Time, Trust, Talent and Peter Jackson

Time, Trust, Talent and Peter Jackson

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Season 1; Episode 15- Time, Trust, Talent and Peter Jackson

Happy New Year from a new place in the world… Auckland, New Zealand.  This week is the first of transitioning away from the research, preparation, and deep thinking of the past several months into actual creation.  We will hear the story of Peter Jackson, beloved son of New Zealand, and legendary creative, who chose to build legacy right where he was already rooted.

Welcome to Beyond the Template.

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Hello all!  I’m Caroline Amelie LeBoeuf, and am I thrilled to be connecting with you all again this week after an amazing holiday hiatus, the turning from one year into another, and a journey to the other side of the world.  Welcome welcome to Beyond the Template.  If you have been following along, you know this podcast is a work in progress this first season.  And I am grateful for you for joining in week after week!  So far, this podcast has embodied well established design principles, and we have learned together how iterative a new creative project can be in the research, planning, deep thinking and preparation stages.  BUT!  It’s time to get messy together.

I am writing today’s episode with a beautiful chocolate labrador by my feet, listening to the three-generation household conversation waft through the open windows from next door (from baby to grandparent), and watching passersby on the sidewalk outside.  It’s a beautiful day today with a high of 25 degrees Celsius.  Puffy clouds are lazily tracing the skies as the warm Pacific winds blow.  I am in a place called Blockhouse Bay, a suburb on the outskirts of Auckland.  From my present home, I have been able to walk to the shores here, something I haven’t ever experienced in my life; not even when I lived in the beach city of Charleston, South Carolina, USA.

I can’t believe it’s January.  Typically, January and February are my least favorite months of the year.  The peak of the holidays always leaves me feeling a hole in my gut and there isn’t anything to fill it up during the dreary, cold, grey, rainy days in the southern United States.  Even when I lived in the mountains where I got snow once in a while, somehow, I never felt the “magic” I should have because it was quick to turn into sleet or black ice or just plain slosh.  So, if this is what you are experiencing right now as you listen to this, I hope you are taking good care of yourself.  I mentioned seasonal affective disorder before… and I know these months are usually the worst since at this point winter has stayed for some time.  I hope you are keeping yourself warm, getting as much sunlight or firelight as possible, and making sure that you are finding ways to bring in as much comfort and rest into your days as possible.

The past two weeks have been amazing!  Auckland is an incredibly diverse place, and I have found myself eating predominantly East Asian cuisine, which I am thrilled about.  That, and all the hand pies!  But this trip has also been eye opening.  I am seeing myself in the mirror differently.  I am sleeping better than ever before.  I am prioritizing my days differently.  And my mind has expanded to see the possibilities for myself both personally and professionally.

One such new possibility dear listeners now brings me to an honest moment with you.  Learning and Development has gotten me here, and I do think understanding best practices in design is helpful.  But I have been approaching podcast this all wrong.  What I have been trying to do is share with you all how to reach your dreams… but the reality is that all I have been doing is adding more noise to a space where you might feel you already aren’t cutting it, or doing enough, or meeting a certain standard or expectation.  I LOVE living in the world of structure and strategy, but for you… well what you are doing, and how you are doing it, is perfect just as it is.  My purpose in partnership is to hold space in a way that you can thrive in, rather than serve to undermine your natural inclinations, rhythms, and patterns.

This realization is going to pivot my business hard this year.  I won’t go into that now, but I am hoping that the remainder of this season lands in a way that feels aligned with my listeners.  

My expanders of the week will now be less biographical and more focused in a way for you to see yourselves in the most incredibly creative and innovative minds in our time and throughout history.  Before I was hoping to inspire by telling the stories of these individuals, but I think it fell flat as lecture versus anecdote.  Since I am in New Zealand, and will be for the next month, our first newly formatted Expander of the Week is someone the entire world might know about at this point, but if you saw him here, in his own country, you might not notice as no one would stare stares or ask him for selfies or autographs.  New Zealand has a way of keeping everyone at the same level.  Celebrity isn’t revered, and Peter Jackson, at least here, is no exception to the “tall poppy” rule.

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Peter Jackson did not arrive in cinema through privilege, polish, or pedigree. There was no red carpet rolled out for him in his early days. No elite film schools. No family lineage in the arts. No quiet confidence that the world would make room for his imagination.

He received instead, a childhood growing up in Pukerua Bay, a small coastal town north of Wellington, where the Pacific ocean crashes against rock with a kind of persistent stubbornness. This was the kind of place where you learn early how to entertain yourself. Where imagination blends seamlessly into the hours of the day.

Jackson was an only child and quiet. He was observant and questioning. A deep thinker.  The kind of kid who disappears into his inner world not because he’s escaping reality, but because reality hasn’t caught up to him yet.  

