HEAVEN CAN WAIT
Conversation with Peter Jackson,

Director of Heavenly Creatures

> What appealed to you about this particular murder case?

It's a very interesting story and ultimately the stuff of which good films can be made. I had long been interested in the case and well before Fran and I began the script.

In the l950s, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hume were branded as possibly the most evil people on earth. What they had done seemed without rational explanation, and people could only assume that there was something terribly wrong with their minds. That is how the case has been regarded over the past 40 years. But once we started to research it, we got beneath the very sensational headlines of the day: "Lesbian Schoolgirl Killers" and so on. We had access to a lot of interviews and files that no one had seen for 40 years. As we began to uncover what was actually a very human story, we gradually came to understand what was going through their minds at the time.

Pauline and Juliet were both incredibly intelligent. When they became friends, they had the ambition of being writers and going to Hollywood. They started to write intricate stories that were usually set around a medieval fantasy kingdom called Borovnia. They wrote about 12 or 13 novels in handwriting in their exercise books. Some of those survived and we have used extracts to create sequences in which the girls go into this fantasy world of Borovnia. Sometimes, too, the characters. from Borovnia come into the real world. As the film progresses, and as the girls start to lose control on what is happening, things become very muddy between these two worlds.

> The girls, in fact, invented their own form of "Dragons and Dungeons"?

Yes. They invented whole royal families with very intricate relationships between queens and kings and sons. They knew who married whom and who divorced whom and who killed whom.

Ultimately, the girls' aim was to turn all these stories into big Hollywood movies with James Mason, Mario Lanza and all their idols. The irony is that is what we have done, 40 years later. We have filmed Pauline and Juliet's fantasy for them, and they are both still alive, somewhere in the world. It's a very strange experience for us.

A lot of the people who were involved at the time are still alive, and I have had all sorts of anguish over whether we should have done it. Ultimately there is no justification. I do feel bad about having done it, and in a sense I shouldn't have. The only justification, and it is not real justification, is that if I hadn't made the film, other people would have. There were two or three other features lined up to go, based on the same case.

Two or three other New Zealand filmmakers also had scripts. One was a tele-movie based on a play that came out about a year or so ago in New Zealand. It was unsympathetic towards the girls and basically just dramatized the sensational headlines of 1950s without having any regard to their being a couple of human beings. The girls must have had a reason for doing what they did - they weren't just mad - but the play portrayed them as psychos.

So, it was a story that was going to be made. And we felt that if it had to be done by somebody, we should do it properly ourselves. We knew we could do a good job of it, and that we had uncovered facts about the case which no one else had.

I do feel that we have treated the whole thing with a lot of humanity. I certainly don't feel bad about the way we are portraying it. But I do feel bad that there are people alive who don't want it made. For them it's a very real tragedy. For the rest of the world, it's a story which is rather horrible. That is why, if we had been the only people developing the film, maybe we wouldn't have made it.

> Do you see Heavenly Creatures as a major departure for yourself?
It's a kind of departure and certainly everyone is going to see it as one. But I have no set plan for my career. To me it was simply that I was interested in making this film. It's something new and that is good. But I have always seen my other films as being different from each other in certain ways. This is obviously a greater leap, however. It is much more of a mainstream film; there is no doubt about that.

It's interesting that people whom I have never met have all these assumptions about my career. People immediately assume that filmmakers do things because of a grand plan. People are no doubt saying, "Oh, Jackson wants to be taken as a serious filmmaker now. He's sick of being branded as a splatter filmmaker and he wants to do arty mainstream films. That's not true. I do intend to do other splatter films. I have intentions of doing all sorts of films.

I have no interest in a "career" as such. If I were really career-oriented, I'd be in Hollywood now making Hollywood films and earning lots of money. I choose to stay in New Zealand earning a fraction of what I could make in Los Angeles because I want to do whatever I feel like doing.

> One hears a lot of analysis of Jane Campion's career from hindsight, as if were perfectly structured and engineered from day one. Maybe the speculation reflects a hope that careers can be that controllable.

It depends on what the person wants to do. It all comes down to individuals. I made Heavenly Creatures not to lead onto anything, I just wanted to make that movie. All I want, by the end of my life, is to have made a bunch of films of which I'm proud and which I had wanted to do. I do not regard myself as a director for hire. I never have and I don't think I ever will.

I have, at odd times, flirted with the idea of going to make a film in America, but the quality of material hasn't been up to it, and I always feel, "Hell, do I really want to lose control of the film at the vital stage? Do I want other people to have final cut? Do I want to feel like I am an employee for a studio which says, "We're just going to pay you to make this and then you must go away while we finish it as we see fit? You're just the director, you're no one else".

I don't want to be a director as such; I want to be a filmmaker. The freedom that I have in New Zealand is worth millions of dollars to me. It is worth more than what I could earn in Hollywood.

