Lock Up Your Mothers

Rip It Up, Issue 232, 1 December 1996, Page 35

Lock Up Your Mothers

In the top suite at the newly named Stamford Plaza (ex-Regent Hotel), Peter Jackson is looking a lot different than he did when I last saw him — pierced up to the eyeballs and surly — a couple of days earlier, on screen in his new movie The Frighteners. Today the look is characteristically comfy; or, as a Wellingtonian I know aptly put it on learning of this morning’s meeting, “Every time you see him on the street you just want to cuddle him.” As for his cameo in The Frighteners...

I think you’d call the look death metal? “Yeah, I was breaking out,” Jackson grins. “I was allowing my alter ego to escape for a few moments.” The piercings obviously weren’t real. “No, the piercings were a bit of eight-gauge wire, which were very painful because they were pinching,” he says, tugging at the offended lip. Have you given a lot of thought to director cameos and the effect they have on fans of a director’s work? “I don’t do it for any particular reason other than to amuse myself. It has become something fans overseas recognise now. I’ve been at a couple of screenings of The Frighteners at festivals and things, and it always gets a laugh when they see me. In The Frighteners I deliberately made it very brief, you barely would know who I was, and yet people still spot me. It’s almost like a game really. The next film I’ll try and be even shorter and briefer, and we’ll see if people can see me. One day I should do it in full prosthetic make-up so no one knows.” It seems with every new film Jackson makes, the list of people he would have to disguise himself from grows gob-smackingly larger. For instance, he and long-time collaborator Fran Walsh were able to boast a certain “Bob” Zemeckis as the “godfather” who helped them guide The Frighteners through that big and scary jungle called Hollywood. This is the same “Bob” Zemeckis who directed the Back to the Future trilogy, which starred the same Michael J Fox who snapped up the chance to star in The Frighteners after seeing Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. Then there’s the clutch of horror stalwarts appearing in The

Frighteners, including Dee Wallace-Stone (The Howling, Cujo, The Hills Have Eyes, not to mention her role as everyone’s favourite mom in FT), Jeffrey Combs (Re-Animator and Bride of ReAnimatoi), John Astin (the original Addams Family Gomez) and Julianna McCarthy... (well, she scared me in The Young and the Restless). Jackson’s gone from being a solitary horror film geek to being the guy who tells the people on the big screen what to do. “It is pretty extraordinary. I mean, I still feel like the same person, I don’t feel any different to the guy that made Bad Taste, I don’t think I’ve changed. Things around me have changed, but I’m basically the same guy. “I’ve been making movies since I was eight years old, and it largely is a solitary thing; especially when everyone else is going out to parties and buying cars, and I’m spending all my money buying a movie camera and taking the train. You have to be pretty single-minded about it; it’s easy to let peer pressure persuade you you’re wasting your time and you should really be doing what everyone else is doing. So, you have to have a single-minded obsession to get through it and come out the other end still with your passion intact.” How much has the decline of the splatter movie over the last decade or so had to do with you making really, really splattery movies? “Well, it certainly has declined. My making Braindead was a direct result of loving ReAnimator, and Evil Dead 11, and Dawn of the Dead... I just watched all these zombie movies when I was about 18, in the early 80s when all those came out. I just thought they were wonderful, and it made me wanna make a zombie movie

