Peter Jackson
Peter Jackson (born October 31, 1961), is a film writer, director and producer born in Pukerua Bay, New Zealand to Bill and Joan Jackson. He was first known for his "splatstick" horror comedies, and came to prominence for his movie Heavenly Creatures, for which he shared an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen with Fran Walsh. Jackson now is best-known as the director of the epic film trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, based on the books by J. R. R. Tolkien. He is married to Fran Walsh, with whom he has two children, Billy and Katie.
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 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. 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 was signed to a reported US$20 million upfront-fee plus 20% take of the total box-office gross by Universal Studios for his next film, a remake of the 1933 classic King Kong — the film that inspired him, aged 8-years-old, to become a film director. As of 2004, that made him the highest-paid motion picture director in history. The film will be released during the Christmas season of 2005, and has a reported cast of Oscar nominated actress Naomi Watts, Oscar winning actor Adrien Brody, Jack Black, Colin Hanks and Andy Serkis. There has been a good deal of speculation as to whether he might direct The Hobbit, predecessor to The Lord of the Rings. His responses to date seem to indicate that he is interested, if the studios can work out the rights. Any such production would need to include scenes set in Bag End and Rivendell and cast a younger version of Bilbo Baggins, which audiences might find hard to accept if he looks too different from the version in Jackson's trilogy. Gandalf, Elrond and Gollum would look essentially the same in returning roles, and likely be played by the same actors.
He won three Academy Awards for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King:
- Academy Award for Directing
- Academy Award for Best Picture
- Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay
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)