The biggest film project in history, JRR Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings, was undertaken by a Kiwi, in New Zealand. Jackson brought movie stars like Liv Tyler, Christopher Lee and Sir Ian McKellen out to New Zealand for 18 months of filming in some of the worlds most stunning landscapes. He also created amazing special effects to rival anything in Hollywood from a small studio in Wellington called Weta Graphics.

It is not just Lord Of The Rings that is putting Kiwi cinema on the map. Look at the evidence. Lee Tamahori, the director of 'Once Were Warriors', directed 'Die Another Day'. Then there are Anna Paquin (The Piano & X Men 1&2) and Jane Campion (also for The Piano & Holy Smoke) who are both Oscar winners and both come from Lower Hutt near New Zealand's capital Wellington.

Another Kiwi director is Roger Donaldson who directed the Tom Cruise movie Cocktail and lately he was responsible for the Cuba Missile drama, '13 Days'. Then there is that typical Kiwi bloke Sam Neil (main actor in Jurassic Park, The Dish, Perfect Strangers) or Temuera Morrison (Star Wars, Attack of the Clones) and Vincent Ward who wrote and directed Aliens 3. We should also mention Andrew Niccol who wrote and directed The Truman Show, Gattaca and S1m0ne.

In addition to this, New Zealand director Andrew Adamson, the man behind Shrek, will bring to life the C.S Lewis classic The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe with a budget of more than $150 million. It is the best known of the seven part series, The Chronicles of Narnia. The location for the film is New Zealand's South Island as it contains forests, coastal scenes, alpine plateaus and English countryside which are all needed for this film.

But it is not just New Zealander's who appreciate New Zealand as a premier filming location. Even Hollywood (minus Kiwi directors) recognizes New Zealand's outstanding landscapes. Remember 'Vertical Limit' which was filmed at K2 the second highest mountain in the world? Well it wasn't really K2 and the Himalayas, rather New Zealand's Mt Cook and the Southern Alps. Then there is Mt Fuji in the latest Tom Cruise movie 'The Last Samurai', but how did they film an 18 century Mt Fuji without all the modern development around it today? Well that was the easy part, technology had nothing to do with it, rather it was Mt Taranaki in the west of New Zealand's North Island.

New Zealand was also the location for some of the most popular TV series, including Hercules, Xena, Space and The Lost Word.

So, in a country with every landscape imaginable and all packed into an area the size of California, coupled with the extraordinary talent that New Zealand offers, with an extremely favourable exchange rate; you simply have to admit that New Zealand is the perfect film set. Even Air New Zealand (the national carrier) has adopted a new slogan, "The Airline to Middle Earth." And billboards for the airline in the Los Angeles area show the country's tallest mountain with the caption, "Visit Middle Earth. They haven't taken the set down."
  
  

Related pages  Lord of the Rings  Lord of the Rings locations  Lord of the Rings Slide Show