Lord of the Oscars

IT WOULD appear that only chronic insomniacs need stay up for the last 15 minutes of tonight’s 76th annual Academy Awards. There will be few surprises in the finale, unless host Billy Crystal decides to side with the anti-Gibson crowd and show us how Jewish he really is.

Those who relished the spills and upsets in previous awards might as well make themselves some cocoa and head for an early night, because the big categories of Best Film and Best Director are less a competition and more a coronation this year, with Peter Jackson already pre-anointed as this year’s big winner.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is still doing blockbuster business, but the Academy will not be honouring that one 3-hour movie as the year’s best. Rather, they will be acknowledging the completion of the three-part nine-hour epic by the 42-year-old New Zealander.

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On the other hand, this will not be a great night for couture designers; Jackson is a driven character, but also short, tubby and bedraggled, heedless of fashion’s demands. He owns only two pairs of shoes, and at home and at work in Wellington he goes barefoot, hobbit-style. "Pete’s a very confident person even though he’s a guy with no shoes and stuff," says Billy Boyd, who portrays the hobbit Pippin. "Don’t let that fool you. One of the main reasons the trilogy got made is that he can make decision after decision all day every day."

Jackson’s movie resume is also deceptive, since it pretty much eschews thoughtful drama and the so-called Hollywood "important" picture for a much more personal, skewed view of the world. His last pre-Rings film was the special-effects ghost story The Frighteners in 1996, with Michael J Fox, and before that there was Heavenly Creatures in 1994, with Kate Winslet, which was based on a true tale of matricide involving young New Zealand girls caught up in a dream world of knights and Mario Lanza. Earlier still was the bizarre low-budget Meet the Feebles (1989), a kind of Muppets-gone-mad free-for-all with a hefty heroine named Heidi the Hippo.

Then again, his first film must have prepped him for long shooting schedules; Bad Taste took nearly four years to complete. Aged 22, a job at The Wellington Evening Post as an engraver, funded the purchase of a 16mm Bolex camera and Jackson set about making Bad Taste, which he filmed on weekends until it was finished in 1987. The project was undoubtedly a labour of love; Jackson recruited friends to film for free on Sundays and the family was often forced to eat sausages for dinner because the oven was being used to make latex models for the film’s amateurish special-effects.

As well as working as the director-producer-writer-editor, Jackson also starred as two of the main characters, because he "ran out of friends". In one scene, he can be seen wrestling himself over a cliff. Adored by its target audience of splatter sci-fi comedy fans, the bad taste of its title proved too literal for some but he managed to sell it overseas and make a modest profit.

By 1995 he had met writer Fran Walsh and formed a relationship that worked well professionally and personally. She works as his co-writer and is the mother of their two children, Billy, 9, and Katie, 7. Together, she and Jackson had been trying to bring King Kong to the big screen when he was diverted to The Lord of the Rings.

Initially it was cigar-chomping Miramax mini-mogul Harvey Weinstein, who asked them to squeeze the book into just two films but then a different mogul, Bob Shay of New Line Films, offered three films, made back-to-back. It was a project other directors had contemplated, notably English director John Boorman, whilst animator Ralph Bakshi managed an animated version of half the story in 1978. But up until now, no-one had been prepared to sink years of their working life into a sprawling, risky project.

Jackson saw the films as a homage to his English parents, who moved after World War II to New Zealand, where his father worked as a payroll clerk. They had always encouraged their only son, even when he commandeered their camera, at seven, to make movies with his toy soldiers and planes. Nor did they dismiss his dream of making his living in film, perhaps as a special effects nerd.

It came especially hard that neither parents saw any of his Tolkien films; his father died shortly before they started shooting the trilogy and his mother four or five days before completion of Fellowship of the Ring. Filmed entirely on location in New Zealand, the trilogy was made far from the kind of suffocating control that American studios typically exert over big-budget projects. Walsh says New Line executives would frequently try and reach Jackson when he was filming in the countryside, but she would always tell them that he was out of reach of the cell phone. And often, this was true.

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But most of the facilities on the New Zealand set - from editing suites and special effects workshops to hair and makeup departments - were within walking distance of the Jackson home. Indeed, with more than 300 crew, dozens of cast members, and some 20,000 extras, Wellington developed its own rogue fraternity and after filming, Jackson had Bag End (Bilbo and Frodo Baggins’ home) moved into the back garden of his New Zealand mansion.

Perversely, the list of actors who failed to win roles in Lord of the Rings is starrier than the eventual cast. Both Johnny Vegas and Graham Norton were in the shortlist for Frodo’s trusted manservant Sam. And Sean Connery rather than Ian McKellen was Jackson’s first choice to play the wizard Gandalf but declined to accept the role because "I didn’t understand the script". "Bobbits? Hobbits?" The former James Bond had never read anything by author JRR Tolkien.

During the editing phase, Jackson was coaxed to fly around the world, promoting the films while his wife and their two young children stayed at home. On one occasion, during a lengthy absence, his wife saw John Rhys-Davies, who played the dwarf Gimli in the film, on TV without his costume: "I said to my daughter: ‘Look who it is,’" Walsh recalled. Their daughter studied the hirsute heavily built actor and decided, "Oh, it’s Daddy!" Said Walsh: "I thought ‘We’d better get him home here soon."

In just 21 years, Jackson has gone from low-budget independent films, to setting new Hollywood pay scales for directors with the upcoming remake of King Kong, where he, his wife and the producer share $20m plus 20% of the gross. Those who pine for a British film industry would do well to examine Jackson’s career; a film maker who shook off his blood-and-guts horror origins, went on to experiment with other genres, and who has never compromised on what he wanted. While Britain’s film funds have propped little-seen highbrow fare like Young Adam and unibrow trash like Sex Lives of the Potato Men, Peter Jackson has managed to persuade America to fund an epic on his doorstep.

The development of Jackson’s production power is a reflection of this Hollywood rebel. Friends describe him as focused and fiercely loyal, whose wit warmed the films, where his pockets were filled with lollipops. Critics paint him as a ruthless businessman who has forgotten his roots and say he manipulated the law to get as much as $200m in tax breaks for his Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Next, though, there is King Kong, Jackson’s new blockbuster which shoots in the autumn of this year. For the time being at least, the director has Hollywood money, without having to cross the Hollywood Hills. "Why would I leave the Shire," he said recently, "to go to Mordor?"