Premiere Reviews: Return of the King

"With The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, director Peter Jackson and his armies of actors and technicians have managed to do what the Wachowski brothers and George Lucas could not: make a perfect trilogy."

Empire Film Review: Return of the King

"The resounding climax to a landmark in cinema history. But the King has now returned, the story is over and the ships are leaving Middle-earth. Ladies and gentlemen, Elvish has left the building."

Empire Film Review: Bad Taste

"A four-year production history that shows in the many lines of dialogue that later had to be dubbed over unmoving lips and a script that really could have used a few more jokes and plot twists to go with its uniquely horror-comic sensibility."

King Kiwi

He is the biggest thing to have come out of New Zealand, thanks to something called a hobbit. Part three of Lord of the Rings premieres here next week, and now its director is set to take on another world-beater... King Kong

David Smith
Sunday November 30, 2003
The Observer

A Cultural Assault: The New Zealand Films of Peter Jackson

USEFUL!

Lord of the Roundtables

Filmmaker Peter Jackson sets the record straight on the Christopher Lee footage excised from The Return of the King, with an assist from his star Elijah Wood.
By Todd Gilchrist

View the rest of this story by clicking the title of this entry.

LOTR

Peter Jackson is working on possibly the greatest trilogy of books ever. The Lord of the Rings.

All three films are being shot back to back with a budget of over $180 million US dollars

The cast for the film is a mixture of unknowns and established actors:

Elijah Wood.... Frodo Baggins

Sean Astin.... Samwise Gamgee

Ian Holm.... Bilbo Baggins

Ian McKellen.... Gandalf

Christopher Lee.... Saruman the White

Billy Boyd.... Pippin

Liv Tyler.... Arwen Undomiel

Cate Blanchett.... Galadriel

Sean Bean.... Boromir

Orlando Bloom.... Legolas

Brad Dourif.... Wormtongue

Dominic Monaghan.... Merry

John Rhys-Davies.... Gimli

Peter is directing, producing and has written the screenplay with Fran Walshe.

Shooting for the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring started on October 11th 1999 and looks to continue for many more months.

The films will be released in year intervals. The first film will be released in the Christmas of 2001, with the other two (The Two Towers, The Return of the King) following in Christmas 2002 and Christmas 2003.

To catch all the latest news on the biggest production EVER outside of the US, visit theonering.net

Braindead

Braindead is the Third film directed by Peter Jackson, and is the second film in which he played a cameo appearance (look out for the Undertaker's crazy assistant). Starring Timothy Balme as Lionel Cosgrove, this film is a comical, gore feast, zombie flick. The farcical nature of the film is the reason that the British and Australian critics left the original uncut, they didn't see that anyone would take it seriously! Unfortuantly in Germany the film was seriously cut.

The budget of $3 million allowed Jackson to experiment with some particularly gruesome effects, above all the grand finale, the flymo! (Over 300 liters of blood were pumped out of that lethal piece of lawn care equipment!) In fact Jackson's favorite scene, the baby in the park, was only shot because there was some money left in the budget.

Just how did they achieve all that gore? with pork fat, latex, sisal, polyfoam, human hair, ultra slime and hundreds of gallons of maple syrup!

Bad Tase

Bad Taste is the first full feature film that Peter Jackson directed. Work started in 1983. What was originally intended to be a fifteen-minute short, progressed into a ninety-two minute, full blown feature film!

The film took nearly 4 years to make, the crew (made up of jackson's friends) working over weekends and holidays to get it completed. Thehttp://img-tbhl.theonering.net/films/images/bt_title.gif crew had to put up with a very limited budget. The majority of the money came from peter jacksons job at the local paper. Originally the movie was recorded on 16mm film, which was blown up to 35 mm for the final cinematic version. The film is a testament to what can be done with a small budget and a lot of dedication.

The film has special effects that were simply constructed (the knife through the head was just made out of card and had a tube in it that squirted out fake blood!) An intresting scene to see is when peter wrestles with himself on the cliff face, a very dangerous shot to shoot peter has said.

The video was quite hard to get hold of for a while, but has recently been re-released in the us, so get your copy today!

Peter Jackson Filmography

Filmography

The Focus Films of this Project shall be...

LOTR: Return of the King http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0167260/

Braindead http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103873/

Meet the Feebles http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097858/

Film Studies Auteur Project Title Proposal

In the films of Peter Jackson, can 'weirdness' be defined as an auteur characteristic?

Project Deadlines

Dates for the Auteur Project:
1. Student Presentations: Friday 25th June - Friday 2nd July

2. Investigation Script Draft Submission: Friday 2nd July

3. Catalogue and Commentary + Evaluation Draft Submission: Friday 9th July4 .

WHOLE PROJECT SUBMISSION: THURSDAY 15th JULY

Mini Biography of Peter Jackson

Peter Jackson was born as an only child in a small coast-side town in New Zealand in 1961. When a friend of his parents bought him a super 8mm movie camera (because she saw how much he enjoyed taking photos), the then eight-year-old Peter instantly grabbed the thing to start recording his own movies, which he made with his friends. They were usually short, but they already had the spectacular trademark that would make Jackson famous: impressive special effects, made at a very low cost. For example, for his film "World War Two" which he made as a teenager, he used to simulate a firing gun by punching little holes into the celluloid, so that, once projected, the gun gave the impression of displaying a small fire. Jackson's first step towards the more serious filmmaking came with an entry in a local contest to stimulate amateur and children's film. For this film he used stop-motion animation to create a monster that ruins a city in the style of Ray Harryhausen. Unfortunately, he didn't win. When Jackson was 22, he embarked on an moviemaking-adventure that would change his life. This film, Bad Taste (1987) , was begun as any other Jackson film, in an amateuristic style, at a low budget and using friends and local people to star in his film. Jackson himself did nearly everything in the movie, he directed, produced, filmed and starred in it, in a number of roles, amongst them that of the hero, Derek. And everything was filmed on a second-hand, $250 camera. It took Jackson and his friends four years to complete the movie. What had started out as an joke in a group of friends, then became a cult-classic. A friend of Jackson who was working in the movie industry convinced him the film had commercial prospects and arranged for it to be shown at the Cannes film festival, where it won a lot of acclaim, as well as a number of prizes. The movie soon became a hit because of its bizarre humor and overdose of special-effects, some realistic, some hilarious because of their amateuristic look. After the success of Bad Taste, Jackson became recognized as a director and the door to fame and fortune was opened. He gave up his job at a local photographer's shop and became a well-known director of horror-movies, after the succes of his first professionaly made movie, Braindead (1992).