Interview: Peter Jackson
Oscar for Best Director

How did you and Fran Walsh first become involved with filming The Lord of the Rings?

Peter Jackson: Well, The Lord of the Rings was an idea that came from us. I had read the book when I was 17 and thought, "Wow, this would make a really cool film. I'd kind of like to see the film," but, of course, the film didn't really come out. There was a cartoon version of it that popped up at some point that didn't work particularly well. But we got through a movie called The Frighteners in New Zealand, which was a big effects film. It had about 500 computer effect shots, and we had done that ourselves.

We're very self-sufficient in New Zealand. We're so far away from everywhere else that we tend to just think, if it's a film that needs a lot of CG computer work, we can't go down the road to hire Sony or Digital Domain or ILM to do our shots. We are in New Zealand, and even back in those days, where there wasn't the communication that there is today, it's like, well, this means that we're going to have to get a lot of computers and do them ourselves. So okay. So we sort of always have a very self-sufficient attitude where we are, that basically don't expect to be able to pull in rental equipment or anything else. Buy the gear, maintain it, just own it, and just get on with your filmmaking. So we've done that over the years.

In this particular time, which was November '95, we had gotten about two thirds of the way through the post production on The Frighteners. Starting to relax a little bit, starting to think about our next project, because I always like to know what I'm doing next by the time I finish a film. And we didn't have a project, but we had these computers all sitting there that had been purchased for The Frighteners and were going to become available. I'd always had a desire to want to do a fantasy film. I grew up with these Ray Harryhausen films, Jason and the Argonauts, Kong.

I wanted to do something fantastical, and I thought that that would be so much fun to take that sort of Sinbad genre and combine it with computer effects. 'Cause Jurassic Park had come out. We had seen the great dinosaurs had now been done, but to actually take fantastical monsters and swashbuckling heroes, and something like Sinbad, and do a movie like that, I thought would be really neat. So I started to think about that being our next film after Frighteners, and needed to write a story -- didn't have a story -- and started to talk to Fran (Walsh) about it, and we kept referencing Lord of the Rings all the time. We just kept thinking, saying, "Well, it's got to be like Lord of the Rings," or "It should be just like that, but like Lord of the Rings, something like that's got to happen." After a few days of doing this, we thought, "Well, why don't we find out about Lord of the Rings? We talk about it all the time, and it was just an absolute assumption that Lord of the Rings would be tied up, unavailable. Just assumed that. I mean, it's such a big title, but I thought it was worth a phone call. So eventually, I called my agent and said could he find out who has got the Lord of the Rings rights.

He made the inquiries, called back and said that they were with Saul Zaentz, and that Saul had the right for 20-odd years and got them from Tolkien himself, and Saul is not really wanting a live action film to happen. He was badly burned on the cartoon version, and really, he's not entertaining ideas of people coming to him. He has people constantly coming to him, wanting these rights, and he doesn't really entertain the notion. So you probably won't get very far. But we had a first look deal with Miramax at that stage. We were a first look deal, which meant anything we wanted to do, we had to go to Miramax and offer it to them first.

I thought it was worthwhile calling Harvey Weinstein at Miramax and just seeing how interested he was in The Lord of the Rings, and he said he was interested, and then when he heard that Saul Zaentz had the rights, he said, "Well, that's going to be no problem. I can get those off Saul," because he was doing The English Patient with Saul Zaentz at the time. This was exactly when The English Patient was being shot, and he said, "I bailed Saul out of The English Patient. I've done huge favors for him. He's going to return the favor. He's going to give me The Lord of the Rings rights."

So Harvey had rescued Saul. Fox had put The English Patient into turnaround and basically killed the movie. It was dead. Then Harvey had come in and taken it over and resuscitated the film. So there was definitely a debt there, and however Harvey used that debt, he did get Saul to agree to license the rights for a period of time to Miramax, and Miramax didn't want to do three movies. We did pitch the idea of doing sort of three, but they just wanted one or two. So we started developing a two-part script, where the first part would end at the Battle of Helms Deep. But it was two big scripts -- fat, big, epic films, the two of them.

Following the books?

Peter Jackson: Following the books, the first ended at Helms Deep, which is sort of about halfway through, and then the next one would carry on. So yeah, pretty much following the books. And anyway, we started to budget these films now, and Miramax were giving us money for the writing, and giving us money for the production design starting to work. So we sort of had a lot of information happening. There were lots of designs. Lots of characters were being sculpted as maquette form, and it simply just got too expensive basically for Miramax, and they had always been open with us.

Harvey said that he couldn't spend more than $75 million per picture. That Disney, who owned him, had put a cap on the amount of money he could spend. He was wanting for these films to be less than $75 million, and we tried. Then he found out that they weren't going to accept part one and part two as two different films, costing $75 million each. They wanted to treat it as one film, and they didn't want to spend $150 million on these two films. They wanted just $75 million. So Harvey was stuck in a really bad place, and he came to us and said, "Listen, the only thing I can do is to basically make one movie, and you guys are going to have to support me here. I've supported you. You're going to have to now do the right thing, and you're going to have to cut the script down to one film, $75 million." And I said, "Is it like the first of three? Could we just do the first one?" "No, no. It's got to be the whole Lord of the Rings as one movie, $75 million, and it has to happen now," and I just said, "I don't think I can do that, Harvey. I don't think I can do it. I don't think you can actually collapse all this into one film, get rid of so much stuff, that you couldn't even call it Lord of the Rings.

It would be like a Reader's Digest version.

Peter Jackson: Yeah. It would be a Reader's Digest Lord of the Rings. It just wouldn't feel right. It wouldn't be something I'd want to have my name on. I was wanting to make Lord of the Rings, not some horrible cut-down thing.

