Anything You Can Imagine

Harvey, wielding his considerable clout, swiftly acquired Heavenly Creatures for distribution and negotiated a prestigious berth for its world premiere — opening The Venice Film Festival.

Being picked up by Miramax had distinct advantages. Founded in 1979 by the two brothers from Buffalo, brash in manner but brilliantly acute in business, it had risen to prominence through films as diverse as My Left Foot; sex, lies and videotape; and Reservoir Dogs. It would rise yet further on the glories of Pulp Fiction and The English Patient to come. Bob Weinstein handled the genre side of the business through the Dimension label, but both brothers always had their say.

The disadvantage was the Weinstein temperament. When things were sunny, all was well. Cross them, particularly Harvey, often over things that ordinarily appear reasonable or, at least, professional, and he would rain down his righteous (or not) fury. It was also a prime negotiating tactic. This was, of course, long before multiple accusations of sexual harassment and worse would bring about an ignominious downfall for the mighty Harvey, sending shockwaves across Hollywood. At this time, he was merely viewed as an industry bully boy.

In 1993, flushed with success, the brothers sold Miramax to Disney for $75 million. They would remain at the helm, with the power to greenlight a film up to the significant figure of $15 million. Any higher and they would require the consent of Disney’s hierarchy. Inevitably, the brothers would come to chafe against such restrictions.

After a lauded run at the box office, and with the assistance of Harvey’s golden touch at the Academy, Heavenly Creatures was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

‘Boom!’ declares Kamins. ‘The whole perception changed the second the film got nominated. I mean, everything changed — perceptually. Now I got my calls returned and the speed with which I got them returned changed; the kinds of conversations that we were having. Everything shifted. Not even in ways that sort of guided a specific path, but just atmospherically it all felt different.’

Smartly, as well as agreeing a deal to distribute Heavenly Creatures in America, Harvey had insisted on pinning down Jackson to a first-look deal with Miramax. While offering an avenue for any new film idea he might have, it would soon feel like he was tied to Weinstein’s often inflexible apron strings, who now had a prize, Oscar-nominated asset.

Jackson would never bind himself to a studio again. ‘It was sort of a strange thing where they would pay some overheads: an office and some people we could hire. In exchange for that they get first refusal on any script we wanted to do. If they say no that’s fine, you can take it somewhere else. Also if you get offered something you are allowed to go and take it. It is not like an old studio contract where you are locked into MGM.’

He would ultimately never make a film with Miramax.

*

First Jackson met Robert Zemeckis, and together they made The Frighteners, a warped comedy-horror about a spiritual conman (played by Back to the Future’s Michael J. Fox) who can actually behold ghosts. It was to be Jacksons’ first studio picture. Universal were attracted to a commercial-sounding mash-up of Ghostbusters, the Elm Street movies and this New Zealand hotshot revealing a knack for visual effects.

Fox’s Frank Bannister begins to realize the Northern Californian coastal town of Fairwater (actually Lyttleton in New Zealand) where he plies his supernatural scams is also being terrorized by an undead serial killer in the guise of the Grim Reaper — a killer only he can see. The visual effects requirements were bold: Bannister would interact with a trio of quirky, translucent ghosts, as pliable as cartoons, as well as the Reaper figure, which flits across town like a runaway kite (and not dissimilar in appearance to Ringwraiths). It would take six months to complete, with scenes being shot in duplicate to insert the ribald ghosts. Jackson’s Sitges friend Rick Baker would provide the rotting-corpse make-up for the dread departed.

Sprawling and tonally uncertain, yet still underappreciated, The Frighteners tends to be forgotten in the journey between the early splatters to the coming of age with Heavenly Creatures, which is seen to segue straight into Middle-earth. If anything, it is viewed as a backwards step in the direction of the rabble-rousing days of those early horror movies.

To Jackson’s mind, here lies the true point of transition to The Lord of the Rings. Without it spans a different career, one that might have made him less global, but no less valuable; making films with more of a New Zealand spirit like Jane Campion. But Jackson’s instincts were always toward the commercial.

