I enjoyed sculpting in plasticine, and this was an early goblin design.
make-up. The trouble with the latex was that it reeked of ammonia – a sickening, vomit-making smell!’
The Planet of the Apes style film for which these masks were made never progressed beyond some footage of Pete O’Herne in an even more elaborate full-head mask made with a foam-latex product, which Peter Jackson purchased from a supplier in Canada and which he would bake in his mother’s oven. ‘It rose like a cake,’ says Pete, ‘but it also stank to high heaven!’ Existing photographs showing Pete wearing the gorilla head and a costume inspired by those worn by the ape soldiers in the film indicate a remarkable level of competence, although the setting – a domestic garden with a carousel clothes dryer – add a bizarre dimension!
Although the ape film project never got beyond the idea stage, who could have guessed that the young man who was so fired up by Planet of the Apes that he created his own gorilla masks, would years later, as a professional film-maker, come near to adding a new title to the Apes franchise? Instead, Tim Burton re-made the original, and cinema audiences were denied the opportunity of seeing what Peter Jackson would have done with the theme of ape superiority.
Now into his teens, Peter was broadening his knowledge of film with books about movies and moviemakers although, ironically, the students’ Film Club at Kapiti College – which seems to have been run by a smug, self-perpetuating oligarchy – repeatedly declined to accept the young Peter Jackson into membership.
Undaunted, Peter pursued his interest in cinema alone or with friends like Ken Hammon, a fellow pupil at Kapiti College, who shared his love of movies, was a fan of Famous Monsters of Filmland and was, conveniently, another non-sportsman! Both boys had film projectors and were spending their pocket money buying 8mm copies of various movies.
One of the first films in Peter’s collection was, unsurprisingly, King Kong, but he also owned prints of the original vampire movie Nosferatu and Lon Chaney’s versions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera. Ken broadened the repertoire with such titles as D.W. Griffith’s silent epic, Intolerance, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Howard Hawks’ gangster movie, Scarface and the Hitchcock thriller, The 39 Steps.
Other 8mm films were hired from a low-profile, illegal operator in the Wellington suburb who was able to supply such assorted delights as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing which, Ken recalls, ‘freaked us out’, and Tobe Hooper’s 1974 seminal tale of murder and cannibalism, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Publicised in America with the poster slogan ‘Who will survive – and what will be left of them?’, Chain Saw Massacre was, for many years, banned in several countries including New Zealand so its illicit availability on hire was especially irresistible to the young film fans.
‘We humped four cans of film back home,’ says Ken, ‘watched the first reel, which was so psychologically unnerving that we were seriously rattled! I remember saying to Pete, “Are you really sure you want to watch the rest?” At the time we were hardly overexposed to such thrillers, so they inevitably made an impression.’ It was an
My Uncle Bill visited us from England in 1976, and bought me my long-wished-for copy of King Kong in Super 8. In the days before video, projecting in Super 8 was the only way to actually own a movie and watch it again and again. Kong got played a lot in my bedroom!
impression that, for Peter Jackson, would endure, as is testified to by the gorier sequences in Bad Taste and Braindead.
In company with Ken and Pete O’Herne, or sometimes on his own, Peter was now regularly travelling into Wellington – or anywhere else that had a cinema and was within commuting distance – in order to catch the latest movie releases or fleeting screenings of vintage films.
I saw American World War II movies for the first time – The Dirty Dozen and Kelly’s Heroes – and a film, made in 1970, about a much earlier war, Waterloo.
Waterloo was the work of Russian director, Sergei Bondarchuk, and starred Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington and Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte. It inspired an interest in that period of time which has remained with me across the years. I collected – and still collect – toy-soldiers, including a number representing various Napoleonic troops.
What I loved about Waterloo were the uniforms and the big formations of soldiers. Filmed in the Soviet Union, Bondarchuk had used the Russian army as extras on the battlefield – 20,000 of them! I was impressed at seeing such a huge number of people on screen, but was also frustrated because the real Battle of Waterloo involved almost 140,000 soldiers, so I remember watching these 20,000 extras and thinking, ‘God! What would it be like to see the real battle?’ That’s why I wanted to create these formidable-looking armies in The Lord of the Rings which, with the aid of computers we were able to achieve.
Ken Hammon offers an interesting perspective on Jackson the young cineaste: ‘People always talk about Pete’s obsession with horror movies, his fascination with gore and splatter, but they overlook another of his early cinematic passions that would certainly inform much of his work on The Lord of the Rings. Pete adored the wide-screen, three-hour historical epics that proliferated in the Fifties and early Sixties: Quo Vadis, Spartacus, El Cid, The Fall of the Roman Empire and the like. He loved these sprawling films with their great battles and thirty years later started making them himself, here in New Zealand!’
I first saw Waterloo on its original release at the Embassy Theatre in Wellington and then, later, I dragged some friends along to see it when it popped up on a Sunday afternoon screening at a flea-pit of a cinema on the outskirts of the city suburbs which involved us in a train journey followed by a half-hour bus ride.
I remember that particular day quite vividly because I had badly cut my thumb that morning. This is the sort of child I was…I had been reading WWII Prisoner of War books and I was intrigued by how, when they were planning an escape, they forged identity papers to show the various inspectors on the trains as they tried to make their way back across Germany to Switzerland. I was particularly fascinated by stories of how they would make fake rubber stamps with which to authorise the forged documents by carving them from the rubber soles of their boots.
On this day, I’d decided to try this myself and was busy in my father’s shed in the back garden carving away at the rubber sole of an old shoe. The knife slipped and it nearly cut the top of my thumb off. It was a very deep cut, so bad that I still have the scar to this day. I should probably have gone to the hospital and had it stitched, but I wanted to go to the cinema to see Waterloo, which was only screening this one day. So I didn’t tell my parents about the wound – I just put a plaster on it and headed out the door. I remember how it throbbed like hell all the way to this terrible little theatre in the back of beyond, but that once I was there watching the film, I became so utterly absorbed in the action that I completely forgot the pain. As for the friends I dragged along to see it, I’m not sure that they appreciated it quite as much as I did!
If Waterloo and other movie epics were to provide a long-term inspiration for the cinematic scope later achieved in The Lord of the Rings, the desire to capture on film the elusive magic of fantasy realms was reinforced by seeing the work of a master-moviemaker whose pictures became an inspiration and a touchstone for Peter Jackson. That man was Ray Harryhausen.
A veteran