In 1988, Sir Peter Jackson, then simply known as “Pete,” received his first-ever piece of fan mail. It was a letter from a high school kid in Wonganui, New Zealand, named Christian Rivers, who had seen Jackson’s self-produced directorial debut, Bad Taste, and sensed a kindred spirit.
“An envelope shows up addressed to me, and it’s stuffed with pages and pages of sketches of dragons and all this fantasy stuff,” recalls Jackson, seated on a plush sofa in the wood-paneled inner sanctum of his sprawling Park Road Post Production facility, on a typically windy recent afternoon in Wellington. “He had written to say that he enjoyed the film, and here’s some drawings he did when he should have been doing his schoolwork.”
Two years later, Jackson was prepping his third…