Another problem with condensing the three Lord of the Rings volumes into one book is that you have a world of fans hanging on every single plot point because they've read it 20 times.

Peter Jackson: Yeah. I said all that stuff to Harvey.

I said, "You know, everybody who's read this book is going to be disappointed. There's no doubt about it. They will be let down, everybody. You are taking debatably the most popular, favorite book in the world, and you're making a film that is guaranteed to disappoint everybody who is familiar with the book." "Well, not that many people have read the book," (he said.) "We won't worry about that." You know, it was like relying on the fact that more people hadn't read the book than had, and wouldn't know the crimes that we committed cutting it down. So anyway, I just said -- we were in New York in the office, "the Miramax Sweat Box," they call it, a hot nasty little room, a windowless room in the middle of the Tribeca office he's got. We just said we just wanted to go home, Fran and I. We were just sick of the whole thing, sick of Harvey and the shenanigans. We just said, "Listen, we'll have to think about it on the flight home, Harvey. All right? And just give us a day or two. We're flying home this afternoon. Let us go, and we'll just give it some thought and give you a call back." And then we flew home, having no intention of doing this film.

We were so kind of -- so sort of defeated, really. It was Fran's birthday when we got home. So we just went off to this hotel up the country just to have a quiet, getaway from it all, away from the phones, and everything else. A quiet little birthday weekend, though I did take a cell phone, and my agent (Ken Kamins) did ring at one stage, and he had spoken to Harvey. Ken had said to Harvey, "Listen, you know, Peter and Fran have given up a year and a half of their lives on this so far. You can't just tell them that they can't do this," because basically we would have said no to the "one movie" thing, and we were being thrown off the project, and Harvey was going to find someone else to make the one movie version. Ken said, "Listen, you know, you can't just discard them when they brought the idea to you. It was their idea to start with. They have certain moral rights here, and what you have to do is at least give them a period of time in which they can set the film up somewhere else," and so Harvey agreed to that, and we basically found ourselves in a position where we had four weeks to find another studio who would commit to three movies and commit to the budget figures that we had and read the scripts that we had written. The scripts would have to be rewritten if it was going to be three, but nonetheless, you'd get an idea from the script.

We went through this process of sending the scripts to everybody in L.A., everybody in Hollywood, some people in London. Only two people replied, which was New Line and Polygram, and Polygram were being sold at that stage. They're an English company, and they said that they'd love to do Lord of the Rings, but they couldn't deal with it until the sales process -- they were going to have a new buyer soon, a new owner -- and until that all settled down, and we said, "Well, we've only got four weeks," and it was three weeks now. "Harvey has only given us three weeks. We've got a ticking clock." So they immediately sort of dropped out, leaving us with only one option. I mean, everybody else passed, passed just on the notion of it.

Sony passed. Fox passed. So the script was sent out to every studio in town, and everybody passed apart from Polygram and New Line, and Polygram had to pass very quickly anyway because they were being sold, and they wanted four or five weeks to finish the sales process before they could decide, and they were very keen on it, but we just said we can't wait those four or five weeks. So that just left us with New Line and Mark Ordesky, who is an old friend of mine. I had written a Nightmare on Elm Street script for them some years earlier and had worked with Mark on that. So he and I knew each other. I knew he was a big Lord of the Rings fan because he had Lord of the Rings posters around his apartment, I remember, when I used to sleep on his couch in the old days when I came over here. So Mark was a champion for the project and got it through New Line.

We had a meeting with Bob Shaye, and Bob basically at that meeting, you know, he looked at the scripts and the various bits of artwork and a videotape that we had put together, and it was in Bob's words were, "Why would you want to charge nine dollars to see this when you could charge $27?" is the words that he used, and I thought, "What's he talking about?" It was a little bit of a mental puzzle, and then I realized he was thinking about three movies. I said, "You mean three movies?" "Yeah. Tolkien wrote three books. Why shouldn't we do three movies?" So they were immediately embracing. They saw the potential that if this was going to be as good as they hoped it would be, you'd want three of these movies, not one. You'd want $27, not nine dollars.

So Bob pretty much had that figured out from the very beginning, which was great. It was great that like, our first meeting at a company, we felt this company finally got it, finally understood what we wanted to do after this terribly, terribly frustrating time at Miramax. So we then embarked on another round of pre-production.

We had to basically rewrite the scripts again. We had to now write three movie scripts. So each of the scripts had to have a beginning, middle and end, and be structured as a satisfying script, so (we) had to tear everything apart and start all over again, carry on to developing, and then finally, we got to that day -- did casting -- and got to the day of shooting which was the 11th of November 1999. That first day of shoot was -- it was three years since I had made that phone call, the first phone call asking about Lord of the Rings. It was three years to get us to that place. Three years spent doing a little design work, a lot of conceptual work, location scouting. We were pretty well prepared. Even though it was three movies being shot back to back, the three years of preparation was fantastic, 'cause we knew what we were doing. We knew how we were going to do it, and we were a very, very well organized group of people.

What prompted the decision to film all three Lord of the Rings books at once?

Peter Jackson: Just the economics and the way that we wanted to release them.

New Line were prepared to take the risk to fund the filming of all three because that's what was going to be so much cheaper for them. We'd build sets once. We'd just shoot the set, which -- some of the sets appeared in all three films, a few of them, some appeared in two films -- and you're done. And you also have the actors on a deal, so that they can't -- you don't make one movie -- because often what happens with franchises is you make one movie, the first one is very successful, and then the actors come back and they want twice the amount of money now because they're in a successful film.