The project had begun life out of desperation. With Heavenly Creatures still awaiting the go-ahead, Jackson and Walsh were badly in need of some work. ‘They needed to make some money,’ clarifies Kamins.

Jackson had sounded urgent on the phone. ‘We need a writing job. What’s out there?’

Fortuitously, Kamins had been in a staff meeting where he had heard about Zemeckis’ involvement in Joel Silver’s portmanteau Tales from the Crypt movie. Different directors would provide their own segments of horror, and Zemeckis, he was told, was still in need of a screenplay. Springing into action, Jackson and Walsh worked up a two-page outline based on an idea they’d had while walking to the shops for milk, the story of a conman who is in cahoots with ghosts. Zemeckis was intrigued. At that stage, he hadn’t even realized Jackson was a director; he just figured they were these quirky writers from New Zealand.

‘I tell you what,’ said Zemeckis, ‘you go write the screenplay, I’ve got to make this movie called Forrest Gump.’

‘Well, that’s fine,’ replied Jackson, ‘because we have this movie we’re going to make called Heavenly Creatures.’ They would work on The Frighteners script while shooting their matricidal drama – the two being closer in theme than is immediately apparent.

Then fate got involved: Forrest Gump became an Oscar-winning phenomenon and Zemeckis lost his taste for a Tales from the Crypt movie. Now very much aware of Jackson as a director, Zemeckis suggested he direct it as a standalone film, which he would produce for a budget of $26 million.

‘The Frighteners matters for two key reasons,’ says Kamins. ‘Number one: it allowed for the build-up of Weta Digital conceptually, which had been a very small unit on Heavenly Creatures. The Frighteners would require over 500 visual effects shots, even at that budget, and Peter had the vision to say, “We can create a bigger visual effects company.”’

Jackson’s plan was typically practical, typically New Zealand: they would lease more computers from Silicon Graphics, then hire out-of-work animators from all over the world, people who were just sitting at home, and double their weekly salaries to come to New Zealand. The only overheads would be space. They would still be able to create visual effects shots much cheaper than ILM. And, sure enough, that’s what happened.

The Frighteners also matters, adds Kamins, because Zemeckis and his partner Steve Starkey would give Jackson and Walsh invaluable tuition on how to navigate the political waters that come with a studio project: ‘What they need to know and when; how to manage their expectations; when to get them excited about things; and when to hold back on information; how to keep them confident, but not in your hair.’

So coming full circle, as Weta were revealing their potential on the visual effects on The Frighteners, Jackson and Walsh’s thoughts turned to the future and the potential of making a fantasy film. However, one morning’s casual discussion was actually several weeks of brainstorming fantasy concepts. ‘It had been a long time since I had read The Lord of the Rings,’ admits Jackson. Fifteen years had now passed since he had waded through the Bakshi tie-in edition, and he really couldn’t remember it at all well.

Whatever ideas he came up with, Walsh and her watertight memory would shoot down: ‘No, no, no. You can’t do that — that’s just The Lord of the Rings.’

Jackson sighs. ‘You don’t want to be seen to be stealing stuff.’

His thought had been to do an original fantasy film, but at every proposal he made Walsh kept on repeating it like a mantra: ‘The Lord of the Rings … The Lord of the Rings … The Lord of the Rings.’

‘It was getting frustrating.’

When he was a teen, no more than sixteen, already displaying a rapacious hunger for filmmaking, Jackson set out to make a Super-8 Sinbad film. There was to be a scene of him fighting a stop-motion skeleton in the surf. He shot himself hip deep in Pukerua Bay swinging a homemade sword, but he never got round to putting in the skeleton. Which was down to the fact that, with the tide heading out, Jackson had dived straight onto an exposed rock. Severe bruising led to a pilonidal cyst which led to surgery. He also hadn’t quite yet figured out how to do stop-motion.

During the Bad Taste era, he had considered shooting a Conan-type film on 16mm at the weekends. ‘I never got any further than swords and monster masks,’ he admits. ‘I had never actually sat down and written a script.’

Truth be told, there was no specific, original sword ‘n’ sorcery concept he’d been yearning to make. It was simply that the genre appealed to his sensibility and offered the chance for Weta to keep expanding. So, why not The Lord of the Rings? Frodo’s enduring tale was the ne plus ultra of the genre. It was fantasy operating on an equivalent dramatic level to Heavenly Creatures.

