Ringmaster: Peter Jackson

Peter Jackson's clip reel — the collection of film highlights that serves as a director's résumé — might very well include: a man shaking, dropping, beating and stomping upon a baby, albeit a zombie baby; an adolescent girl being made love to by, alternately, Kate Winslet and a golem sculpted to resemble Orson Welles; a human forced by aliens to drink from a bowl of regurgitated human flesh; a cat kneeling beneath a desk and pleasuring a walrus; the ghost of Michael J. Fox carrying a massive automatic rifle in each hand; Salome, enraptured by John the Baptist's head, in a pitch-perfect replica of an early-1900s silent film; a man literally mowing down a roomful of zombies by holding a lawnmower blades-out in front of him; a fly eating his species' famed favorite course — with a spoon — while talking to the, uh, "chef"; and a scientist firing at brain-eating aliens with a shotgun whose barrel has been shoved through the blast cavity in another alien's corpse.

And now, it also includes scenes from an adaptation of one of the most widely read, respected and loved books of all time.

Jackson, all of whose films are shot in his native New Zealand, is a filmmaker whose idiosyncrasies make it seem a little strange that the most vocal contingent of Tolkien fanatics have been supportive of him being chosen to helm the film trilogy The Lord of the Rings — to look at his career on paper, the irreverence and impropriety of his subject matter might mark him as hopelessly juvenile to some. And it might seem stranger still that he was entrusted by a motion picture studio not only with a blockbuster budget but the license to shoot all three films back to back, when it would have been safer for the studio to hedge its bet and see how the first one performed — especially since Jackson's last film, 1996's The Frighteners, was his only picture to be widely released, and it performed terribly at the box office.

Particularly when dealing with an established property, studios tend to look toward reliable, inoffensive and boring directors — Chris Columbus handling Harry Potter, for example. That both the fans and the studio heads back Jackson is therefore a most uncommon show of support and, frankly, taste.

It's more than a little funny to acclaim Jackson as a tasteful choice — he started his career with the 1987 low-budget sci-fi comedy Bad Taste, which earned its title with gross-out scenes including, but certainly not limited to, the regurgitation and shotgun scenes mentioned above. But it's also a remarkably assured first foray into 16mm, showing an intuitive understanding of screen comedy. The low-budget splatter gurus — Jackson's contemporary in this regard (and many others) is Sam Raimi, and he's clearly influenced by Stuart Gordon —all know how close hysterical screams are to hysterical laugher, and Jackson's grotesques play better for laughs, both hearty and queasy, than for frights.

The story is laid out simply: The New Zealand government dispatches a team of paranormal investigators to research a potential alien landing. It turns out to be legit — shape-shifters have arrived on Earth to harvest humans for fast food. "The Boys" wipe out all the aliens they can, and when a priest is captured by the aliens for a celebratory farewell dinner, they storm the spaceship to rescue him.

What sets Bad Taste apart is how many of its greatest moments can be attributed directly to its micro-budget: Until they morph at the end back to their natural form (courtesy of some great make-up and prosthesis), the aliens are only distinguishable from humans in that they all wear, exclusively, powder-blue oxfords and blue jeans — funny. Their spaceship has taken the form of a cottage on a hill — clever. The Boys uncover the nature of the aliens' appetites when they walk into a room packed floor to ceiling with perfectly cubic cardboard boxes dripping crimson here and there — truly unsettling. The way in which this should reassure Tolkien fans may not be obvious, but it's a crucial point: Like Robert Rodriguez, Jackson has proven he knows how to magnify his budgets, meaning you might be fooled into thinking $300 million was spent not on the whole trilogy but on each film.

After the first version of the film was finished, Jackson got some more money to add effects and pad its 75 minutes out to 90, and this extended Bad Taste would become a minor cult hit. But it's Jackson's next two films that have achieved the most deeply entrenched cult status: 1989's Meet the Feebles and 1992's Dead Alive.

Meet the Feebles is Jackson's acid version of "The Muppet Show." It's not clear why Henson's creature factory warrants such blasphemy — it's probably just that Jackson loves puppetry. But it's definitely a love-hate relationship, as the Feebles (of "The Feebles Variety Hour") are put through the paces more sadistically than perhaps any other cast in the history of movies. The backstage drama isn't a soap opera so much as it is a bleach opera — Bletch, the stage manager/walrus, has been cheating on Heidi, the lead actress/hippo, with Samantha, the mistress/cat; meanwhile, Harry, the actor/rabbit, lives in mortal fear that he's contracted an STD; Trevor, the pornographer/rat, is a drug dealer; Sidney the elephant is being sued by Sandy the chicken for child support; and so forth ad nauseam, emphasis on the nauseam. It's not clear what Jackson's satirizing — Hollywood, maybe, or celebrity culture, or maybe he thinks that this is following the idea of self-consciously hip children's entertainment to its literally bitter end. Meet the Feebles is pretty wretched, lacking all the humanity and the other envelope-pushers that characterize Jackson's early career. The only take-home lesson for the Lord of the Rings fan is that hopefully Jackson has now gotten all of this out of his system.