Fair enough. There's nothing wrong with that, but this was a danger for this project with three movies.

New Line had the actors contracted as one -- they're basically as one big job, and we knew it was three movies, but it was like getting paid for a job, and they're getting paid at the rate they were at that time. So like, even though Orlando Bloom's career rocketed through the three Lord of the Rings films, he was still getting paid exactly the same on the third one as he was on the first, even though he was getting a lot more money, you know, being offered to him for other films. So the economics of it, it's quick, quicker. You get a momentum going. It will be quicker to shoot. You don't have to wrap and have post-production and then start up pre-production again and do that three times. You just sort of set up, go, and stop. Anyway, it was certainly much cheaper to do it that way, but the downside of it is the risk. The downside is if the first film fails, then you've squandered the money for the other two. So that was -- you know -- it comes at its price.

It must make the casting choices even more crucial, because you can't really change them in midstream.

Peter Jackson: No, no. We did change Aragorn after we started shooting, but that's just because we felt we had to. We weren't happy with our first choice for him, but we made that decision in the first week of shooting, because we just knew. We knew if this went on that it was going to be turned to a total nightmare. And in that regard, I think, on a normal film we wouldn't have done that. We would have thought, okay, we'll get through a few weeks with this guy. We'll make it work somehow. It will be okay, but the fact we were facing 18 months of shooting, we just had to have people who were 100 percent committed, 100 percent nice people who we felt we could comfortably work with.

Casting the human beings, you know, who were actors, but casting them as humans was so important, casting them as people that we got to know, and feel whether they would survive in New Zealand for 18 months without being driven crazy, whether they'd be supportive of the film. I think what happened is we got a really incredible group of people and who had great loyalty, and I think -- I thought about it afterwards -- and I thought that really, what the dynamic has done is it's -- now we've ended up with people that are really thinking, "If I've committed to a movie that's going to -- I'm going to spend 18 months of my life on it -- it's going to have to be pretty bloody good. I don't want to spend 18 months on a dud." So everybody showed up on set every day with a spirit of, "Let's make this as good as it can be because, man, this is a big piece of my life, and I don't want to see this going to waste on a bad movie."

So that spirit of "let's make this as good as we can" never went away. It was actually just a spirit that was there and a reflection the whole time.

We've all met people who literally have read The Lord of the Rings 20, 30, 40 times. Were you one of those people who kind of digested the book as a child?

Peter Jackson: No. I read it when I was 17, once, and I never read it again until the idea of doing the film came about.

But obviously, it appealed to you greatly.

Peter Jackson: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's the sort of story that I always wanted to make. I mean, my frame of context was more, you know, Jason and the Argonauts, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, more that type of thing.

I'd always wanted to make a fantasy film because I used to love those films when I was a kid. Ones with monsters and ogres and trolls and sword fighting and big battles and castles. I mean just that whole thing, that was one of the worlds that I loved the most really, and so it just happened to end up being The Lord of the Rings, the big granddaddy of them all, ended up being our subject matter. But it was certainly a project that -- it was a genre that I wanted to do, but I had always thought Lord of the Rings was a bit unattainable. I thought it was out of our reach, especially when you're down in New Zealand. You're not ever gonna think you're going to get a chance to make Lord of the Rings. You don't even dream about it. You think you're going to write an original story, a Lord of the Rings-ish type of fantasy story. That's what I assumed would happen.

Talk about the decision to remake King Kong. We know it was a favorite of yours as a child, but it takes a lot of guts to do something like that.

Peter Jackson: King Kong is, in my view, one of the great pieces of escapist entertainment. It has everything that's wonderful about escapist cinema. It's got monsters. It's got intrigue, adventure, action, lost islands, dinosaurs, gorillas, and then at its heart, it's got a wonderful love story. It's a very romantic story about a gorilla who's had no empathy with any other creature. His heart is lost to Ann Darrow, to this young woman, and it's a bittersweet sad story, whilst being this, you know, wonderful adventure.

I'm a huge fan of the first, original film, but that didn't make me feel like this film should never be remade. I don't think like that. The film is not in any danger, and the fact, you know, the production of our film ultimately inspired Warner Brothers to finally do a lovely DVD restoration for King Kong. It was no coincidence that it was released just as our film was coming out. They released a wonderfully restored version of King Kong, which had never been out on DVD in the U.S. before. So that was good. It was good that we caused that to happen.

My feeling also is that there's a lot of kids today who don't watch black-and-white films. I mean, you ask for a show of hands of who has watched King Kong. Some people will put their hands up, but almost all of them will have watched the Jessica Lange version from 1976. That is their King Kong. That's the one in color that they see on TV. Hardly anyone would have watched the 1933 film. That's just the reality, whether you like it or not. It's just the fact that these films are not enjoyed anymore by kids who think they're old fashioned. They just have no patience for that sort of stuff.

I just thought this is a wonderful story. The time is now here, both from the point of view of nobody sees King Kong anymore, and the fact that the technology has now gotten so potent and so powerful, the computing power that we have, that Kong can be done in a totally photo-realistic way. And you know, we set out to preserve as much about the original film as we could in the sense of the 1933 setting, the Depression, which is a very important part of the story, and I didn't want to lose that. I wanted the Empire State Building with him being attacked by biplanes. So I wanted it set in the '30s again for that reason.

How did you rebuild 1930s New York?

Peter Jackson: We built a very small back lot of New York in New Zealand, a very small bunch of streets. There were only about 20-foot tall buildings, and then there we used the street stuff for the actors, and we would use CG extensions to make the buildings go higher.

