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*Peter* *Jackson* Director, Writer, Actor, Producer
Birthday:
31 October 1961
Peter
Jackson was raised in the coast just north of Wellington, and as a good horror
filmmaker, he was born on Halloween, 1961. He was the only child of English
immigrants. Peter’s favourite
movies were Jason and the Argonauts and One Million Year BC. Inspired by these
movies, Peter began building all sorts of monsters, weapons, airplanes and
spaceships with plasticine, paper-machè and other materials. His first model
was a ‘crazy hunchback rat’, followed by some King Kong like gorillas.
On Christmas 1969, Peter’s parents bought a Super8 camera. He started
filming his hand-made models to reproduce the fantastic world that Peter loved
to watch. In 1971 Peter and a
couple of friends dressed up in WWI uniforms, made a hole in the garden and shot
a short movie called The Dwarf Patrol. In this, Peter experimented with his
first special effects: holes in the celluloid for simulating gun shots. For all
his short movies, Peter created the make-up, the shotguns, weapons, swords and
costumes. In 1978, at his sixth
form year at Kapiti College, Peter met classmate Ken Hammon, another film lover.
Together with Hammon, Peter Jackson shot one of his most amazing short movies, a
20 minute fantasy called “The Valley”. The Valley was shot in a couple of
week-ends but the plot involved an enormous Cyclops, totally animated in
stop-motion. At the age of 18,
during a train voyage to Auckland, Peter discovered JRR Tolkien’s THE LORD OF
THE RINGS for the first time. In 1994, Jackson decided to make a psychological drama, HEAVENLY CREATURES, based on the 1954 Parker-Hulme murder case. HEAVENLY CREATURES was shot with a 5 million dollar budget, Jackson used the same location of the real facts, including the Liam Homstead tea room at Victoria Park, and the doctors office. The most important locations were frequently unavailable, like the Rieper house, or unsuitable, like the murder scene. HEAVENLY CREATURES was presented at the Venice Film Festival in 1994. Jury president David Lynch liked the movie as well as the Festival guest Quentin Tarantino. During the promotional launch in the US, Miramax, who was the film distributor, discovered that the acclaimed writer Anne Perry was the real Juliet Hulme. HEAVENLY CREATURES is the first movie in which Jackson employs digital technology. Because there was no digital effects company in NZ, Jackson (together with Richard Taylor, Tania Rodger, Jamie Selkirk and George Port) created one on his own, the Weta Workshop bipolar company, called WETA DIGITAL. Weta digital was founded in 1993 and the first general quarter was an old Wellington apartment. Originally there was only a PC and a 1 million dollar processor for creating the special effects. FORGOTTEN
SILVER began after the release of HEAVENLY CREATURES. TV New Zealand was looking
for short documentaries, sort of contemporary drama, for the 100 year
anniversary of cinema. Peter was asked to produce a short movie and he contacted
Costa Botes, (who is an alien in BAD TASTE and the making of director of LOTR),
to collaborate on the short movie. His
intention was to celebrate the best things of New Zealand film industry.
With a little equipment and a script written by Jackson, Botes and
Frances Walsh (who is credited only as script consultant) production began in
the early months of 1995. Jackson’s newborn digital effects company, Weta
Digital, did all the post-production with the CGI, helping to create the Richard
Pierce first fly, and the Salomè ruins. On
September 1996 FORGOTTEN SILVER was shown at the Venice Film Festival when he
won the Special Jury Prize. During
the writing of HEAVENLY CREATURES, Peter and Fran came up with the idea of a
ghost movie and Peter heard via his American agent that director Robert Zemeckis
was looking for stories for a third Tales from the Crypt feature film. Peter was
producing his first movie for a US studio and he convinced the producers to
shoot the movie in New Zealand with an American cast and NZ technicians.
Zemeckis let Jackson make his choices. With the money from Universal, Peter
employed the Weta Digital staff with 35 new experts and many state-of-the-art
processors. Special effects supervisor was Wes Ford Takahashi, who worked on
Zemeckis’ Roger Rabbit. The cast was composed of such talented actors as
Michael J. Fox, Trini Alvarado, John Astin, Peter Dobson and Jeffrey Combs. With
30 million US dollars, FRIGHTENERS was shot between May and December 1995.
