Background

Peter Jackson was born on October 31, 1961, in Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, a small seaside town not far from the country’s capital city, Wellington. He was the only child of Joan and Bill Jackson. Peter Jackson’s imagination was inspired by a picturesque coastline of cliffs and caves. At an early age, he was captivated by the television series Thunderbirds. With its marionettes, futuristic vehicles, and ingenious special effects, it fed his interest in science fiction and model building. By age nine he had commandeered the family’s home movie camera to make his own short films, trying to reproduce the special effects he loved. His imagination received another powerful stimulus when he first saw the 1933 film King Kong on television. The next morning, he began experimenting with the stop-motion animation technique that had so excited him in the movie.

Education

Peter gained his formal education from Kapiti College but dropped out of the same when he was sixteen, to pursue his film hobby.

In 2001, together with his partner Fran Walsh, Peter received the honorary graduation from Massey University.

Career

At 16, Peter dropped out of school and took a job as an apprentice engraver in a newspaper’s photography department, living with his parents to save money for camera equipment and film. When he acquired his first 16mm camera, he set out to make a short film to familiarize himself with the equipment. This project, a tongue-in-cheek science fiction horror fantasy called Bad Taste gradually grew into a full-length feature film. The project would consume four years of his life. While his contemporaries were going to university or embarking on more conventional careers, Jackson continued to labor every weekend on his project. He wrote, directed, and photographed the film, building all of the models and special effects, playing multiple roles, including the lead, and recruited neighbors and friends to fill out the cast.

A grant from the New Zealand Film Commission enabled Jackson to quit his day job while he edited and scored his homemade feature. To his surprise, the Commission decided to send Jackson’s film to the 1987 Cannes Film Festival. Astonishingly, Bad Taste, with its amateur actors and improvised special effects, charmed the festival-goers, and Jackson landed deals to distribute the film commercially in 12 countries.

Fresh from his triumph at Cannes, Jackson returned home as a certified professional filmmaker. New Zealand’s film industry was still in its infancy, but the head of the country’s film commission, James Booth, had faith in Jackson’s talent and formed a partnership to produce Jackson’s next two features. The partners followed up the surprise success of Bad Taste with a raunchy puppet film, Meet the Feebles (1990). Like Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles acquired a cult following. Jackson’s first professional live-action feature, Braindead (released as Dead Alive in the United States), established him on the international scene as an accomplished director of horror films, one with a refreshingly giddy sense of humor. As Jackson assembled a team of trusted collaborators, he co-founded a production facility, Weta Workshop, to provide special effects for his films.

By this time, Jackson had formed a professional and personal partnership with screenwriter Fran Walsh. Although the pair thoroughly enjoyed their horror and fantasy creations, they were looking for a project that demonstrated a wider range. In Heavenly Creatures (1994), they dramatized one of the most shocking murder cases in New Zealand’s history, that of a teenage girl who murdered her mother with the assistance of her best friend. Jackson showed unusual sensitivity in exploring the relationship between the two disturbed young girls and employed his growing expertise with special effects to render the girls’ shared world of fantasy. The film won international acclaim, including an Oscar nomination for Jackson and Walsh’s screenplay, and focused the industry’s attention on the film’s hitherto unknown teenage star, Kate Winslet. The mock documentary Forgotten Silver (1995) and the ghost story The Frighteners (1996) followed.

In a little less than a decade of nonstop movie-making, Jackson and his team had built up a formidable special effects production capability and were ready for a large-scale project. Jackson dreamed of an epic fantasy with swordplay and monsters, along the lines of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films. As Jackson and Fran Walsh struggled to develop an original fantasy story, they found themselves repeatedly referring to The Lord of the Rings, the beloved trilogy of fantasy novels by J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973). Jackson and Walsh had both read and loved the books as young people, but they assumed the film rights were already held by a major studio and that other producers and directors would have preemptive claims to the material.

The head of the studio had the rights to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Jackson, along with Walsh and first–time screenwriter Philippa Boyens, worked on the script for a time. At first, Jackson saw the film as a two-part movie, but Miramax wanted only one. New Line Cinema was interested in the project, as well, and felt that there was a possibility for three movies in all, reflecting the trilogy of books themselves.

