I want you to picture a teenager in a quiet New
Zealand suburb. This is back in the 1970s. He's
just standing in his backyard holding a sharp
sewing needle, and he's meticulously poking these
tiny individual holes into a strip of celluloid
film. Just by hand. Completely by hand. And he
isn't destroying the film. He's holding it up
to the light, calculating exactly where to puncture
it. Because, you know, when it runs through a
projector, the bright light shining through that
tiny hole will look exactly like a muzzle flash.
Like a World War II rifle firing? Exactly. He
is literally physically inventing his own special
effects out of absolutely nothing. And the wild
part is, today, that exact same guy is an Oscar
-winning director and a billionaire tech pioneer.
It really is a profound trajectory. I mean, we
are so used to the standard Silicon Valley narrative.
Oh, yeah, the Ivy League dropout coding in a
slick garage. Right. Exactly. But this story,
it breaks every single one of those templates.
It really does. So welcome to today's deep dive.
Our mission today for you listening is to trace
this wildly unconventional evolution. From poking
holes in film to reshaping the global entertainment
industry. Yeah. We are going to explore exactly
how Peter Jackson pulled this off, because this
isn't just a biography. It's a masterclass for
you on how obsessive, passion, and a total refusal
to accept technological limitations. And a wonderfully
macabre sense of humor. Yes. How all of that
can completely redefine an industry. OK, let's
unpack this. It's the perfect place to start,
because to understand his eventual tech empire,
you really have to understand his foundational
philosophy. Right. Jackson's career is basically
the ultimate case study in scaling up a fiercely
independent do -it -yourself ethos. Taking that
backyard ingenuity and just supersizing it. Exactly.
He scaled it into a multi -billion dollar global
machine, but he never actually lost that obsessive
tinkerer identity. So to understand the billionaire
who builds digital empires, we have to look closely
at the kid who built cinematic worlds out of
thin air. The kid in Pukaro Bay. Yeah, this coastal
town. Growing up, he was completely captivated
by Ray Harryhausen films and the original King
Kong. Which is pretty standard for future filmmakers,
but Jackson took it further. Much further. At
just nine years old, he isn't just watching these
movies. He's trying to reverse engineer them.
He's making his own stop motion models. Right.
trying to literally remake King Kong scene by
scene in his house. And that drive to just reverse
engineer reality, it only intensifies. You mentioned
him poking pinholes in the film earlier. Yeah,
the muzzle flashes. Right. That was for a short
film he made as a teenager called The Dwarf Patrol.
Great title. It is. But he had no budget, no
special effects department, and obviously no
access to industry tools. So he just looked at
the problem mechanically. Exactly. How do you
simulate a bright flash on a physical medium?
You literally let the projector's bulb do the
work by scratching away the emulsion on the film
strip. It's brilliant problem -solving, but the
sheer dedication is what really gets me. Like,
he actually drops out of school at 16. Wait,
at 16? Yeah, drops out and gets a job as a a
photo engraver at a local newspaper in Wellington.
That's a serious commitment. And he stays at
that day job for seven years. Wow. Seven years.
And he continues living at home with his parents
that entire time just so he can save every single
penny. To buy equipment. Yeah, to buy his own
professional grade camera equipment. Which pays
off because he finally secures a 16 millimeter
camera. Yeah. And that specific piece of hardware
becomes the engine for his first feature film.
Bad Taste. Bad Taste. Oh, man. Bad Taste is legendary
in the indie world. It really is. For those who
don't know, it's this wild, over -the -top, splatter
comedy. It's about aliens coming to Earth to
harvest humans for an intergalactic fast food
chain. As one does. Right. But because he is
still working his day job, he shoots this movie
almost entirely on weekends. Over the course
of four years, right? Four years of weekends.
His friends are acting for free. He builds his
own camera crane. He's practically a one man
studio. He even plays two separate roles in the
film. There's this incredible sequence where
his two characters are physically fighting each
other. On the edge of a cliff, right? Yes. On
the edge of a cliff. So you have a director out
on a ledge, literally filming himself fighting
himself. What's fascinating here is that this
entire period was built on pure, unadulterated
trial and error. Because he had no training.
