What makes Peter Jackson so damn precious?
This month’s Person of the Month has had a strange rise to fame since his debut film in 1987. Starting out in Pukerua Bay, a town near Wellington, New Zealand, Peter Jackson spent four years making a film named Bad Taste with friends, about an elite team that battles foul-mouthed aliens. The film was directed, written, produced and starred Jackson, and it got a lot of attention due Jackson’s gory homemade special effects.
From that small success he made his first professional films Meet the Feebles and Braindead (aka Dead Alive) which both utilised Jackson’s quick witted dialogue and bloody special effects. But it was Heavenly Creatures that got him noticed and marked a departure from his earlier work. That film starred Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey and was a crime drama meet fantasy, but more importantly was a film that was meant to be serious. The film won an Oscar nomination for Jackson and his writing partner Fran Walsh, which saw the world of Hollywood open up to him.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy came calling next, and this is where most film fans became aware of his existence. After a gruelling 1997-2003 commitment he garnered seven Oscar nominations and three wins for his part in the films, following them up with big budget remake King Kong, unnerving drama The Lovely Bones and is currently knee deep in The Hobbit trilogy.
We’re excited post 2014 when Jackson will be tackling the next Tintin project, The Adventures of Tintin: Prisoners of the Sun, and hopefully he’ll make more diverse films ranging from the gory, to the dramatic, to the comedic. Jackson is still a promising talent and with so much of his film career dominated by The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films, we’re excited at the prospect of more films to come in and out of Middle Earth.