Peter Jackson: Master of Film Fantasy

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Academy of Achievement

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4.6 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 12 August 2019

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Peter Jackson grew up in a country without any film industry or film schools, and yet, he only ever wanted to do one thing: make movies. The story of how he came to direct The Lord of the Rings (and Heavenly Creatures, The Hobbit, King Kong, and They Shall Not Grow Old) is both improbable and inspiring. He tells the story here of how he quit school to earn enough money for a 16 millimeter camera, and then, while learning to use it, inadvertently created his first feature length film -- a gory, sci fi comedy that landed him at the Cannes Film Festival. Jackson also describes what an audacious and unlikely idea it was that he, a New Zealander who made campy “splatter movies” as he calls them, would get the rights and the funding to turn the Lord of the Rings into a film trilogy. But the Rings of Power were clearly on his side. They were three of the most technically sophisticated and highest earning films of all time. (c ) American Academy of Achievement 2019

Transcript

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0:00.0	Must have the precious.
0:05.0	Ever since the Lord of the Rings came out as a movie,
0:08.0	New Zealand has been flooded with what they call
0:11.0	Tolkien tourists. People who come to see where the trilogy was filmed.
0:16.4	Sometimes they even wear costumes and pretend they are in Middle Earth, the fantasy world
0:22.1	that J.R. Tolkien created in his novels.
0:25.0	Well, credit for this uptick in New Zealand tourism belongs to Peter Jackson.
0:32.0	He, of course, directed the Lord of the Rings, one of the most elaborately filmed
0:36.8	and most successful series of all time, and one of the first international hits to come out of the Kiwi Nation.
0:45.0	I'd always wanted to make a fantasy film,
0:48.0	because I used to love those films when I was a kid.
0:50.0	Ones with monsters and ogres and trolls and sword fighting in big battles and castles.
0:55.2	I mean, just that whole thing.
0:57.7	That was one of the worlds that I love the most, really.
1:01.8	And so it just happened to end up being Lord of the Rings
1:04.3	the big granddaddy of them all ended up being our subject matter but I'd always thought
1:10.7	Lord of the Rings was a bit unattainable. I thought it was out of our reach,
1:14.4	especially when you're down New Zealand, you're not ever going to think you're going to get a chance to make
1:17.6	Lord of the Rings. You don't even dream about it.
1:19.4	It might not have occurred to Peter Jackson that he could make the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit which he later made, but from the time he was school-aged, making movies was the only thing that did occur to him.
1:32.0	On this episode, how Peter Jackson went almost in a single
1:36.2	bound from making gory blood and guts comedies on a shoestring budget to directing some of the most expensive technically advanced
	...

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