None. Jackson had absolutely zero formal training
in filmmaking. No film school. No mentors. He
was just figuring it out as he went. Teaching
himself editing, visual effects, prosthetics,
all on the fly. And because he never learned
the traditional rules of how a Hollywood movie
is supposed to be made. We didn't know the limits.
Exactly. He never internalized those traditional
boundaries. He simply didn't know what was supposed
to be impossible. It really makes me think of
like a garage band musician. Oh, that's a good
comparison. But it's not just a musician who
is writing their own songs in the garage. It's
someone who is in there actually soldering together
the circuitry for their amplifiers. Building
the hardware. Right. Hand carving the wood for
their own guitars, all just to get the exact,
highly specific sound they hear in their head.
That is a highly accurate way to look at it.
He was actively building the tools to make the
art, rather than just making art with the tools
provided to him. But you know, building homemade
camera rigs and shooting aliens in the woods
on a Sunday, it has a natural ceiling. It does.
Splatter comedies, no matter how inventive they
are, they don't exactly get you massive studio
funding or like... critical prestige. Not usually,
no. To truly scale up as a world builder, he
had to prove he could handle genuine, nuanced
human emotion. Not just fake blood and latex
masks. Exactly. And that causal shift brings
us to 1994 with the release of Heavenly Creatures.
Which is a massive pivot. A completely different
universe. He abandons the alien vomit for this
beautifully shot, deeply tragic, critically lauded
drama. Based on a true story, too. Yeah, a real
-life 19 - murder case in New Zealand, it starred
a then unknown Kate Winslet. And it fundamentally
changed how the industry viewed him. It earned
him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original
Screenplay. And we have to give immense credit
here to his partner and frequent collaborator,
Fran Walsh. Oh, absolutely. It was Walsh who
really saw the potential. in this specific true
crime story. She pushed for it to be told. Her
enthusiasm and her writing really drove the project.
It proved that their team could direct incredibly
complex human stories. But even with that newfound
prestige, the tinkerer in him just couldn't resist
manipulating the medium. I had to put the boundaries
again. Just a year later, in 1995, He and co
-director Kosta Boats pull off one of the great
media hoaxes. Forgotten Silver. This is maybe
my favorite thing he's ever done. It's a television
mockumentary. And people totally fell for it.
Completely. They invent this completely fictitious
New Zealand film pioneer named Colin McKenzie.
Right. Totally made -up guy. And they create
a documentary claiming this guy secretly invented
color film. And the talkies? Yes. Decades before
Hollywood did. They fabricate old film reels,
age them to look authentic. And they just broadcast
it. They broadcast the whole thing in a serious
drama slot on national television with zero warning
that it was fake. Which is so bull - People were
absolutely outraged when they found out they
had been duped. But look at what that prank achieved.
mechanically. Right. It proved beyond a shadow
of a doubt that Jackson could flawlessly manipulate
reality. He made the unbelievable look entirely
factual. It was a flex. A huge flex. Yeah. And
that specific skill set blending the impossible
with the real is exactly what caught the eye
of Hollywood. which leads to his 1996 comedy
horror film, The Frighteners. Starring Michael
J. Fox. Okay, wait, I have to push back here
for a second. He finally lands the big Hollywood
backing. He gets a major star like Michael J.
Fox. A huge star at the time. And the film itself
is set in a North American town. Wouldn't the
absolute most logical... easiest path to success
for a rising director be to pack up, move to
Los Angeles and plug into the studio system?
You would think so. So why on earth did Jackson
insist on shooting the Frighteners entirely in
New Zealand? It's a great question. And honestly,
understanding his decision here unlocks his entire
future empire. Moving to Los Angeles would have
meant plugging himself into someone else's machine.
Ah. He would have had to rent Hollywood special
effects houses. He'd have to abide by their schedules,
their rules, their unions. He'd be an employee,
basically. Right. By dicking his heels in and
insisting the production stay in New Zealand,
Jackson essentially forced the studio to fund
the creation of his own infrastructure. Wait.
So by refusing to go to LA, he used their Hollywood
budget to build his own personal factory. Exactly.
To handle the complex digital and physical effects
required for the Frighteners, he and his collaborators
rapidly expanded their own local effects company,
Weeda Workshop, and its digital counterpart,
Weeda Digital. He was employing vertical integration,
controlling every step of the process. He wanted
total creative control. And to have that, you
must own the means of production. By staying
home, he built a facility that could eventually
handle anything his imagination could conjure.
