Sure, Peter Jackson directed the fellowship of the Ring and has a shot at three Oscars this year -- for directing, producing, and adapting the first part of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. You could say the guy's arrived. But you probably couldn't say much about the rest of his oeuvre, as the 40-year-old Kiwi's previous work wasn't exactly mainstream. Here, Jackson talks about his oddball early efforts.
BAD TASTE (1988) Impaled feet, severed noggins, and vomit-slurping aliens vie for screen time in Jackson's debut. ''I was a photolithographer at a Wellington newspaper -- but I always wanted to make movies. So I got some friends, and we started filming during weekends. It took us four years. I ended up playing two characters [because] I ran out of friends. We took the film to the Cannes Film Festival, and it sold to 30 countries -- and enabled me to become a full-time filmmaker.''
MEET THE FEEBLES (1989) This Muppets-mocking musical stars porn-addled puppets struggling with substance abuse, infidelity, and Nam flashbacks. ''That's when I first met [longtime F/X collaborator and current three-time nominee] Richard Taylor; he built some puppets for us. I remember going into this basement full of toxic fumes and glues, where he made models and slept in the same room. Which is probably not advisable. But he was brilliant.''
BRAINDEAD (A.K.A. DEAD ALIVE) (1993) Zombies take over a town in an ultragruesome black comedy. ''[Screenwriter] Stephen Sinclair had devised the original story, with the thought of doing a stage play. After the movie, the play did get done: The front three rows of the audience were supplied with raincoats because the blood was flying around so much. Fran [Walsh, Jackson's wife and screenwriting partner] wrote the songs -- it was a musical. But the film was Stephen's idea, then he and Fran and myself wrote the script -- and I directed actors for the first time. So it was like a real movie.''
HEAVENLY CREATURES (1994) Jackson and Walsh's screenplay about two murderous New Zealand girls earned an Oscar nomination, gave Kate Winslet her big break, and featured Middle-earth-like fantasy sequences. ''There was a murder case from 1954 that Fran had been really interested in when she was a kid. Fran [wanted]to find out who these girls were -- what journey they went on that ended in them killing one of their mothers. We loved the script process because we had to behave like investigative journalists. Everything in the movie was taken from people's memories.''
FORGOTTEN SILVER (1996) This fake documentary -- cowritten and directed by Jackson and Costa Botes -- celebrated the achievements of unheralded (and fictional) Kiwi film pioneer Colin McKenzie. ''It screened in New Zealand on a Sunday night on TV. Everyone was glued to it. The next morning when the country woke up, we realized with horror that the entire nation believed us. Suddenly, Colin McKenzie was a national hero. It was like Orson Welles and War of the Worlds. We had to go on TV that night and admit to the country it wasn't true.''
THE FRIGHTENERS (1996) Michael J. Fox plays a ghost-wrangling con man in Jackson's first big studio movie. "It was always made as a Halloween film. Then Daylight, the Sylvester Stallone [summer] movie, got delayed. So [Universal] dumped Frighteners into Daylight's spot as if it was just filler. And people went expecting a summer film and got a Halloween film. The release wasn't a great experience, but I'm very proud of the film."
You Might Also Like
- Movie Commentary Who could replace Peter Jackson? | Vanessa Juarez
- Movie Commentary Producing ''The Hobbit'' | Missy Schwartz
