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It’s been 11 years since Peter Jackson last directed a non-documentary film, and seven since he last wrote one. (The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies and Mortal Engines, respectively; shout-out to anyone who knew that second one, because we’re guessing you’re the last person you know who still remembers the Mortal Engines movie.) That decade-plus might seem like big a number, in the course of Hollywood careers that typically run for 50 or 60 years. But perhaps, we suggest, a little perspective is in order. Let’s compare that (largely Beatles-focused) span of time to a much larger sum. Like, say, 600 years—how long the New Zealand giant moa has been extinct—or 300 or 400, i.e., the number of the dead birds’ bones that Peter Jackson apparently owns, spends his time amassing more of, and is now embarking on genetic experimentation upon.
We got to thinking about Peter Jackson’s massive collection of big-ass bird bones courtesy of a very weird interview he gave to ScreenRant this week. In said conversation, Jackson took a little time to deny that he was retired from making movies, noting that he’s working on three different film scripts at the moment, including the one for Andy Serkis’ upcoming Lord Of The Rings return project, The Hunt For Gollum. It’s just that he’s been a little distracted by all these bird bones, and his deep-seated, extremely expensive desire to use them to bring the moa back to life.
This is, wouldn’t you know it, all about Colossal Biosciences, the company that made headlines a few months back when it announced that it had “recreated” some long-extinct direwolves, complete with a vote of support from No. 1 direwolf publicist George R.R. Martin. Jackson, as it turns out, is a “major” investor in the company, which he and wife Fran Walsh tossed money at with the stipulation that they switch at least some of their focus to these very large, very extinct birds that he’s apparently obsessed with. (Brief educational parenthetical: The moa was a large flightless bird native to New Zealand, and does, to be fair to the man, sound exactly like the sort of shit Peter Jackson would be into—with some reportedly standing more than 2 meters tall.)
Jackson had already been collecting bones from the animal out of simple hobbyist interest, as one does when one is embarking on a new career as an eccentric billionaire. More recently, he’s been focused on working with Colossal to try to use those bones to extract the genome for the nine known species of the animal. (It’s apparently pretty tough: Even Peter Jackson, who owns more moa bones than anybody we know, apparently only had 25 viable specimens in his whole collection!) As with the wolves, Colossal intends to use the genome to alter the DNA of existing animals to adopt more “moa” traits, with an eye toward creating a moa-ish animal that can then be bred. So, yeah: There’s your answer the next time someone asks you “Hey, what’s Peter Jackson been up to for the last decade?” Dead Bird Jurassic Park (and also writing a script for that Andy Serkis movie, of course).
