Something very odd happens across Wellington when the Big Man has a film showing. There’s a citywide festival atmosphere. Down all the main streets, flags flutter from every streetlamp, bearing the logo of his latest work, in this case, King Kong. This must have been what London felt like when Richard the Lionheart returned from the Holy Land, bringing riches and glory back to his adoring public. There are banners, enormous posters, light shows (less impressive in Dark Age Europe, granted.) and there’s also something less definable. A mood shift. It would not surprise me at all to find that the crime rate plummets during the opening week of a Peter Jackson film.

I was in town for work over the weekend that Return of The King was up for eleven academy awards the other year. The air was electric, like Christmas Eve when you were a child. It was slightly different this time when we flew into the city a couple of days before New Years. There was excitement but there was also a discernable self-satisfaction. King Kong is currently at the top of the box office so PJ’s success is in full swing. People chat openly about it, about him, at bar tables out in the New Zealand sunshine. They claim his successes as their own. Yes, Peter Jackson has been good to the city of Wellington, but the city has also been very good to him.

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know. There is a gorgeous old cinema in the central city at the end of its party strip (Wellington’s Bourbon St, only without the vomit.) called The Embassy. PJ himself was instrumental in its restoration. He uses it for the New Zealand premieres of his films. During the three years that Lord of The Rings was successively released, that is all they screened. Yep, that’s right. They screened the first one for a year until the second one came out and then they screened that until the third one came out. Every day. That’s commitment. So of course that is where we went to see his latest work. “Oh, you have to see King Kong at The Embassy.”

First of all, let me tell you that people ran up the stairs. This is despite the fact that the film had been out for several weeks and despite the fact that there was allocated seating. Once it started, I listened carefully to the audience reactions. (I always do. I hate audience reactions of any kind. If you try to talk to me in a cinema I will follow you into the car park and slash your tires.) But there was something different in the usual audience murmurs and chuckles of approval. Something almost maternal. Like slide night with your grandparents used to be when they cooed and clucked over pictures of you in a superman costume. Whenever his twisted sense of humour shone through the drama (for example when Ann Darrow dangles above one dinosaur mouth whilst clinging to another), they would chuckle as if to say, “Oh, that’s so Peter.” On top of that was a distinctive sense of civic pride, of taking ownership. It was filmed in its entirety in an old paint factory just over the hill, after all. Then there were the squeals of recognition. Everyone in the audience knew someone in King Kong. I live seven hundred kilometres away and I know eight. Watching a Peter Jackson film at the Embassy is like going to the world’s most expensive school concert. It was fantastic.

Peter Jackson is widely regarded as the most powerful man in Hollywood. Ha. His control over Wellington borders on the feudal. If there is a coastal development he doesn’t approve of, then neither does the council. Buildings get restored (the aforementioned Embassy Theatre being one), roads get built. I sincerely hope he doesn’t enter politics, he’ll lose all ability to make positive changes. Dictators aren’t as effective. Nor are they as beneficial. He’s bought up acres of industrial land and is turning them into a world class movie-making facility, film by film. This ambitious plan to make Wellington the destination for cutting-edge filmmaking will ultimately be worth millions to his home town. Every major city should be run by a profoundly successful artist. Their motivations for change would come from a far more sincere place. Education, transport and the preservation of the natural landscape would replace “this is where you get the photocopied form you need to build a high-rise apartment block” as the council’s raison d’etre.

Proud, parochial, united in celebration. I have never seen a city like Peter Jackson’s Wellington. Thinking on it… That makes me a little sad. I wish it could be like that everywhere. All hail the King of Kong. Long may he reign.