Why Peter Jackson would never consider himself an auteur: “I never quite understand that term”
In the 1950s, an academic theory about filmmaking began to circulate, and it would come to define generations of directors. The idea was that a film is driven by a single person – the director – in the same way a novel is driven by its author. When you see a film and know exactly who helmed it even though you haven’t seen the credits, chances are, you’re watching a movie made by a director who is described as an auteur. Over the years, people who have earned this moniker include the likes of Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and Wes Anderson. One director who would prefer not to be singled out that way, however, is Peter Jackson.
The New Zealand director is best known for bringing Middle Earth to the silver screen in his Oscar-winning adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, but his credits stretch far beyond the realm of hobbits and orcs. He made a name for himself internationally with the chilling 1994 drama Heavenly Creatures, which starred Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey as real-life teenage friends who committed murder.
Even before that film, however, Jackson was demonstrating his considerable range, making low-budget slasher horror movies and a macabre musical satire featuring puppets.
When Jackson landed the opportunity to adapt the Lord of the Rings novels in the late 1990s, his legacy as a fantasy director was set. However, after the original trilogy and a Hobbit trilogy, he has managed to break out of the mould by making several acclaimed documentaries, including a stunning restoration of World War I footage in They Shall Not Grow Old and an extensive chronicle of the making of the Beatles’ final album, Let It Be.
Despite having won three Academy Awards, three Baftas, and a Golden Globe, Jackson is adamant that he should not be viewed as the sole author of his films. “I don’t quite know what an auteur is,” he told an interviewer in 2005 during a press tour for King Kong. “I never quite understand that term because filmmaking is such a huge team effort. I regard myself as being the final filter, so that anything that ends up in the movie is there because it’s something that I would think was cool in a movie somebody else had made. I very much tried to make a film that I’d enjoy, but I’m open to ideas. I need a huge team of people to help me and I try to encourage everyone to contribute as much as possible. I think that’s the job of a director, really, to sort of funnel all the creativity into one centralised point of being.”
Jackson wasn’t just paying lip service to the collaborative nature of filmmaking. Throughout his career, he has focused on projects that require extensive special effects as well as those that require wading through thousands of hours of footage. It’s no wonder that he’s stuck with a core group of filmmakers to shepherd his productions from script to screen, including writer/producer Fran Walsh, who he started working with during the ‘80s, and screenwriter Philippa Boyens, who began working with him on The Lord of the Rings and continued collaborating with him through The Lovely Bones in 2009.
Jackson’s dismissal of the auteur theory shouldn’t just be considered pure humility, either. In fact, there are many other directors who have been labelled as auteurs whose filmographies are full of repeat collaborators. Martin Scorsese, for example, has worked with editor Thelma Schoonmaker on every film since his debut feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door, in 1967, while Christopher Nolan is known to stick with a core group of collaborators, including actors and special effects masters, as well as producer Emma Thomas and, more recently, cinematographer Hoyte von Hoytema.