At age eight, he saw King Kong on television.  And, that was it.  Jackson became obsessed.  Maybe even possessed. His passion was not a gentle spark.  His mind went ablaze.

He would later describe that moment not as inspiration, but as recognition. Jackson said the film had a “profound effect” on him and described its titular ape as “a very special little chap” who captured his heart. 

Something in his brain locked into place. This was not about wanting to be famous. This was not about money. This was not even about storytelling in the conventional sense.

It was about world-building.

From that point forward, Jackson did not consume movies passively. He dissected them. He rewound scenes until the tape wore thin. He wanted to know how the illusion worked. How sound, camera, movement, and timing could conspire to create belief.

When he was 12, he even made a rubber Kong and cardboard model of the Empire State Building and tried to animate it using his parents’ Super-8 camera.

Most kids would film family holidays. Peter Jackson began making his own monster movies.

His first projects were crude. Bloody. Absurd. They were messy and perfect for where he was in his process.

And they were the workings of someone not just exploring a new creative path but cutting through one of their own.  He built models out of scrap materials. Shot scenes in his backyard and garage. He edited obsessively. Jackson was learning stop-motion through trial and error. He taught himself everything because there was no one around to teach him.

Jackson did not grow up surrounded by collaborators. Instead, he grew up to learn to value and make room for them. 

By his late teens, he was working as a photo engraver in Wellington by day and filming at night. This was hard.  Exhausting.  Jackson wasn’t experiencing a romantic idea of the creative process.  His forward momentum was due to creative hunger at odds with his economic reality.

You would think by the time Jackson was an adult; after working on filmmaking for decades prior his early feature films would have been deemed by film critics as respectable.  But no.

They were splatter films. Gore-soaked, grotesque, deliberately offensive. Bad Taste (1987 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IHwKJOZZ6U) . Meet the Feebles (1989 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6C6CzEEKaXQ) . 

These films could not have said more loudly: “I do not belong to your polite cinematic world.”

And yet, even inside those very first film attempts… was something unmistakable.

Technical audacity. Precision. Rhythm. A brain that understood sequencing, pacing, escalation. A mind that could hold dozens of moving parts simultaneously.

So, what did critics say?  “Destined to stand as an unfortunate footnote for Mr. Jackson’s career.” (New York Times critic, Janet Maslin). 

But Peter Jackson was not making trash.  These weren’t footnotes.  He was still learning, pivoting, growing, and expanding in his craft.  He was training himself.

Every absurd practical effect was a rehearsal.
 Every outrageous scene was a systems test.
 Everything deemed a “failure” by those critics, taught Jackson how collaboration actually works when resources are scarce.

Because Jackson did not evolve by remaining a lone genius.  He began to accelerate only after building creative ecosystems; the most important of these being with Fran Walsh.

Walsh was not a sidekick. Not a muse. Not a supportive partner standing politely in the background.

She was a writer. A thinker. A structural mind.

Together, they balanced each other. Where Jackson was visually obsessive and technically daring, Walsh brought emotional grounding, narrative coherence, and thematic depth.

Later, Philippa Boyens would join them, completing what would become one of the most effective collaborative writing partnerships in modern cinema.

Three minds. Three sensibilities. One shared vision.

This first established network of collaborative creativity was more than incidental.  It was foundational for Jackson’s most epic achievements.  

When Jackson pivoted from being a cult filmmaker to a “serious director” with Heavenly Creatures, it was Walsh’s emotional intelligence and psychological insight that anchored the story. The film explored obsession, fantasy, violence, and intimacy with a maturity that surprised critics who had already written Jackson off.

But THEN… thirty years after he received his first camera… came The Lord of the Rings.

LOTR has created a sort of myth around Peter Jackson.  Many don’t know the honest truth about who he was, where he started, and even where he was going before his collaborators elevated his genius to worldwide renowned heights.  

People see him simply as: Visionary director. Impossible dream. One man brings Middle-earth to life.

That story is so obviously incomplete at best.

What actually happened was this:

Jackson didn’t leave New Zealand.  Even when people were pressuring him to go to Hollywood to become “legitimate.” 

He stayed. Built and partnered right where he was.  And there he expanded further.

I didn’t mean to, but I attended Auckland’s Weta Workshop Unleashed my first day in New Zealand without even knowing it was tied to Peter Jackson.  I like opening up Google Maps and zooming into to see landmarks and then reading reviews.  After visiting Weta, my review got hundreds of views.  The last time I was that happy was when I went to Seattle Washington’s Pop Culture Museum.  Their exhibits were phenomenal, but this was immersive and intimate as it connects to one production company… and now I know it was Peter Jackson who pulled it together for his own purposes.  

