On the Hollywood set of “The Adventures of Tintin” this spring, Steven Spielberg directed an actor in a motion-capture suit as he portrayed the antics of the globe-trotting comic-book hero. One camera was beaming a live feed halfway around the world. Filmmaker Peter Jackson was watching from his headquarters in New Zealand, and discussing the action with Mr. Spielberg via the video link.
A Scene From 'Alive in Joburg'
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Watch a scene from "Alive in Joburg," a 2005 science fiction short film from Neil Blomkamp, director of "District 9." Video courtesy of Spy Films.
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Four years after his last movie hit the screen, Mr. Jackson, director of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, is gearing up for an extended run at the box office. In recent years, the director’s projects have been shadowed by lawsuits, delays and studio upheavals. Now, working with a stable of filmmakers, from fellow Oscar-winners to first-time directors, Mr. Jackson is turning out a slew of new movies from his New Zealand-based production hub. He has entered the territory of a small group of directors like George Lucas and Mr. Spielberg, who control their own movie-making empires.
Next week will see the release of “District 9,” a sci-fi drama that Mr. Jackson produced and seeded with his own money. Though Mr. Jackson’s involvement has helped build buzz for the film, about aliens marooned in Johannesburg, the movie was directed by a young filmmaker that Mr. Jackson has mentored. Mr. Jackson is co-writing and producing an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” but he’s handing the directing reins to Guillermo del Toro, known for his fantastical hit “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
Peter Jackson with Saoirse Ronan on a set of ‘The Lovely Bones’ on the South Island of New Zealand.
.“In some respects, I’m still not sure if I made the right decision in not directing, because I’m enjoying it so much,” Mr Jackson says of “The Hobbit.”
He hasn’t abandoned the director’s chair. His $65 million adaptation of Alice Sebold’s supernatural bestseller “The Lovely Bones” is being released Dec. 11 to coincide with awards season.
Though he shot much of “The Lovely Bones” in Pennsylvania, Mr. Jackson typically works in New Zealand. His largely autonomous operation there includes massive sound stages, a postproduction facility and an effects and design shop capable of making everything from chain-mail armor to operational assault vehicles.
“He has the equivalent of a full studio. He’s got tanks down there. Hangars of them. You don’t see that anymore, not even in Hollywood,” says Bill Block, an executive producer of “District 9.”
To sell the idea for “District 9,” Peter Jackson turned to comics ...
Many sci-fi and fantasy films are adapted from popular graphic novels. The graphic novel that launched “District 9” isn’t available to the public. (Read an excerpt.)
In the fall of 2006, filmmaker Peter Jackson hired a small team at Weta Workshop, the New Zealand design studio that he co-owns, to illustrate a script in development about aliens stranded in South Africa. Meanwhile, Neill Blomkamp, who was co-writing the screenplay with Terri Tatchell, traveled to Johannesburg to shoot photographs in preparation for directing the film. The results were packaged into a graphic novel-style treatment to attract potential investors.
“I was handed that book and told, ‘OK, here’s a movie,’ ” says Ken Kamins, Mr. Jackson’s longtime manager. About 10 copies of the book, a few of them in hardcover, were published. Mr. Kamins took one to the film financing company QED International, which pounced, in large part because of Mr. Jackson’s involvement.
“No star. No script. No budget. To us there was ample data [in the graphic novel] to make a decision,” says Bill Block, chief executive of QED, who also used the book to sign deals with distributors, including Sony.
Working with illustrators helped Mr. Blomkamp confront creative challenges. He had originally envisioned menacing creatures akin to those in the “Alien” movies. But he soon realized audiences wouldn’t empathize with them. The solution was to give them human-like eyes.
The graphic novel also sketched out the wider world of “District 9,” where there’s deep human resentment over the aliens subsisting in a fenced-in shantytown. “The police use cattle prods to subdue the aliens, loading them into vans, moving them off. The evictions are in full effect,” reads one page of the comic.
The comic featured elements that didn’t make it into the final film, but laid the groundwork for the viral marketing. That campaign, orchestrated by Sony, included signs in public places (“Restrooms for Humans Only”) and online videos that showed glimpses of the alien culture. That foreign society was also depicted in the book. One page describes an alien commercial with the lines “Learn to talk human! Better jobs at the mine!” There are no plans to sell the graphic novel in stores.
Many sci-fi and fantasy films are adapted from popular graphic novels.
The graphic novel that launched “District 9” isn’t available to the public. (Read an excerpt.)
In the fall of 2006, filmmaker Peter Jackson hired a small team at Weta Workshop, the New Zealand design studio that he co-owns, to illustrate a script in development about aliens stranded in South Africa. Meanwhile, Neill Blomkamp, who was co-writing the screenplay with Terri Tatchell, traveled to Johannesburg to shoot photographs in preparation for directing the film. The results were packaged into a graphic novel-style treatment to attract potential investors.
