Regular listeners to the Empire Podcast will reveal that we sat down with one Peter Jackson a couple of months ago, ostensibly to talk about the footage restoration in his acclaimed World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. While we had him in the clutches of the Pod,we also broached the subject of using the same tech to clean up his old output. Jackson has now confirmed that he's doing just that for Bad Taste, Braindead (AKA 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," Jackson tells The Hollywood Reporter. "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!"
While the first three are certainly candidates for such cleaning up (even if there are worries about them losing their low-rent charm along the way), it's more surprising to learn that Heavenly Creatures needs much work. Yet there will be hefty bonus features for all four, as the director explains. "I've always had video diaries being shot," Jackson says, not that anyone who owns one of the big LOTR or Hobbit home entertainment releases needs to be told. "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."
"I'm pretty keen to actually just get them back out there again," Jackson continues. "That's sort of my plan for now: to do a nice little box set — the early years! The naughty years!" Sounds good to us. We don't yet know when the box set will hit, but we'll be waiting. They Shall Not Grow Old, meanwhile, is available on DVD, Blu-ray and Digital Download now.
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