As with his other movies, Jackson chose to produce this one in New Zealand and also chose a New Zealand setting to resemble Middle–earth. While Jackson and his collaborators adapted much of the book freely, they took Tolkien "as the bible in terms of descriptions," as he told Scifi.com's Perenson. Employing models, miniatures, matte paintings, and computer graphics, he enhanced the landscape into the fantasy world of Middle-earth. Painstaking care was taken, for example, in the creation of the hobbit hall at Bilbo Baggins' house. Jackson's crew created two separate scales of that set, exact duplicates of each other except for size, in order to give the illusion of a four-foot-tall hobbit.

Additionally, Jackson determined early on in the project to shoot all three parts of the movie simultaneously, over a 15-month period. Starring Elijah Wood as Frodo, along with Cate Blanchett, Viggo Mortensen, Christopher Lee, Liv Tyler, and Sir Ian McKellen, the first of the three films appeared in December of 2001 to critical acclaim. Nominated for 13 Academy Awards, The Fellowship of the Ring was an auspicious debut for the trilogy.

The Fellowship of the Ring was the second–highest-grossing release of 2001, earning $860 million worldwide. Its sequel, The Lord of the Rings: The two towers, was released in late 2002 and took a darker turn, with more violence, doom, and an epic battle scene in Helm's Deep.

The third film in the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, opened in 2003. Focusing on the final battle, the forces of good battle the evil army gathered by Saruman, an evil wizard and ally of Sauron. Although the forces of good are outnumbered, they persist with their fight to give Frodo time to complete his quest. The three movies - The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003) - were both critically and commercially successful.

Next on Jackson's horizon was an autobiography he was working on with Brian Sibley. Plus, his dream of directing a remake of King Kong was finally coming true. He had signed a "20/20" deal to direct the film, in which he would be paid $20 million for directing, plus 20% of the box office profits. The deal made him one of the highest-paid directors of all time. Jackson was scheduled to start shooting a new version in August of 2004 in New Zealand. The film is set in 1933, like the original, with actors Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody, and Jack Black playing the lead human roles. Jackson was also in negotiations to direct a film adaptation of Alice Sebold's best–selling The Lovely Bones, which he would shoot after releasing King Kong.

Jackson and Fran Walsh adapted the bestselling novel The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, in which a murdered girl looks down from heaven and recalls her life and death while watching her family and friends go on without her. The film’s release in December 2009 once again demonstrated Jackson’s directing talents outside of the fantasy/adventure genre. After overcoming a series of production delays and a contractual dispute with New Line Cinema, Jackson produced and directed a trilogy of films inspired by of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The first installment in the series, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) grossed over $1 billion worldwide. It was followed in 2013 and 2014 by The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies.

In 2018, Peter Jackson stunned audiences with a feature-length documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old. The film compiles archival footage of the First World War, digitally restored, augmented, and colorized, accompanied by narration culled from recorded interviews with veterans of the Great War. With breathtaking technological wizardry and meticulous attention to historic detail, Jackson carried his audience 100 years back in time and plunged viewers into the reality of trench warfare on the Western Front.

2018 saw the premiere of Mortal Engines, a post-apocalyptic film based on on the 2001 novel of the same name by Philip Reeve.

Achievements

• 

  As the director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson is one of the most popular and acclaimed film directors alive. Jackson was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2010. He was appointed to the Order of New Zealand in 2012. He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on December 8, 2014.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • District 9

    (From producer Peter Jackson and director Neill Blomkamp c...)

    2009
  • They Shall Not Grow Old

    (On the centenary of the end of the First World War, Acade...)

    2018
  • The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

    (The adventure follows Bilbo Baggins, who is swept into an...)

    2012
  • The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

    (In the company of thirteen dwarves and the wizard Gandalf...)

    2013
  • Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

    (In the part second of the Tolkien trilogy, Frodo Baggins ...)

    2003
  • King Kong

    (A greedy Hollywood producer assembles a team of filmmaker...)

    2005
  • Heavenly Creatures

    (Two teenage girls share a unique bond; their parents, con...)

    1994
  • Tintin and the Prisoners of the Sun

    (A team of adventurers stumble upon the tombstone of Rasca...)

