PETER JACKSON: BAD TASTE (1987) / THE HOBBIT (PARTS I, II, III) (2012-2014)
“…all the crane shots were done by pointing the camera in the general direction of the actors and just hoping for the best.”
It doesn’t take a committed cinephile to work out that Peter Jackson was probably not referring to The Hobbit here. He is actually talking about some of the techniques that he and his crew used for filming Bad Taste, a splatter-horror-comedy he made when he was 25 with nothing but a bunch of (seriously loyal) friends and a cheerful disregard for the bounds of possibility.
But Jackson’s own words could not be a more perfect summary of the differences between his first and last films, nor of his own approach as a director. There is no sensible way of trying to compare the contents of a movie adaptation of a Tolkien classic with a shoe-string-budget film in which a group of aliens are looking to use humans as the food source for an intergalactic chain of fast-food restaurants. But what is important are the differences in how they were made; it is only by looking at the facts and figures of the two films alongside each other that the phenomenal distance Jackson has come from the days when making a film required he and his friends to film at weekends because they all had full-time jobs can be appreciated. Plus, the numbers are absolutely mind-blowing. So, without further ado, here is a [sadly whittled down] blow-by-blow account of the making of Bad Taste versus the making of The Hobbit.
First things first – budget and numbers.
The Hobbit cost around $560m to make: Bad Taste cost around $25,000.
The number of people working on The Hobbit was so vast that when filming on location there would be more than 500 people just on a main unit, with over 200 working on the secondary units. The cast and crew of Bad Taste amounted to….7. And I literally mean, cast AND crew – almost every name on the actor credit list also has ‘camera’ listed after it.
Despite having been in the industry for over 16 years, Martin Freeman earned most of his $15m fortune just for his role as Bilbo Baggins. Ken Hammon, just one example cast member from Bad Taste, played 23 different characters throughout the movie and was paid precisely – nothing.
The catering team for The Hobbit was more than 200 strong, with over 100kg of meat being cooked every day. The catering team for the cast/crew of Bad Taste – was Jackson’s mother. She fed them beans on toast (and still keeps one of the left over cans).
Next up, we have the shooting and special effects category.
For the ‘crane rigs’ on Bad Taste, Jackson joked that he was using a mechano set, which he had put together himself from reclaimed steel rods and was operated by hand. In The Hobbit, the scaffolding rigs were so high that crew would eat lunch where they were, to save themselves the effort of climbing down.
Most of Bad Taste was shot on handheld Bolex cameras, which needed winding up and recorded 30 seconds worth of film at a time. The Hobbit used the Red Epic camera, which allowed them to shoot directly into 3D, and which stored the images not on reel but on 128GB digital cards.
The various departments and workshops responsible for the costumes, props and set design for The Hobbit filled several floors of buildings so vast that people could go to work together one morning and not see each other again for six months. A machete used in Bad Taste was made from a piece of cardboard and some lollipop sticks – in Jackson’s dad’s garage.
Sets on The Hobbit took several teams numerous weeks to build, and then were often digitally enhanced. When Jackson needed to make replicas of a house in Bad Taste that explodes, he and his six buddies/actors/camera men turned their hands to woodwork, and built the model houses themselves. All reducing-scale four of them.
Some of the actors in The Hobbit spent up to five hours a day in make-up having prosthetics applied. Peter Jackson made the masks for the aliens in Bad Taste himself out of clay – and baked them in his mother’s oven. (Hence why she only ever able to feed them baked beans).
Then, we have the locations and logistics.
After The Lord of the Rings, parts of New Zealand had essentially become Middle Earth, and for other studio-based sections, sound stages were housed in former car assembly plants. For Bad Taste, it took Jackson’s dad to convince the owner of a nearby colonial house that the boys wouldn’t wreck too much, and would pay for any damages.
The transporting of The Hobbit’s equipment, crew, cast, caterers, trailers, generators and facilities to their various filming locations – where their 100 plus trucks would cover areas the size of two rugby fields – are among the biggest logistical operations in cinematic history. In Bad Taste, filmed mostly in and around Jackson’s town and own yard, they just…went out the backdoor.
The list goes on. But I’m going to have to stop there, because there is a very specific reason for pointing all this out. This is that despite the almost unbelievable comparisons between the making of Jackson’s first and last films, there is one thing that remains absolutely the same – and that is Jackson himself.
When talking about the handheld cameras that they used on The Hobbit, Jackson makes it very clear that this type of filming had always been very important to how he’d made his movies, and just because they were now able to shoot in 3D he didn’t want to fundamentally change the shooting style. And this is exactly the kind of director Jackson is. Unlike some other directors, Jackson’s first film doesn’t have a signature on-screen style, and in terms of quality film-making it doesn’t get much worse than this. Bad Taste makes Piranha II look like….well, Avatar. But what Bad Taste does have is a signature attitude.
One final fact summarizes this perfectly, which is that despite its lowly status as compared to The Hobbit, Bad Taste took four years to film where The Hobbit took just two; from the very beginning there was nothing that was too much for Jackson, nothing that he and his crew couldn’t achieve if they approached it right, no matter what it was or how long it took.
Jackson may now have endless finances with which to make things happen, but the fact that we have his adaptations of Tolkien at all is because this is still how he approaches his filmmaking today. We don’t have to have something polished and breath-taking on the screen to see who Jackson is as a director; when we compare those facts and figures between the making of the two films, we see that we are close to him as a director in Bad Taste as we are in The Hobbit, and in all his realizations of Tolkien’s world – if not closer. Cinematically and financially, Jackson has been on a journey that could rival that of any of his Tolkien characters. But his values and visions have always been the same – there and back again.
Don’t just watch the films. If you ever get chance, watch the making-of documentaries – in chronological order. It is astounding.
