Peter Jackson

Jackson started his career as a fanatical hobbyist, creating small movies with simple technical means and the help of a couple of friends. When one of his projects, the horror comedy Bad Taste, over a period of four years grew from the originally planned half-hour to a 90 minutes feature film, Jackson and his crew took the end result to the film festival in Cannes, where it received critical acclaim and was sold to twelve countries. This allowed him to start a professional career as a film director.

Unlike other New Zealand film directors, Jackson has remained in New Zealand to make films, preferring to have Hollywood come to him, rather than going to Hollywood to make his films. In the process he has created or acquired a number of local businesses in order to support film production in New Zealand. He was an early user of computer enhancement technology and provided digital special effects to a number of Hollywood films by use of telecommunications and satellite links to transmit raw images and the enhanced results across the Pacific Ocean, making good use of time differences between New Zealand and North America.

Although appearing casual and relaxed, inevitably dressing in his trademark baggy shorts without shoes, Jackson is a hard core perfectionist with his film projects. He demands countless takes of every scene, pushes his special effects crew to make their work seamless and invisible, and insists in authenticity in miniatures even on the sides that are never shown in a film. On the other hand, many of his most beautiful scenes result from purely serendipitous shots taken while flying from one location to another. The juxtaposition of his freestyle creativity and his obsession with detail and planning results in some of the most extraordinary theatre ever created. Despite this perfectionism, he is well-known for the fact that he needs significantly less budget than his peers to achieve spectacular results.

Peter Jackson has been promised a reported US$20 million fee for his next film, a remake of the 1933 classic King Kong. As of 2003, that made him the highest-paid motion picture director in history. He's also mentioned that he might be interested in directing a film adaptation of Tolkien's precursor book, The Hobbit.

Filmography

• Bad Taste (1987)
• Meet The Feebles (1989)
• Braindead (a.k.a. Dead Alive) (1992)
• Heavenly Creatures (1994)
• Forgotten Silver (1995) - mockumentary
• The Frighteners (1996)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
• King Kong (2005)

See also

• New Zealand cinema
• Weta Workshop

Referenced By