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Home / Lifestyle

Peter Jackson reportedly working on Dam Busters remake

7 May, 2006 11:53 PM3 mins to read

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Peter Jackson

Peter Jackson

New Zealand film director Peter Jackson is set to film a remake of the World War 2 film The Dam Busters, with a budget of almost $300 million dollars, according to a British Sunday newspaper.

The Mail on Sunday yesterday reported Jackson would work on the estimated £100 million movie
($293.5 million) alongside Sir David Frost - who last year bought the rights to Paul Brickhill's 1951 book about 617 Squadron's daring low-level bombing of German dams.

The newspaper said Jackson was a self-confessed war buff who had a lifelong interest in British military history after being inspired by a childhood visit to London's Imperial War Museum.

Jackson owns replicas of two World War 1 fighters and a tank and spent £50,000 ($146,700) of his own money restoring the only film of Anzac troops at Gallipoli, the newspaper reported.

Jackson recently spent a day filming one of the last surviving Lancaster bombers in preparation for the remake of the much-loved 1954 black-and-white film, which starred Richard Todd as Wing Commander Guy Gibson and Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis, who invented the bouncing bomb.

A source quoted in the paper said Jackson, 44, had met a group of RAF veterans in New Zealand who restored the plane.

"It was clear just how much he knew about warplanes. We believe the footage is to help his special effects team.

"Peter has been in contact with the old crewmen, who are well into their 80s. I believe he is helping to create a memorial to the New Zealand airmen who flew bombers, including those who died in the Dam Busters mission," the unnamed source was quoted in the newspaper.

Codenamed Operation Chastise, the 1943 raid is one of the most famous military operations. Gibson hand-picked crews from other Lancaster squadrons to fly at low level to destroy three heavily protected dams in the industrial Ruhr Valley.

The Mohne and Eder dams were breached using Wallis's extraordinary bouncing bomb. To be effective, the revolving mine had to be released while flying at precisely 220mph, 60ft above the water and 425 yards from a dam.

Jackson was reported to be sending his assistant Matt Dravitski to the annual Dam Busters reunion this month at Petwood Hotel, near Lincoln, which had been 617 Squadron's wartime mess.

Of the 19 Lancasters that took off from nearby RAF Scampton on May 16, 1943, eight failed to return and 56 airmen were killed.

The newspaper said one question remained - What to call Gibson's beloved but now controversially-named dog, Nigger.

Sir David Frost said "The word Nigger is not ideal for the modern world. But the real challenge is to make the film as good as, or better than, the original."

The famous theme music by Eric Coates would stay. Sir David said it would be crazy to change it.

- NZPA

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