Peter Jackson plans to restore his early ‘naughty’ films

Team Udayavani, Dec 11, 2018, 4:03 PM IST

Los Angeles: Filmmaker Peter Jackson has shared his plans to restore his films that he directed before the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

The 57-year-old director whose most recent documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old” featured old footage from the World War I which he had upgraded and colourised with the help of modern tools.

Jackson has now confirmed that he will be giving the same treatment to his four old features — “Bad Taste”, “Braindead” (also known as “Dead Alive”), “Meet The Feebles” and the Oscar-nominated “Heavenly Creatures”.

“I’ve decided to go back and do this to my old films the first four I made, which I own but never re-released. I’ve done some tests on ‘Braindead’, where we took the 16mm negative and put it through our World War I restoration pipeline and s**t, it looks fantastic!” the director told The Hollywood Reporter.

“Bad Taste”, a comedy horror splatter film, was Jackson’s second directorial project and it released in 1987. “Meet the Feebles” was a musical black comedy that hit the theatres in 1989.

The 1994 psychological drama “Heavenly Creatures”, starring Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet, was the most acclaimed work of Jackson before he bagged the worldwide attention with “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Jackson said he is interested in remastering them and releasing them as “a nice little box set the early years! The naughty years!” 

He also revealed that all the four films will contain a lot of bonus features.

“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 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,” Jackson said.