What Peter Did Next

So how do you follow the eye-popping grandeur of a three-year labour of love the size of The Lord of the Rings trilogy? Let your ego expand to the size of Jupiter, recklessly go hell for leather at another huge project and land roundly on your arse? Not if you're Peter Jackson, you don't. Wisely giving himself a break from the Balrogs of this world and putting off his proposed King Kong remake, Jackson is to make a small, true story in the vein of Heavenly Creatures his next project. His writer and producer on LOTR, Fran Walsh has revealed that one such candidate is the true tale As Nature Made Him about a New Zealand doctor who thought he'd found the perfect subject to test his theory that gender can be assigned to newborns. The medicine man switched the gender of an eight-month old baby after the child was deformed in a disastrous circumcision mishap. Walsh told Variety, "The boy was remade and raised as a girl, and it's the story of how that experiment ended so disastrously." Any further away from Tolkien you cannot get. But Jackson's got to wrap up the third and final part of his Middle-Earth masterpiece before concentrating on such smaller movies. Walsh added "Peter's already very much engaged in Return of the King, and I know he's most proud of the last movie."