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