it imagined what might have happened if the American director of such uncompromising movies as The Wild Bunch and the then recently-released Straw Dogs had made a film of Julian Slade’s Fifties musical Salad Days.
The result is an English country house-party that unexpectedly turns into a fevered gore-fest. Beginning innocently enough with someone playing a piano on a lawn and lads in blazers and flannels and girls in pretty frocks frolicking about to the music, things start going wrong when the bright young things embark on a game of tennis: someone is hit in the eye with a tennis-ball; a girl gets a racquet embedded in her stomach; another person’s arm is ripped off; the piano-lid drops, severing the pianist’s hands and causing fountains of blood to erupt from the stumps. Finally, the piano collapses in slow-motion, crushing everyone to death and the grisly debacle concludes with a shot in which, as the script tastefully puts it, ‘a volcanic quantity of blood geysers upwards.’
It was Python at its most outrageous: defiantly unapologetic, even down to the on-screen ‘Apology’: THE BBC WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGISE TO EVERYONE IN THE WORLD FOR THE LAST ITEM. IT WAS DISGUSTING AND BAD AND THOROUGHLY DISOBEDIENT AND PLEASE DON’T BOTHER TO PHONE UP BECAUSE WE KNOW IT WAS VERY TASTELESS, BUT THEY DIDN’T REALLY MEAN IT AND THEY DO ALL COME FROM BROKEN HOMES AND HAVE VERY UNHAPPY PERSONAL LIVES…’
I remember watching that episode on TV and being absolutely gobsmacked. Quite simply, it was the most extraordinarily funny thing that I’d ever seen. That sketch did more to steer my sense of humour towards over-the-top bloodletting than any horror film ever did! My splattermovies – Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead – owe as much to Monty Python as they do to any other genre. It is about pushing humour to the limit of ludicrousness, the furthest and most absurd extreme imaginable – so extreme that the only possible response to it is to laugh because there is nothing else left to do!
In 1975, Peter moved on to secondary education, attending Kapiti College, located north of Pukerua Bay at Raumati Beach, where he demonstrated an exceptional aptitude for maths, a complete lack of skill (or interest) in sport and where he was variously perceived by his peers, some of whom have described him as being painfully shy with an awkward stammer, as a boy who was so retiring, remote and self-effacing that he went all but unnoticed by teachers and fellow pupils. Others, who shared his passionate excitement for movies, saw beyond the shyness and the occasional stutter and found him an entertaining, intriguing, slightly eccentric character.
‘You would never have called Peter “a leader of men”,’ says one friend, ‘and yet we all followed him around! He came up with ideas, schemes and enterprises and we went along with them, took part, got involved. People have said he was reserved and lacking in self-confidence and he could, sometimes, give that impression – he rarely made vocal contributions in class – but he had massive self-confidence in his ideas and abilities. In that sense, you would not describe Peter as modest. I believe he always knew that he was going to be special, that he would have a charmed life…’
To his close mates, Peter was often the joker: pulling stunts and gags. ‘He was totally lunatic!’ remembers Pete O’Herne. ‘We went into town one day and we got off the bus in Wellington and, as soon as it had driven away, Peter suddenly said, “Oh my God, Pete, where’s your bag?” I start panicking, thinking, ‘I’ve lost my bag! I’ve left it on the bus…’ And then I realised, for Christ’s sakes, that I’m actually holding the bag in my hand! And there’s Peter, laughing like hell!’
There were also occasional trips to see a live taping of a TV comedy show: ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ laughs Pete, ‘there we’d be in the audience – these guys from the loony-left, of the school of Python – watching some normal, mainstream comedy show that really just couldn’t do it for us! So, Peter and I would start hee-hawing away, making up the loudest, silliest, high-pitched laughs and crazy demented sounds. Then we’d watch the show on transmission and spot ourselves on the soundtrack which was easy because we were always way over the top for the kind of jokes in the show.’
If the antics of the Monty Python team were shaping Peter’s sense of humour, he was also still in the thrall of the film fantasists. He had already discovered the American publication, Famous Monsters of Filmland that had been founded in 1958, three years before he was born and which was generally regarded by sci-fi, fantasy and horrorgeeks worldwide as being the bible on all forms of movie-monsterlife.
In the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, Peter read about the work of veterans Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price as well as the Sixties stars of Hammer’s House of Horror, Peter Cushing and the man who would one day play Saruman the White, Christopher Lee. Behind-the-scenes features on the making of some of the great monster classics, fuelled his interest in special-effects while revelations about the tricks-of-the-trade of stop-frame animation and, in particular, the work of Willis O’Brien and the team who created King Kong deepened his appreciation for the movie-magic behind the Eighth Wonder of the World.
In homage to Kong, Peter had toyed with attempting a possible ape movie of his own, building a gorilla puppet (using part of an old fur stole belonging to his mother), constructing a cardboard Empire State Building and painting a Manhattan skyscape for the backdrop.
Peter’s first original monster was constructed around a ‘skeleton’ made from rolled-up newspapers and was what he describes as ‘a crazy hunch-back rat’ – a forerunner, perhaps, of the rabid rat-monkey that wreaks havoc in Braindead.
More simian life forms were to exert their influence when Peter saw the 1968 movie, Planet of the Apes. The first – and unarguably the best – of a series of ape pictures, Planet was no conventional monster-movie. Based on a novella by Pierre Boulle, it had a satiric script, a seminal Sixties ‘message for mankind’, a compelling central performance from Charlton Heston and – for the period in which it was made – cutting-edge make-up effects that convincingly turned Roddy McDowall and others into assorted chimps, gorillas and orangutans.
I saw Planet of the Apes on TV and was blown away by it. I loved the special make-up effects but I also loved the story. I was already a fan of King Kong – although my fascination is not really with apes and gorillas so much as with a couple of great movies that both happen to have apes in them!
Nevertheless, both films, though they approach it in a very different way, have an intriguing theme in common: that the gap separating humans from apes is far less than we might like to suppose!
It wasn’t long before Peter Jackson was sculpting and moulding ape-masks and involving his friend Pete O’Herne in the process. Pete, who still proudly owns and displays highly competent prototypes for their handiwork – albeit now incredibly fragile – recalls, ‘Peter’s imagination was such that if something impressed him, he had to try and do it for himself – filming, sculpting, whatever – and if Peter was doing it, you’d want to do it, too! We’d seen Planet of the Apes and I went round to his house the following week and he had a model head and was working on a face mask: sculpturing it in Plasticine, freehand – not using drawings or photographs but creating this thing in three-dimensions, from his own mind. Of course, I’d think, “I’ll give that a go as well…” So I did!’
The process, as Pete remembers was time-consuming and expensive on pocket-money budgets: ‘Peter found this latex rubber in a hardware store; it came in little bottles that cost about $8 each.