'I've got myself in a position where suddenly it's clear that anything I want to do can happen,' he says, managing to smile ungloatingly. 'It's a moment in time where anybody would finance anything I come up with. It's very strange because I'm from the independent film world. I'm used to scraping things together.' What's the view from the top like? He stops smiling. 'I've never been somebody who's ever, ever, given a damn about what other people think of me or my films. But I got nervous for the first time. Nervous of being in a position where everyone had time to say, 'Can he ever top The Lord of the Rings?''
He settled on Kong because it was the project he had planned to make before Rings. 'I didn't want to even have a second where I'd be thinking what other people might want me to make. I hate the idea of that. It's like the Oscars thing. There's a certainÉ' he trails off, working out how to phrase the problem of Oscar. 'When I was making my first films, like Bad Taste and Feebles and Braindead [his micro-budget horror flicks of the late 1980s and early 1990s] I was human and like anyone in that position was always thinking, 'Gosh, I wonder if I'll ever win an Oscar. I wonder if I'll ever make a film that makes $100m.' But in some respects, rather than a burden, it feels like a huge relief to have made big, successful films, to have won Oscars, because it's highly likely I'll never make another in my life that earns as much money as The Lord of the Rings does, and it's a weight off, frankly. I never have to think about any of that ever again.'
Later, Jackson likens his current creative and financial freedoms to 'being like a kid again'.
He takes my notebook and scribbles down an address in his childlike hand. It's the home where he grew up and lived well into his twenties, several miles up the coast from Wellington in the small town of Pukerua Bay. I take a cab and find the meagre, single-storey, wood-clad house with its corrugated-iron roof hunched down from
the road at the side of a valley. It is immediately apparent why he wanted me to see it.
The view tickles the furthest reaches of childhood fantasy. There are the cliffs, the hillocks, the woodlands, the meadows, the sea, all staked out like a canvas in front of Jackson's sitting-room windows. It seems trite to say he grew up looking at Middle-earth but, manifestly, this was the case. Children play in car-less road, which decades ago would have been even quieter, back when Jackson picked up his first camera aged seven.()
'I've never had any material ambition,' he says. 'I never wanted to become a famous film maker. I wanted to do special effects, and I was driven out of desperation because I knew I was never going to do that unless I proved to people that they had to give me a chance. When I look back, I see myself as a child with a fairly singular kind of drive. I was sort of isolated from the world, socially not particularly interested and I didn't have a lot of friends. The outside world was big and scary and I never thought I'd do too well.'
An only child, Jackson's love of film became a private world of make-believe. 'My mum and dad weren't big cinema-goers and I never got taken to the films that would have blown my mind.' He made do with the Sunday screenings on New Zealand's single black-and-white television station. 'Jason and the Argonauts, Thunderbirds, those sorts of things. I saw Kong when I was nine and it's been my all-time favourite movie ever since. People have written whole books about its themes. They project anything on it from racism to sexism, but I'm not a big theme kind of guy. The reason I'm making it is the same as why I loved it when I was nine - escapism.' So it's not postmodern? 'Don't be silly.'
His childhood backwater was beautiful but boring. 'Everything that I loved about cinema was that it could take me to amazing worlds I was never going to see. I first tried to make Kong when I was 12. I became obsessed with stop-motion. I would make a model of a dinosaur or something and sit there all weekend clicking off frames.' His parents, Bill and Joan - who died during production on The Lord of the Rings - wanted him to become an architect, but supported him when he left school at 16. He got a job as an engraver on the Wellington Evening Post for NZ$200 a week. Film stock for his 16mm camera cost $100 for three minutes, but after four years of baking latex masks and brewing fake blood in the family kitchen he produced the celebrated zombie B-movie Bad Taste in 1987.
He had met the scriptwriter Fran Walsh when they worked on the 1986 extravaganza Worzel Gummidge Down Under together. They quickly married and have become one of the most successful husband-and-wife teams of any business in the world. Walsh has written all, and produced most, of the films Jackson has directed since 1989's Meet the Feebles.
How they were able to keep working in New Zealand - where there was next to no film industry till Jackson - is an indication of the couple's tenacity. With each new project they bought more equipment, a graphics computer for Heavenly Creatures in 1994 and eventually a studio when, after a failed attempt to make King Kong in the mid-1990s, it looked like The Lord of the Rings might actually happen instead. 'Driving around, we found an old paint factory that was perfect. We thought we'd go to the bank and get a mortgage but were worried about what if the film doesn't happen,' says Jackson. 'We went for a last look when there were still men working there, and in the cafeteria lying on a chair was a paperback book. It was The Lord of the Rings. Is that a sign or what? We said we'd buy the building and put ourselves in fortune's hands.'
Fortune hasn't only smiled on Jackson. She's kissed him with tongues. After protracted negotiation he won over New Line bosses who stumped up $180m that became an estimated $273m by the end of the three films' production. Jackson was elevated to mythic status, as the actors spoke of him with unprecedented reverie in ceaseless interviews. Then the money came flooding in, and the awards, and a deeply reserved man got elbowed onto the world stage.
'I'll do almost anything to avoid a party. I don't like them - all those people, all that expectation.' He sounds anxious, perhaps anticipating the upcoming world tour to launch Kong. 'I don't like the trappings of Hollywood at all.' Does all the money make it harder? 'I'm a terrible businessman. I'm frustrated because I look at George Lucas and what he's achieved. I'm only good at half of it, and it's not the important bit either. I'm very impulsive because I do it for the love of it. I sort of don't care, really, if none of it makes money.'
