Peter Jackson, Lord of the Rings Director
Once a struggling filmmaker, Wellington-based director Peter Jackson is enjoying worldwide critical acclaim as he brings Tolkien's epic
Lord of the Rings trilogy to life. Born in Wellington's Pukerua Bay in 1961, Jackson began making his first film shorts at the age of eight. He fell in love with horror movies during his teenage years, cutting his directing teeth on low-budget horror comedies. His first feature,
Bad Taste (1987), told the gruesome but comic story of aliens who landed on Earth to harvest humans for an intergalactic fast-food chain. Made on a shoe-string budget, Jackson paid for equipment from his own salary as a photo engraver on the local paper, building his own dolly tracks and cranes, making his own models, and recruiting friends and colleagues to serve as cast and crew.
Jackson has followed this with a string of cult horror comedies, including the splatter puppet feature called
Meet the Feebles (1989), and the zombie spectacular
Braindead (aka
Dead Alive, 1992). The infamous lawn-mowing scene, where the hero mows his way through a roomful of zombies, used 300 litres of fake blood!
Next came the dark psychological drama
Heavenly Creatures in 1994 - a retelling of New Zealand's real-life Parker/Hulme scandal, in which two teenage girls committed murder. The film won him a joint Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, and the Silver Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. During production, Jackson and several friends established WETA (Wingnut Effects and Technical Allusions) to handle the film's fantasy effects. The company would eventually win an Oscar for the landmark special effects it created for
the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Jackson also directed
The Frighteners (1996), a Hollywood-funded supernatural thriller about a psychic con man played by Michael J Fox. Jackson made a special deal to allow him to film in New Zealand with his usual crew. Today, he remains committed to filming here - despite the lure of Hollywood - and successfully convinced New Line Cinemas that NZ was the perfect setting for
the Lord of the Rings.
After the triumphs of
The Lord of the Rings, Jackson is now in the final stages of preparing his
King Kong remake for the big screen.
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