Peter Jackson plans movie on Gallipoli

WELLINGTON - Film-maker Peter Jackson plans to make a movie on Gallipoli ahead of the April 2015 centenary of the ill-fated Anzac landings on the peninsula in World War I.The helmer had planned to give a New Zealand perspective years ago after the release of Australian director Peter Weir’s 1981 film Gallipoli, but now he plans to make a more balanced version.

“I have been thinking about it recently,” Stuff.co.nz quoted him as telling Australia’s ABC.

He added: “I have been thinking that I’d do it much more from a combined Australian and New Zealand point of view.

“I don’t think that we need necessarily to tell a film from a New Zealand perspective because the Anzac tradition, the Australian and New Zealand, were so intertwined in that particular campaign that I think it would be a mistake.

“To me, it’s a remarkable part of our history and Peter Weir obviously made a great movie but Peter’s movie was set around events of August 7th, August 8th, 1915.

“Gallipoli was a seven or eight month long campaign and that story is yet to be told on film, so I’d like to do that.”

The Lord of the Rings director’s grandfather had even won a conduct medal at Gallipoli.

He said: “I went to Gallipoli in 1990 for the 75th anniversary. That was the amazing year where … 50 of the original diggers were there”.

“It was an amazing experience to see them all looking at this landscape that most of them hadn’t seen since 1915, hadn’t seen it for 75 years.” (ANI)