After completing the FRIGHTENERS, Jackson did some additional work on the
CGI of Robert Zemeckis Contact to re-pay the favour Zemeckis did to Jackson. If the lean outcome of FRIGHTENERS could have demoralized Peter, he could find comfort in a new cinematographic plan that he had begun to write together with Fran Walsh. Universal had commissioned for King Kong, the second remake of the sci-fi classic directed in 1933 from Merian C. Cooper. Once the script was completed, Universal asked Jackson to take care of the direction. Excited by the idea of being able to realize the remake of one of the films that he had loved, Jackson worked for six months. When, in January of 1997, the production of King Kong became officially suspended, Peter already had another plan, destined to become the most important film of his career, one of the most successful of the history of the cinema. Then in the six months of pre-production of King Kong, Peter had begun an adaptation of the LORD OF THE RINGS, the epic trilogy by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. In October 1995, when he began to think effectively to a film drawn from the English writer, the rights for the reduction of the works of Tolkien belonged to Saul Zaent, collaborating with Harvey Weinstein for The English Patient at the time. After the economic failure of the animated version of The Lord of the Rings in 1978, Zaent had decided not to work on any more inspired films to Tolkien. When he saw the tests that Weta had realized for King Kong, he decided to grant to LOTR a second possibility. The pre-production of the film began in 1997, after the sunset of King Kong. The intentions of Jackson are those to create two films, one entitled The Fellowship of the Ring and the other The War of the Ring, but when Disney, possessing a great percentage of Miramax, demonstrated a disposition to realize a single film, Jackson decided to address elsewhere. The last resource is New Line Cinema. In order to convince the leader of New Line Cinema, Robert Shaye, to finance the film, Jackson creates a half-hour documentary in which they come to show all of the plans from Weta Limited during pre-production. Shaye wishes to create not two, but three films, so in August 1998 the production had begun. New Line Cinema allocated 350 million dollars in order to transform in celluloid the 138 pages of screenplay signed in three years by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and the Auckland new writer Philippa Boyens, originally consulted only for one review of the script. In January 1999 began the first enterprise for Jackson and its four directors of casting, Victoria Burrows, John Hubbard, Liz Mullane and Ann Robinson: the choice of the protagonists. The young Elijah Wood comes chosen from Jackson in a more singular way. Instead of the classic meeting, Wood sent to Jackson a VHS in which, dressed up as Frodo Baggins, he recites some lines of the book. For the part of Gandalf, they had thought to Sean Connery, but Jackson did not too much notice to the iconic value of the him and he decided on Ian McKellen, veteran of applauded English films like Apt Pupil and Gods and Monsters. For the part of Aragorn, Jackson selected the 30 year British actor Stuart Townsend, but he was much to young for the part. He was replaced by Viggo Mortensen, who did not know the world of Tolkien well but had been sped up to participate from his son. Mortensen has demonstrated one of the more intense interpreters, attacking the role of Aragorn, even losing two teeth during a battle scene. In order to interpret the faithful friend of Frodo, Samwise Gamgee, Jackson engages Sean Astin. Jackson chooses two esurient actors, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd, for the roles of hobbits Merry and Pippin, following in some way the directives of Tolkien, that it had always seen the hobbit like miniature English people. Another newcomer in the group is actor Orlando Bloom, called to interpret the elf Legolas. The Australian Cate Blanchett and the American Liv Tyler came for the roles of Galadriel and Arwen.. He completes the cast with 80 year old Christopher Lee. On
October 1999 begins the simultaneous photography of the three episodes. The
design of the world of Tolkien comes entrusted to the images of Alan Lee and
John Howe, great artists who had taken care themselves of the printed
publication edition illustrations of the novel. The greater challenge for the
Weta Digital, than takes care of the special and visual effects and the creation
of all the creatures who infest the trilogy (orcs, trolls, balrogs, and Gollum),
have been the reduction of the actors in order to adapt them to the dimensions
described from Tolkien. In March of the 2000 the principal photography was
concluded. For Jackson it is still a work in progress. The final figures of the
film are breathtaking: 20 protagonists and 20 000 extras, 100 weapons
handcrafted and 2000 others. The Fellowship of the Ring opened in December 2001
and grossed about 90 million dollars in the first weekend.
Jackson is now working on reshooting of the third episode, The Return of
the King, which comes out in December 2003.
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[The Ring Goes North] 2003 |