According to prevailing Hollywood wisdom, fantasy, as a genre, was a joke. Jackson agrees. ‘I used to watch all the fantasy films. Things like Krull and Conan … Fantasy was one of those B-grade genres. No quality movies were ever made in the fantasy genre. Right from the outset The Lord of the Rings was always something different. You can’t think of Krull and The Lord of the Rings in the same sentence. While it was fantasy, in our minds it was always something quite different to that.’

And that was when they had put in the call to Kamins to find out who had the rights, and made their approach to Harvey. And even then things only grew more complicated.

The possibility of adapting Tolkien was soon to be one of three potential fantasy projects for Jackson.

For all of Harvey’s confidence in calling in a favour with Zaentz, it would take eight perilous months of negotiation for a deal to be struck. Zaentz had held the rights tight to his chest for three decades; whatever Harvey had done for him on The English Patient he wasn’t going to part with them lightly. Tribes of rival lawyers were making proposal and counterproposal, putting in calls, arranging meetings, filing memos, coming up with offers, rebuffing counteroffers, and charging by the hour. And Harvey showed zero inclination toward allowing Zaentz any active participation in his project.

Another problem was the weird, bifurcated rights situation surrounding The Hobbit. Harvey had endeavoured to go direct to MGM, which had purchased the crippled UA in the wake of Heaven’s Gate. Ironically, MGM was itself a studio in decline and in one of its many cycles of bankruptcy, reorganization and sale, nobody was about to give away one of its chief assets — even if they were only partial rights to The Hobbit.

‘The hell with it,’ cried Harvey, ‘let’s forget The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings is a better-known title anyway. Let’s just go right to The Lord of the Rings. Two movies shot back-to-back.’

Still, with no sign of an agreement with Zaentz being reached, Jackson was growing increasingly nervous. The clock was ticking on his Weta project, even his career. It was becoming increasingly clear they were going to have to make something else in the meantime.

‘I will never forget it,’ recalls Kamins, and true to his word he can remember the exact day: ‘Monday, April first, nineteen ninety-six, I went to a premiere of Primal Fear at Paramount. I come home and there’s a message from Peter on my answering machine. This is like eleven p.m. at night. And he never calls me at home that late.’

Jackson’s recorded voice carried a seriousness Kamins had heard only rarely. ‘I need to know what my next movie is by the end of the week, otherwise all these great people that I put together to do the visual effects for The Frighteners are going to leave …’

As is standard practice, six weeks before the end of any movie the freelance visual effects team — and any other department employed on a film-by-film basis — is entitled to start looking for their next job. The buzz had gotten around about the visual effects work on The Frighteners, and the more established effects houses were reaching out to the Weta team, trying to entice them back to LA.

Meanwhile, Kamins was maintaining a constant vigil for any opportunities for his client, as he puts it, playing ‘backstop’ on Jackson’s career. Given the mercurial nature of the film business, any director would be foolhardy not to have more than one plate spinning at a time. He swiftly engaged a strategy to push forward on any one of the projects he and Jackson had in various stages of development.

Besides The Lord of the Rings, two other noticeably non-Miramax movies were to emerge. Confirming that this was a defining period in Jackson’s life and career, each would have a significant influence on his future. That first-look deal with Miramax notwithstanding, Jackson headed to LA to begin discussing the alternatives. He didn’t see himself as acting in bad faith. The Lord of the Rings had been his priority, but despite Kamins urgent pressing of Miramax it showed little sign of being resolved.

‘So we spoke to Universal about King Kong,’ says Jackson, ‘and I did a lot of meetings with Fox about Planet of the Apes.’

A Planet of the Apes reboot had been jostling about in development for a number of years. Spreading its allegorical net to include the fear of atomic destruction and the civil rights movement, Franklin J. Schaffner’s biting, apocalyptic, 1968 Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston, could fairly be considered a classic (if not its diminishing sequels). Jackson certainly thought so — he has some original John Chambers’ prosthetics in his collection and once designed his own set of ape masks for another of his novice ventures into filmmaking, The Valley, which paid homage to the first film’s devastating ending.

