Peter Jackson
Peter Jackson
Sir Peter Robert Jackson ONZ KNZMis a New Zealand filmmaker and screenwriter. He is best known as the director, writer and producer of The Lord of the Rings trilogyand The Hobbit trilogy, both of which are adapted from the novels of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien. Other notable films include the critically lauded drama Heavenly Creatures, the mockumentary Forgotten Silver, the horror comedy The Frighteners, the epic monster remake film King Kongand the supernatural drama film The...
NationalityNew Zealander
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth31 October 1961
CityPukerua Bay, New Zealand
As a filmmaker, you are going to manipulate the character as you need to make the scenes work.
Structure is important in film, but there's often structure to be found in the most unlikely of places! It's quite possible to build a structured story and retain idiosyncrasy.
When you're directing, you're right at the coal face, always exhausted, often emotional - and I'll enjoy being a couple of steps back from that and simply helping where I can.
Writing a screen play with a group of collaborators is like the Lennon McCartney collaboration .... sometimes one or two people do more than others on certain parts of the process and vice versa.
I adore physical miniatures and try to use them as much as I can and have a bit of a fetish about that.
I think that George Lucas' 'Star Wars' films are fantastic. What he's done, which I admire, is he has taken all the money and profit from those films and poured it into developing digital sound and surround sound, which we are using today.
Rivalry doesn't help anybody.
Elijah can register such subtle emotion on his face that I loved doing close-ups on him. He really brings a superb emotional level to Frodo's scenes and although he is a very instinctive actor, we discussed the character thoroughly.
I mean, I didn't have a huge upbringing with movies, I guess.
No matter how many great performances or exciting visuals we put together for the movie, we found that it was all somewhat two dimensional until we added the emotional heart of Howard Shore's music. Then, and only then, did the film come to life.
There's no real rules about what you do [while directing]; it's just you just use your instincts as to the pacing of a film and what is repetitive and what is the minimum amount you can get away with to tell the story, that scene didn't make it in.
One of the first movies I ever saw was 'Batman,' based on the TV series with Adam West and Burt Ward.
I didn't want my kids having to pass through an airport named after their father.
You shouldn't think of these movies as being 'The Lord of the Rings.' The Lord of the Rings is, and always will be, a wonderful book - one of the greatest ever written. Any films will only ever be an INTERPRETATION of the book. In this case my interpretation.