The New and Official Peter Jackson biography
November 1st 2006 07:59
Since 'Lord of the Rings' stormed the silver screen and Peter Jackson rose from b-grade horror auteur to Academy-Award winning director (and all-round household name!), there have been two or three biographies of the man rushed out to the masses. All of these were very much of the unofficial variety, writers poring over interviews and tracking his career from pre-go to woah, not without some passion or detail, but not with the direct involvement of the man himself either.
And now we finally have an 'official' biography. Peter Jackson didn't write it, he's far too busy for that, but every sentence of it comes stamped with his approval. And it's a bloody big book too.
I had a quick flick through it... it looks very promising. Aside from a lot of colour photographs with personal commentary from Jackson himself, there are also other black and white photos gracing the many pages between from his own personal archives. Photos of his labour-of-love effects-work in the 80s, photos of him nerding it up at conventions pre-film career, stacks and stacks of fascinating pictures of everything you can possibly want to see. It's pretty in-depth, and Jackson's own words on the cover promise that's all predominantly about film-making and that there's none of the boring stuff in-between that you might find in other biographies.
There are a lot of things you could probably say about Peter Jackson if you sought to cast dispersions on his talent, but I don't think you could claim that he doesn't care about his fans. The man was a fan himself at one point, attending conventions and gushing over films and celebrities like the best of film-geeks, and he knows what fans like. He ensures that his films come packed with stacks of extras when he releases them on DVD, and now - with this book - he's packed it full of the sort of quirky trivia that fans like and left out the boring crap that has ruined many an other biography.
It looks very promising, another book on my to-read list!
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