> Of the many Australians who have worked overseas, most have retained their individuality as filmmakers: George Miller, Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi and Simon Wincer, and so on. This doesn't seem as much the case with New Zealand directors. Obviously Jane Campion is an  exception, but Roger Donaldson's and Geoff Murphy's American work is  rather impersonal.

Again I think it's up to the individual. Philip Noyce has become a fairly mainstream director - and he is actually quite good at it too! One problem the New Zealand film industry will always face, and I'm sure it is similiar in Australia, is that when filmmakers have done their second or third features - and it's not till you get to your second or third film that I believe you actually start to get the confidence you need and begin to learn from your mistakes - they leave to go overseas. This means the film industry is perpetually new; its infancy is never-ending. There never seems to be an established base of experienced directors who stay in the country, making better and better movies, which is what should happen.

> That highlights the unrealistic and ever-present expectation one finds in New Zealand and Australia for better box-office results. If a country is dependent on new people all the time, how can one expect instant results? After all, while The Piano is a hit, Sweetie hasn't recouped its budget.

You're absolutely right. People do expect too much from first time filmmakers.

There are a lot of very exciting young directors in New Zealand - particularly of short films. The New Zealand film industry will ultimately be great when all these young directors get to make three, four or five movies in New Zealand. But will it ever happen? The pattern that is so entrenched is that people will cut their teeth here by making their first movie, with all its mistakes, then making a second film, which will be kind of good and a moderate success, and then, wham, leaving for overseas to make art films in America. We are then back to square one. That's the pattern and I do not know what we can do about it.

> Do you think you can afford to remain based in New Zealand?

I don't see why not. I just want to get to a stage where people in the States, or wherever, genuinely want me to make movies for them. I want to be in the position where I can say, "Okay, I will do a bigger budget film, but I want to shoot it in New Zealand and I want to retain control".

What I imagine might happen is that I carry on as I'm now, but have access to money in excess of what the Film Commisssion could ever supply. Heavenly Creatures was more than half-financed by German money: the Film Commission put up the rest. We are now talking to that same German company about other films in the future. It is a distinct advantage if the Film Commission can help films get made by only having to put up half or less the budget. That will allow many more films to be made. That is why what is happening with me at the moment is so encouraging.

> Is there a strain of social realism out there?

Well, people have attemped it, but not very successfully. It's just something we are not very good at. I do not know why.  I personally think the greatest weakness in New Zealand films is the scriptwriting. There are good directors, but whether or not we are ever going to get proficient at writing scripts I don't know. A lot of New Zealand filmmakers, including scriptwriters, don't seem very well versed in the basics of the craft of writing a story structure. That, more than anything, drags New Zealand films down and makes them non-competitive. We have a terrible insecurity about our culture. We are terribly protective of it and feel we shouldn't be making American movies. That somehow gets perverted into a sense we shouldn't be using American story structure techniques, because they would threaten our cultural identity. This is a load of rubbish (...)

People just think that you sit down and write a feature; that if you get down a hundred pages and muddle through the story, then it's going to make a good movie. But it won't. It has to be a very, very carefully-structured document. People in New Zealand just don't understand that.

With some exceptions, the film industry in New Zealand is run by individuals. Often they're directors and sometimes they write the scripts themselves, or they have a friend who is a scriptwriter write them. It's all just individuals with the idea that they want to write a film. Very rarely is there a writer who knows how to write screenplays, who actually writes one and sends it off to a producer, who then gets a director and says, "Read this".

I don't think our feature film industry is an industry at all. Four features a year is a cottage industry. It's run by people who are doing the very best they can, but without any of the formal structure that a real industry has.

Ultimately, though, that could be the strength of the New Zealand cinema. We can't compete with what the Americans are doing and perhaps our strength lies in the fact that ours are individual movies made by people who really want to make films badly. But somewhere along the line people should learn a little bit more about the structure of story-telling.

> Could that lack of the industry structure be one reason why directors are so easily tempted away? Alison MacLean made one feature, Crush, and then it was off to America.

Yes, there is a certain excitement and pace in Los Angeles, where films are being made all the time. If you have success, you can be starting another film the minute you finish the previous one. If all you want to do is just direct movies, then L.A. is a great place to be. You will work with big stars, with big publicity machines, and it will be all terribly exciting.

In New Zealand, there is none of that. Here you make a film and there is a tremendous amount of doubt whether you are ever going to make another one. It is entirely possible in New Zealand that once you finish a film it could be two or more years before you do another one; that's just how long the process can take.

What I'm trying to do is overlap things. I'm trying to prepare my next film while I'm still cutting this. I don't want to be in a situation where it takes me so long to get a film off the ground that I'm hanging around doing nothing.

New Zealand hasn't the adrenalin and excitement that L.A. has. Maybe that is the answer to your earlier question. Maybe what does appeal to people about America is the fact that you can get films made without any problem.

From: Cinema Papers - New Zealand Supplement