“I was handed that book and told, ‘OK, here’s a movie,’ ” says Ken Kamins, Mr. Jackson’s longtime manager. About 10 copies of the book, a few of them in hardcover, were published. Mr. Kamins took one to the film financing company QED International, which pounced, in large part because of Mr. Jackson’s involvement.
“No star. No script. No budget. To us there was ample data [in the graphic novel] to make a decision,” says Bill Block, chief executive of QED, who also used the book to sign deals with distributors, including Sony.
Working with illustrators helped Mr. Blomkamp confront creative challenges. He had originally envisioned menacing creatures akin to those in the “Alien” movies. But he soon realized audiences wouldn’t empathize with them. The solution was to give them human-like eyes.
The graphic novel also sketched out the wider world of “District 9,” where there’s deep human resentment over the aliens subsisting in a fenced-in shantytown. “The police use cattle prods to subdue the aliens, loading them into vans, moving them off. The evictions are in full effect,” reads one page of the comic.
The comic featured elements that didn’t make it into the final film, but laid the groundwork for the viral marketing. That campaign, orchestrated by Sony, included signs in public places (“Restrooms for Humans Only”) and online videos that showed glimpses of the alien culture. That foreign society was also depicted in the book. One page describes an alien commercial with the lines “Learn to talk human! Better jobs at the mine!” There are no plans to sell the graphic novel in stores.
John Jurgensen
.The set-up allows Mr. Jackson to keep his distance from Hollywood as he operates on the far side of the globe without a traditional studio deal, selling movies on the open market. It also gives him a hand in the work of other filmmakers, such as “Titanic” director James Cameron, who relied on the facilities’ cutting-edge technology for his coming 3-D sci-fi epic “Avatar.”
Mr. Jackson’s operations—along with tax breaks offered by New Zealand—have turned his home base of Wellington into a movie hub. In 1998, the year Mr. Jackson began shooting his “Rings” trilogy, four features were shot in New Zealand; last year, five times as many movies were shot there.
Even in New Zealand, Mr. Jackson isn’t safe from Hollywood drama. Both “Tintin” and “The Lovely Bones” temporarily went into limbo last year when Mr. Spielberg’s DreamWorks company split from Paramount. An anticipated movie version of the hit videogame Halo that Mr. Jackson was producing fell apart in 2006.
In 2005, Mr. Jackson and his personal and professional partner Fran Walsh sued New Line Cinema to force an audit on “The Fellowship of the Ring,” believing they had been shortchanged on profits from the first film in the Tolkien trilogy. The three movies brought in about $3 billion combined at the box office worldwide. The feud froze movement on a prequel project based on “The Hobbit,” with New Line executives saying publicly that they wanted nothing to do with the director, and Mr. Jackson announcing his days in Middle-earth were over. A settlement in December, 2007, paved the way for two live-action “Hobbit” films from New Line, with Mr. del Toro tapped to direct. The project is being co-produced by MGM.
“This was purely a business dispute,” says Mr. Jackson’s manager, Ken Kamins. “Once it was resolved, everyone was happy to proceed with an ongoing creative relationship.”
A different lawsuit that does not involve Mr. Jackson now threatens progress on “The Hobbit” again. In a case scheduled to go trial in October, the heirs of Mr. Tolkien have sued New Line for their share of revenues from the trilogy (they say they’ve received none) and to terminate the studio’s rights to “The Hobbit.” A spokesman for Warner Bros., New Line’s parent company, declined to comment on either lawsuit.
The attorney representing the Tolkien family, Bonnie Eskenazi, says the lawsuit isn’t a judgment on Mr. Jackson’s work. “This lawsuit has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the films,” she says. “It has to do with the money.”
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TriStar Pictures
Mr. Jackson posed with ‘District 9’ star Sharlto Copley, left, and director Neill Blomkamp at San Diego’s Comic-Con in July.
.Mr. Jackson says of the pending case, “I can only assume that whatever the result is, it will allow the film to get made and completed.” Because a script and budget have not yet been submitted to the studio, however, he says, “The Hobbit” doesn’t have an official green light.
Fans were salivating over the prospect of “The Hobbit” long before the project was officially announced two years ago. At Comic-Con, an annual gathering in San Diego for sci-fi and fantasy enthusiasts and the entertainment companies that cater to them, the director received a standing ovation in the convention’s biggest room, the 6,500-seat Hall H. It was the self-described geek’s first in-person appearance at the 40-year-old event (he said his shooting schedule had never allowed it), and he snapped photos from the stage. Mingling with the fans masquerading as Klingons and Star Wars stormtroopers were devotees of Tolkien, including middle-aged triplets, known as the Ring Sisters, who wore peasant dresses and furry plastic Hobbit feet.
