Name: Peter Jackson

Age: 46

Country: New Zealand

Category: Entertainment

Calling: Filmmaker

The Beginning

Born on 31^st October 1961. Jackson began his career in films without any technical support and with the help of his friends. He had no formal training in film-making and was also turned down for a post by New Zealand’s National Film Unit. Jackson juggled between several jobs to fund his passion. All filming was done during weekends as his was a full-time job. The first palpable result of this was the film Bad Taste, about aliens that come to earth with the plan on farming humans for food. One of the special effects included the use of muesli hot cereal in a bowl mixed with green food colouring. Over four years, Bad Taste turned from a 10-minute short to a 90-minute feature and Jackson managed to garner some critical acclaim at Cannes (I wonder how) and sell foreign rights to 12 countries. This was followed by the gross-out films such as Meet the Feebles and Brain Dead

Rise

Jackson got a lot of attention for his film Heavenly Creatures, which was a departure from his earlier macabre films and dealt with a real-life case of two girls murdering the mother of one of them. The film won an Academy Award nomination for the husband-wife writing duo of Jackson and Fran Walsh. Thereafter, Jackson made the big disappointment The Frighteners, which was such a box-office dud that several of his projects pending with big studios were shelved. With this, the husband-wife team began focusing on Jackson’s biggest dream: to adapt J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings. Not only was the dream realized by Jackson, but its culmination was marveled at by audiences across the world making him the most sought-after filmmaker in the world

Power-Play

Has to be his obsessive passion for films and his unique style of working. From overseeing production on simultaneous sets, to taking shots from different angles, from focusing on objects that don’t even feature in the film, to taking instantaneous shots, Jackson has sure evolved from the Brain Dead days where he was filming the hero spoon feed a Zombie by flipping back his severed head and pouring it down its neck !!! What a turnaround!