Corporate Video Production Sydney: Film director and screenwriter Peter Robert Jackson was born on October 31, 1961, in Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, a picturesque coastal town near the capital of Wellington. “Our house was on the edge of a cliff that sort of plummeted right down into the ocean,” Jackson recalled. “It was a children’s playground, an adventure playground.” His parents were both English immigrants. His father, Bill, was a local authority employee, and his mother, Joan, was a homemaker.
Corporate Video Production Sydney: The Beginning of a Great Director
‘It was a Friday evening. I was nine years old and I was watching King Kong on TV. That night I understood what I will become. – Peter Jackson
Jackson’s family bought their first TV when he was 5 years old, and the world of television immediately captured his young imagination, especially a futuristic English sci-fi show called Thunderbirds (1965-66). Jackson’s obsession with film began when he saw the original King Kong at the age of nine. “I think I still have a rotting puppet of King Kong somewhere in my basement,” he said. “It was about a foot high. Then I made a cardboard cut-out of the Empire State Building for him to stand on, and I painted a backdrop of Manhattan.”
Corporate Video Production Sydney: First Camera
In 1969, the same year that he saw King Kong, Jackson’s parents received a Super 8 movie camera as a gift. Jackson remembers thinking, “Now I can get my spaceships that I’ve made, my models, and I can film them, just like Thunderbirds.” By his early teens, he was using his friends as actors, his parents’ house as a set and whatever he could concoct in the kitchen for special effects, Jackson set out to make original movies. He recalled, “I did like a World War II drama film with friends of mine in old army uniforms—kids with big helmets and uniforms that don’t fit very well—running around, dug trenches in my parents’ garden.”
He attended Kapiti College, a state-run secondary school, but dropped out at the age of 16 so that he could get a job to finance his film hobby. “I just wanted to get out of school and into a job, any job, so that I could start saving up for the next piece of film equipment that I wanted,” he said.
