Sir Peter Jackson
Filmmaker, Weta FX
Sir Peter Jackson is the filmmaker behind The Lord of the Rings, and one of the wealthiest people in New Zealand. With his partner Dame Fran Walsh he built a filmmaking and visual-effects operation in Wellington that rivalled Hollywood, a body of work that places the pair among the country's richest people.
From Pukerua Bay to Hollywood
Born in Wellington in 1961 and raised in the coastal town of Pukerua Bay, Jackson was making his own short films as a teenager with a camera his parents had given him. He left school at 16 and spent seven years as a photo engraver at the Evening Post newspaper, saving to buy film equipment. His first feature, the splatter comedy Bad Taste, was shot at weekends with friends over four years and screened at Cannes in 1988, followed by Meet the Feebles and Braindead.
The 1994 drama Heavenly Creatures, written with Walsh, earned the pair their first Academy Award nomination for its screenplay and showed Jackson could work far beyond low-budget horror.
Building Weta in Wellington
The Lord of the Rings, filmed entirely in New Zealand and released between 2001 and 2003, won 17 Academy Awards across the three films, including Best Director and Best Picture for The Return of the King. To make it, Jackson and his collaborators grew Weta, the visual-effects house he co-founded in 1993, into a facility that could deliver Hollywood-scale work from the Wellington suburb of Miramar. He followed the trilogy with a King Kong remake, The Hobbit films and the restored First World War documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, keeping production and post-production based at home rather than moving offshore.
The Unity billion-dollar sale
Much of the fortune came from what he built around the films. Weta's technology arm developed software and tools used on some of the world's highest-grossing movies. In 2021 Jackson and Walsh sold that business to the software company Unity for about US$1.65 billion, the deal that made him a billionaire, while the effects studio itself carried on in Wellington as Weta FX.
Jackson was knighted in 2010 for services to film. His story sits alongside founders like Sir Stephen Tindall as proof that a New Zealander could build a world-leading business from home, in his case turning a small country's film industry into one of its most recognised exports.
About this profile
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