— you watch other people’s zombie movies and you wanna do one yourself. But horror has always been very cyclic. In the 30s and early 40s there were all the Universal Frankenstein, and Dracula, and Wolfman movies. Then Hammer did a whole cycle of it in the 60s, then it declined for a while. Then in the 80s there was a lot of splatter movies and stalker/slasher type of films. Now it’s declined again, now science fiction’s in and horror’s not a particularly popular genre — especially since studios have tried to make these big horror movies like Frankenstein and Coppola’s Dracula, and they haven’t done that well, and they’re kind of big, pompous movies. They sort of lost the point really, they’ve forgotten what’s good about horror movies. So, it’s a bit of a dead patch at the moment. I would imagine, probably in five or six years, some horror movie will get made which is a massive success and everyone will jump on it again. We’re gonna have to go through a lot of alien invaders and space movies before that actually happens.” What would you like to see as the next mutation of horror? “I like smart horror movies. I like splatter/zombie type of stuff. I kind of liked From Dusk Till Dawn — that was trying to have another go at it at a time when the climate wasn’t really right for it. I would like the climate to be good for a whole ’nother round of zombie movies.” While The Frighteners finds its dead in the form of ghosts (courtesy of a barrage of ingenious computer generated imagery) as opposed to zombies, it does feature another figure never far from the action of any Jackson movie — ie. the evil mother (played by McCarthy this time around). I wonder how much horror movie conventions have to do with the bad rap mothers get, and give, in your movies. “It’s all sort of a coincidence really. I’ve ended up with this sort of thing that I have a mother complex, which is actually not true at all. “The original story of Braindead, which is all about a mother turning into a zombie, was not my idea. It was Stephen Sinclair’s idea — it was his story, it wasn’t mine. And then Heavenly Creatures — Fran was always interested in this murder case, and she persuaded me that it would make a good film — so, okay, I made a film about a mother getting killed. The Frighteners was spawned by Heavenly Creatures a bit, because we wrote The Frighteners while Heavenly Creatures was in postproduction — we were cutting Heavenly Creatures in the day and writing The Frighteners at night. So, we were still very much in this world of Parker/Hulme, and teenage killers, and killer couples, and all this sort of thing. We thought it was territory that still had more life in it. “The Frighteners, the idea with the serial killer couple, was definitely born out of Heavenly Creatures. \Ne liked the idea of what would happen if these two 15-year-old killers, if one of them had died and the other one is now 40 years old. So — time has gone by — what would this person be like when they were 40? Would they still be a killer or would they have gotten over it? And what would happen if the guy that died was still existing in the afterlife? What happens when serial killers die — do they suddenly become good spirits or do they

retain that inherent evil? This was all just a perversion on Heavenly Creatures really, just exploring ground we were very much into at the time.” Hence, it’s no coincidence Michael J Fox’s love interest in The Frighteners takes her name, Dr Lucy Lynskey (played by Trini Alvarado), from the real life star of Heavenly Creatures, Melanie Lynskey. “When you’re writing a script, you’re sitting there saying, ‘Well, what are we gonna call this person?’ As I say, we were writing [The Frighteners] while we were doing Heavenly Creatures, so we borrowed Mel’s name. We didn’t actually ask her, but I don’t think she minded.” What about Melanie Lynskey’s brief cameo as a deputy in a scene alongside Lucy Lynskey — was that just fora gas? Jackson chuckles, “Yeah, Mel was studying at Victoria University last year, and when we wanted a few deputies for our sheriff’s office we gave her a call and said, ‘Do you wanna be in the film?,’ just for fun. It wasn’t a big role or anything.” One can afford to have quite a bit of fun with a budget of S(US)3O-million, it seems, even if the film’s comparatively low price was cause for surprise on the part of Zemeckis. “We had a lotta money to spend,” says Jackson, barely able to conceal his glee. “I was able to shoot it as long as I wanted to basically, and have as much film stock as I wanted to shoot it in, and hire as many cameras, there was no kind of limit to it really and it was fun. “Certainly kiwi ingenuity does help a lot. I think Americans tend to panic and throw money to solve problems. If something comes up they can’t deal with, or it’s a difficulty, they just throw dollars at it, and keep throwing people at it to sort it out. Yet we sit back and figure out an ingenious way to solve it. It is a different culture, different mentality really.” As legend goes, it’s the kind of culture geared towards making dreams come true, as one of Jackson’s did when The Frighteners backers, Universal, offered him the chance to direct a remake of the movie which inspired him to start making movies in the first place — the original, 1933 version of King Kong. “When Universal said, ‘Do you wanna do King Kong?...' I didn’t even know there was gonna be another King Kong. It was totally chance. They wanted to make it and they obviously thought of us because of The Frighteners and the special effects, and thought it would be a good idea to get us to do it. I found it impossible to turn down really. I didn’t particularly wanna do a remake of King Kong, but it is my favourite film. When the idea came up I just couldn’t bear the idea of somebody else doing it. This is my one and only chance to do King Kong, no one’s probably gonna ask me again. I don’t own the rights myself, I can’t do it myself, so I just thought, ‘We’ll do it, it’ll be a real challenge.’” Could King Kong be the first movie you’ll make that won’t have anything in it that might make people sick? “Dunno, dunno,” Jackson muses non-commital-ly, “You never know. There might be some things in King Kong that might make people sick. It won’t be quite as extreme as The Frighteners. And there are no mothers in King Kong either — there’s definitely no mothers.

BRONWYN TRUDGEON