SAN DIEGO - Peter Jackson pads about a two-story hotel penthouse that overlooks this city's scenic downtown waterfront - and a sea of teens gathered below dressed as wookiees, iron men and hobbits.Jackson turns from the window to prepare a cup of hot tea (sweetened with chocolate milk) and settles into the living room couch. He's a small-looking man, thanks to a diet that shaved more than 30 pounds from his frame, and in the corner of the room he's almost hidden in the oversized furniture.
Yet Jackson, 47, seems content away from the electricity outside. For a man about to make his first appearance at Comic-Con with his first film in four years, The Lord of the Nerds looks a touch sheepish.
It's a bit big, isn't it all?" Jackson says of the pop-culture convention, which drew 125,000 people last month. "It looks like it can be overwhelming.
This is all great, talking about movies. But I'd just as soon be on the floor, looking for toys."
He may be the architect of one of the most successful film trilogies of all time, but Jackson remains a geek at heart, a meticulous World War I model builder who believes the video game World of Warcraft rivals most Hollywood films for entertainment. He has a life-size "Star Wars" storm trooper costume.
And he's susceptible to droughts of confidence. He procrastinated for months before starting to write "The Hobbit," worried that he couldn't duplicate the magic of his earlier scripts. Jackson was so unnerved by the success of the "Lord of the Rings" films - released in 2001, 2002 and 2003 - that he was spooked out of directing another.
Fitting, then, that he emerges from his New Zealand home and studio as the producer of "District 9," a low-budget alien flick born of the ashes of "Halo," the $145 million video game adaptation that Jackson was to write and produce. When that fell through, Jackson found himself scrambling to come up with a substitute film, hire more talent and scrape together $30 million to pay for it all.
And he was loving it.
To be honest, it made me realize how much I miss guerrilla filmmaking," he says. "I miss the chances I used to be able to take."
He's taking one with "District 9," a documentary-style tale of aliens who are forced into the ghettos of Johannesburg. Fans used to the exotic worlds that spring from Jackson's Weta Digital effects house may be startled by the bloody, barbed-wire world of "District 9." The film marks a return of sorts for Jackson to his low-budget roots, when he made his name as a "splatstick" producer, director or writer of horror titles such as "Bad Taste" in 1987 and "Dead Alive" in 1992.
And though the latest film is directed by newcomer Neill Blomkamp, few argue that it wasn't three words that propelled "District 9" to its Comic-Con splash and Sony's summer release slate: "Peter Jackson presents."
Jackson is "a wicked-smart dude," says "Titanic" director and friend James Cameron, who is working on the 3-D opus "Avatar," due Dec. 18.
Cameron says it was Jackson and his computer-generated character Gollum that inspired him to do his latest film.
When I saw the second 'Lord of the Rings' movie, when Gollum had that soliloquy with himself, I knew we could make 'Avatar,'" Cameron says. Jackson "has an enthusiasm for movies that makes anything possible."
The birth of 'District 9'
District 9," which opens Aug. 14, seemed anything but possible three years ago, when distribution problems and creativity disputes sunk Halo.
Jackson had become fond of Blomkamp, 29, a music video filmmaker in Johannesburg who impressed him with a six-minute short movie, "Alive in Joburg," about aliens forced into a South African slum.
I hadn't met someone who needed to be making movies more than Neill," Jackson says. "So when ('Halo') fell through, we thought, Why not make that short movie into a feature and let Neill insert his (vision)?' "
The film centers on an alien race known as "prawns" that is kept segregated from humans in the ghettos of Johannesburg. The film follows a government agent (Sharlto Copley) who is sprayed with a mysterious alien chemical.
For Blomkamp, the invitation from Jackson was nothing short of a lottery win. "Here's this royalty in movies, telling you he wants to make your film," Blomkamp says. "I'd been watching his movies since I was 15. The first time we met, it was like meeting your childhood idol."
That is, if your childhood idol has a thing for unassembled plastic toys. Blomkamp remembers the first time he met Jackson, who was emerging from a car, struggling with an armful of models.
He's still like a kid," Blomkamp says. "I think if he weren't making movies, he'd be gluing those models. That's why fans love him so much. There's no faking it. He's one of them."
Though overlaid with subtexts on everything from poverty to race relations, "District 9" remains true to the Peter Jackson school of science fiction, Blomkamp says: It has to be fun.
This is still a satire," Blomkamp says. "If we're not using spaceships and aliens and lasers, I'm not making this movie. This is about having fun with toys. Maybe that's why Peter liked me."
Jackson's geekery can occasionally blind him to the power of his movies, Cameron says. Five years ago, the two directors had planned to meet to discuss 3-D scenes for Jackson's "King Kong" (2005). Jackson had requested a morning meeting that day, March 1, 2004 - a day after the Academy Awards, for which Jackson was up for 11 Oscars for "The Return of the King."
I said, 'You're going to win every Oscar there is; you're not going to be up by 9 a.m.,' " Cameron says. "He huffed humbly. I said, Let's make it 5 p.m., because that's when you're going to wake up.' "
It was," Jackson recalls sheepishly. The film won all 11 Oscars.
Back to what he loved
Jackson isn't completely unaware of success or clout. He was a hands-on producer for "District 9," helping wrangle through script issues and budget constraints. He has another big-studio film coming down the pike, "The Lovely Bones" with Mark Wahlberg. It arrives Dec. 11.
But the "District 9" experience has him thinking he'll return to smaller movies, which served him well with hits such as "Heavenly Creatures" in 1994 and "The Frighteners" in 1996.
We were taking such chances back then," Jackson says. "You weren't worrying about a $150 million budget that everyone wants to get their hands on. Or appealing to a usually white demographic to make the most money possible. This is what I've always loved doing: making movies for the geeks."
Of course, all true geeks return eventually to the world of J.R.R. Tolkien. And while Jackson acknowledges he put off writing "The Hobbit" for months because of heightened expectations, his fears dissipated when he returned to Middle-earth.
I was amazed how quickly I was back in the middle of things again," he says. "It was really fun. Writing Bilbo and Gandalf down, writing dialogue for them, it really felt good to be back. I wasn't expecting that."
And he was never expecting to direct "The Hobbit," which will be shot in two parts, back-to-back. Guillermo del Toro is set to direct the films, to be released in 2011 and 2012.
I was worried that I had already made the best movies I could make, to be completely honest," Jackson says. "My fear was that I would have a miserable time competing against myself in Middle-earth again. Maybe I made the wrong decision, but I thought it would be better to have a fresh voice behind Hobbiton. Let him beat the bastard who made 'Lord of the Rings.'"
And if del Toro does? Jackson seems almost relieved at the notion of someone else holding the One Ring that binds them all. He'd just as soon talk toy models - he just finished painting and gluing the creature Hydra from the 1963 fantasy film Jason and the Argonauts - as fantasy films.
I'm like any other fan; I just want the movies about the things I love to be good. If 'The Hobbit' made one more dollar and won one more Oscar than my movies, I'd probably be the happiest guy in the room."
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