Peter Jackson

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter Jackson was born on the 31st of October 1961 in Wellington, New Zealand, and grew up in the far northern suburb of Pukerua Bay. His parents were English immigrants: his mother Joan worked as a factory worker and housewife, and his father William, known as Bill, was a wages clerk. Few people who knew the boy wearing a duffel coat to school with what his classmates described as "an obsession verging on religious" could have predicted that he would one day become the fourth-highest-grossing film director of all time, with his films earning over $6.5 billion worldwide.

  The story starts with a Super 8 camera given to the family with Peter in mind. It ends, for now, with an Honorary Palme d'Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in May 2026 and a new Lord of the Rings film series in production. Between those two moments lies one of cinema's most unlikely careers: a self-taught filmmaker from a Wellington suburb who never attended film school, learned editing and visual effects by trial and error, and built a global production empire from the ground up, entirely in New Zealand.

  What drove him? How did a teenager working as a photo-engraver at a Wellington newspaper, saving every spare cent for film equipment, end up winning eleven Academy Awards in a single night? And what does his work reveal about the relationship between obsession, place, and craft? Those are the questions worth sitting with as this story unfolds.

• 2. A Boy with a Camera

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  At around the age of nine, Peter Jackson attempted to remake King Kong using stop-motion models he built himself. That is where the ambition starts: not with a film school application, not with an industry connection, but with a child in Pukerua Bay trying to replicate on a tabletop what had electrified him on a screen.

  The camera that made it possible was a Super 8 handed to the family by a friend, with Peter specifically in mind. He made short films with friends, and among them was a World War II epic called The Dwarf Patrol, in which his first special effect involved poking pinholes in the actual film to simulate gunshots. A James Bond spoof called Coldfinger followed. Most significantly, a 20-minute short called The Valley won him a special prize for the shots he used.

  Jackson attended Kapiti College, where sport held no interest for him. He had no formal training in filmmaking at any point. Everything he learned about editing, visual effects, and make-up came through his own experimentation.

  When he was 16, Jackson left school and started working full-time as a photo-engraver at a Wellington newspaper called The Evening Post. For seven years he stayed living at home with his parents, channelling as much money as possible into film equipment. After two years of that saving, he bought a 16mm camera and started shooting footage that would eventually become his first feature film. His discovery of J. R. R. Tolkien came through watching Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated part-adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, a moment that would not bear fruit for more than two decades.

• 3. Splatter, Puppets, and the Fringe

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  Bad Taste debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1987, but getting it there had taken years. Jackson shot mostly on weekends because he was still working full-time. His friends acted and worked on the film for free. The premise was deliberately outrageous: aliens arriving on earth intending to harvest humans as food. Jackson himself took two acting roles, including a scene in which he fights himself on a cliff face.

  The film was only completed after a late injection of funding from the New Zealand Film Commission, whose executive director Jim Booth became convinced of Jackson's talent and later left the Commission to become Jackson's producer.

  Around this time, Jackson began writing scripts in various collaborative groupings with playwright Stephen Sinclair, writer Fran Walsh, and writer and actor Danny Mulheron. Walsh would become his life partner. Some of those scripts, including a proposed sequel to A Nightmare on Elm Street, were never produced.

  Meet the Feebles followed in 1989, co-written with Sinclair, Walsh, and Mulheron. It went weeks over schedule on a very low budget. Jackson described it plainly: "It's got a quality of humour that alienates a lot of people. It's very black, very satirical, very savage." A zombie comedy called Braindead came next in 1992, after extensive rewrites to the original script.

  These three films established a voice that was macabre, technically inventive, and entirely unbothered by mainstream sensibility. They also established the working relationships, particularly with Walsh and with what would become Weta Workshop, that would define everything that followed.

• 4. Heavenly Creatures and Mainstream Notice

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  Released in 1994, Heavenly Creatures was based on the real-life 1950s Parker-Hulme murder case, in which two teenage girls killed one of their mothers. Jackson has said the film "only got made" because of Fran Walsh's enthusiasm for the subject; she was the one who persuaded him the case had the makings of a movie.

  Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet played Parker and Hulme respectively. The film was critically acclaimed and appeared in the top ten year-end lists of Time, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The New Zealand Herald. It earned Jackson and Walsh a nomination for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. The film's release also coincided with New Zealand media tracking down Juliet Hulme, who had been living under the name Anne Perry and had built a career writing books.

  The following year, Jackson co-directed Forgotten Silver with Wellington filmmaker Costa Botes. The mockumentary presented a fictional New Zealand cinema pioneer named Colin McKenzie, who had supposedly invented colour film and talkies and had attempted an epic film of Salome before being forgotten. Though it aired in a television slot normally reserved for drama, no warning was given that the story was fabricated. Many viewers were outraged when they discovered McKenzie had never existed. The scale of the deception, and the number of people who were taken in, spoke to Jackson and Botes's precise understanding of their country's self-image as a nation of inventors and unsung pioneers.

  Those two projects together, one a grounded drama about real violence and one an elaborate constructed fiction, showed a filmmaker moving well beyond the splatter work of his early career. The Hollywood call came next, in the form of a horror comedy starring Michael J. Fox.

• 5. Building Weta

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  The Frighteners, released in 1996 with Michael J. Fox in the lead, was Jackson's first big-budget Hollywood film. Despite being set in a North American town, he was allowed to shoot it entirely in New Zealand. Film critic Roger Ebert expressed disappointment, writing that "incredible effort has resulted in a film that looks more like a demo reel than a movie". The film was regarded as a box office failure.

  Behind the scenes, this period was transformative for the infrastructure Jackson was assembling. Weta Workshop had grown out of the one-man contributions of George Port to Heavenly Creatures. In 1993, Jackson and key collaborators co-founded two Wellington-based companies: Weta Workshop, to handle special and physical effects, and Weta Digital, to focus on digital visual effects. Richard Taylor commanded the make-up and costumes work in the early phases. Both companies grew rapidly during the production of The Frighteners.

  The same period brought friction with the New Zealand Film Commission. Jackson has claimed the Commission considered firing him from Meet the Feebles after it went over budget. In 1997, he submitted a lengthy criticism of the Commission for a magazine supplement marking the body's 20th anniversary, targeting what he called inconsistent decision-making by inexperienced board members. The magazine found the piece too long and potentially defamatory to publish in full; a shortened version ran in Metro. Jackson refused to drop a client-confidentiality provision that would have allowed the Commission to publicly respond.

  Also in that period, Jackson's planned remake of King Kong was shelved by Universal Studios. The studio was already committed to Mighty Joe Young and Godzilla and feared being overtaken by those two higher-budget monster films. The King Kong project would wait almost a decade.

• 6. The Lord of the Rings

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  In 1997, Jackson won the rights to adapt Tolkien's trilogy after a meeting with producer Saul Zaentz. The path to the screen was not straightforward. Jackson initially worked with Miramax Films toward a two-film production, then faced pressure to compress the whole story into a single film. He overcame that constraint by making a last-minute deal with New Line Cinema, which was committed to a trilogy.

  Principal photography ran from the 11th of October 1999 to the 22nd of December 2000, with extensive location filming across New Zealand. Each film then had extended post-production and additional shooting periods before its release. Jackson's mother Joan died three days before The Fellowship of the Ring reached cinemas. The family held a special showing of the film after her funeral.

  The Return of the King won all eleven Academy Awards for which it was nominated, including Best Picture and Best Director. It was the first fantasy film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and only the second sequel to win that prize, after The Godfather Part II. Jackson received three Academy Awards personally for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

  The technical achievements ran alongside the critical ones. All three Lord of the Rings films won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in their respective years. Jackson was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2002, then knighted by Governor-General Sir Anand Satyanand at a ceremony in Wellington in April 2010. The Lord of the Rings conceptual designer Alan Lee captured something about the atmosphere on set when he joked that "the film is kind of incidental, really", a reference to Jackson's relentless demand for coverage and his habit of calling for additional takes with the phrase "one more for luck".