Weta Workshop and Weta Digital were not accidents. They were intentional responses to limitation. If Hollywood would not give him the tools, Jackson simply decided that he would create them. And, if the industry would not trust the local New Zealand talent, he would train it.

Hundreds of artists, technicians, designers, engineers and craftspeople moved through Weta with Jackson.

It should be no surprise that Middle-earth was not built by one man, but instead was built by a community.

So, Jackson’s genius was not just imagination. It was also aligned with infrastructure thinking.

He understood that creativity at scale requires balanced systems which held skills and talent not one person might hold. If he had attempted to move forward with his vision without the partnerships in place, that vision would have collapsed under its own weight. Jackson knew that the future of his art and that of New Zealand, was not meant to be centered around his own individual brilliance, but instead scaffolded with the coordinated intelligences of many.

During the filming of The Lord of the Rings, Jackson lived in Wellington. Worked in Miramar, which is a neighborhood or burrow within the city. Jackson set up an office in an old home right in the center, near the same streets where Weta buzzed day and night. Jackson was not a distant executive directing from afar.

He was dedicated, present but even more so embedded.  If LOTR production was an organism, Jackson allowed himself to be one part of it.  

Neurologically, Jackson displayed early on the traits often associated with divergent thinking: deep pattern recognition, intense focus, nonlinear problem-solving, and an unusual tolerance for complexity.

But he is both exceptional in how differently he thinks and how generously he thinks.

True geniuses know how to delegate, trust, listen, and understand that the people they surround themselves with make all the difference.  That and they know how to create environments where others can do their best work.  Creativity, therefore can and should be symbiotic.

He once said, “The key to making a good movie is surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you.”

It might sound like false humility to some, but I see that as a strategy.  And it’s something I have been working on myself over the past two years.  It has been eye opening.

When the LOTR films succeeded—and then again when they became cultural landmarks—Jackson didn’t stop there.  Instead, he reinvested in his community once again to mentor, hire more locals, and expand Weta further into farther reaching projects.

Through his career, Jackson ended up proving something somewhat radical in the industry.  The best creative work might come from building capacity where you are.  And the lesson of Peter Jackson’s story is not “dream bigger.”  I have a feeling that your dreams are already quite large in your hearts.  The lesson we should all take from Jackson is “stop trying to carry your entire dream alone.”

Jackson could have burned out a dozen times over. The pressure alone was enough to break most people. Instead, he distributed the load.  Smart.  Creative partnership did not result in a compromise for him.  He was able to manifest his vision fully.  Partnerships and collaborations unlocked the gates and Jackson led the way through.

Peter Jackson did not become less of a creator when he partnered.

He became more precise.
 More ambitious.
 And more sustainable.

His part as creator ended up being more about making space for the stories, people and innate meaning to the work. 

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Which brings us back to you.

Are you in the midst of the quiet exhaustion of doing everything yourself?  Has your work reached a threshold that you alone can’t quite cross?

Sure, you could do it all alone.  And yes, maybe sharing the load of your vision, your brainchild, the project that feels like it is a part of you, the extension of yourself as creation…feels… really scary.  It might even feel like failure.  Sharing is intimate.  Trusting someone to help you see your vision through with you is even scarier.  

But what if you not only no longer need to do everything yourself, but your vision expands because of partnership or collaboration?  What if there is another way to grow?

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I hope you enjoyed this episode!  I am having a blast making Beyond the Template.  Please make sure to spread the word for anyone you think would have fun with us.  Before I leave you this week, let’s engage in conversation!

I want to hear about YOU. 

1.       Send me Expander of the Week suggestions!

2.       What was your main takeaway from this week’s episode?

3.       What projects are you working on right now? 

4.       What are you struggling with as a creative these days? 

You can add anything you would like to share in the comments section or email me directly at camelieleboeuf@gmail.com.  This will be in description for you.  No one monitors this email but me.  So, I welcome your thoughts.  And I would love to address them (with anonymity) in future episodes.  Let’s grow this community of creatives and innovators together! 

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Thank you for joining me today for Beyond the Template.  Keep it up, keep it creative.

I created my business because more and more non-linear thinking creatives and innovators are expanding in the world and I hope to serve as the partner and collaborator for them.  I understand the struggles, the guilt, and the overwhelm that comes from dreaming big, but needing someone by your side to ground that dream into real actionable and strategic steps.  I am not a consultant or a coach.  I don’t just give advice, I stay by your side to the end with empathy, understanding and grounding presence.

If this sounds like an exciting possibility, or let’s be honest a weight off your shoulders, please reach out to me for a FREE chat about your project, your goals, and your dreams.

Contact your host: camelieleboeuf@gmail.com

About your host: cameliedesigns.com

Join the YouTube community: https://www.youtube.com/@camelieleboeuf

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