The actual aerial shots where we are flying around the Empire State Building, that "all of Manhattan" is built on the computer, one building at a time. In fact, we didn't even have enough time. There's 78,000 buildings there, and we didn't have enough time to have a person model each building. We just couldn't have done it. We didn't have enough. Too many buildings and not enough people. So we developed a piece of software in the computer, and the computer constructed the city for us. We put in a bunch of architectural styles of different buildings: sandstones, brownstones and apartment blocks and business places and banks, and we put a street map of New York in, and we labeled each street in the computer with the type of buildings it would have, the sort of ranges of heights that we would need, and we would literally press the button, and the computer program went through and built the city for us. We'd written this piece of city-building software because we didn't have enough manpower to do the whole thing.

The Empire State Building we obviously built very realistically, got the original blueprints of the building. The airplanes, the Curtis Hell Divers that don't exist anymore, they were the planes that attacked Kong in the 1933 film, and I thought we would find one in a museum somewhere that we could copy, but actually they're all gone. There is not one single surviving Curtis Hell Diver anymore. So we had to go back to the factory drawings we got out of the Smithsonian, or out of the Curtis factory, and we recreated the planes from the drawings.

It's a very loving homage to the earlier film and obviously with state-of-the-art modern technology. The character of Kong himself has so much poignancy. How did you make him so scary, yet so touching in his humanity, as it were?

Peter Jackson: Kong is a wild animal. We wanted to not make him unduly cute. He's a terrifying, frightening animal who is unpredictable, full of rage. That was really the main priority for us was to establish him as a very frightening, scary creature, and then we were able to -- starting at that point -- we were able to then just peel away little moments of the facade at times, and reveal a heart and a soul and something more caring underneath that. And I think that Ann just -- Ann, who he had every intention of killing when he first takes her away into the jungle -- she manages to survive on something, some sort of cunning and wit that she has, but she basically sparks his interest, and while he's curious about her, she'll stay alive. She realizes if she can just keep him curious and keep him wondering and keep him entertained to some degree, then he won't kill her.

The tables really turn when you reach a point where Kong is now fearful that Ann's going to be taken away or be hurt. So he goes into a protective mode, and then at that point, the power shift has happened. Because what is interesting is Kong has an immense power over Ann, but in the moment in the story where he now is going to do anything he can to protect her, is the power has shifted to her, really, that Ann now has power over Kong, and that's ultimately his downfall, of course, because once he's in this super-protective mode -- that anybody who tries to take her away, he's going to come after them -- that is going to lead to his demise. It sort of has to, really.

The actor Andy Serkis has been at the center of these two great epics that you've made, providing the movements for Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, and for Kong himself in King Kong. We haven't heard much about anyone else doing that.

Peter Jackson: No. Andy has become somebody, an actor, who is very, very intrigued by motion capture, and for obvious reasons. I mean, he did Gollum, and now he's on Kong, and he just loves performance. He's a powerful actor just by himself. You see him in films and TV stuff that he's done. Andy is a very strong actor, and very full of aggression and rage and power, and he's actually pretty formidable, and he's just fascinated by channeling that, through the process of motion capture, through the computers, and allowing it to be translated onto the face of a completely different creature. I think he finds that fascinating, and it's an interesting way of shooting a film, and I think it's a way of filmmaking that's going to get much more common, rather than not, because it allows you to get performance out of any creature that you really want to get performance out of. You were always a little bit at risk, you know, if it was just animators animating the face of a creature. You're getting an animation, but you're not necessarily getting a great performance.

I think what we've shown, with Gollum and with Kong, is that at the heart of any great performance is an actor, is a human actor, and we've tried to develop a pipeline that allows everything that is good and strong about that actor's performance to be preserved and translated and captured and kept and contained within our CG performance, not dissipated. I think that's the lesson really. I don't think any other companies are doing that, other than us. Other companies seem to just animate their characters, but we try to have them driven by the spirit of a human being, and that spirit I think is important.

Can you tell us about the place where you grew up in New Zealand? Did that sort of spur your imagination?

Peter Jackson: I grew up in a little town in New Zealand at the bottom of the North Island called Pukerua Bay. It had about 800 people, but it was a very -- I mean, I look back on it as being very romantic, but it was. It's something like a Wuthering Heights-like Goonies type town, right on the edge of the coast, thundering waves along the beach. There's stone caves inside the mountains. There's lots of hills, waterfalls, streams going down, houses perched in amongst hills. Our house was on the edge of a cliff that sort of plummeted right down into the ocean. It was a children's playground, an adventure playground. I was an only child. So I didn't have brothers and sisters, spent a lot of time by myself reading books, imagining, and I used to imagine adventures taking place in the area that I was in.

I was convinced that at some point I'd be going through some of the bush and into a stream and I'd find an old flintlock -- a gun from the 1800s -- that somebody had dropped. I was convinced that on one of my journeys I'd stumble across an old gun, which was always in my head when I was scrambling around. I never actually did, but that was my dream, to find an old musket. Nonetheless, it was a childhood that was full of this stimulus, this environment in which I lived, which was fantastic. I used to do things without my parents knowing. Being a parent now, I'd be horrified!

When I was about eight or nine, some friends and I got into this routine where we would wake up at three o'clock in the morning, tap on our windows, you know, because we lived down the street, tap on the window. We'd get out. We'd get dressed. We'd climb on our bikes, and we'd go biking up and down the hills and down to the beach, and around at three o'clock in the morning, just a group of us, and then by four o'clock, go back, get undressed, get back in our jammies, and go back to sleep again, and parents had no idea we were doing this. We had these sort of midnight adventures, and they were just like adventures out of Enid Blyton, who was a famous British author, wrote children's adventure stories, Famous Five, Secret Seven. We were sort of heavily into that world, and that was how I grew up.