Which directly sets the stage for the most audacious
pitch in cinema history. The big one. Because
he now owns this massive, vertically -integrated
factory with WIDA, he is uniquely positioned
to walk into a studio and confidently say, I
want to adapt JR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
The scale of that ambition cannot be overstated.
It really can't. And initially, he developed
the project with Miramax. Oh, right. However,
the studio heads there started pressuring him
heavily. They wanted him to condense this massive,
sprawling, historically rich fantasy epic into
just one single two -hour film. Imagine trying
to cram all of Middle Earth into one movie. It's
impossible. It would have been an absolute creative
disaster. Jackson knew it would fail. So in a
massive gamble, he takes the project to New Line
Cinema for a last -minute pitch. And New Line
didn't just save the project. No. They doubled
down. They insisted on making it a proper trilogy.
Three massive films shot back -to -back, concurrently.
Here's where it gets really interesting. Hell
me. Think about the mechanics of that negotiation.
It's like you walk into a bank and you ask the
loan officer for a small personal loan to build
a little wooden shed in your backyard. Right.
And the bank manager looks at you and says, no.
Absolutely not. I demand that you take hundreds
of millions of dollars and build a three -story
mansion instead. That is insane. It was completely
unheard of in Hollywood to greenlight three blockbuster
films at once for an unproven franchise. Unheard
of and incredibly risky. I mean, principal photography
lasted for well over a year. With multiple units
shooting all across the rugged terrain of New
Zealand. And this is where that digital ecosystem
he built truly flexed its muscles. Right. Why?
Because to create the massive sweeping battles
of Middle Earth, Weta Digital developed a revolutionary
piece of software called Massive. Because you
can't just hire 50 ,000 extras for an orc army.
Exactly. The logistics alone would ruin you.
So the Massive software utilized artificial intelligence
to give thousands of individual digital characters
their own autonomous brains. Wait, their own
brains? Yeah. Instead of manually animating every
single soldier frame by frame, they program a
digital agents with rules for combat, vision,
and movement. That is so far ahead of its time.
And then they essentially press play. and let
them fight it out organically. He literally scaled
his childhood stop -motion models into autonomous
digital armies. And the payoff for this integration
of tech and art was historic. Beyond historic,
The Return of the King Alone won 11 Academy Awards.
Tying the all -time record. And becoming the
very first fantasy film to ever win Best Picture.
And when you look at his actual directing style
on set during those films. Oh, it is intensely
perfectionist. Very. He was famous for demanding
take after take from his actors. Always asking
for one more for luck. Right. He would shoot
a scene from a staggering number of angles to
get what the industry calls coverage. And that
specific directing style, the absolute insistence
on relentless coverage and multiple takes, that
is a direct descendant of his DIY roots. How
so? Remember, he spent years manually splicing
his own film strips by hand for bad taste. Oh,
true. He knows the agonizing feeling of sitting
in an editing bay at 3 a .m. and realizing you
don't have the exact shot you need to make a
scene work. You can't just fix it in post if
you don't have the footage. Exactly. So by shooting
from every conceivable angle on set, he ensures
he has every possible puzzle piece available
to him when it's time to assemble the final picture.
That makes perfect sense. He also clearly had
a blast making them, despite the immense pressure.
He constantly sneaks into his own movies. Of
the cameos? Yes. In The Fellowship of the Ring,
he's the grumpy guy chomping on a carrot in the
rain in the town of Bree. Oh yeah. In The Two
Towers, he's a Rohan defender. curling a spear
off the wall at Helm's Deep. Classic. And my
absolute favorite, in The Return of the King,
he plays a pirate mercenary who accidentally
gets shot in the chest by Legolas. It's a great
reminder that the kid making movies in his backyard
with his buddies is still very much alive on
that set. Completely. So he conquers the ultimate
fantasy epic. He then follows it up by living
out his childhood dream. Remaking King Kong.