By the early 1990s, 20th Century Fox were keen to revive the idea of a future where the evolutionary order has been upended and apes have subjugated humanity. Some big directors had toyed with the hair-brained mythology, with all its juicy metaphorical potential, amongst them Oliver Stone, Sam Raimi, Chris Columbus, Roland Emmerich and Philip Noyce.

Jackson and Walsh had initially become involved as screenwriters in 1992, before Heavenly Creatures, only for their concept to fall out of favour with a regime change at Fox. But in 1996, following another bloody succession at the helm of the studio, the project was back on the table with Jackson potentially directing.

Ever the traditionalist, central to Jackson’s enchanting simian vision was the return of actor Roddy McDowell, who had played the pro-human chimp Cornelius in the original. He’d even gone to lunch with the actor and producer Harry J. Ufland to pitch his concept. McDowell had been resistant to doing another Apes film: decades might have passed but he could still remember itching beneath those prosthetics. Unbowed, Jackson pitched him Renaissance of the Planet of the Apes. It was to be a continuation of the first line of movies, and the apes have had a flowering of their artistic ability. ‘Like Florence or Venice, the Ape World has gained artistic beauty,’ he explains. McDowell would play an aged Cornelius-type character, sort of a primate Leonardo da Vinci. McDowell was enthralled. ‘Count me in,’ he told them.

Amid this renaissance of ape culture, the gorillas would cover the police patrols, the chimps were the artists, and, Jackson laughs, ‘I was going to have a big, fat orangutan with all the jowls as the Pope. It was a satirical look at religion.’ Everywhere the camera turned we would see statues of apes; then in one twist a statue gets knocked over and beneath the marble, which turns out to be plaster, we glimpse a human face.

‘It is all a façade!’ enthuses Jackson, the old excitement returning. ‘And we were actually going to have a half-human, half-ape character too that Roddy’s ape character had in hiding, because he would be killed if the ape society found out that there was this hybrid. It was quite interesting …’

Re-pitching his idea (for which, working on spec, he and Walsh had never earned a cent) to Fox’s new studio heads, Peter Chernin and Tom Rothman, he was informed the studio were also in talks with James Cameron to produce and Arnold Schwarzenegger to star.

‘We got an offer from Planet of the Apes, aggressive up front,’ says Kamins. ‘Not on the back end, because they couldn’t afford it because of Jim and Arnold.’

Jackson and Walsh had their qualms: this would be a big studio film and prey to big studio interference. Their natural independence, the very way they worked, would come under intense pressure.

Still the mind boggles a little at the notion: Peter Jackson directing Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Planet of the Apes movie produced by James Cameron, set in a crumbling ape Renaissance shot in New Zealand …

Jackson wouldn’t meet Cameron until 2005. Getting along straightaway, the Kiwi found himself wondering what might have happened if they had said yes. Tim Burton would eventually step into the project in 2001 for a tepid reverse-engineered spin on the original 1968 film with Mark Wahlberg; although the prosthetics masks, created by Rick Baker, were fabulous.

Many moons later, the legacy of the Apes would return to Jackson’s faraway kingdom. Following Weta’s industry-transforming breakthroughs not only with motion-capture but the filigree textures of digital fur through Gollum and then Kong, when Fox rolled the dice on the Apes saga once more with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, it was Weta who created the now stunningly lifelike digital simians, with Andy Serkis starring as the sentient chimp, Caesar.

*

Since the 1976 debacle, King Kong had remained in the keeping of Universal, the very studio where The Frighteners was about to be released sooner rather than later.

The plan had been to lean toward its horror credentials and release the undead comedy around Halloween in 1996. Despite Jackson’s best intentions to make a family film, The Frighteners had been landed with an adult R-rating (15 in the UK). In the meantime, however, Daylight was running late. Universal’s tunnel-bound Sylvester Stallone disaster movie, featuring a young Viggo Mortensen, had gone overschedule and was going to miss its 17 July release date.