As I did that . . .

I was beginning to get interested in film, but that came through watching Thunderbirds on TV, a British TV show, Thunderbirds. When I was about five, our parents got TV. When I was five, I remember it arriving in the lounge in a cardboard box and Dad having to screw the wooden legs into the set, this old black-and-white Philips set. So from five, I had TV, watched Thunderbirds, was really captivated by the fantasy elements, and the TV show has lots of models of spaceships and interesting sort of gimmicks and gadgets. It's a great TV show, very, very inventive and imaginative. The next thing that happened really is seeing King Kong, the original King Kong, when I was nine, and that film really accelerated a burgeoning interest in special effects, models and films. I could make models quite well.

I used to make a lot of model kits when I was a kid, and I used to sometimes make kits out of cardboard boxes and things. I didn't just make plastic kits. I made my own models.

My parents got given a Super 8 movie camera by a friend down the road, just presented it to my parents for Christmas one year when I was about nine. This camera arrived one Christmas, which was for us to do Super 8 home movies, except I grabbed the camera immediately, because I thought, "God, now I can get my spaceships that I've made, my models, and I can film them, just like Thunderbirds."

You know, I can have two things smashing together. I used to buy plastic model airplanes and set fire to them, because they'd burn quite well. They have this inky black smoke that comes off the plastic when you set fire to them, and I used to have them going down on carton lines and smashing into the dirt bank. It used to be like a World War II Spitfire crashing out of control, and the melted plastic would just be sort of sitting there, smoldering away, and so I did a lot of that sort of filming.

I got interested in stop-motion animation as a result of King Kong. Ray Harryhausen's films, two: 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts. They're all stop-motion. We move the figure one frame at a time, and my camera didn't have a "one frame" button. I could only just squeeze the trigger and squirt off two or three frames before I had to move the puppet, and then another two or three frames, so very, very jerky animation, since it was very imprecise. But anyway, this was all sort of fueling me. I wanted for a long time to be Ray Harryhausen's assistant when I grew up, and help him do stop-motion animation. Didn't think about directing films at this point in time. I just wanted to do special effects.

I made World War II movies. I eventually got a Super 8 camera that could do single frame, and I got a sound camera, so I could record dialogue.

I did like a World War II drama film with friends of mine in old army uniforms -- kids with big helmets and uniforms that don't fit very well -- running around, dug trenches in my parents' garden. My parents were really great, and that's actually something worth talking about on this, because I think unless you have the wholehearted support of your parents, I think any nutty kind of hobby or just passion that you have, you're going to get cold water thrown on it. I was having these nutty ideas about wanting to build trenches in our garden, get Dad to help me build machine guns out of broomsticks. I wanted to make movies and to make monsters and all this. And my parents, I think, who were very, very -- just very gentle, simple, conservative people, they would have probably preferred -- they kept trying to prod me into an architecture career, but nonetheless, every single thing I did with film, they supported me.

They drove me to vacations before I had my driver's license. They helped me get the stuff I needed to do foam latex.

I ended up having to bake foam latex heads in these big plaster of paris molds in my mum's oven. So mum couldn't cook the Sunday roast that Sunday. We always had to have beans on toast or something, because the oven was commandeered by me filling the house full of fumes -- of course, toxic fumes -- as the foam latex queue is in the oven.

So just very understanding parents are important, and I think there's a good lesson for students here who are going to become parents themselves, that I think if you want your kids to achieve in any sort of way, you have to just let them find their passions. You can't impose a passion onto anybody. Somehow you are born with it, or things get triggered during your childhood.

I'm here because I'm a film maker and I want to make films, and that's been the way I felt almost since I was born, and I've never really thought about doing anything else, and so I had -- my parents supported me, and that support is really important, and I often think how many people out there have failed to achieve in later life because they didn't get that support from their parents when they were young.

I got through my teenage years, wanting to leave school as quickly as possible, where again, I look at all the students at the Academy here, and it's like I'm definitely not the right role model when it comes to that.

I just wanted to get out of school as fast as I could, not because I hated school, although I didn't like it. I wanted to get out of school because I wanted to buy a 16 millimeter camera. This was all about the equipment. It was all about the frustration of trying to make films, but not having the best gear. My parents had got me a Super 8 sound camera for a Christmas present during my teenage years, which I used, but we're now getting up to a point that they couldn't expect to buy me a 16 millimeter camera for a Christmas present, and I needed a camera, which meant I needed to earn money. I just had to earn money, and so I just wanted to get out of school and into a job, any job, so that I could start saving up for the next piece of film equipment that I wanted. I did leave school at 16. I got a job at a newspaper as a photo lithographer, and during that seven years I was there, I basically spent two of the years saving up for a 16 millimeter camera, which cost several thousand dollars, and I was only getting paid 75 bucks a week. I lived at home with my parents all this time because I couldn't afford not to.

They were giving me free board and free rent, and it was like all my friends were going into flats. They were leaving home, but I just realized that leaving home was going to become really expensive. I'd have to buy a car. I'd have to pay a landlord rent. It was like, "How am I going to buy a camera if I've got all these outgoing?"

So I stayed at home with Mum and Dad, who didn't charge me anything to stay at home, and was able to save this money. Got my 16-mil camera eventually, after a couple of years. And at that point I started working on a film that started out as a short movie, because I wanted to try the camera out. It was a Bolex camera, a 16-mil spring-wound camera, but quite complicated, more sophisticated than what I'd ever done. I had to set my own exposures, develop with a light meter, and had to learn how to do that, because all the Super 8 cameras were just auto point-and-shoot things. So I suddenly had to figure things out. And I didn't want to waste any money at all, because I realized with 16 millimeter that three minutes of film was basically $100 -- by the time you've bought the roll of negative, you again have to process the negative, and then you have to get a print made off the negative. By the time you'd gone through that, back in those days, it was $100 to get those three minutes done. So this was serious now.