    2019
  • The Lovely Bones

    (A murdered girl watches over her family as they struggle ...)

    2009
  • Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

    (With a help of a courageous fellowship of friends and all...)

    2001
  • Bad Taste

    (The population of a small town disappears and is replaced...)

    1989
  • The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

    (In this classic graphic novel, Tintin stumbles across a m...)

  • The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

    (The epic conclusion to the adventure of Bilbo Baggins. Th...)

    2014
  • Mortal Engines

    (Peter Jackson presents a world unlike any you've seen. A ...)

    2018
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

    (The final battle for Middle-earth begins. Frodo and Sam, ...)

    2003
  • The Frighteners

    (Down-on-his-luck ghostbuster Michael J. Fox must stop an ...)

    1996
  • Meet the Feebles 1989

Religion

Jackson purchased a church in the Wellington suburb of Seatoun for about $10 million, saving it from demolition.

Views

Peter Jackson is actively involved in charity. He donated NZ$500,000 to stem cell research and supported the American Red Cross.

Quotations: "Fantasy is an 'F' word that hopefully the five-second delay won't do anything with."

"I don't take stuff seriously. I saw 'Hellraiser 3' the other day at Cannes; it's OK, it's a good film, I didn't hate it or anything. I thought it was quite good, but it was all just so serious. Some guy walking round with pins sticking out of his face. I just can't sit there and think ,'this is really scary.' If I made a 'Hellraiser' film, I'd like Pinhead to be whacked against a wall and have all the pins flattened into his face."

"And so I look back on not just the last ten years but everything that I've done as being sort of an ongoing growing continual film school. I mean I don't think I've got to a point where I've achieved anything that feels like, a particular milestone, but there's still a lot more to learn and hopefully a lot more films to make."

"Remember, pain is temporary; film is forever."

Personality

Peter Jackson is known for his attention to detail, a habit of shooting scenes from many angles, a macabre sense of humor, and a general playfulness - the latter to the point where The Lord of the Rings conceptual designer Alan Lee jokingly remarked "the film is almost incidental really."

Jackson made several cameo appearances in his own films. In The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) and The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), he plays a drunken man in Bree named Albert Dreary. In The Two Towers (2002), he was a Rohirrim Warrior. In Return of the King (2003), he was a Corsair killed by an arrow fired by Legolas. In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), he was a Dwarf of the Lonely Mountain Dwarf running from the rampaging dragon Smaug in the synopsis-scene. He was also seen in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug briefly when Bard was escorting the Dwarves to his house. Although uncredited, he appeared in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies as Bungo Baggins in a painting that can be seen at the end of the third film in Bag End. The same painting appeared in Bag End also in The Fellowship of the Ring.

Peter Jackson collects models of airplanes from World War One.

Interests

• Music & Bands

  The Beatles

Connections

Jackson married Fran Walsh, a screenwriter who had helped him gain contacts in the New Zealand film industry during the 1980s. Walsh co-wrote the screenplays for Heavenly Creatures and The Lovely Bones. They have two children, Billy and Katie.

Wife:

Fran Walsh

Son:

Billy Jackson

Daughter:

Katie Jackson

colleague:

James Cameron

James Cameron collaborated with Peter Jackson. Jackson provided special effects for Cameron’s 3-D science-fiction epic, Avatar.

colleague:

Steven Spielberg

Peter Jackson oversaw post-production of Spielberg’s film version of the classic Belgian children’s comic strip Tintin.

colleague:

Liv Tyler

colleague:

Ian McKellen

colleague:

Elijah Wood

colleague:

Christopher Lee

References

• Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth The definitive history of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth saga, Anything You Can Imagine takes us on a cinematic journey across all six films, featuring brand-new interviews with Peter, his cast & crew.
  2018
• Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey Authorized and fully illustrated insight into the life and career of the award-winning director, from his childhood film projects up to King Kong, together with Jackson's revealing personal account of his six-year quest to film The Lord of the Rings.
  2006
• Peter Jackson: From Prince of Splatter to Lord of the Rings This fascinating look at the now-celebrated director tells of the inspiration that led to the making of the three world-famous Lord of the Rings films - and the six other films that preceded them.
  2003