Out on the exhibition floor crowded with costumed conventioneers was a booth stocked with laser guns, ornate swords and statuettes. It was the handiwork of Weta Workshop, which Mr. Jackson co-owns. The Wellington-based workshop designed all the mythical creatures of the “Rings” films, such as the creepy Gollum. Sister studio Weta Digital, also co-owned by Mr. Jackson, has pioneered special-effects techniques. For example, Weta’s motion-capture technology used an actor’s movements to animate the giant ape in Mr. Jackson’s 2005 remake of “King Kong.”
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Everett Collection
Mr. Jackson is working with Steven Spielberg on an adaptation of the Belgian Tintin comic.
.Four years ago, Mr. Spielberg approached Weta Digital about inserting a computer-generated character, Tintin’s dog, Snowy, into a live-action feature. After the director discovered that Mr. Jackson was a fan of the comic, the two men eventually teamed up and decided to use motion capture to turn artist Georges Remi’s two-dimensional drawings into 3-D figures with textured hair and clothing. Mr. Spielberg recently finished six weeks of shooting with actors in motion-capture suits, and now Mr. Jackson will oversee the rest of the process at Weta. Then, Mr. Jackson will direct the sequel film, which Mr. Spielberg will produce.
Somewhere in the Weta complex is a cache of props that may never be seen by the public: the Marine uniforms and guns designed for the mothballed Halo film. In 2005, Mr. Jackson was hired to produce an action movie based on the Microsoft videogame franchise, in which futuristic soldiers battle aliens on multiple planets. To direct, they hired the then 25-year-old Neill Blomkamp, who had built a reputation with effects-driven commercials but had never directed a feature film. Mr. Blomkamp decamped from his Vancouver home to New Zealand, where he started working with Weta designers on the look of the Halo world.
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Sony Pictures
In ‘District 9,’ left, produced by Mr. Jackson, aliens are marooned in Johannesberg.
.By fall 2006, however the project fell apart. The partner studios in the project, Universal and Twentieth Century Fox, allowed the Halo rights to lapse and revert back to Microsoft. Microsoft says the project is on hold. Both Universal and Twentieth Century Fox declined to comment.
“It was a very distressing moment in time. We decided to turn a defeat into something of a victory,” Mr. Jackson says.
To continue their mission to “godfather” Mr. Blomkamp’s first film, Mr. Jackson and Ms. Walsh immediately suggested that Mr. Blomkamp launch a new project by expanding on a six-minute film he’d made in 2005 called “Alive in Joburg.” A native of South Africa, Mr. Blomkamp had explored the country’s charged racial history through the short about aliens living uninvited in Johannesburg. Mr. Jackson spent about $500,000 on development of “District 9,” hiring Weta for initial design work, sending Mr. Blomkamp to Johannesburg to shoot photos and helping to produce a graphic novel that was used to entice investors.
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Dreamworks Studios
Mark Wahlberg and Saoirse Ronan star in ‘The Lovely Bones,’ directed by Mr. Jackson.
.In “District 9,” human characters mingle and clash with aliens who look like insects on two legs. Having lost their leadership and control over their massive space ship, the aliens (derisively called “prawns” by the human locals) subsist in a shantytown. With no stars and shot largely with handheld cameras in a documentary style, the movie was made on a tight budget of $30 million.
Mr. Blomkamp says Mr. Jackson helped to amplify many of the film’s action sequences. “I may have been set at like 8, and with him it’s turned up to 11,” says Mr. Blomkamp.
In the movie, actor Sharlto Copley (an old friend of Mr. Blomkamp’s from Johannesburg, who is making his feature debut) plays an Afrikaner named Wikus, a puffed-up middle manager of a corporation hired to transplant the troublesome aliens to a new camp. As he goes shack-to-shack in District 9, Wikus is exposed to an alien substance, resulting in a horrific infection that transforms his body. In one scene, Wikus grabs a hatchet, intending to chop off an infected appendage. The character changes his mind in Mr. Blomkamp’s script. But Mr. Jackson, whose gory first movie was entitled “Bad Taste,” talked the director into an amputation.
Working on “District 9” “has got me itching,” Mr. Jackson said at Comic-Con. While “The Hobbit” is being directed by Mr. del Toro, he said, “maybe I should find a little low-budget horror movie that I can just be making in the meantime.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Director Peter Jackson began filming his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of films in October 1999. This article incorrectly stated that shooting began in 1998. The article was correct in saying that four film features were shot in New Zealand in 1998.
Write to John Jurgensen at john.jurgensen@wsj.com
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