Yes, in 2005, utilizing Weta's motion capture
technology. But once you have built a machine,
capable of creating Middle Earth and a hyper
-realistic giant ape. What do you point it at
next? Right. You've climbed the mountain. For
Jackson, the answer was unexpected. He turned
his technological ecosystem toward reality. Towards
history. Exactly. This transition completely
blew my mind. In 2018, he releases a documentary
called They Shall Not Grow Old. A masterpiece
of restoration. He takes century -old, grainy,
silent, black -and -white archival footage from
the trenches of World War I, and he unleashes
the full power of wetta upon it. The restoration
process was staggering. I mean, they didn't just
clean up the scratches. They computationally
adjusted the frame rates. So the soldiers stop
moving in that jerky sped up motion typical of
old film. It looks like modern video. It does.
They painstakingly colorize the uniforms and
the mud to historically accurate shades. And
they converted the entire thing into an immersive
3D experience. And the audio. I couldn't believe
this part. Oh, the lip readers. Yes. They actually
brought in professional lip readers to study
the silent mounds of the soldiers on film. Just
to see what they were saying in the background.
Exactly. Just so they could accurately script
and dub in the exact words the men were shouting
in the trenches 100 years ago. The critical consensus
was that the film created an eerie, hyper -real
sense of life. It really did. It took figures
that we are used to seeing as distant, unrelatable
ghosts of the past and made them undeniably,
viscerally human. He then applies a similar technological
leap to music history. Yes, The Beatles. In 2021,
he releases the massive documentary series, The
Beatles. Get back. Which was a massive undertaking.
Huge. He has handed 55 hours of unseen video
footage and 140 hours of audio from the band's
final days together. But there was a major issue
with the audio, wasn't there? A huge issue. The
problem was a lot of that audio was just a noisy
jumbled mess. They were playing over each other.
Constantly. Instruments were bleeding into vocal
mics and it was considered largely unusable by
standard metrics. So what does his team do? They
literally invent groundbreaking demixing software
to solve it. This demixing technology is a true
paradigm shift in audio engineering. It's basically
magic. It feels like it. Yeah. Previously, if
you had a mono track with a guitar and a voice
mix together, you couldn't separate them cleanly.
They're baked in. Right. But Jackson's team utilized
machine learning to solve this. They essentially
trained an AI to recognize the specific acoustic
waveform of John Lennon's voice and the specific
waveform of Paul McCartney's bass. It's literally
like teaching a computer how to unbake a cake.
That is a brilliant way to conceptualize it.
You have a fully baked cake, which is the mono
audio track, and this software somehow manages
to perfectly extract the flour from the eggs
without ruining either ingredient. The A .I.
isolates the individual instruments and vocals,
allowing them to remix a messy 1969 recording
with pristine modern clarity. And that technology
didn't just stay in his documentary. No, it changed
everything. It completely revolutionized the
music industry overnight. It allowed for the
incredibly crisp 2022 reissue of the Beatles
album Revolver. And even more astonishingly.
It led to the completion of Now and Then in 2023.
The last Beatles song. Yes. The surviving Beatles
used Jackson's de -mixing tech to cleanly extract
John Lennon's vocal from a very muddy, low -quality
demo cassette he recorded in his apartment in
1977. Just a tape recorder sitting on a piano.
And they built a modern track around it. And
it literally just won a Grammy. Jackson even
stepped in to direct the music video, seamlessly
blending new footage with restored vintage clips.
But, you know, stepping back. Applying this level
of computational power to historical artifacts
raises a fascinating philosophical debate. It
really does. Right. I have to ask you this because
I keep thinking about it. Sure. When you take
century -old silent war footage and you colorize
it, adjust the speed, convert it to 3D and add
synthetic dialogue. Right. Or when you rip apart
the sonic fabric of a 1970s cassette tape to
build a modern high fidelity pop song. Are we
preserving history? Or are we modernizing it
so heavily that it stops being a historical document
and becomes a totally new piece of art? If we
connect this to the bigger picture, we really
have to look closely at Jackson's underlying
philosophy regarding archives. Okay, what is
it? For him, a historical artifact locked in
a vault or a grainy video that a modern teenager
cannot connect with is essentially dead. Interesting.
He fundamentally believes that knowledge and
history are most valuable when they are understood
and, crucially, when they are felt by a contemporary
audience. So it's about emotional resonance.
Exactly. He isn't trying to overwrite the archive.
