50 facts about Peter Jackson: best known as the director and producer of The Lord of the Rings trilogy

50 things about New Zealand film Peter Jackson.

1. Sir Peter Robert Jackson ONZ KNZM is a New Zealand filmmaker.

2. Peter Jackson is best known as the director and producer of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03) and The Hobbit trilogy (2012-14), both of which are adapted from the novels of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien.

3. Other notable films include the drama Heavenly Creatures (1994), the mockumentary Forgotten Silver (1995), the horror comedy The Frighteners (1996), the epic monster film King Kong (2005) and the supernatural drama film The Lovely Bones (2009).

4. Peter Jackson also produced District 9 (2009), The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn (2011) and the documentary West of Memphis (2012).

5. Peter Jackson began his career with the "splatstick" horror comedy Bad Taste (1987) and the black comedy Meet the Feebles (1989) before filming the zombie comedy Braindead (1992).

6. Peter Jackson shared an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay nomination with his partner Fran Walsh for Heavenly Creatures, which brought him to mainstream prominence in the film industry.

7. Peter Jackson has been awarded three Academy Awards in his career, including the award for Best Director in 2003, and has been nominated for nine Academy Awards overall.

8. Peter Jackson has also received a Golden Globe, four Saturn Awards and three BAFTAs amongst others.

9. His production company is Wingnut Films, and his most regular collaborators are co-writers and producers Walsh and Philippa Boyens.

10. Peter Jackson was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2002.

11. He was later knighted (as a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit) by Anand Satyanand, the Governor-General of New Zealand, at a ceremony in Wellington in April 2010.

12. In December 2014, Jackson was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

13. Peter Jackson was born on 31 October 1961 in Wellington and was raised at the nearby coastal town of Pukerua Bay.

14. His parents - Joan (née Ruck), a factory worker and housewife, and William "Bill" Jackson, a wages clerk - were both immigrants from England.

15. His father Bill Jackson was a veteran of the Siege of Malta in World War II.

16. As a child, Jackson was a keen film fan, growing up on Ray Harryhausen films, as well as finding inspiration in the television series Thunderbirds and Monty Python's Flying Circus.

17. After a family friend gave the Jacksons a Super 8 cine-camera with Peter in mind, he began making short films with his friends.

18. Peter Jackson has long cited King Kong as his favourite film, and around the age of nine he attempted to remake it using his own stop-motion models.

19. Also, as a child Jackson made a WWII epic called "The Dwarf Patrol" seen on the Bad Taste bonus disc which featured his first special effect of poking pinholes in the film for gun shots, and a James Bond spoof named Coldfinger.

20. Most notable though was a 20-minute short called The Valley, which won him a special prize because of the shots he used.

21. In school, Jackson expressed no interest in sports. His classmates also remember him wearing a duffle coat with "an obsession verging on religious".

22. He had no formal training in film-making, but learned about editing, special effects and make-up largely through his own trial and error.

23. As a young adult, Jackson discovered the work of author J. R. R. Tolkien after watching The Lord of the Rings (1978), an animated film by Ralph Bakshi that was a part-adaptation of Tolkien's fantasy trilogy.

24. When he was 16 years old, Jackson left school and began working full-time as a photo-engraver for a Wellington newspaper, The Evening Post.

25. For the seven years he worked there, Jackson lived at home with his parents so he could save as much money as possible to spend on film equipment.

26. After two years of work Jackson bought a 16 mm camera, and began shooting a film that later became Bad Taste.

27. Peter Jackson has long cited several films as influences. It is well known that Jackson has a passion for King Kong, often citing it as his favourite film and as the film that inspired him early in his life.

28. Peter Jackson recalls attempting to remake King Kong when he was 12.

29. At the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con International, while being interviewed alongside Avatar and Titanic director James Cameron, Jackson said certain films gave him a "kick".

30. Peter Jackson mentioned Martin Scorsese's crime films Goodfellas and Casino, remarking on "something about those particular movies and the way Martin Scorsese just fearlessly rockets his camera around and has shot those films that I can watch those movies and feel inspired."

31. He said the 1970 film Waterloo inspired him in his youth.

32. Jackson's first feature was Bad Taste, a haphazard fashion splatter comedy, which included many of Jackson's friends acting and working on it for free. Shooting was normally done in the weekends since Jackson was then working full-time.

33. Released in 1994 after Jackson won a race to bring the story to the screen, Heavenly Creatures marked a major change for Jackson in terms of both style and tone. The film is based on the real Parker-Hulme murder case in which two teenage girls in 1950s Christchurch became close friends and later murdered the mother of one of the girls.

34. Heavenly Creatures received considerable critical acclaim, including an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and making top ten of the year lists in Time, The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The New Zealand Herald.

35. The success of Heavenly Creatures won Jackson attention from US company Miramax, who promoted the film vigorously in America and signed the director to a first-look deal.

36. The success of Heavenly Creatures helped pave the way for Jackson's first big budget Hollywood film, The Frighteners starring Michael J. Fox, in 1996.

37. Peter Jackson won the rights to film Tolkien's epic in 1997 after meeting with producer Saul Zaentz. Originally working with Miramax towards a two-film production, Jackson was later pressured to render the story as a single film, and finally overcame a tight deadline by making a last-minute deal with New Line, who were keen on a trilogy

38. Following The Return of the King, Jackson lost a large amount of weight -over 50 pounds (23 kg) to the point of being unrecognisable to some fans. In The Daily Telegraph, he attributed his weight loss to his diet. He said, "I just got tired of being overweight and unfit, so I changed my diet from hamburgers to yogurt and muesli and it seems to work."

39. Jackson was one of three producers on The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 2011.

40. Spielberg also chose to work with Peter Jackson due to the impressive digital work on the Lord of the Rings films, and knew Peter Jackson's company Weta Workshop would make his vision a reality.

41. He purchased a church in the Wellington suburb of Seatoun for about $10 million, saving it from demolition.

42. He also contributes his expertise to 48HOURS, a New Zealand film-making competition, through annually selecting 3 "Wildcards" for the National Final.

43. Jackson, a World War I aviation enthusiast, is chair of the 14-18 Aviation Heritage Trust.

44. Peter Jackson donated his services and provided replica aircraft to create a 10-minute multimedia display called Over the Front for the Australian War Memorial in 2008.

45. Peter Jackson ontributed to the defense fund for the West Memphis Three.

46. In 2011, Jackson and Walsh purchased 1 Kent Terrace, the home of BATS Theatre in Wellington, effectively securing the theatre's future.

47. Peter Jackson is known for his attention to detail, a habit of shooting scenes from many angles, a macabre sense of humour, and a general playfulness - the latter to the point where The Lord of the Rings conceptual designer Alan Lee jokingly remarked "the film is almost incidental really".

48. Peter Jackson was a noted perfectionist on the Lord of the Rings shoot, where he demanded numerous takes of scenes, requesting additional takes by repeatedly saying, "one more for luck".

49. Peter Jackson is also renowned within the New Zealand film industry for his insistence on "coverage"-shooting a scene from as many angles as possible, giving him more options during editing

50. Peter Jackson is one of the lead actors in two of his films: in Bad Taste, he plays two characters named Derek and Robert, even engaging them both in a fight.

Source: Wikipedia.org