• 7. Restoring the Lost and the Forgotten

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  On the 16th of October 2018, They Shall Not Grow Old premiered as the Special Presentation at the BFI London Film Festival, with a question-and-answer session hosted by film critic Mark Kermode. The documentary used original footage from Imperial War Museums' extensive archive, much of it previously unseen, alongside BBC and IWM interviews with servicemen. The majority of the footage was colourised, converted to 3D, and processed with modern production techniques.

  Before the screening, Jackson set clear terms for what the film was: "This is not a story of the First World War, it is not a historical story, it may not even be entirely accurate but it's the memories of the men who fought, they're just giving their impressions of what it was like to be a soldier." The film was broadcast on BBC Two on the 11th of November 2018, the hundredth anniversary of the Armistice.

  The same restorative impulse drove The Beatles: Get Back. Jackson announced the project on the 30th of January 2019, the fiftieth anniversary of the Beatles' rooftop concert, which was their final public performance. Around 55 hours of never-before-seen footage and 140 hours of audio were made available to his team. Most of the footage had been originally recorded for the 1970 Let It Be documentary. The project was made with the full cooperation of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, as well as Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison. The final cut included the complete 42-minute rooftop concert.

  Walt Disney Studios acquired worldwide distribution rights in March 2020. The film was eventually released on Disney+ as a three-part series on the 25th, 26th, and the 27th of November 2021. It won five Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series.

  The de-mixing technology developed for Get Back to isolate instruments and vocals from old recordings had consequences beyond the documentary itself. It was used in the 2022 Revolver Special Edition reissue. It also made possible the release on the 2nd of November 2023 of "Now and Then", described as the last Beatles song, which used the technology to salvage audio from a 1977 demo recorded by John Lennon. Jackson directed the music video personally, incorporating new footage of McCartney and Starr alongside restored archive footage to place all four Beatles on screen together.

• 8. Obsessions Beyond Film

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  Jackson's interests beyond directing reveal a consistent pattern: he is drawn to things built with obsessive attention to craft, especially things connected to the First World War. He owns more than 40 airworthy World War I-era warbirds housed at Hood Aerodrome near Masterton. He is chair of the 14-18 Aviation Heritage Trust and chairs the Omaka Aviation Heritage Trust, which hosts a biennial air show. In 2008, he donated his services and provided replica aircraft to create a 10-minute multimedia display called Over the Front for the Australian War Memorial.

  He owns Wingnut Wings, a scale modelling company specialising in World War I subjects, though the company stopped producing kits in March 2020 with its future unresolved. He also owns The Vintage Aviator, an aircraft restoration and manufacturing company based in Kilbirnie, Wellington, and at Hood Aerodrome in Masterton, dedicated to aircraft from both World Wars and from the 1920s and 1930s.

  In 2006, he gave NZ$500,000 to embryonic stem cell research. In 2011, he and Walsh purchased 1 Kent Terrace, the home of BATS Theatre in Wellington, securing the theatre's future. He also purchased a church in the Wellington suburb of Seatoun for NZ$1.06 million to save it from demolition.

  Jackson became a billionaire in 2021 by selling Weta to Unity Technologies, an interactive 3D gaming business. He has also invested in Colossal Biosciences, a company working toward reviving extinct creatures including the woolly mammoth. His Gulfstream G650, registered ZK-KFB, was used in April 2014 in the search for MH370 before being subsequently sold.

  In May 2026, he was awarded the Honorary Palme d'Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in recognition of his lifetime contribution to cinema, and a new Lord of the Rings film series, with Andy Serkis directing The Hunt for Gollum from a screenplay co-written by Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Phoebe Gittins, and Arty Papageorgiou, is intended for release in 2027.