Seizing the opportunity, Zemeckis called Jackson: ‘I want you to put together a short effects reel for me so I can take it into the studio.’ He intended to make a move to put The Frighteners into the more lucrative summer slot in place of the delayed Daylight.

When Weta’s visual effects proved to be on a par with ILM, Universal got excited and agreed to the July slot, and set about repositioning The Frighteners as a new visual effects extravaganza featuring Marty McFly!

Hollywood was becoming greatly intrigued. This wunderkind from over the ocean kept changing hats. First, he was the horror bandit, gorier even than Sam Raimi. Then he was the Weinsteins’ arthouse darling who brought such dark sensitivity to Heavenly Creatures. And now he was the new George Lucas, nurturing his own visual effects company.

‘So now the narrative’s starting to unfold very differently,’ says Kamins intently. Fox are making their overtures about Renaissance of the Planet of the Apes, The Frighteners is all of a sudden a summer movie and whispers of Jackson’s devotion to the great 1933 stop-motion marvel have reached Universal’s vice-president Lenny Kornburg. It was Kornburg who slyly tempted Jackson with his heart’s desire: ‘Would you have an interest in doing King Kong?’

What a moment of infinite possibility this must have seemed. And it would prove too good to be true. Yet, for a few weeks, Jackson had in front of him the chance of adapting Tolkien’s beloved bestseller, reviving Charlton Heston’s dystopian talking ape thriller, or remaking the film that had, in many ways, charted the course for his life. Which would, in fact, count as his second attempt to remake King Kong.

A twelve-year-old Jackson had constructed the Empire State Building out of cardboard boxes and turned a bed sheet into a cyclorama of New York that featured the Chrysler Building, Hudson River and assorted bridges for an aborted version of the classic. He still has the jointed model of Kong built from wire, foam rubber and a fox stole his mother no longer wore (at least, she didn’t now). When he finally came to remake King Kong in 2005, Jackson flew out the original 1933 eighteen-inch armature of Kong designed by Willis O’Brien and sculptor Marcel Delgado, along with its collector Bob Burns, to set in an act of quasi-holy symbolism.

Jackson was fired up by the possibility of any remake of King Kong, but his own? Astonishingly, given the company she kept, Walsh had never seen the original. An oversight that was swiftly put to rights, and she was convinced enough for the talks to intensify with Universal.

While the projects circled like 747s awaiting permission to land, Jackson’s long-time lawyer Peter Nelson drew up a pro-forma contract that could apply to any one of them. Together Nelson, Kamins and Jackson were determined to set the terms of engagement. There were two significant stipulations. Firstly, that a ‘considerable sum’ be guaranteed by the studio for research and development into special effects. Secondly, that Jackson become a ‘first dollar gross participant’ meaning he would receive a percentage of the gross earnings of the film — not the net profit, which according to the elusive magic of studio accounting seldom seemed to materialize. He would also get final cut.

By autumn 1996, still undecided over which pathway smelled fairest, Jackson and Walsh took a holiday, driving around the South Island, taking in the stunning scenery that would so readily lend itself to Middle-earth. ‘We decided that during this trip we would figure out which film we were going to make,’ he says, and, essentially at this stage, it was a choice of two. Waiting for The Lord of the Rings to be ‘absolutely nailed’ by Harvey was too risky, too frustrating. Unless there was a radical breakthrough in the Middle-earth standoff, it was a case of which ape movie?

‘Both Fox and Universal were happy for us to jump into one of their films.’ And for Jackson it was the personal connection that finally told. ‘We decided to do Kong.’

First, though, he had to let Harvey know.

Making the connection across the thousands of miles that lay between New York and the South Island, Jackson got straight to the point. ‘Harvey, we are not going to wait any longer, we are doing Kong.’

Harvey went straight to force ten, the betrayed producer: ‘THIS IS NOT HAPPENING! I AM NOT HEARING THIS! YOU’RE NOT TELLING ME THIS! YOU ARE NOT TELLING ME THIS!’

It was Jackson’s first taste of the Miramax head’s notorious spleen. But he knew well enough the stories of screaming fits that had reduced both M. Night Shyamalan and Uma Thurman to public tears and narrowly missed causing a fistfight with Quentin Tarantino.