August 2006
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Thats right everyone. Its official. After 'The Lovely Bones' Peter will indeed be involved in a remake of the 1954 film 'The Dam Busters'. To be honest I'm not quite sure what to make of this one. Peter/WETA have the ability to bring any project to life. The SFX will look outstanding and the cast will be tremendous I'm sure. But does this really need to be remade? All the luck in the world to PJ from his fellow bastards. We'll see how this one pads out!
The Peter Jackson and his WingNut Films have revealed plans to make a new film based on the book The Dam Busters by Paul Brickhill and the classic 1954 British war film of the same name.
Jackson will produce and Christian Rivers, who has worked with Jackson for over 17 years most recently as animation director on King Kong, will make his directorial debut on the film, which has been redubbed Dambusters.
Universal Pictures and StudioCanal are co-financing the project; Universal will have worldwide distribution rights excluding France which will be handled by StudioCanal.
Dambusters is the true story of Operation Chastise, one of the most daring Royal Air Force (RAF) missions in World War II.
In March 1943, Wing Commander Guy Gibson assembled a hand-picked squadron of pilots from the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA to conduct a top secret assignment – the destruction of three dams in the heart of Germany which were crucial to the Nazi steel industry. The specially modified Lancaster bombers being flown by RAF Squadron 617 were attempting to destroy the dams using a revolutionary "bouncing" bomb developed by scientist Barnes Wallis which had to be dropped at close range and low altitude in order to be effective.
Also producing with Jackson are Jan Blenkin and Carolynne Cunningham while Sir David Frost, who bought the rights to Brickhill's book in 2005, and Jackson's manager Ken Kamins are executive producers. StudioCanal owns rights to the original film produced by Associated British Picture Corporation which starred Michael Redgrave as Wallis and Richard Todd as Gibson.
In an exclusive interview with Screen Daily from New Zealand yesterday, Jackson said that he expects the film to be shooting by mid-2007 on locations in the UK and New Zealand, with studio and post-production work at his Weta facility in New Zealand. He said he plans to make it in the $30m-$40m budget range.
"I want to keep it as authentic as possible and as close to the spirit of the original as possible," he explained. "There's that wonderful mentality of the British during the war, that heads-down, persevering, keep-on-plugging-away mentality which is the spirit of Dambusters."
He said that he and Rivers are currently in the process of finding a screenwriter for the project and "would favour" a UK writer.
Jackson has long harboured plans to remake The Dam Busters, having originally seen it on a big screen when he was a child,
"I saw it in the cinema when I was 10 or 11 when they used to have a Sunday double feature in New Zealand," he recalls. "They had an eclectic mix of movies and one particular time, I saw The Dam Busters and Dr No together. I really loved it. I came from a household where World War II was a discussion point. My parents were both English who emigrated to New Zealand in 1949, having lived through the war. I used to love reading World War II books and became hooked on those British war films of the 50s like Ice Cold In Alex, The Colditz Story and The Wooden Horse."
Jackson read Brickhill's book when he was a teenager and bought every other book on the mission that was available. "There were quite a few," he says.
Around the time that he was tying up rights to The Lord Of The Rings, Jackson asked Kamins, his then agent at ICM, to find out what the position was with remake rights to The Dam Busters. "He came back and said that Icon had the rights and that Mel Gibson was going to direct and possibly act in it. Obviously that didn't happen. A year or two ago, Ken came to me and asked if I was still interested. Canal Plus was apparently looking for somebody to remake it."
Rivers was, chuckles Jackson, "one of my first fans." "Back in the old days, when I had just made Bad Taste, no-one was writing any fan mail to me, but one day a package showed up in the mail from a New Zealand schoolboy who had seen Bad Taste and sent me some of his artwork which was basically doodles and science fiction drawings. I happily wrote back, and he kept on sending me drawings and it became clear that he was very talented."
When Jackson started prepping Brain Dead, he wanted to storyboard the film and asked Rivers, who has just leaving school, to do the job. Since then, he has storyboarded all Jackson's films as well as working in prosthetics, as an animator and second unit director. He created computer sequences in the Lord Of The Rings films and King Kong as well as directing Andy Serkis in the latter on the motion-capture stage for "quite a few days when I couldn't be there."
Rivers won an Oscar as part of the visual effects team for King Kong.
"I grew up with the Dam Busters mythology as part of my heritage," said Rivers. "I remember seeing it for the first time on television in England with my grandfather. I'll never forget marveling at the image of the bouncing bomb punching across the water."
