Peter Jackson Biography

(born Oct. 31, 1961, Pukerua Bay, North Island, N.Z) New Zealand director, perhaps best known for his film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

When Jackson was eight years old, his parents bought an 8-mm movie camera, and he began making short films. He later purchased a used 16-mm camera and, with his friends, began work on what started out to be another short film. It kept growing, however, and, with the aid of a grant from the New Zealand Film Commission, Bad Taste was released in 1987. The movie won acclaim at the Cannes film festival and went on to become a cult horror classic.

Jackson followed up with Meet the Feebles (1989), which features puppets and people in animal suits engaging in the seamier aspects of human behaviour, and the zombie film Braindead (1992; U.S. title, Dead Alive), which won numerous international science fiction awards and was said by some to be the goriest film ever made. He then turned to a real-life incident for Heavenly Creatures (1994), about two teenage girls who kill one girl's mother. Its screenplay garnered Academy Award nominations for Jackson and Frances Walsh, his partner. The mock documentary Forgotten Silver (1995) and the ghost story The Frighteners (1996) followed.

For The Lord of the Rings, Jackson took the unprecedented step of shooting all three installments simultaneously, over a 15-month period in New Zealand, the location of all his movies. In addition to directing the films, he also cowrote the screenplays. The three movies—The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), and The Return of the King (2003)—were both critically and commercially successful. Jackson received Academy Awards for best director and for best adapted screenplay (which he shared with Walsh and Philippa Boyens) for The Return of the King, which won a total of 11 Oscars, including best picture. He next directed and cowrote a remake of King Kong (2005).