Q&A with CECILIA PECK

Peter Jackson

The Frighteners is quite a departure from New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson's previous collaboration with co-writer Fran Walsh, Heavenly Creatures - as Cecilia Peck finds out

Did you expect Heavenly Creatures to receive the kind of international acclaim it got?

No, I didn't. Heavenly Creatures was based on a famous New Zealand murder case that we'd grown up with, which was not known outside of [the country]. So we made it for a New Zealand audience.

We wanted to reinterpret the 40-year-old mythology that had surrounded the case. We'd grown up thinking that Pauline Parker and Juliet Hume were evil personified, and we felt that it would be good to re-examine it from a modern perspective. And also to do it truthfully. So it was very satisfying for us that audiences who had never heard of the case responded to the story.

Have the studios tried to lure you to Hollywood since then?

The opportunities have always been there, but New Zealand is the country where I live and where I work, and I just feel comfortable here. I always say that I know how to make movies in New Zealand; I don't know how to make them in America.

Were the ghosts in The Frighteners based upon ghosts you have known?

Not really. But five or six years ago, I was in my apartment here in New Zealand. It was about six o'clock in the morning and Fran was out making a cup of coffee in the kitchen. I was lying in bed, the bedroom door was open, and suddenly this woman just kind of drifted into the bedroom. I was immediately kind of tense because I thought it was a real person. The woman also looked scary because she had this fixed scream on her face - her mouth was wide open.

It took me a few seconds to realise that it was a ghost, but once I did it wasn't so scary. It was much more frightening when it could have been a real person. She was kind of transparent, like a photographic negative of an image. She drifted past the end of the bed, slightly rising into the air, and then she disappeared through the far wall.

I yelled out to Fran, saying, 'I think I've just seen a ghost.' And the first thing she said was, 'Was it a woman with a screaming face?'

This was her apartment where she'd been living for about five years. Two years earlier she had woken up in the middle of the night and seen a woman with a screaming face standing at the end of the bed.

In The Frighteners I wanted the ghosts to look like ghosts - to make them enough of a special effect that it would tell us they were ghosts right away, so the audience could lock into them immediately and listen to what they were saying without being distracted.

What were the advantages of making the film in New Zealand?

We probably shot the film for about half the cost of what it would have been in the States. Robert Zemeckis did an estimated budget of about US$65 million and we did it for at least half that.

Can you talk about striking a balance between comedy and horror? Is this the genre you've called 'splatstick'?

Splatstick was more appropriate to some of the earlier films I made that were kind of like splatter movies. They had a lot of blood and guts in them, whereas The Frighteners doesn't.

You can only make the movies that you enjoy watching. You can't guess what other people want. I like a combination of humour and scares; I like that genre. You really have to trust your own instincts as to where to draw the line between humour and horror, and it's a fine line that you're walking. It doesn't suit everybody's taste, but you've got to hope that there are enough people out there who share the same sensibilities as you.

I think of The Frighteners as a roller-coaster, almost more as an amusement park ride than a movie. On a roller-coaster we want to laugh and scream at the same time. You're go-ing through this experience so fast that you just respond with whatever comes out first. I wanted to give people a good ride.

You have another film in Venice this year - Forgotten Silver.

Forgotten Silver is what I call a fun project. I co-wrote it and co-directed it with a friend of mine, Costa Botes. It's an hour-long drama that was made for New Zealand TV.

It's based on a story about a pioneer New Zealand filmmaker who worked early in the century and who invented a lot of the processes we use today, like colour film and sound. We unearthed a lot of facts about his life and the whole question is whether or not he was real.

Only Costa and I know for sure. We show proof of his existence; whether or not people believe us is another question!

What's your next project?

I'm doing a remake of King Kong for Universal. We want to be much more faithful to the original than what happened [with the version] in the 1970s. Fran and I are working on the script at the moment.