THE PEOPLE VS. PETER JACKSON
In lieu of a game of riddles, we posed your questions to the Lord Of The Rings legend. And no matter how leftfield or board-game-related, he was more than happy to answer them
If you were able to become one of your characters for a single day, who would it be?
TOM HARDMAN
Well, it would be quite good being King Kong, because I would get to see dinosaurs and stuff. As long as it’s not the New York part of the story, as long as it was just beating up Tyrannosauruses. If I was Kong, I would be in charge of keeping the dinosaurs in order on Skull Island.
How often do you abandon a concept or a screenplay because you can’t make it work?
MATT GRIFFITHS
I don’t think that has ever happened. There are scripts we have written that have never been made, but that is not because we have abandoned them. We wrote a script for a thing called
Concrete many years ago — a comic-book thing around The Frighteners time. We wrote it, delivered it, I think it was for Fox, and it never got made. We haven’t got too many of those either. In terms of starting a script and bashing our heads against a wall, I don’t think this has ever happened. If you are starting a script it is because, inherently, your gut tells you there is a story in there. Whether it is based on a novel or an original idea, you are sniffing out a story. Crafting and shaping a story is a clinical kind of exercise in some respects. It is a manipulation of the audience in terms of the first act and the second act and inciting incidents, all those things. So you have to take the original idea that attracts you, whatever it is, and then apply the formula to it and then make that work.
During Bad Taste, was there ever a moment when you thought what you were attempting might be impossible?
PAT HIGGINS There was, certainly. Looking back on it, one of my lowest moments on Bad Taste, and this is not blaming anybody, but whenever we were filming, I had to convince my mates from the photoengraving department at The Evening Post to come out on their Sundays. There was one Sunday, and it only happened once, where I showed up at the location, the old house, and nobody arrived. I was there all day long and nobody came.
I was there the entire day just waiting, waiting, waiting, until five o’clock, and then went home again. That evening
I was so demoralised I felt like giving up. Generally, with adversity, it fuels me. There were moments in Bad Taste when I would be applying for some money from the film commission and would be turned down, which would just make me angry. That kind of thing fuels me more than demoralises me. DAVID TOON
I am still around and I can definitely do a good impersonation of the original Derek. Reasonably good, anyway.
MATT KIRKHAM They are sociopaths, so they don’t have that gene that triggers the fight-or-flight thing. They are just stupid. Fear is a good thing. Fear is when your brain is telling you to get the hell out of there. Most people have got that. But if you are a sociopath, that fear thing isn’t there — it is more like a thrill. Derek has a sociopathic brain.
The IMDB lists you as having played roles in 162 films and TV series [including interviews]. Does that make you the most unappreciated actor of your generation?
MICHAEL KELLET I remember looking at the IMDB once and I was credited with shooting all this stuff in the 1960s, when I was a kid. Then I realised the BBC had a cameraman with the same name. So I wouldn’t necessarily trust the IMDB. There is a reason I am underappreciated. Occasionally, if I was trying to direct Ian Mckellen and I had a particular idea in my head and he couldn’t grasp it, he would say, “Just act it for me.” Suddenly I am doing my performance for Ian Mckellen and I feel a right twit. One day Edgar [Wright] has got to do an entire origin story about the psycho Santa [in Hot Fuzz]. I am waiting for that phone call.
Which actor has confounded your expectations and shown you things in a performance you had never expected?
MATT JONES One of the actors that delivered the goods beyond what we ever imagined was Elijah Wood playing Frodo. We didn’t really know Elijah beforehand — he was the kid from Flipper. But he did a great audition. He really owned that role. When you have got a great relationship with an actor it is fun to go to work. I have never seen Elijah in a bad mood; I don’t know if he is genetically capable of getting angry or grumpy. He was really good for the spirit of the whole crew. There are a lot of others too I could name, but Elijah, if you looked at it on paper, would be a slightly unusual choice for that role. We were trying to cast a Brit, and he was very young and known for being in these kiddie-type movies — because he was a kid. That was his first adult role and he knocked it out of the park.
Did shooting Boromir’s death scene [in The Fellowship Of The Ring] make you cry?
BEN MALTON Not really, because you are not shooting it as it appears in the movie. It was very technical, we had these arrows that were going into him: some were CG and we had to put these fake ones into poor old Sean [Bean]. I remember Viggo [Mortensen] was really great on that day. Viggo’s reaction to Sean’s death also fuelled Sean. It was like a Lennon and Mccartney thing where the two of them are making each other better. It was great to see these two actors giving everything they’ve got for each other. A lot of the power in that scene comes from the reactions. When an arrow thumps into Sean, you have Merry and Pippin screaming, “Nooo!” Also the sound effects and music added a lot. I see these interviews with Sean and he says it is his favourite death scene. Which is something certainly to be proud of because he dies in virtually every film. He was a joy to work with. Supplying him with his favourite death was the least I could do.
What were the worst and best days filming The Lord Of The Rings?
