Peter Jackson

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Peter Jackson in New York (USA), at the premiere of King Kong, December 5 2005

Peter Jackson is also a brand of cigarettes owned by Imperial Tobacco and a men's clothing store that sells suits in Australia.

Peter Jackson CNZM (born October 311961, Pukerua Bay) is a New Zealand-born filmmaker best-known as the director of the epic film trilogy The Lord of the Rings, which he, along with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, adapted from the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Jackson first gained attention with his "splatstick" horror comedies, and came to prominence with his movie Heavenly Creatures, for which he shared an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen with his wife, Fran Walsh. He and Walsh had two children, Billy and Katie. His parents are Bill and Joan Jackson.

Career

Peter Jackson in Wellington (New Zealand), at the premiere of Return of the King, December 2003

Jackson started his career in film as a fanatical hobbyist, creating small movies with simple technical means and with the help 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-minute feature film, Jackson and his crew took the end result to the Cannes Film Festival, received critical acclaim and sold the rights to twelve countries. This allowed him to start a professional career as a film director.

Unlike some other New Zealand film directors, Jackson has remained in New Zealand to make films, preferring to have Hollywood come to him to make his films. This has been the genesis of several production and support companies. Most of Jackson's assets are on the Miramar Peninsula in his home town of Wellington and much of his filming occurs in and around the city. He successfully cajoled New Line Cinema into holding the world premiere of Return of the King in the city's iconic Embassy Theatre which he has helped restore.

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 zone differences between New Zealand and North America.

Although appearing casual and relaxed, inevitably dressing in his trademark baggy shorts and without shoes, Jackson is a perfectionist with his film projects. He demands many takes of every scene (with his "One more for luck"), pushes his special-effects crew to make their work seamless and invisible, and insists upon authenticity in miniatures even on the sides that never appear 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 has a reputation for requiring a significantly smaller budget than his peers.

Universal Studios signed Peter Jackson for his first film following the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a remake of the 1933 classic King Kong — the film that inspired him to become a film director when he was 8 years old. He was reportedly being paid a fee of US$20 million upfront, against a 20% take of the total box-office gross. The film was released on December 142005, with a cast that includes Oscar-nominated actress Naomi Watts, Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody, Jack Black, Colin Hanks and Andy Serkis. The production cost of King Kong exceeded $200 million USD and the final theatrical cut runs more than 3 hours; both of these figures are far greater than those of their 1933 counterpart.

His attention will now move to the film version of Alice Sebold's bestseller The Lovely Bones, which he will be writing and directing and which he has said will be a welcome relief from the larger-scale epics and bears some similarities to Heavenly Creatures.

Much speculation has occurred as to whether Jackson might direct a film of The Hobbit, prequel to The Lord of the Rings. His comments to date seem to indicate that he is interested, if the studios can work out the rights. Late in 2004 it appeared unlikely, as MGM (the studio which holds the rights to The Hobbit) was sold to Sony in the race between Warner Bros. in December of 2004. Jackson said that production on "The Hobbit" will take at least three or four years, which would place a likely release date in 2010.

Peter Jackson is also executive producing the game-to-film adaptation of Microsoft/Bungie's blockbuster title Halo, expected to hit theaters around mid-2007.

Jackson won three Academy Awards for Lord of the Rings: Return of the King:

• Academy Award for Directing
• Academy Award for Best Picture
• Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay

Trivia

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Peter Jackson in The Fellowship of the Ring (top), The Two Towers (middle), and The Return of the King (bottom).

• Jackson usually appears in cameo appearances in his own films. In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he played a citizen of Bree (Fellowship of the Ring); a spear-throwing defender of Helm's Deep (The Two Towers); and a corsair captain (The Return of the King). While this last scene appears only in the extended cut, Jackson has a cameo in the theatrical release, as a rider during the charge on the Pelennor Fields, giving him two different cameos in the same film. He also appeared as a bi-plane pilot attacking King Kong, reprising the cameo which original King Kong filmmaker Merian C. Cooper made in his 1933 film.
• In Jackson's film Braindead, the natives of Skull Island, home of film's Sumatran Rat-Monkey, were played by the rugby team of Fiji.
• Between The Return of the King and King Kong, Jackson lost a large amount of weight (over 50 lbs/22.5kg) to the point of being unrecognizable to some fans. He attributes his weight loss, according to Britain's Daily Telegraph to a diet change. He said, "I just got tired of being overweight and unfit, so I changed my diet from hamburgers to yogurt and muesli and it seems to work." [1]
• Rumors of a feud between Jackson and George Lucas are apparently untrue. Jackson credits Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic in teaching him ways of special effects in film.
• He owns a King Kong and Pterosaur model used in the original 1933 King Kong film
• He shares one hobby with the New Zealand politican Don Brash: his estate supposedly houses a giant underground reptile farm that associates have dubbed "crocodile corner".

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)
• The Lovely Bones (2007) (Announced)
• Halo (2007) - Producer (Announced)

See also

• New Zealand cinema
• Weta Workshop
• Weta Digital
• Park Road Productions
• Stone Street Studios

External links

• The Bastards Have Landed: official fanclub
• Kaihoro.de - German Peter Jackson Fanbase
• Peter Jackson at IMDb
• GoodTaste - Polish Peter Jackson Fansite
• Peter Jackson interviewed in Three Monkeys Online Magazine
• A Picture of a thinner Peter Jackson