Jackson eyes Gallipoli movie

Film-maker Peter Jackson is looking at the possibility of making his own Gallipoli movie. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Film-maker Peter Jackson is looking at the possibility of making his own Gallipoli movie as the April 2015 centenary of the ill-fated Anzac landings on the peninsula in World War 1 gets closer.

"I have been thinking about it recently," Jackson told Australia's ABC.

Jackson considered making a film of the battle from a New Zealand perspective years ago, to complement Australian director Peter Weir's 1981 film Gallipoli.

Now the director and producer has a more balanced version in mind.

"I have been thinking that I'd do it much more from a combined Australian and New Zealand point of view. I don't think that we need necessarily to tell a film from a New Zealand perspective because the Anzac tradition, the Australian and New Zealand, were so intertwined in that particular campaign that I think it would be a mistake.

"To me, it's a remarkable part of our history and Peter Weir obviously made a great movie but Peter's movie was set around events of August 7th, August 8th, 1915.

"Gallipoli was a seven or eight month long campaign and that story is yet to be told on film, so I'd like to do that."

Jackson said he did not have any sort of "game plan" in terms of the type of movies he made, but chose those which got him interested and excited, rather than repeating himself - part of the reason why he decided not to direct the Hobbit movies after the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

His grandfather was at Gallipoli and won a distinguished conduct medal.
"I went to Gallipoli in 1990 for the 75th anniversary. That was the amazing year where ... 50 of the original diggers were there".

He said that the men - the youngest was 92, the oldest was 103 - looked around as the dawn broke.

"It was an amazing experience to see them all looking at this landscape that most of them hadn't seen since 1915, hadn't seen it for 75 years."

Jackson was involved in the restoration of the only movie film known to have taken of the Anzacs at Gallipoli, a newsreel from 1916.

The grainy, wobbling footage shot by Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, an English war correspondent, in July 1915 showed a line of soldiers engaged in a vigorous trench fire-fight with their Turkish enemy perhaps not more than 10m away.

And scenes from Quinn's Post, the most dangerous spot on Gallipoli in 1915, are thought have been of New Zealanders - the Wellington Battalion commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel William Malone.

- NZPA