He is attempting to translate history into a
visceral, modern cinematic language so that people
today will actually engage with it emotionally.
Translating history. I really love that framing.
It fits perfectly. So what does this all mean
for the kid from Pookaroo Bay? Well, mastering
this level of world building and technological
translation eventually pushes him entirely beyond
the bounds of traditional cinema. Oh, far beyond.
The guy who was poking holes in film with a sewing
needle officially became a billionaire in twenty
twenty one. Yes. And the mechanism of how he
became a billionaire is telling how he sold the
technology division of what a digital. to Unity
technologies, for over 1 .6 billion dollars.
Which is wild. Unity, for those listening who
might not know, is a massive 3D gaming engine
company. Right. Why would a video game company
want a movie director's special effects house?
Because the line between video games and cinema
is disappearing. Blurring together. Completely.
The tools WIDA built to render the jungles of
King Kong, or the subsurface scattering of Gollum's
skin? Those are exactly the tools game developers
need to build immersive, real -time 3D environments.
So Unity bought Weida to integrate Hollywood
-level visual fidelity into the interactive gaming
space. Exactly. It's the ultimate convergence.
But what's truly wild is what he does with that
immense wealth. Oh, his hobbies. He has become
a billionaire hobbyist on a scale that is hard
to comprehend. His real estate and aviation portfolios
alone are staggering. Doesn't he own like a fleet
of planes? He owns over four - 40 air -worthy
World War I -era planes. That's incredible. And
he doesn't just display them in a hangar, he
runs an entire aircraft restoration and manufacturing
company called the Vintage Aviator just to keep
them flying. He's sustaining an entire micro
industry. He also owns modern Gulfstream jets,
and he actually deployed one of them to actively
assist in the international search for the missing
Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. It's a very
active, kinetic type of wealth. Very much so.
involved in philanthropy. He donated half a million
dollars to embryonic stem cell research. Wow.
He stepped in to buy an old church in Wellington,
and later the Bats Theater, specifically to save
them from the wrecking ball and preserve them
for the community. And if saving old architecture
and maintaining a private air force of biplanes
wasn't enough. There's more. There is. He is
also a major investor in colossal biosciences.
Wait. The genetic company? Yes. That is the radical
genetic engineering company that is actively
attempting to bring extinct creatures like the
woolly mammoth back to life. That is the absolute
ultimate evolution of a world builder. Right.
He has gone from animating a clay King Kong on
a tabletop to funding The literal genetic de
-extinction of a mammoth. It is a conceptually
perfect through line. It really is. Jackson's
wealth is clearly not spent on passive luxury.
It is actively deployed for preservation and
creation. Cutting the money to work. Whether
it's keeping a 1915 biplane in the sky, protecting
a local theater, extracting a ghost's voice from
a cassette tape, or exploring radical bioscience.
his obsession remains entirely consistent. Which
is. He wants to make the impossible visible,
tangible, and real. It really is one of the most
incredible creative. journeys of our time. For
you listening, we've traced a path from a teenager
hand cranking a 16 millimeter camera on the weekends
to film bad tastes. To an Academy Award sweeping
visionary. To a billionaire tech innovator reshaping
how we experience history in music. Peter Jackson's
career proves that fully embracing your most
obsessive curiosities, building your own tools
when none exist, and absolutely refusing to take
no for an answer when technology tells you something
is impossible. It can quite literally change
the world. This raises an important question,
though, a thought I'd like to leave you with.
Let's hear it. If the technology built by this
one filmmaker can now perfectly extract a voice
from a degraded tape and seamlessly transform
100 -year -old trench warfare into a hyper -real,
immersive 3D experience, we are officially entering
a new era. Yeah. As these tools become even more
advanced, allowing us to perfectly digitally
simulate history, music, and perhaps even resurrect
biology. If technology allows us to perfectly
Photoshop the past, we have to wonder if we're
actually preserving history or just creating
a highly convincing simulation of it. That is
a heavy thought. Will we eventually lose the
ability to tell the difference between what was
originally real and what has been perfectly digitally
remembered? That is a deeply wild thought to
end on. As the tools to rebuild our past get
sharper, the line between reality and simulation
gets beautifully, terrifyingly thin. Keep mulling
that over and keep diving deep. We'll catch you
next time.