For instance: Dead Alive, a.k.a Braindead. From a technical perspective, it's not much of an advance from Bad Taste. Jackson is a little bit more ambitious, but also less successful; the movie's editing rhythms never really feel right. Unlike Raimi, Jackson's skills are more in filling the frame with thoughtfully askance compositions and imaginative creatures than actually in manipulating the camera or editing bay — more misé-en-scène, less montage.

But storywise, Dead Alive is a quantum leap forward from Bad Taste's limp ideas about corporate imperialism (and saying that it actually had those ideas is being fairly generous). Co-written by Stephen Sinclair and Jackson's longtime partner Frances Walsh, it takes a horror chestnut — zombies — comes up with a fresh, topical take — zombification is spread, Ebola-like, from a rare monkey to the first victim, who can now transfer it to any she bites, etc. — and then puts a fresh, character-based spin on the story. Lionel (Timothy Balme) is the quintessential mother's boy a la Norman Bates, and when a local shopgirl becomes infatuated with him based on a tarot reading, the mother wigs out; it's while she's trying to interrupt a date that she gets bit by the claymation "rat monkey of Sumatra." The controlling, prim mother — about to be named chair of the Wellington Ladies' Welfare League — becomes a flesh-falling-off zombie who infects a kung-fu-fighting priest and a pair of roughs. But, in the same way that he always pacified instead of confronted his mother, Lionel preserves propriety not by seeking to eradicate the zombies but to sedate them and keep them happy, with his palatial home now the habitat of a small zombie's colony. It's not as densely layered as Tolkien, to be sure, but it's smarter and more alive than many of its peers.

Things get out of hand and lead to a bloody end, but the movie never loses its grip on its family comedy. The plot spins on the intrusion of an obnoxious uncle who commandeers the family home and throws a big party (which of course only provides ample zombie fodder). Dead Alive takes a gruesome faux birth scene from Bad Taste and tweaks it into a character moment — the zombie mother, amplified to horrific proportion by animal stimulant, pulls Lionel back into her womb. It's pretty clever stuff; not great, but high-octane. It shows that Jackson is conscious of themes, if not a wizard of them.

The wizardry came with his next film, 1994's Heavenly Creatures. It rightfully recast perceptions of Jackson — it was his most intelligent work to date, and while it's tiresome to have such proclamations always applied to a director's straight dramas instead of his genre pieces, it's indisputable here — and, besides, Jackson would release an equally accomplished return to horror/comedy form just two years later.

Filling in the blanks of the diaries kept by Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey), an adolescent Christchurch girl in the 1950s, Heavenly Creatures conjectures about the relationship that she must have had with Juliet Hume (Kate Winslet in her first film role) — a relationship of interest to New Zealanders because Parker and Hume became notorious for the murder of one of their parents. And from those blanks, Jackson and co-writer Walsh paint a stunning portrait of adolescence, with all of its imagination, rebellion and burgeoning sexuality.

The last point is an especially sticky one since the girls were only 16 and 15 at the time of the murder that ends the film. It's the parents' concerns of lesbianism that cause them, fatefully, to start to drive a wedge between the girls, but it's not homosexuality that the filmmakers paint — it's a sort of ambisexuality that seems to favor boys but is also swept up in the intensity of the girls' relationship.

This is the tenuous, complex stuff that you don't want an exploitation filmmaker coming near, and Jackson's shock schlock is definitely a close cousin of exploitation. But he approaches the material in the best way possible — not respectfully, because respect implies a certain reverent distance, but intimately. The girls have very active fantasy lives — they approach their visions of arts figures like tenor Mario Lanza worshipfully, as if they were gods; they create a whole kingdom populated with animate, life-size replicas of the clay figurines they sculpt; they write and talk (and, eventually, kiss and caress) as if they were a royal couple — and as the film's point-of-view shuttles back and forth between reality and the girls' perceptions, there's never a trace of artifice. The girls (particularly Pauline) think in fantasy, and Jackson's presentation of these thoughts show that he does as well. His ability to immerse himself in their world and, importantly, make it seem like theirs is remarkable. This is a good omen indeed for those Tolkien fans nervous about seeing the books' vision betrayed.

Furthermore, the character development shows an unprecedented richness — the filmmakers could never know just what Pauline and Juliet were like, but the characters they've created couldn't seem more believable. Heavenly Creatures is certainly the Jackson film to see for the aesthete concerned about some Hollywood brute tarnishing Tolkien's good name.