The Super 8 things were like four dollars each. So I had to be pretty serious every time I squeezed that trigger on that camera. It wasn't for fun anymore, really. So I thought, okay, I need to learn how the camera works, but I'll do that by making a short film, so at least at the end of the day, I get a film out of my tutorial, as it were. So I made this short film and figured out how the camera worked.

I could only film on Sundays 'cause I had a full time job, and I had to work a sixth day overtime at the newspaper I was working at, just so I could earn enough overtime pay, 'cause now to pay the expenses of this film. So the short movie expanded and grew, and I thought it would be ten minutes long and then -- film it over two or three weeks -- and then what would happen is I'd sit all week in this boring job that I didn't particularly like, and my mind would just be thinking about the movie the whole time, and I'd come up with new ideas of things I hadn't thought about for what we were going to shoot next Sunday. So next Sunday would roll around, and I'd have a whole different bit of plot that I'd figured out that I wanted to do on that particular Sunday. And so the short film grew and grew and grew and expanded out over this period of time, and eventually we ended up shooting it for four years -- Sundays for four years -- and I had none of it cut.

Then I took a two weeks leave of my job because I was only allowed three weeks holiday a year. So I took two weeks of my holiday.

I got a very simple editing machine -- 16-mil editing machine -- and I sat on my mum's kitchen table, and they couldn't eat dinner on the table anymore. They had to eat on their laps. So for two weeks, I just simply edited the film that we had been shooting over the course of the last few years, and it came to a feature length. I mean, I knew I had shot a lot, but I thought it might have been 45 minutes or an hour, but it came to something like 75 minutes, and we still had a little bit of filming to go. So at that point, after like three years of working on this film, I realized it was now a feature. I'd been completely thinking short film, short film, and I thought, "My God, I'm actually making a feature film!"

At that point, I got some help from the New Zealand Film Commission. They saw it and came on board. I had spent 17 grand of my own money to reach that point. The film commission came on board, saw what I had, the 75 minutes, and they agreed to come in with another 30-odd grand which would enable me to leave my job, work full time on the film, still shoot it the weekends, but I'd be able to build the costumes and sets during the week, and it was just going to exhilarate the whole thing. Then they gave me money to finish the post-production of the film, which was 200 grand, because that's quite an expensive process, the post-production. You have to blow it up to 35 mil, have to lay a soundtrack, hire a composer, do a score, do a sound mix, color timing, everything to get the film done.

We got it done in 1988 for the Cannes Film Festival. It was called Bad Taste, and it sold really well. The irony is that it was the fastest selling New Zealand film ever. New Zealand had made sort of worthy films, socially aware sort of, you know, slightly arty, pretentious films to some degree. And I come along, and the Film Commission, they have the job of selling all the New Zealand films at Cannes, and within the space of 48 hours, I think, Bad Taste had sold to more than 30 countries who'd come in and bought it, and we were already at that stage, way past the money. We were in profit. We'd gone way past what we actually spent on the film. It still gets sold now. The licenses always get renewed, and the film's sort of in constant circulation.

It seems like if you had been growing up in Hollywood, you would have been hard-pressed to go to the Los Angeles Film Commission and have them say, "Okay. You're a talented young filmmaker. You've never made a film before, but we're going to support this and make sure you have the money to finish it." So in a way, it sounds like you were helped by the fact that you were where you were.

Peter Jackson: Yeah. Well, the New Zealand Film Commission, it was an odd one for them as well, because they're used to getting applications for films about the difficulties of bringing up a child by yourself after you divorced your husband or wife. You know, socially conscious, aware. The subjects of New Zealand films are often very bland and very boring and very uninteresting. Nobody in those days had a feeling of fantasy and imagination in the films, I didn't believe.

This film, I have to say was very gory. It was a splatter movie called Bad Taste. So it was not -- it was actually something very unusual for a government film organization to fund. I had a very good friend called Jim Booth who was the head of the -- I mean, he became a good friend. He was a sort of enemy at the beginning, 'cause he was the head of the Film Commission, but Jim supported it. He later left to become a producing partner with me, so he became a good friend, and he was the right guy at the Film Commission to actually do this. He was a person prepared to take risks and not to stick with the norm.

I left the newspaper, left my full-time job after seven years. I left at the moment the Film Commission came in with money for me to finish it. Quit my job, and I've never been back there since. Always felt that one day I might have to go back, but I guess now I probably can start to put those fears to rest. I still have recurring dreams that I'm back at the newspaper there, that things haven't worked out well in the film business, and I'm back in the photolithography department.

There's one very interesting sort of gap in your résumé. A lot of filmmakers of your generation have a degree from a film school -- from USC or NYU or whatever. But you're a very impressive example of someone who taught themselves.

Peter Jackson: New Zealand didn't have a film school. New Zealand didn't have a film industry when I was starting out with my early films. I was wanting to make movies in a country that didn't make films basically, didn't make anything. So I think I must have been assuming when I was young that I'd have to travel overseas, and I'd have to go to where Ray Harryhausen was if I was going to be his assistant or whatever. I certainly had a feeling that I wasn't able to stay in New Zealand.

