From gore to Gandalf.

If you hear the name Peter Jackson, 2 things spring to mind, gore & Hobbits. Before all of this we will have to take you back to the beginning:

Peter was born as an only child in a small coastal town on the north island of New Zealand on October 31st 1961 to Bill and Joan Jackson. From an early age he was making films, firstly using a super 8mm movie camera that his parents bought him for his 8th birthday. This was the catalyst that inspired the young Peter to start making films: from World War 2 films to stop-motion animation in the style of Ray Harryhausen.

The first film that brought an adult Peter to prominence was a "no-budget" film made with the help of friends, workmates, his parents and an immense amount of ingenuity, he embarked on a 4-year journey that would change his life. The shooting started in 1983 and ran for 4 years at weekends. The film had it's ups and downs as some films do - the marriage of one of his actors, Craig Smith, to a deeply religious bride who forbid him to work on Sundays and finally running out of money being just two.

Some of Peter's ingenuity was amazing, from making everything needed from dolly tracks to even making his own stedicam for only $15. Along with the use of his mother's oven to make the latex masks used in the film the Jackson family lived on sausages and salad for a long time, not bad for someone in his early twenties. After 3 years of production Peter was broke. He couldn't afford to keep making the film using the money he made working as a photo engraver on one of New Zealand's newspapers, The Evening Post.

His luck changed in about 1986 when some people in the New Zealand film industry heard about his crazy project and were impressed by what they saw. NZ Film Commission CEO Jim Booth finally came to the rescue drip-feeding Peter enough money to get the project back on track, Craig Smith divorced his wife and the film was back on.

The film was the cult classic "Bad Taste". First shown in 1987 at the Cannes film festival and becoming an instant classic. As always this small town New Zealand boy liked some of the atmosphere of being back home so it seems to be that he only ate at McDonald's because he "didn't like foreign food".

It could have ended there as his genre of films didn't endear him to the New Zealand film establishment as his brain eating, green vomit exploding, eyeball popping gore fest just didn't fit the profile for New Zealand Cinema. This would have been a great loss of, what was to become, a great filmmaker. This was possibly the most difficult part of his career coming from a world-wide cult classic to trying to get another movie off the ground. Just before the end of his Bad Taste adventure he met Fran Walsh and her partner Stephen Sinclair who helped him finish the film. They also volunteered to help write he next film project.

After Bad Taste was released Peter managed to secure a Hollywood lawyer/manager and an agent. The offers from L.A. came flooding in but with a large amount of nerve and the cosy familiarity of home he didn't take up the offers, as he seemed not to be a film director but by doing his own thing.

Now we come to, possibly, the strangest of Peter's films - Meet the Feebles. The film is a cross between The Muppets and Taxi Driver, even more gore and laughs than Bad Taste but using puppets! What started out as a short 30 minute feature evolved over a year into an unfinished film. The film, like Peter's career, was teetering on the edge of failure. What saved the film was his idea of showing a rough cut of the 30minute short film at that year's Cannes Film Festival. A Japanese distributor saw and loved it enough to offer funding of $250,000 on the condition that it was made into a feature length film ready for the next year's festival.

A constant theme of his early films was the lack of money and, on this film at least, time. The money on offer was half what was needed to complete the film and the timescale was near impossible to meet. With help from Fran, Stephen and Danny Mulheron to get the script finished and Jim Booth, who had now left the NZ Film Commission, as a producer they managed to get the other $250,000 required to finish the film.

This film made the Film Commission very uncomfortable and when the film ran over time and budget both sides refused to budge, and in the event the cast and crew finished the shoot without being paid.

You would think that there would be a happy ending, I would love there to be as it's possibly Peter Jackson's unknown film but, as with Bad Taste it captured a cult following but not a mainstream one as everyone had hoped.

In the wake of this film Peter had a problem staying in New Zealand due to his cult reputation. Relations with funding bureaucrats were frosty and it seemed that he was going nowhere fast. Then in 1990 he went to a seminar on screenplay and story structure. Robert McKee, an American story analyst, presented this over three days. If you could single out any one event that transformed a cult gore-fest director to internationally acclaimed director this would be it. At the time Peter was finding the movie as it went along. Not the best way of making coherent movies. The films were mostly improvised and the story evolved whilst shooting, not from a written script that was made into a movie.

This was the catalyst to make Peter and Fran go back to a stalled zombie movie, Brain Dead. Redesigning the whole film from the start. Writing nine drafts the script evolved from something like a Bad Taste 2 to a clever story with powerful interlocking elements involving lawnmowers and hundreds of gallons of blood. What was finally filmed must be one of the most shockingly violent films ever made and one of the funniest as well.

As with the rest of his films to this date it didn't start of as smoothly as everyone had hoped. Money was found from a Spanish distributor who said that there had to be a Spanish actor taking one of the leading roles. So with the agonising duty Peter had to audition a bevy of gorgeous Spanish girls. He found the right girl and promised her the part. Then the Spanish investor pulled out. Peter promised the actress, Diana Peñalver, the part and he kept his word. Other directors would have just dropped the role and rewrote parts of the film.

The film had its fair share of nostalgia and gore, set in 1950's Wellington with a script that also used the language and customs of the era. It is still a comedy horror as most of his early films, but this one was different. Firstly it had a very well written script instead of scribbles in a notebook and secondly it captured the look and feel of the period perfectly.

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