Peter Jackson's Auteur Theory

To what extent can the auteur theory be applied successfully to the work of Peter Jackson? Is there evidence of a characteristic authorial signature and if so what is it?
To apply the term ‘auteur’ to a director who has openly claimed “I don’t quite know what an auteur is.” may seem nonsensical, but there is no denying that the work of Peter Jackson has proven him to be deemed an auteur. From his origins in amateur ‘splatstick’, Jackson’s stylistic and thematic traits have remained a constant in his work, even to be found in his ambitious The Lord of the Rings franchise. Jackson’s obvious passion for the film industry as well as his technical expertise – both of which are displayed particularly in Bad Taste (Peter Jackson, 1988), Heavenly
This experience of watching and creating his own original films at such a young age encourages the idea of Jackson as an auteur, if nothing else, in simply his life-long connection to and passion for cinema. And not just any cinema; the fact that it was Hammer horror films that originally inspired Jackson can account for the themes of violence, gore and horror that are a constant throughout his body of work – a display of the importance of a director’s own life being a major influence on their authorial work. Having been dubbed a “Kiwi gore specialist”2 , Jackson’s interest in cinematic gore is never more prolific than in his first feature length film Bad Taste. An ambitious amateur project, Bad Taste (“Jackson’s baby”3) was four years in the making and saw Jackson taking on the roles of director, producer, actor, cinematographer, writer and head of special effects, all on a tiny budget. Although it was, for the most part, due to the constraints of little funding and few resources that forced Jackson to multi-task in such a way, this role gave him the opportunity to have almost complete creative control over every aspect of the film; it was on this film that he was first able to express his
After a dramatic opening montage sequence, in which the audience is greeted with a non-diegetic strings soundtrack and the diegetic pleas of a distressed villager of the doomed village of Kaihoro, the audience is introduced to the film’s protagonists – ‘The Boys’. Not two minutes later, the AIDS (Astro Investigation and Defence Service) worker Barry is splattered head to toe in the blood and brains of the extra-terrestrial he has just killed. Fellow AIDS member Derek (played by Peter Jackson in his first of many cameo roles throughout his career), who is watching from afar comments “I hope I’m not the poor bastard who’s got to clean that up”. With this, the audience is welcomed into the strange and brutal world of Bad Taste, and is encouraged to feel disgusted and yet somewhat satisfied with the morbid comedy of it all. With this opening to his first feature length film, Jackson truly starts as he means to go on – with an attitude reflected in the quote “What I don 't like are pompous, pretentious movies.”8Bad Taste is far from pretentious; Jackson made it to satisfy himself and his own personal cinematic interests, rather than concerning himself with the wider audience and the box office. The low budget result is impressive but not at all sophisticated. Here the quote “...the auteur is a subject to himself”9 comes into play, with Bazin’s