Peter Jackson is a director most of the world knows for his work on such mega-films as THE LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, THE HOBBIT trilogy, and KING KONG. But us horror fans know the man as the maniac behind such splatter films as BAD TASTE, MEET THE FEEBLES, BRAINDEAD, and THE FRIGHTENERS. While Jackson has become one of the biggest directors of all time, he isn't against waxing nostalgic about his splatter film days. In fact, the filmmaker would love to make another splatter movie one of these days!
Jackson says:
Oh, I'm very happy to be disgusting again if the right project comes along. It would be interesting to see how disgusting Fran [Walsh] and I could be in our older age compared to our younger years because we've learned a few things since then. We know a little bit more about the world than we did then, so maybe our levels of disgusting could go into whole new places!
This quote comes from a piece THR just did on Jackson regarding his documentary THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD. The film has a f*cking fascinating history behind it, but the gest is that Jackson and his crew took hours of old silent black and white WWI footage, and colorized it, added dialogue, and the end result looks fantastic. Check it out HERE. Anyhow, it turns out that Jackson plans to take the same restoration technology and apply it to his earlier splatter films such as BAD TASTE, which is the most in need of restoration. Jackson stored the negative under his bed during production.
Jackson says:
I'm pretty keen to actually just get them back out there again. I've decided to go back and do this to my old films — the first four I made, which I own but never rereleased. I've done some tests on Braindead, where we took the 16mm negative and put it through our World War I restoration pipeline — and shit, it looks fantastic! That's sort of my plan for now: to do a nice little box set — the early years! The naughty years! Even if it's just removing the mold from Bad Taste, that will be a very good thing to do.
Jackson splatter fans will also be happy to hear that he's planning on digging into behind-the-scenes footage that was collected during the making of his early movies. Jackson and his team plan to comb through the footage, restore it as necessary and assemble a documentary to go with the box set.
Jackson says:
I've always had video diaries being shot. So I've got about an hour or two of us shooting Bad Taste, seven or eight hours of us shooting The Feebles, 50 to 60 hours of us filming Braindead, and at least 70 hours of us doing Heavenly Creatures. And it's not just people talking to the camera. It's actually a guy on the set filming us making the film. So there's some pretty interesting stuff there and none of it has ever been out.
In addition to using his new restoration pipeline to upgrade the films into 4K, Jackson plans to retool the audio. We'll let you know when we hear more!