Lord of the fantasy

Peter Jackson is short, podgy - a cross between Danny DiVito with lots of hair and a beard, and Stephen Spielberg with bigger spectacles, but a matching creative urge.

Just as Spielberg dreamed of making Schindler's List, the acclaimed movie about the Holocaust, the kiwi filmmaker has always wanted to bring to life JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, a mythical saga also about the triumph of good over evil.

He was 18, he remembers, an apprentice photo-engraver at Wellington Newspapers, and was headed on the Limited Express to Auckland for a trade-training course when he began to read the Tolkien trilogy.

He was entranced; completely captivated by the world of Middle Earth and it's inhabitants, the hobbits and halflings, trolls and orcs. What a movie that would make, thought this kid who had borrowed his parent' Super 8 cine camera and become a movie-maker at the age of eight.

Now he's got his chance; a $264 million chance that was sealed this week when Newline Cinema, a division of Time Warner, announced it would bankroll the three-film project which will take more than three years to complete.

The films will be shot entirely in New Zealand, much of them at Camperdown Studios in Miramar, not far from the headquarters of Jackson's WingNut Films, which operates out of a homestead believed to be once owned by the Crawford (as in Mt Crawford) family.

The man of the hour's enormous office-cum- operations room is at the top of a rather grand winding wooden staircase, through a door to which is pinned a hand-written note "Do Not Disturb."

But we're family. Well, almost.

Jackson sits me on a sofa, asks Bill Kearns, who is taking pictures, where he should sit and confides that he would never have got his first feature film finished had it not been for his workmates at Press House.

Mike Minett, who still works there, remembers it well. He started out helping at the weekends to carry gear up the hill to the Gear Homestead in Poirua where much of Bad Taste was shot and ended up playing Frank, one of the stars of thee gruesome "splatter" show.

"It was an extraordinary way to make a film, really" reflects Jackson, who recalls that Mike and another one of his mates were quite happy to do it so long as they could nick away for a couple hours on Sunday to play soccer.

And  it was an arrangement that continued for four years, even after Jackson, in 1986, got from the Film Commission $5000 to complete the film and quit newspapering on the same day.     

"We went through an  adventure together," he says. "And that's precisely what it is. You can't take any of this seriously. You've got to say at the end of the day whether it was Bad Taste back then or what i'm doing now, it is  only a movie.

"There are much  more important things in this world than movies."

As a youngster, he says, he dreamed of being a special-effects man. He loved making monsters, building little rubber puppets and Thunderbirds   spaceships out of toilet rolls - the craftsman side  of it.

"We went through an  adventure together," he says. "And that's precisely what it is. You can't take any of this seriously. You've got to say at the end of the day whether it was Bad Taste back then or what i'm doing now, it is  only a movie.

"There are much  more important things in this world than movies."

As a youngster, he says, he dreamed of being a special-effects man. He loved making monsters, building little rubber puppets and Thunderbirds   spaceships out of toilet rolls - the craftsman side  of it.

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Lights, camera, action...   Peter Jackson, above, at home among some of the movie industry's best-known monsters at the headquarters of his WingNut films company.

"But in the end just making models was not enough. I wanted to see them on film."

While the other kids at Kapiti College were driving around in their parent's cars and going to parties, he'd be at home in Pukerua Bay making dinosaurs out of plasticine and shooting a stop-motion movie in his  bedroom. "I just liked doing it.

"It was my hobby and I still can't believe I've been  able to turn it into what I do."

Of course it didn't happen overnight. First there was Bad Taste, then Meet The Feebles, Brain Dead, Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners - a story he and screen writer Fran Walsh, his partner in professional as well as private life, dreamed up when they were walking to the dairy to get some milk one day.

Now this. And Just in the nick of time it seems. Jackson, 36, says that since completing The Frighteners, and since the plan to do a re-make of King Kong fell over he's been, in Hollywood terms, in developement hell - developing but not making things.

At least it's given him and Fran more time at Seatourn with Billy and Kate, their children. But before this deal was done it had just about got to the point of going to Hollywood to earn some money.

Then someone asked him to do film in New Zealand featuring World War 1 aeroplanes, one of his passions.

And that's what he would have been doing if The Lord of the Rings deal had not been clinched at roughly the same time.

Film Commission boss Lindsay Shelton says the deal is a recognition by Hollywood of Jackson's substantial talent.

Jackson likes to think it's as much to do with the equally substantial talents of New Zealand technicians and film crews, particularily those at Camperdown and at Weta, the special-effects company in which  he also has a stake.

We are not allowed inside to have a look because, he explains, when people are spending this sort of money on this sort of movie they want to have an element of surprise.

"You are not going to see it till the year 2000 and they do not want you to  know what to expect till it actually hits the screen.

"And because Lord of the Rings is what it is we are really not going to be shooting outside in full view of the public.

"We're going to be shooting in the studios and the locations are likely to be on the side of some mountain down south miles away from anywhere."

Jackson assumes that the roles of the hobbits, who are on screen for most of the tie, will be unknown actors selected for performance, not because they're one metre (3 1/2 feet) tall. That will  be taken care  of by special-effects whizkids and their computers.

Bigger-name actors will probably occupy cameo-style roles. But not the actors with too big a name, he hopes. "I get scared of stars. I'd much rather work with non-stars."

As for the $100-200 million that the project will pump into Wellington and into the New Zealand economy, "How that impacts is one of those intangibles," he says. "I guess the Miramar dairy  owners are going to sell more pies at lunchtime because there are going to be 300 people working on the film here. Local tiber yards will also be selling a lot more timber for a while."

Three-and-a-half years down the track, Jackson confesses he really would like to take a year off to build some of the World War 1 aeroplane kitsets he's got at home. "Yes. Seriously."

Then he and Fran have got a true New Zealand story that they'd like to tell - a much smaller film. More fun, he reckons.

"The most fun I've had making a movie since we made Bad Taste was doing Forgotten Silver,  the spoof I did with Costa Botes.

"It was guerilla film-making and it was on the smell of an oily rag. And this was on the even of doing The Frighteners, a $30 million film. I just had so much fun.

"There are two different worlds in this game, you know. I want to keep a foot in both."