Jackson followed Heavenly Creatures with 1996's Forgotten Silver, a short-form documentary for New Zealand public television about Colin McKenzie, a New Zealand filmmaker who, working in exclusion from the rest of world film culture, pioneered synchronized sound in 1908 and color film in 1911. Unfortunately, the sound film featured Chinese dialogue that no one understood or cared to watch, and the color film of Tahitian islands was labeled as smut because if featured topless islanders.

McKenzie, of course, doesn't exist, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from watching Forgotten Silver, co-directed by Costa Botes. It's a droll, genius mockumentary that may never make you laugh but will keep you smiling throughout. Predicated on the idea that Jackson has stumbled across a treasure trove of unseen cinematic classics in his neighbor's shed, the movie presents itself as a chronicle of the career of the prodigal McKenzie, which culminates in his epic struggle to film the Biblical story of Salome (she who danced for John the Baptist's head). McKenzie's every action is qualified by superlatives — the first tracking shot, the earliest footage of an airplane (invented, natch, by a New Zealander a few months before the Wrights took off at Kitty Hawk), the first trick camera (disguised in a suitcase) that captures the first "news" footage (of a Rodney King-like beating by the prime minister's bodyguards), the largest set every built (a whole jungle city), the greatest number of extras ever amassed … and on and on.

Forgotten Silver is an agreeably funny lark, and its punchlines are the meticulous recreations of silent films Jackson and Botes themselves create. But what's really going on in the film is a bit of Kiwi mythmaking — grand exploits that, were they true, would exalt New Zealand. And this, of course, was Tolkien's motivation in writing "The Lord of the Rings" — to provide a mythology for his native England. Forgotten Silver also features a powder-dry wit, a quality you hope Jackson brings to his latest venture.

The same year, Jackson released his only mainstream film — the paranormal comedy thriller The Frighteners. Widowed in a car accident, Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) gained the ability to communicate with souls that have not yet "followed the light" all the way home, and uses these abilities to orchestrate "hauntings" that he can then exorcise for a small fee. Bannister basically pals around with ghosts and lives hand-to-mouth until he starts to look into a rash of inexplicable deaths and encounters a grim reaper that, surprise, might have had something to do with his wife's death.

The Frighteners is a miracle of a "Hollywood" film (though set in the United States, it was, not surprisingly, shot in New Zealand, and you can tell) — the funny bits are funny, the scary parts are scary, the sentimental scenes aren't mawkish, the story is twisting but it makes sense, it's charismatically acted without ever being hammy, and the special effects actually look special.

To address the last point first: The Frighteners is CGI-laden; Bannister's always with a ghost and always seeing apparitions, and the main meanie appears alternately as a bump in the rug (a technique Jan De Bont killed through overuse in The Haunting) or as a feral jumble of tattered cloaks with a switch-action scythe. And this is 1996, remember, which was right in the middle of a dank valley of special effects bloat — that year alone saw Twister, Independence Day, Mission Impossible, 101 Dalmatians, The Nutty Professor … . The Frighteners is memorable as being absolutely in the upper echelon of '90s movies in terms of its capable, consistently engaging integration of special effects.

And it uses those effects in service of the story. The Frighteners is, at time, funny, scary and true about topics like love and death, and Fox anchors the movie with his performance. Jackson balances all of the demands of event moviemaking with aplomb — but when you're up fighting for air against all of the above movies and many more (like The Rock and Eraser), sometimes you get the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Suffice it to say that's unlikely to happen with The Fellowship of the Ring, which makes similar and even greater demands when it comes to balancing spectacle with story.

A whole other host of pertinent things could be said about Jackson — how his constant sarcastic jibes at religion might clash with Tolkien's sensibilities; how his talents seem perfect for shorter features (Heavenly Creatures is his longest film, at 99 minutes) and might be challenged by the 178-minute running time of The Fellowship of the Rings; how his splatter-movie tastes reflect an interest in biology that is likely well-suited to drafting Tolkien's imaginary beasts; how fitting it is that Jackson shot all three simultaneously in the same way that Tolkien wrote his book as a whole, trisecting it only for marketing purposes; how Jackson looks like a hobbit. But the fundamental portrait you get from his films is one of a resourceful and ceaselessly creative director who's a natural behind the camera and who commands cutting-edge filmmaking technology as easily as he does the nuances of story. He may very well be the best director for this job, and can be expected to present a respectful but rollicking version of Tolkien's books.

In fact, expect people to be saying by this time next week — or even by this time Thursday — that Jackson has rocketed to ranks of an A-list director. Wouldn't the Feebles be surprised?

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)