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Peter Jackson Biography |
Peter Jackson (born October 31, 1961), a film writer, director and producer from New Zealand. He was first known for his "splatstick" horror comedies, and came to prominence for his movie Heavenly Creatures, for which he received Oscar nominations. 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.
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 has been promised a reported US$20 million fee for his next film, a remake of the 1933 classic King Kong. As of 2004, that made him the highest-paid motion picture director in history. 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 younger versions of Gandalf, Bilbo Baggins, Elrond and Gollum, and audiences might find it hard to accept them if they looked too different from the versions in Jackson's trilogy. (Although the immortal Gandalf and Elrond wouldn't look noticably different.)
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 Best 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) |
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