58 Facts About Peter Jackson

1. Peter Jackson was born as an only child in a small coast-side town in New Zealand in 1961.

2. Peter Jackson was in negotiations to direct a film adaptation of Alice Sebold's best–selling The Lovely Bones, which he would shoot after releasing King Kong.

3. Peter Jackson was scheduled to start shooting a new version in August of 2004 in New Zealand.

4. Peter Jackson met his future love and writing partner, Fran Walsh, at a screening for the film.

5. Peter Jackson left school at 17 hoping to get work in the New Zealand film industry.

6. Peter Jackson firmly denies that Heavenly Creatures represents a bid to be seen as a "serious filmmaker" who wants to do "arty mainstream films.

7. Peter Jackson left school at age 17 hoping to get a job in the New Zealand movie business.

8. Peter Jackson began looking for another studio to finance the film.

9. In 1994 Peter Jackson directed a film that surprised his hardcore fans.

10. At the age of eight, Peter Jackson began playing around with his parents' 8-millimeter camera, making home movies.

11. Peter Jackson was born in 1961 on Halloween, October 31, an appropriate birthday for a boy who would grow up to make exceptionally scary, blood-soaked films.

12. Peter Jackson made a name for himself in the movie industry with a small collection of gory, low-budget horror films including Dead Alive and The Frighteners.

13. Peter Jackson is 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.

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

15. 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.

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

17. Peter Jackson was made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2010.

18. Peter Jackson received Academy Awards for best director and for best adapted screenplay for The Return of the King, which won a total of 11 Oscars, including best picture.

19. Peter Jackson married Fran Walsh, a screenwriter who had helped him gain contacts in the New Zealand film industry during the 1980s.

20. Peter Jackson broke out into decidedly different territory as the screenwriter and director of the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures, a disturbing dramatization of a famous New Zealand matricide case from the 1950s.

21. Peter Jackson landed a job as a photographic lithographer at a local newspaper.

22. Peter Jackson is notorious for appearing in public without shoes.

23. Peter Jackson offers a new, more complex level of historical reimagining.

24. Peter Jackson might not have the most directing credits in show business, but he's still one of the richest Hollywood movie directors around.

25. In total Peter Jackson's directed efforts have been the most awarded films at three separate Academy Award ceremonies, the 74th, 76th and 78th.

26. Peter Jackson is an avid aviation enthusiast and owns a collection of over 40 airworthy World War I-era warbirds housed at Hood Aerodrome near Masterton, and a Gulfstream G650 in Wellington.

27. Peter Jackson had a cameo on the HBO show Entourage in 5 August 2007 episode, "Gary's Desk", in which he offers a business proposal to Eric Murphy, manager to the lead character, Vincent Chase.

28. Peter Jackson has made cameos in several films not directed by him.

29. 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.

30. Peter Jackson was an early user of computer enhancement technology and provided digital special effects to a number of Hollywood films.

31. Peter Jackson is 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.

32. Peter Jackson owns a scale modeling company Wingnut Wings that specializes in World War One subjects.

33. Peter Jackson owns an aircraft restoration and manufacturing company, The Vintage Aviator, which is dedicated to World War I and World War II fighter planes among other planes from the 1920s and 1930s.

34. Peter Jackson contributed to the defense fund for the West Memphis Three.

35. 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.

36. In December 2014, Peter Jackson said that the Tintin sequel would be made "at some point soon", although he intended to focus on directing two New Zealand films before that.

37. In December 2012, Peter Jackson said that the Tintin schedule was to shoot performance-capture in 2013, aiming for a release in 2015.

38. Peter Jackson is officially credited as producer but before he began working on The Hobbit, helped Spielberg direct the film.

39. Peter 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. In 2006, Peter Jackson has won the rights to a film adaptation of the fantasy novel series Temeraire, a novel written by Naomi Novik about dragons being used in combat in the Napoleonic Wars concerning a dragon named Temeraire and his captain, Will Laurence.

41. In October 2016, Peter Jackson announced that the film would be his next project as producer and co-writer, alongside Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens .

42. In late December 2009, Peter Jackson announced his interest in the movie adaptation of the novel Mortal Engines.

43. Peter Jackson wrote that the third film would not act as a bridge between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings films, but would continue to expand The Hobbit story by using material found in the Lord of the Rings Appendices.

44. On 30 July 2012, Peter Jackson announced on his Facebook page that the two planned Hobbit movies would be expanded into a trilogy.

45. Peter Jackson completed an adaptation of Alice Sebold's bestseller, The Lovely Bones, which was released in the United States on 11 December 2009.

46. In 2007, Peter Jackson directed a short film entitled Crossing the Line, to test a new model of digital cinema camera, the RED ONE.

47. Peter Jackson 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.

48. Peter Jackson won the rights to film Tolkien's epic in 1997 after meeting with producer Saul Zaentz.

49. Peter Jackson has claimed the Commission considered firing him from Feebles, though the NZFC went on to help fund his next three films.

50. Peter Jackson hired actresses Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet in the roles of Parker and Hulme.

51. Peter Jackson stated of his second feature-length film, "It's got a quality of humour that alienates a lot of people.

52. 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.

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

54. 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.

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

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

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

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