There's only one title on Hollywood's lips right now, and it doesn't include the words 'Harry' or 'Potter'. 350 sets, 2000 technicians, and 48000 assorted props, and $270m, 15 months and 4.5 million feet of film later, the most ambitious film project ever attempted is all but complete. The Fellowship Of The Ring, the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings, opened worldwide on December 19 to considerable acclaim, and looks set to do for fantasy filmmaking what Star Wars did for science-fiction in 1977. Not bad for a director best known for low-budget splatter horror, goofy slapstick and scatological humour. So how did a modest, New Zealand filmmaker few people in Hollywood have ever heard of land just about the biggest directing job of the last twenty years?
Peter Jackson has indeed come a long way since the days of baking latex heads in his mother's oven. An only child born on Halloween, 1961 on the New Zealand coast, Jackson began experimenting with film when his parents bought a basic Super-8 camera in 1969. Inspired by the comic antics of Monty Python and Buster Keaton, and the inventive effects and fantasy scenarios of Thunderbirds, King Kong and especially stop-motion pioneer Ray Harryhausen, Jackson produced a number of shorts throughout his teens, experimenting with a slapdash mix of home-made models, stop-motion animation, broad comedy and special effects that would later become his stock-in-trade.
It was a practical grounding that was largely responsible for the success of his first three features. In 1981, Jackson acquired a 16mm camera and began to work up the idea for a low-budget film that would showcase his talents to the wider world. Lacking professional contacts or technical expertise, Jackson simply decided to do everything - directing, producing, and scripting his project, as well as taking the lead role of hapless Derek. Over four years from 1983 to 1987, working at a local newspaper by day, cobbling together the necessary special effects and costumes by night, and filming guerrilla-style at weekends, Jackson, along with like-minded friends, began to patch together the film that would become both a cult classic and his unintended passport to notoriety: the grotesque, gory and very funny Bad Taste (1987).
The plot - man-eating aliens invade a small town in search of new additions to their menu - is really a thinly disguised excuse to indulge in splatter and slapstick of the highest order: exploding body parts, putty-faced aliens, more brain matter than a surgeon's operating table, gruesome action sequences and a spectacularly bloody chainsaw-and-rocket launcher finale. To Jackson's surprise, what had begun purely as a labour of love seemed suddenly to have commercial potential too. The energetic direction and wicked sense of humour at work in Bad Taste convinced friends and admirers in the industry to enter the film at the 1987 Cannes Festival, and the 17th Paris Festival of Fantasy and Sci-Fi, where the film won the coveted Gore Award. Huge foreign sales and a cult audience quickly followed. Jackson was on his way.
His two subsequent films are companion pieces, of a kind, to Bad Taste: provocative, funny, visually imaginative, and unashamedly low-brow. Meet The Feebles (1989), described by Jackson as a "satire on human behaviour", explores the debauched backstage antics of a troupe of Muppet-like puppets, which include cussing, fighting, insulting each other, and gags that run the gamut of bodily functions. Braindead (1992) was a more obvious sequel to Bad Taste, a Raimi-esque splatter-horror in which a boy's mother transforms into a flesh-eating zombie. Bigger, bloodier, and ballsier than Bad Taste, Braindead takes Jackson's imagination for visual extremes, visceral splatter, and stomach-churning slapstick to the next level, with a 20-minute finale that ranks amongst the goriest ever filmed. Like its predecessors, it's an elaborate visual joke in deliberately bad taste; a joke most (but by no means all) audiences appreciated.
Flush with new-found success but becoming straightjacketed by his splatter mantle, Jackson's subsequent films marked a sea-change in his work, both in terms of budget and subject matter, replacing the grotesque comedy of his earlier work with a more sombre style and a developing interest in exploring intense relationships and powerful atmosphere. Heavenly Creatures (1994), based on a celebrated New Zealand murder case of the 1950s, explores the adolescent bond forged between two disaffected young girls, and their gradual retreat from the real world into self-created fantasy and delusion; while The Frighteners (1996) delves into the world of the paranormal through the eyes of a con-man para-psychologist. Jackson's imaginative camerawork and striking visual style are more deftly used in these films, subtly evoking mood, psychological state and setting where previously they had been employed for comic or shock effect. But it's Jackson's ability to convincingly blend real and fantasy worlds, whether the imaginary mediaeval kingdom in Heavenly Creatures or the supernatural world of The Frighteners, to make the unreal real, that distinguishes him from most directors, and would prove so important in his interest in The Lord Of The Rings.
By now Jackson was established as a highly visual director with a unusual talent for fantasy filmmaking. Equally important was his dedication to remaining in New Zealand (all his films had been shot there) and developing and retaining creative control over his own projects, free from the commercial and narrative constraints of the studio system. In an interview with a New Zealand newspaper in 1994, Jackson explained:
"I made Heavenly Creatures not to lead onto anything, I just wanted to make that movie. All I want, by the end of my life, is to have made a bunch of films of which I'm proud and which I had wanted to do. I do not regard myself as a director for hire. I never have and I don't think I ever will.
"I have, at odd times, flirted with the idea of going to make a film in America, but the quality of material hasn't been up to it, and I always feel, "Hell, do I really want to lose control of the film at the vital stage? Do I want other people to have final cut? Do I want to feel like I am an employee for a studio which says, "We're just going to pay you to make this and then you must go away while we finish it as we see fit? You're just the director, you're no one else".
"I don't want to be a director as such; I want to be a 'film-maker'. The freedom that I have in New Zealand is worth millions of dollars to me. It is worth more than what I could earn in Hollywood."
The unusual of dedication to his projects was to prove central in getting Lord Of The Rings off the ground. Simply put, it was his idea.
During post-production work on The Frighteners in 1995 with his home-grown special effects company (named WETA after a New Zealand bug), Jackson was contemplating the possibilities of recent advances in CGI technology and a return to his Ray Harryhausen inspired roots. With his long-cherished remake of King Kong stalling in pre-production, Jackson first toyed with the idea of filming the apparently unfilmable; a live-action version of Lord Of The Rings. Over the next year, he began to search around for the film rights while making a little-seen 'mockumentary' on the film industry, Forgotten Silver (1996). Ironically, the rights were still owned by Saul Zaentz, the maverick producer who had presided over the another attempt to adapt Tolkien's book for the screen, Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated version. A combination of qualities convinced Zaentz, together with producers at both Miramax and New Line, that Jackson alone might be able to deliver the impossible. His obvious talent for fantasy and highly visual filmmaking, his command of cutting-edge special effects, and devotion to Tolkien's work played major parts. The epic scope of the story, the breathtaking battle sequences, and fantastic scenarios seem tailor-made for him in hindsight. But it was Jackson's creative commitment and enthusiasm, the same dedication that kept him up every night for four years making props and prosthetic heads in his mother's oven for Bad Taste, that really sealed the deal. He would co-write and then direct all three films in an unprecedented back-to-back manner over 15 months. His special effects company would create all the production design and effects from scratch. It would be filmed, as always, on location in his homeland New Zealand. He would live and breathe Lord Of The Rings for 3 years of his life. And most importantly of all, Peter Jackson believed it could be done.
One film to rule them all?