ALEX BOND There were quite a few worst days. Bad days on films are usually when things go wrong outside of your control. There weren’t any personal bad days in the sense of us arguing or fighting. That never happened. The flooding in Queenstown was bad. Generally the worst days are weather-related because you can’t insure against it. You don’t get those days back again. The best days... I remember enjoying shooting the charge of the Rohirrim down at Twizel, we had 200 horses, and I had a lot of fun that day. I liked working with Ian Holm and Ian Mckellen together in Bag End. We had a lot of laughs. Sometimes you get adrenalised when you have a day with a lot happening, keeping your finger on multiple pulses. On Return Of The King we had 500 extras from the New Zealand army dressed up as orcs and Gondorians charging each other and smashing each other with swords — that was a day when you come back and your adrenaline is pumping. There was such a lot happening, it was so spectacular with people screaming and yelling at each other, you come back to the hotel pumping.
Does it sometimes feel that The Lord Of The Rings overshadows your other great films?
ANDREW FLACK It is what it is. With The Lord Of The Rings we have a lot to be grateful for. There is something for everybody. Half the people who like The Lord Of The Rings would probably hate [Meet The] Feebles, but some people who like those movies would hate Lord Of The Rings. It never worries me in the slightest.
How scary would your Nightmare On Elm Street movie have been?
TASH WILLING God, I can’t remember much about it now. It was supposed to be scary. It went to and from Elm Street and the dream world. There was a cop who is trapped in a coma. It is only when you got into a dream Freddy can attack you so we thought, “What is the most danger we could put our character in? How about going into a coma where he can’t wake up?” So he is stuck in this world and if Freddy kills him there he is going to die in a hospital bed. Shooting scary stuff is hard; it can fall flat on its face. Everyone’s tolerance for frights is different. I try to make it scary for me. A good example is the spider stuff in Lord Of The Rings.
Spiders freak me out. Those scenes are crafted in a way to be my worst nightmare. The scariest thing I’ve ever shot, on a personal level, would be where the camera cranes beneath Elijah and you look up and see the thing creeping above his head.
If all directors were tasked with remaking a film from the ’70s, which would you chose?
MARTIN TAYLOR [Mulling it over] You could say, I’ve already done King Kong, which is a ’70s remake. It wouldn’t be a franchise, like a Bond movie or anything… Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been remade. Jaws should never be remade. All those auteur films you wouldn’t touch with a barge pole… Then there are the cheesy ones… I was going to say The Poseidon Adventure, but they did remake it… The Blue Max is 1966, a little bit earlier. Aces High? Red Baron? I don’t want to remake those either. I don’t want to remake anything. In a weird way I am remaking Let It Be with my Beatles doc.
Could you see applying the technique of They Shall Not Grow Old to a silent classic like Nosferatu or Metropolis?
SAM ALLEN We haven’t been approached about doing anything like that, but I would love to. I was watching some Lon Chaney movies over Christmas and it would be great to do it with those. We are actually restoring a bunch of civil-rights footage for a museum in the United States opening in Little Rock, Arkansas. They want to have movies playing on screens, and we are in the process of applying our World War I techniques to it and it looks great. The Beatles footage [for his upcoming documentary] looks fantastic. If anyone wants us to do anything, we are very happy to. I love that transformation. We are doing my old films as well — they don’t look like they were shot on 16mm anymore. At the time, I thought they were fine, but looking back they are pretty shonky. Putting them through our World War I restoration pipeline they look fantastic.
Given you may one day direct an episode of Doctor Who, what is your favourite storyline?
SIMON EDWARDS The Doctor Who that stands out above all others in my head, which is not because it is a particularly good one but it made a huge impression on me, was the Patrick Troughton one with the Yetis in the London Underground [‘The Web Of Fear’, 1968]. That was the first time I can remember being utterly terrified and running behind the couch, as people always do with Doctor Who. What if you were a kid watching Doctor Who and there was no couch in the room to hide behind? Doesn’t bear thinking about. Those episodes have recently been found again, and I watched them for the first time since I was five years old. It wasn’t quite the same. Some of the Dalek episodes in recent years were kind of cool. I haven’t had any Doctor Who conversations for quite some time. That moment of time has maybe passed me by. I would have done it, if I had the time, but a lot of that was happening when we were making The Hobbit.
Have you ever played Lord Of The Rings Risk?
ROHAN ACHARYIA No, but I do have a set. I am a traditional Risk player. Sometimes you can win in the first move and other times you have to play for hours and hours. It is unpredictable. It can be a slog. Like a one-day cricket game. You need to book out the time.
If you were ever to direct a biopic, who would you chose?
ANDY LUKE I don’t think there has ever been a really good biopic about Napoleon Bonaparte. I have always been interested in that period of time. He is an interesting guy. But I don’t speak French, and I think you would have to be a bit more of a Francophile to take that on in a proper way. It wouldn’t be just one movie. His experiences in Egypt alone would make a great movie.
As a fellow fan of a good brew, how many cups of tea are you currently consuming per day?
JAMES CLAYTON I was actually thinking about making a fresh cup, because this one is going cold. The answer is it depends on what I am doing. If I am in the editing room I like to make my own tea — I find that when I stretch my legs, make a cup of tea, I just get ideas, which you don’t get looking at the screen. It acts as a little bit of a head-clearing exercise. That amounts to one cup an hour. If I’m on set shooting, people bring me cups of tea constantly. It is not about the tea itself. I don’t crave tea in that sense. It is like a comfort blanket. It is a psychological thing. If I am getting up out of my chair to go and talk to actors I want to carry a cup of tea with me.