As a child Peter Jackson used to commandeer his mother's kitchen to cook up gore and viscera for his homemade 8-mm movies, and in his many features he has never lost this childlike glee in the sheer joy of making movies. He started his career making outrageous no-budget horror films, but The Lord of the Rings trilogy put him at the top of the Hollywood filmmaking fraternity and able to initiate any project he chooses. A canny operator, he has, remarkably, achieved this autonomy without moving from his native New Zealand - Hollywood bends to his every whim without him having to stir from his own backyard.
But whether he is working on cheap, independent horror flicks or studio-approved blockbusters, his approach and aesthetic remain the same: he has a penchant for the grotesque, a reliance on blunt, crude humour, a delight in subverting genre expectations and a manic desire to make his films work for his audience.
Homemade Gore
Peter Jackson was born in Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, in 1961 and became obsessed with movies at an early age. He began experimenting with his parents' Super 8 camera, and his early filmography includes a Second World War piece entitled The Dwarf Patrol, a James Bond spoof, Coldfinger - with Jackson himself playing 007 - and Revenge of the Gravewalker, a widescreen zombie epic.
However, all this Super 8 experience was not enough to land him a job at the National Film Unit, the government body that produced newsreels as well as tourist films promoting New Zealand. Undeterred, Jackson started making his most ambitious project yet, a ten minute horror film called Roast of the Day, financing the shoot himself from a day job as a photo-engraver at The Evening Post newspaper in Wellington. The project was beset with production and financial difficulties, but Jackson persevered for over four years, and the project expanded from a short to a 90-minute feature. Fate was on Jackson's side, as the NZ Film Commission got wind of his project and provided additional funds.
The film, when it eventually emerged in 1987, was now called Bad Taste. The story is simple: an alien fast-food manufacturer looking for new delicacies lands in the small New Zealand town of Kaihoro. The government dispatches the Astro Investigation and Defence Service (AIDS) team to investigate. Influenced by horror maestro Sam Raimi and Monty Python, Bad Taste lives up to its billing, thriving on homespun gore, adolescent humour and gross-out excesses. It was a huge hit at the Cannes Film Festival and was sold to 30 countries, putting Jackson on the film-industry ladder. It also brought him together with his wife and future screenwriting partner, Fran Walsh, whom he met during postproduction.
Puppets And Zombies
Jackson's next film was meant to be Braindead, an ambitious zombie movie, but the project proved too costly. He needed a smaller-scale project, and his solution was to use no actors. Meet the Feebles (1989) is a vicious satire on The Muppet Show, injecting the backstage antics with all forms of sleaze and filth - such as a frog haunted by Vietnam flashbacks and a musical number extolling the virtues of sodomy - that really has to be seen to be believed.
The success of Meet the Feebles meant Braindead (1992) was back on. Jackson subverts the whole zombie sub-genre when a Sumatran rat monkey bites a domineering mother, and her son (Timothy Balme) has to keep his now flesh-eating mother from infecting the rest of the town. Fuelled by high-octane action and nutty invention - look out for the kung fu priest and the zombie baby - Jackson flits between toilet humour and sharp satire as he piles up the half-eaten craniums and dismembered limbs in the Grandest of Guignols.
After Jackson proved with Heavenly Creatures (1994) that he could do more than just gore he returned to the horror-fantasy arena. The difference this time, however, was that Heavenly Creatures had attracted the attention of Universal and Jackson was now working with a sizeable budget. The Frighteners (1996) is a battle of wits between a psychic private eye (Michael J. Fox) and creatures from the hereafter. It is a fun showcase both for Jackson's imagination and the new computer-generated effects, but lacking the anarchy of his
so-called 'aplatstick' era or the sensitivity of Heavenly Creatures, it remains the forgotten film of Jackson's career.
The Rings Cycle
Following The Frighteners Jackson was slated to remake King Kong, a favourite film from his childhood. When Universal Studios shelved the project Jackson turned to another cherished ambition. His first contact with J.R.R. Tolkein's trilogy The Lord of the Rings came when he saw the 1978 animated version and then read the original texts. Determined to bring it to the screen properly Jackson originally worked with Miramax to adapt the three parts into two films, but when Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein insisted the film be reduced to a single movie Jackson baulked and moved the production to New Line, now as a trilogy.
This boldness and reluctance to compromise flows through the entire production of The Lord of the Rings. This is no slavish reproduction of a classic novel. Jackson and co-writers Walsh and Philippa Boyens excised key scenes and characters while building up others. Equally courageous, Jackson opted to shoot all three films concurrently over 274 days in 150 locations the length and breadth of New Zealand. The shoot produced over 6 million feet of film (approximately 1,140 miles or 1,830 km), ultimately whittled down, if you take all three movies together, to 11 hours and 23 minutes.
The result is thrilling, epic cinema. Jackson takes the potentially hokey story of four hobbits travelling across the fantastical land of Middle Earth to dispose of an all-powerful ring and imbues it with unforgettable spectacle - but through careful direction and great casting he never loses sight of the characters, be they elves, dwarves or wlking trees. He also creates a believable, almost tangible, world in which the characters exist through a brilliant fusion of organic, beautiful New Zealand landscape and state-of-the-art visual effects.
With a budget of US $280 million the trilogy was a huge gamble, but it paid off handsomely. The movies are, respectively, the 14th-, 7th- and 2nd-highest-grossing films of all time, the whole series earning in excess of US $2 billion. The trilogy won 17 out of its 30
Academy Award nominations, with the third part, The Return of the King, taking 11 out of 11, the joint biggest haul in Oscar history. But perhaps more important than all the number crunching, these are movies that audiences have embraced as classics for all time.
The Return Of King Kong
The success of The Lord of the Rings put Jackson on the very top of the heap. Yet, admirably, he decided to stay in New Zealand, returning to his cherished remake of King Kong. As you would expect from a director reworking his favourite film, the adaptation is reverential to the 1933 original, using modern technology to brilliantly reimagine the film's famous moments, including the giant ape's battle with dinosaurs and the duel with biplanes atop the Empire State Building. But there is something missing in Jackson's retelling - some of the storytelling bravery that marked out The Lord of the Rings, perhaps.
Jackson went small for his next project, an adaptation of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, which shares elements with Heavenly Creatures in its mingling of teenage girls, fantasy and death. Not that he is forsaking large-canvas movies for ever - he is also planning to co-direct with Steven Spielberg an animated version of comic-book favourite Tintin for release in 2009. It all weems a long way from his mother's kitchen - but then again, maybe not.
Heavenly Creatures
Based on the notorious Parker-Hulme murder case in 1950s New Zealand, Heavenly Creatures charts the slow descent of two 15-year-old girls, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, into an obsessive relationship that results in the murder of Parker's mother. Jackson vividly creates the fantasy landscapes of Borovnia, the modelling-clay fairytale kingdom that the girls inhabit. But it is the compassion and insight which Jackson brings to the intense adolescent feelings that gives the film its power, drawing brilliant performances from Melanie Lynskey and a then unknown
Kate Winslet as the central duo.
The Wizards Of NZ
Named after a New Zealand beetle, WETA is the special-effects workshop that Jackson set up with childhood friend Richard Taylor, and it was essential to the success of The Lord of the Rings. Key effects developed for the film include very large miniature models nicknamed 'gigatures', a computer program called MASSIVE, which digitally created thousands of realistic extras, and the motion-capture animation techniques used to create Gollum. Actor
Andy Serkis performed as Gollum wearing a suit that stored the movements as digital data, which was then used by animatiors to create flawless character movement. This process - again using Serkis - was later refined to bring Kong to life.