Jackson says that, as a producer on the film, he will be heavily involved and has already worked intensively with Rivers in what he calls "the fun stuff" – the research and development of the film.
"We traveled to the UK and met the five surviving pilots of the 144 on the original mission," he said. "We went to Canada and had a flight in one of the two Lancaster aircraft which are still being flown [see picture above]. We went to Germany to visit the dams which were rebuilt as they originally were after the war."
The project will also utilize information and details of the mission which were still classified at the time the original film was made by director Michael Anderson. "So much of it was still secret," explains Jackson. "They weren't even allowed to show the bomb itself and had to create a fictionalized bomb. We also want to include a lot more about the development of the bomb. Barnes Wallis had to overcome incredible bureaucratic hurdles to get the bomb taken seriously. It was seen as a crackpot, vaguely nutty idea. The RAF, as were all defense departments at the time, was always being approached by eccentrics claiming they had the weapon to end the war. But he persevered.
"The film was made in 1954 so a lot of the people involved were still alive and they had to be polite, but in reality he was up against a lot more stringent opposition than was shown."
He also points to the courage and resilience of Guy Gibson who had to put the squadron together and train it for the mission in just seven weeks. "Gibson learned about the true nature of the mission three or four weeks beforehand, but the squadron were only told about what they had to do at 2pm on the day itself. They took off that night at 8.30pm."
Weta Digital and Weta Workshop will create the visual effects and miniatures for the film, and Jackson says that Rivers wants to bring the experience of flying in a Lancaster to the screen. "He wants to put an audience in those planes and for them to feel what it's like in those planes. When we flew in the Lancaster, my legs were trembling afterwards because it's such a visceral, vibrating, rattling, loud experience. And that was on a sunny day. The squadron flew at treetop level at night with no lights and thousands of flak guns shooting at them along the way. 19 planes went out, and eight didn't return. Some were shot down and some hit power lines and crashed."
Meanwhile Jackson and his screenwriting partners Fran Walsh and Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens are close to finishing the first draft for The Lovely Bones, the adaptation of Alice Sebold's bestselling novel which Jackson will make his next film as director.
"We are literally a week away from finishing the first draft on that," he says. "I'm not really prioritizing between Dambusters and The Lovely Bones. It's all to do with the script. I don't know what draft of Lovely Bones we'll end up shooting. I assume on Dambusters, once we find a writer, we will have a script in six months' time. We don't want to change it too much because the structure of the original film is superb."
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We've recently had two great video submissions to the board of bastards. Middle Earth Idols is an amusing send-up of American Idol, with different Lord of the Rings characters as the contestants! Check out some of the other works from these talented teenage film makers at www.marsproductions.net. The second piece, Spring Kong is a hilarious remake of the classic King Kong. However instead of a giant ape, theres a... well, just check it out, you'll see! As always check out these and other great entries in The Board of Bastards, and keep them coming in! We especially love this sort of thing!
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BadTaste.it has recently posted a fascinating interview with Alan Lee, the conceptual designer for the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and King Kong. He mainly discusses the creative processes on the movies. Interestingly Lee also mentions that he's "pretty sure that in three-four years' time the Hobbit movie is going to be made". Let's hope he's right!
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For a while now there has been speculation of who would fill the role of director for Peter Jackson produced computer game based movie Halo and it was announced yesterday that it would be South African director Neill Blomkamp. Halo is to be Blockamp's big screen debut, and although many of you won't recognise his name, I'm sure a large number of you will recognise his work on the Transformers inspired Citroen advert Alive With Technology. He is also been acclaimed for his work in short film Alive in Joburg.
Halo has been pencilled in for release in Summer 2008.
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November 10 is to be a very happy day. That's the day you can get your grubby mitts on your very own copy of "Peter Jackson: A Film-maker's Journey"; the first authorised biography of our beloved NZ director PJ. The book tells his life-story in Peter Jackson's own words, as well as those from friends family and colleagues. Harper Collins is to publish the biography in time for the Christmas period, which has been written over several years by Brian Sibley. Sibley was the producer on the remarkable BBC radio adaptation of Tolkien's LoTR, and was chosen after numerous approaches.
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According to Now Playing magazine, Peter Jackson's special effects company Weta FX has been hired to handle the effects in James Cameron's new movie Avatar. The sci-fi thriller commences filming in November, and is due to be released in 2008, back to back with his other project, Battle Angel(2009).