But when I was about 16 or 17 years old, Roger Donaldson made a movie called Sleeping Dogs, which was New Zealand's first real feature film. It was 1977, and it was in color. It had Warren Oates in it. It was like a real movie, and then other film makers, Jeff Murphy, followed very quickly. Goodbye, Pork Pie, which was a very funny comedic film, came along, and then suddenly, with a hiss and a roar, the New Zealand film industry got underway, and the government formed the Film Commission. And this was happening at just the right time for me, because I was 17, 18 years old. I was now getting really serious with the films that I had been making during my teenage years. I had been making, you know, James Bond movies and all sorts of things. So I was really excited that there was a film industry.

I tried to get a job in the film industry when I left school, but I couldn't get any job at all. It wasn't an industry, it's just a bunch of people that make movies. There was nothing, no position I could go into. So I ended up at the newspaper. But anyway, by the time Bad Taste came out at Cannes, I was essentially a professional filmmaker at that point. I sort of ended up becoming a professional filmmaker because I got this film made in the weekends and it got sold at Cannes and it made money. So suddenly, I was there.

I wanted to keep the momentum going very quickly. I met up with some interesting people. I met up with Fran Walsh at this stage, and Steven Sinclair, another writer.

We started writing a zombie comedy film called Braindead, but we couldn't get the money for that. It was too expensive. So we had this other idea called Meet the Feebles, which was a cheaper idea based on puppets, like the Muppets, but puppets who do sex and drugs, and they murder each other, and when they shoot each other, squibs would fire off with blood spurts out of these puppets as they keep getting hit, and it's like this -- it's a very anarchic film, very funny actually. It's very funny. It's the one film I screened for the cast of King Kong last year when they came down to New Zealand. I got an old print out off the shelf, and we sat down and watched the Feebles, and they couldn't believe it. Sort of thought they should know who they're dealing with.

But anyway, Meet the Feebles was another one that sold well at the marketplace, that went to Cannes and sold well and made its money back very quickly, which enabled us to then finally get Braindead made, which is called Dead Alive in the U.S. That 's a very gory horror comedy about zombies.

Braindead was still a low budget film, but it holds up very well.

Peter Jackson: That was three gory splatter movies pretty much in a row, and at that point, I did feel like doing something a little different. Fran -- who had written both Feebles and Braindead with me, and we were now a writing team -- Fran said to me, "Why don't we do something on the Parker-Hulme murder case?" I hadn't heard of the Parker-Hulme murder case, and she told me about this very famous murder case that happened in New Zealand -- the South Island of New Zealand, Christchurch -- in 1954. it Involved these two teenage girls that killed the mother of one of the girls.

The other girl is a friend, but they get into this. They're friends. Their friendship builds. They get into this slightly hysterical space. They do what all kids do. They invent imaginary characters, and they write stories about their imaginary kingdoms that these characters live in. They slowly get torn apart because one of the girls' families, Juliet's family, starts to separate, and they're English. So they're going to take her back to England, and so this friendship is going to be torn apart, and it's really out of that grief that these two girls, who had formed a very, very close bond, are going to be separated. Out of that grief comes a plot. A crazy, silly plot to murder the mother of Pauline, who was the girl who was staying, who wasn't going to be leaving. They were deluded. In their minds, they justified that if they killed Pauline's mother, then it would put the brakes on the whole separation, and so they did what is quite unthinkable, this premeditated act.

They took her on a bus to some tea rooms at the top of a hill, gave her a cup of tea and a cake, and then went walking down the hill. And they walked down the hill to this track, and they had predetermined the spot where they were going to drop a plastic bauble -- you know, a sort of piece of plastic jewelry -- on the ground and make the mother pick it up, and as she bent down, they were going to hit her over the head with a brick, and they went through with this. It was one of those things where you think at any time, they would stop doing it, they would pull out, they would chicken out, but they actually went through, and they brutally murdered Pauline's mother. That was a very famous murder case in 1954.

There's ramifications of it down in Christchurch still. I mean, it's a case that Christchurch doesn't like to talk about. It was almost seen as an embarrassment to the city. This is a very English, upper class city, Christchurch, and this black dark stain on the record of the town is something that people still feel today. But we wanted our movie to explore the friendship, and to explore how this positive friendship could have ended up twisting around to this murderous act. So that movie was Heavenly Creatures. We got nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay on that film.

The casting of that film was amazing.

Peter Jackson: We wanted two unknown girls to play the two teenagers. They were 15 and 16, and so we had Melanie Lynskey, who's a New Zealand girl, to play Pauline, the Kiwi girl. Fran just found her in a class in school. She literally -- Fran got so desperate, because the casting directors weren't showing us people that we liked, and so she got in a car and drove to schools and asked if she could go into classrooms, said that she's casting for a film, and she would just stand in the classroom and ask a girl to stand up, and then just say, "Could you come with me?" and then she'd go and audition her.

The schools were fine with this to happen. It was like Fran was just tearing girls out of their classrooms, because we got very, very desperate.

The English girl, Juliet, who was 17 years old, was played by a 17-year-old unknown actress in the UK, who had never made a film, called Kate Winslet. Kate Winslet's obviously gone on and made a lot more movies now, but this was her first film, and she was fantastic to work with obviously, and so Kate and Mel were a really great combination. They bonded pretty well, and they got through the film, helped us through the film.

What did you see in Kate Winslet that made you think she would be able to pull this off, when she had never been in a film?

