Jackson has plenty of other talents as a filmmaker, but I still enjoy seeing him as the ultimate Harryhausen fan who grew up to carry on the great man's legacy.
This is something I've always hoped to personally convey to the filmmaker, and I resolved to do just that when I found out I would be visiting the set of The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in the middle of last year. My set-report is here.
On-set interviews can be a little tricky - the ever-present publicists tend to start having convulsions if you ask anything that isn't (in their mind) 100 per cent about the film being promoted. Despite this, I was determined to work Ray Harryhausen into my brief conversation with Jackson, consequences be damned. All I've ever wanted is to look PJ in the eyes, say the words "Ray Harryhausen" and enjoy the moment as a fellow Harryhausen fan. I wasn't going to let what could end up being my only opportunity to do so go by without at least trying.
Read more:
• Movie review: The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies
• Evangeline Lilly stole from The Hobbit set
• Peter Jackson receives Hollywood star
I was sharing my Peter Jackson interview time with a couple of European journalists who projected a mild "deer-in-the-headlights" quality, so I wasn't concerned about them getting in the way.
Immediately upon Jackson taking his seat (cup of tea in hand of course), I seized the few seconds of silent awkwardness and stated that I'd always admired how he carried on the legacy of Ray Harryhausen in his films. Then I enquired as to how that legacy manifests in the third Hobbit film. This was his response:
"I think any time if you have creatures and monsters - of the three Hobbit movies, the third one is the one with the trolls and the ogres and the very Harryhausen-like creatures. In fact it's very similar. Because I was actually thinking about some of this battle, and I was thinking the other day about the Laketown men who were sort of armed, the make-shift army ,and I was thinking about them throwing spears on to ogres and trolls, and I'm thinking, 'Well, that's incredibly Harryhausen-like.'"
Special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen and his models.
By this point I had achieved my lifelong dream of sharing a Ray Harryhausen moment with Peter Jackson. Although I had worked The Hobbit into my question, the publicist was already glaring at me with fury in her eyes. But I wasn't done yet.
In the final chapter of Harryhausen's stunning professional memoir "An Animated Life", he describes a variety of projects he never got around to making for one reason or another. In these ten or so pages, there are synopses for at least a dozen of the coolest-sounding movies never made. Some are myth adaptations, some are original ideas, some feature concepts that were eventually incorporated into other Harryhausen movies. It reads like pure catnip to a Harryhausen fan.
In my wildest fantasies, Peter Jackson would select one of these unmade Harryhausen projects and mount it. I'm all for PJ doing whatever he wants, and I can definitely see the argument for him generating his own original projects, but I found it impossible to read these Harryhausen ideas and not imagine what kind of film Jackson could make from them.
Which is why I simply could not resist the temptation of suggesting this to Jackson. So I did.
"I don't know," he said. "I don't know if the scripts have been written. I know that The Hobbit was a project he was considering at one stage. Probably in the 1950s, I guess."
It was a naturally evasive response coming from a director who is understandably quite press wary. But also maybe he was gently trying to tell me that he'd already done an "unmade Harryhausen feature" and that was that. Or maybe I planted a seed. Either way, I had set out what I planned to do and was happy.
At the time we had this chat, Harryhausen had only been dead about a month, so before the publicist grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, I decided to push my luck one last time and share in the commiseration of the great man's passing with Jackson.
"So sad about his death," I said.
"Yeah," said PJ.
The conversation then turned to more Hobbit-centric topics, and the publicist relaxed. Here are some of the other tidbits Jackson offered up:
On his trademark 'swooping' camera moves:
"Every director is obviously different and have their own kind of sensibilities. But I always am fascinated with the idea of feeling, it's an emotional things really, feeling how the camera can almost become an actor in the scene. Because really, I think the camera's a tool by which you can be sending a subliminal message to the audience. People aren't really realizing, but if you have an actor being very, very still in an emotional moment, your camera's moving in, then you may not even be aware of it, but you're being drawn into that actor's performance. I just like to keep things alive and if something is chaotic and it's a battle and be swirling around, if you're trying to make the characters feel like they're in the middle of mayhem, then moving the camera around helps. I always look at a scene and think how can a camera be a cast member of this particular scene, and if it's a cast member, what role should it be playing and how should it be performing."
On 48 frames per second:
"My thing with forty-eight frames and anything else is that we're here in 2013, and if you look back 100 years to 1913, you know, films were black and white, they were silent. For the most part, they were twenty minutes long, they were shot at sixteen frames a second. And now a hundred years, we have seen almost the end of film and it's become digital and it's 2-K and I just think okay, if you now think forward to a hundred years from now, twenty-one thirteen, I can guarantee films are not going to be twenty-four frames a second anymore. Guarantee they're not going to be 2-K, they'll probably be some enormous high-resolution, you know. I mean, who knows, who knows what movies are gonna be like in a hundred years' time. So, somewhere in this journey, we have to use technology to keep pushing things along. So, yeah. I think with the advance and all the electronics and electronic projectors and cameras and digital, I think there's going to be lot of opportunities to really. You've got to make the theatrical experience more than you can ever get at home if you are trying to bring people back to the cinema."
On the future of cinema:
"I think it's very unpredictable what's going to happen with the film industry. I do believe there'll always be movies - just the fact that it involves leaving your house, possibly having a dinner and meeting up with some friends and going to a sort of dark, huge room with a big screen, that in itself is a magical thing that will never go away. Whatever form it takes in years to come, who knows. I can't imagine that as human beings we're going to be happy just staying in our house all the time and watching all our entertainment in our home. I don't think that's going to happen."
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies opens in cinemas today.
* How well do you think Peter Jackson carries Ray Harryhausen's legacy? Comment below!
