Peter Jackson makes us care about people caught up in fantasy. We admire the warmth and conviction he brings to them, though his restless camera and fondness for prolonged spectacle can test our patience.
Fi1m perspective
In Heavenly Creatures (1994), the girls’ fantasies sit close enough to ordinary life that we are never quite released from their company. Peter Jackson lets the friendship become appealing before making its intensity frightening. We were unsettled by how readily Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet made everyone outside that friendship seem unnecessary. This is Jackson at his most persuasive: he gives us a reason to care about the people before asking us to follow them into an imagined world.
His early splatter comedies, Bad Taste (1987), Meet the Feebles (1989) and Braindead (1992), established his appetite for macabre humour and effects. Heavenly Creatures brought wider attention, but the move into drama did not mean abandoning fantasy. The screenplay he wrote with Fran Walsh makes the girls’ private world inviting enough for their withdrawal into it to worry us.
Jamie Selkirk’s editing keeps the shifts between fantasy and daily life from breaking our involvement, while Peter Dasent’s score helps make the imagined world welcoming. The performances still do most of the work. Jackson’s moving camera is less consistently helpful: it can insist on excitement when the actors have already supplied it. We wanted more room for ordinary life and for the people outside the pair to make themselves felt.
The scale grew through The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), shot back-to-back in New Zealand, and King Kong (2005). The trilogy’s immersive worlds show how well his appetite for detail can work, with Walsh and Philippa Boyens among his screenwriting collaborators. In The Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014), the reliance on digital effects and drawn-out pacing make his habit of overdoing things harder to forgive.
The later turn to documentaries, with They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and The Beatles: Get Back (2021), takes him beyond invented worlds. We remain curious about what he might do with another drama on the scale of Heavenly Creatures, especially if he allowed the actors more stillness. If the spectacle has worn you down, give Heavenly Creatures an evening.
Biography
Sir Peter Jackson is a New Zealand film director, screenwriter and producer. Born on 31 October 1961 in Pukerua Bay, he began making short films as a child and released his first feature, Bad Taste, in 1987. He gained wider attention with the horror comedies Meet the Feebles (1989) and Braindead (1992).
Jackson came to international prominence with the 1994 drama Heavenly Creatures, which he directed and co-wrote with Fran Walsh; the film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. He is best known for directing and co-writing the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003) and the Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014), as well as the 2005 remake of King Kong. For The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) he won Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture.