Peter Jackson: John Hubbard, our London casting director, had very good instincts. I remember very clearly, he said to us, "Kate Winslet's going to be a big star one day." That's what John says. He doesn't say that with hardly anybody, but he says Kate's going to be a big star one day, and that wasn't really for that reason, because she wasn't a star now for our film, but we liked her energy. She was able -- she had a truthfulness which is really powerful. She's very strong on emotional stuff, because this was a very emotional, very angst -- fraught with despair, and she had to play all that stuff, and she just does emotion very, very well. She's very believable, and she taps into real things where she generates her tears and her upset, and it comes from a real place. Often actors pretend, and you can see they're pretending. The best actors don't pretend. They actually channel some part of their selves which causes immense pain, and the pain is on their face and the tears come out of their eyes, and they've gone there. They've gone to a dark place, whatever that is, and they are living the anguish and the pain, and they're giving that to you to film for your movie, and that's what Kate does.

You've mentioned your partnership with Fran Walsh. By the time of Heavenly Creatures, were you also a couple, or were you still just collaborators?

Peter Jackson: We were a couple about the time of Heavenly Creatures, yeah. We were friends. We were very good friends through a couple of years while we wrote Feebles and Braindead, and then we got together around Heavenly Creatures time, which was really great. It was nice. I think Fran and I both absolutely valued the fact that we got two or three years of just getting to know each other as friends, as coworkers, co-script writers before anything got serious. So it was good. It's given our relationship a really stable, solid foundation.

How do you complement each other as writers and collaborators? Is it completely democratic? Do you take certain roles? Is she an editor? Are you an editor?

Peter Jackson: It tends to vary, and there's no rules, and we don't actually think about it too much.

Often the best writing is really with Fran and I just sitting on the floor, lying on the floor with a note pad and pen, and we're just bouncing ideas back across between each other, and she's scribbling stuff down and I'm scribbling stuff down. We're trying out lines of dialogue. We're figuring out sort of the way a scene might flow, and we're just making notes, and then after that, I'd just get her notes and my notes, which are almost indecipherable, and go up and I'd sit down and I'd have a go at just typing the scene into the computer, so we could have a look at it actually in the cold light of day, have a look at it written out as a scene.

And then...

Fran is very good at revising. I usually just let her sit down with the pages. There's always a time where she sits down by herself with the written pages and starts revising and starts changing, because that's where a lot of the skill of script writing is. It's not in actually getting the script written, it's the revising afterwards. It's the endless, endless revisions, and Fran's strength is that. She's fantastic at picking the weaknesses out of a script and just revising it and revising it and revising it 'til we're happy with it.

What's next for you and Fran Walsh?

Peter Jackson: We're doing our own adaptation of The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold's book. We just bought the rights to the book ourselves. We're not attached to any studio, which is an unusual way of doing it, because normally, even for the fact that the book's rights cost quite a lot of money, you go to a studio and partner with them, and they get you the book. We wanted to avoid everything that comes with that, because at that point, they have an expectation of delivering a script, an expectation of a date the film is going to be. They even figure out the date they are going to release the film, and suddenly you are on the machine again.

We just had been on the grind for ten years basically, you know, the grinding film machine where you're laying the tracks in front of the train the whole time and the thing's coming down behind you. With Kong following the three Lord of the Rings films, it was ten years of that, and we literally wanted to wake up in the morning for a while and not have anybody expecting something from us, not having a script that people are waiting for and not having a -- you know, show up on the scoring stage, show up at Weta (workshop) to talk about a fix. We just wanted to have a period where our calendar wasn't packed with meetings and expectations for us to have to perform and do things. And so the only way we could avoid that is to just option the book ourselves with our own money, which we did, and so now nobody is telling us how quickly, how slow or fast we have to write the script, and we're really enjoying it.

It's making for a better script in actual fact, because we really feel we're writing this one for us. We don't know who the company is. We obviously will eventually make the film with a studio, but we don't even know who that studio is yet. So at the moment, it just feels like we're doing it for ourselves, which is a lovely feeling. It gives you a lot more freedom in writing the script too. We don't have to worry about the fact that, "Somebody is going to read this in three weeks! Oh my God!" You sort of don't get self conscious about it. The Lovely Bones is a story in which I think everybody who reads the book probably takes different things from it. I think what's important is that Fran and I get to write a script that very clearly and vividly describes the movie that we see being made, because I think that is important for this project that we are all on the same page.

I think the danger with The Lovely Bones would be writing a script with a studio attached, and you end up with a completely different film than the studio was imagining, and then suddenly they're saying, "Well, can't we change this and can't we change that?" We just really want to have the script in a state that's -- you know, not going to happen immediately, it will take several drafts -- but get the script in a state that we are comfortable, and we've arrived at the film that we want to make, and then go to different companies at that point with the script, and we'll simply go with the company that we think is supportive, and responds to the script that they read.

You've been very true to New Zealand for the filming of all your movies. You've also had a tremendous impact on New Zealand tourism. Everybody wants to go see where Lord of the Rings was shot, but you've really had an impact on the film businesses.

Peter Jackson: We've had an impact to a degree. Tourism in New Zealand has certainly exploded since The Lord of the Rings films came out. There is a little bit more activity in the local industry. That's the industry that I want to see helped, is the New Zealand filmmakers trying to get their films made. The government will put more money into filmmaking. They do seriously understand the benefits that a film can bring to a country now, and I think it maybe took Lord of the Rings to happen before they fully appreciated that. So they're working on supporting local filmmakers with a little bit more vigor than what has happened in the past. At the same time, Lord of the Rings is bringing down a lot of overseas productions. Narnia came down to shoot, and there is sort of an endless stream of films coming down to use New Zealand as a production base, because they realize we've got the scenery and we've got the technical expertise.

Well, thank you for the wonderful films that you've made already and that you will make in the future, and thanks for the interview.

Peter Jackson: Thank you. Thanks very much. Very fun. All right. Cool.