Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey
Authorised 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.Once, Peter Jackson was a name unknown to all but a small band of loyal fans and fellow film-makers. Now he is the newest member of Hollywood's elite fellowship, with his name on the most successful movie trilogy of all time.Written with Jackson's full participation, this extensive biography, illustrated with never-before-seen photos from Jackson's personal collection, tells the inside story of how a New Zealander became Hollywood's hottest property – from the early cult classics, through Academy Award™-winning success with Kate Winslet's Heavenly Creatures, the abandoned King Kong remake, and the filming of The Lord of the Rings, a project which was abandoned two years into pre-production, rejected by most of the other studios and then picked up by New Line Cinema in the biggest gamble in film history.Drawing upon interviews with fifty of Peter Jackson's colleagues and contemporaries, author Brian Sibley paints a portrait of a true auteur, a man gifted with single-minded determination and an artist's vision. Jackson himself is both revealing and insightful about his entire film-making life, from his first childhood steps filming in Super 8 to the grand realisation of his life’s dream: King Kong.Together, these joint narratives provide a truly unique and compelling insight into one of the finest cinematic minds at work today.
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Peter Jackson
A Film-maker’s Journey
Brian Sibley
HarperCollinsEntertainmentAn Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Table of Contents
‘How on earth did this guy ever come to be making The Lord of the Rings?’
That is a question that has been asked many times over the past few years. The person asking it, on this occasion, is the person about whom it is asked – Peter Jackson…
‘Most fans of The Lord of the Rings’, he says, ‘are probably not that familiar with my earlier films, so they may have the impression that I popped up out of nowhere and was suddenly directing this huge movie-project. But, from my perspective, I certainly didn’t pop up out of nowhere. If I had, I never would have been equipped to direct The Lord of the Rings!’
Peter Jackson is about to give me another interview for this book. Our conversations – scattered across five years – have taken place on movie-sets, in editing suites, via telephone from opposite ends of the earth and at opposite ends of the day, in his home in New Zealand and in various hotels during moments snatched between attending scoring sessions, giving media interviews and going to (or coming from) award ceremonies…
For this interview we are in London’s Dorchester Hotel and Peter and his partner Fran Walsh are en route to what will turn out to be their grand-slam night at the Oscars.
We are having another conversation about this book and, specifically, how it should be described. Is it, for example, a ‘biography’? Frankly, that is not a definition with which Peter is altogether easy: it smacks, perhaps, too much of ego, suggests a sense of self-importance that is not quite to his taste…
Certainly there must be biographical elements, but they ought to serve a specific end, which is to answer that question: ‘How did this relatively unknown guy from New Zealand, whose previous career seems to have been predominantly concerned with making splattermovies, end up directing a literary ‘Holy Grail’ like The Lord of the Rings?’
The short answer – the longer version will be found in the pages which follow – is that, throughout his childhood and adolescence, Peter Jackson was unwittingly auditioning to make The Lord of the Rings. His hobbies and interests – passionately, even obsessively, pursued – were consistently preparing the man for the task. And those preparations were to continue when he began his professional film-making career.
‘It was,’ he says, ‘a hard slog to get as far as making The Lord of the Rings and it only happened because, for the ten years before, I had made movies and learnt enough about film politics to give me the skill base I needed to tackle this particular project. Ten years of film-making – if you count the little amateur ones I made as a child, thirty years of film-making. People may or may not have seen, or even know of, those films, but that is almost beside the point, because it was the experience of facing the often seemingly overwhelming odds involved in making them – creatively, technically, politically – that really equipped me to face the enormous challenges that were involved in filming The Lord of the Rings.’
Once that has been understood, the tale of the Kiwi who got to make a movie based on one of the most popular books in the world is less fluke than inevitability.
True, for every ambition there was a disappointment, for every dream, a nightmare. But one of Peter Jackson’s commonly underestimated attributes is his pragmatism. Yes, he is a perfectionist, an idealist; but he is also a down-to-earth realist: someone who – for better or worse, and regardless of accolades or criticisms – sees life as it is and then does his level best to handle it in whatever way seems most desirable – but always with the proviso that if it doesn’t work out, then it is time to re-think, to adapt and survive…
A combination of vision, talent, confidence, boundless enthusiasm and unswerving tenacity – together with a reasonable helping of sheer, unadulterated good luck – brought Peter Jackson to a point where he was directing the biggest, most ambitious film project in the history of cinema. And this then sustained him through the fourteen months of principal photography, during which that project – one film but at the same time three films – was brought to the screen.
‘This book,’ Peter said in one of our earliest conversations, ‘should not be a mere re-run of the story people have read in the magazines and newspapers. Nor should it be just a “nuts-and-bolts” account of making three complex films. It must be a frank “insider” look into the workings and politics of film-making – both independently and within the Hollywood system.’
And, of course, to answer that question ‘Why Peter Jackson?’ along with other intriguing questions, not least among them: ‘Why, having made the phenominally successful
