Peter Jackson
Peter Jackson is a director, born 1961.
Peter Jackson's first feature was made at the absolute bottom of the budget scale: Bad Taste, from 1987, a splatter comedy he directed and in which he also plays two separate roles. He followed it with Braindead, where he turns up as an undertaker's assistant in the middle of the goriest film New Zealand has ever exported. That apprenticeship matters, because the appetite for practical mess never left him.
Heavenly Creatures in 1994 was the swerve nobody expected: a true story about two teenage girls and their private mythology, directed with real tenderness, which proved he could handle actors as well as latex. Forgotten Silver, his mock documentary about an invented New Zealand film pioneer, is the other side of the same wit.
Then The Lord of the Rings, which won him the Academy Award for Best Director and rebuilt an entire national film industry around Wellington. The trilogy still looks like an act of controlled obsession, with the miniatures, the armour and the mud all genuinely present.
The Hobbit trilogy is where the resistance disappeared. Stretching one short novel across three films produced an enormous amount of digital weightlessness, and it is the clearest evidence that his instincts sharpen under constraint. King Kong has the same problem in a milder form.
He is now the fourth highest grossing filmmaker in history, and his most valuable recent work has been restoration: They Shall Not Grow Old and The Beatles: Get Back both put his obsessive tinkering to work on real footage.
Movies (33)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
- The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)
- The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
- King Kong (2005)
- The Lovely Bones (2009)
- Braindead (1992)
- Braindead (1992)
- The Frighteners (1996)
- Bad Taste (1987)
- Bad Taste (1987)
- Heavenly Creatures (1994)
- Heavenly Creatures (1994)
- They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)
- Close Up (2012)
- Forgotten Silver (1997)
- Forgotten Silver (1997)
- Forgotten Silver (1997)
- Nos Bastidores de Hollywood (2005)
- Beyond the Movie: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
- Ringers: Lord of the Fans (2005)
- The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot (2013)
- Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan (2012)
- Attack of the Doc! (2023)
- The Beatles: Get Back - The Rooftop Concert (2022)
- The Making of 'The Return of the King' (2004)
- The Making of 'The Two Towers' (2003)
- A Filmmaker's Journey: Making 'The Return of the King' (2004)
TV (3)
Where to start with Peter Jackson
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is the obvious door and it remains the best of the three, the one where the scale still feels earned rather than assumed.
But the film to watch if you want to understand him is Heavenly Creatures, which is small, cruel and enormously sympathetic, and which contains more directing per minute than the trilogy does.
The early films are worth the detour. Bad Taste and Braindead are gleeful, homemade and extremely messy, and The Frighteners is the transitional film where the splatter instincts meet a real studio budget.
The two documentaries are the late career highlights. They Shall Not Grow Old transforms archive footage into something immediate, and The Beatles: Get Back is eight hours of studio process that is far more gripping than that description suggests.
Middle-earth
Six films, and the gap in quality between the two trilogies is the most discussed thing in his career. The Lord of the Rings was shot as one continuous production; The Hobbit was three films stretched from one short book, and he took it over at short notice.
The New Zealand films
The work before the money. Bad Taste and Braindead are splatter comedies made for almost nothing, and Braindead is still the goriest film ever released. Heavenly Creatures is the turn, and Forgotten Silver is the hoax documentary that fooled a nation.
The documentaries
The late career, restoring archive film with the same technology his effects house built for features. They Shall Not Grow Old colourises and re-times First World War footage, and Get Back reassembles sixty hours of Beatles rushes into eight.