Grant Major

Grant Major, MNZM, argues that his career has been much influenced by the rising trajectory of Peter Jackson. But Major had already shown his mettle on a wide range of projects, long before entering Middle-earth: everything from kidult classics to Janet Frame adaptations, to the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games.

Major studied graphic art at Auckland Technical Institute (now AUT). It was the golden age of guaranteed jobs for all who completed the course. Uninterested in advertising, Major decided he would study for a fine arts degree after he'd done a year making some money in television. "At that point, it was such a good way to earn a living. And since I was earning a living at it I just kept at it".

Three weeks after joining TV2 as a set designer, he was sent to Stewart Island to design and build sets for Castaways of the General Grant, part of ambitious shipwreck series Castaways. "It was pretty much on-the-job-training . . . having a graphic arts background at the time was very useful, because back then the set designs were a lot more painterly."

After three and a half years with the state broadcaster, including helping design 1900s-era kidult adventure Children of Fire Mountain, Major began his "true apprenticeship" in the early 80s: studying and working in set design for the BBC, in London and then Belfast. In London, studios worked on 24-hour shifts, and the 100-strong art department dwarfed anything he had seen.

Major returned home four years later, in time to work on acclaimed historical series Hanlon (1984) and then redesign the set for TV One's primetime news. The industry was in a state of transition. State television had closed down its in-house design departments, and many of Major's old TV colleagues had moved into film. Major assisted one of them, working under production designer Rob Gillies as art director on 1984 movie Other Halves — one of the first local films to make Auckland look stylish — and TV movie The Grasscutter. He worked on classic short Kitchen Sink, and drew plans for the strange creature which emerges from it.

Needing to diversify to pay the bills, he also did some graphics work and helped Logan Brewer design the NZ pavilions at the Brisbane and Seville world expos. Later, Major and Brewer worked together on the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1990 Commonwealth Games (Major talks about Brewer in this documentary).

Major's first big movie job sprang from television: a demanding assignment as production designer on three-part Janet Frame adaptation, An Angel at My Table (1990), which was made for TV but ended up winning accolades on the big screen. The project "was ambitious for the money, so we had to be really careful with spending".  Some of the furniture and props were sourced from friends, and the side of the road. 

In the 90s there were more television projects — redesigning various news sets for TV3, production designing miniseries The Chosen, and working as one of the art directors on two of the original Hercules tele-movies. But feature films were about to take over his life. That decade Major production designed nine movies, mining dark and/or fantastical themes on each. Among them was award-winner The Ugly (1997), built around a memorably blue-tinted prison set, and twisted family tale Jack Be Nimble, which was made for only $1.6 million.

The 90s marked the decade when Major began to work on increasingly bigger budgets, for two highly visual directors making ripples overseas. In 1996 he designed troubled love story Memory and Desire, the feature debut of longtime colleague Niki Caro. The film won acclaim, and an invitation to Cannes. But Caro's commercial breakthrough would have to wait until Whale Rider in 2002. Major compared the film's Māori design elements, especially the village meeting house, to Japanese architecture: "huge, heavy, wooden, beautifully carved sculptures which have ancestral resonance to them ... fantastic."

Back in 1994, Peter Jackson had invited Major to production design Heavenly Creatures. In evoking Christchurch (and beyond) as seen through the eyes of two imaginative 1950s teenagers, the project offered a rich blend of history and fantasy. For the real world locales, accuracy was the byword. When the interiors of Juliet Hulme's house were rebuilt in a Christchurch warehouse, Major used architectural plans from the period to ensure accuracy (although the sets were shrunk by around 15 per cent from their original size).

As the scale of Jackson's movies grew, Major joined Richard Taylor and Jamie Selkirk as key parties in bringing the director's increasingly grand visions to the screen. Big-budget ghost tale The Frighteners saw Major recreating a modern-day North American town in Wellington and Lyttelton.

Then Major signed on as production designer of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, whose scale dwarfed anything else shot in New Zealand to date. "There's a certain thrill in making big sets and doing these big production-design set-ups," Major told fellow production designer Tom Lisowski. "We have huge teams of people working with us and under us. On the big films you have a lot more technical toys to play with. The visual effects work and special effects work are amped up so it's a greater rollercoaster ride."

Major started work the same day as noted Tolkien illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe. "We worked side-by-side on the whole thing." There was plenty to design, from multi-story sets to tiny flints. Major got busy designing practical, filmable sets; at the beginning, there were 350 sets and locations; the number grew. He oversaw the creation of life-size exterior sets of Rivendell, Hobbiton, and the hilltop town of Edoras, plus sections of Minas Tirith, the seven-tiered city that is attacked in the final film. Aiming for a "sense of mystery" in the Elvish kingdom of Rivendell, he designed 40-foot towers which shimmer in the background.

Realism and durability were key mantras. With hundreds of crew underfoot (Major's team numbered 375 at its height), sets had to be built to withstand a lot of wear. The crew included leather workers, saddle-makers and "a foundry to make all our own rings, because rings in those days were all hand-beaten".

Major and his crew were nominated and awarded multiple times for their work on the Rings trilogy — the final film alone won an Oscar and design gongs from the American Film Institute, and the country's Art Directors Guild and National Board of Review.

Next came Jackson's King Kong (2005), which he talks about in this video interview. Major's design brief included the coastal steamer on which the heroes travel to Skull Island (which existed in five different versions), the fake jungles and 15 metre tall wall from which Kong emerges, and the streets of 1930s-era New York. Drawing on extensive research, Major masterminded the construction of a seven and a half acre set including Times Square, on the northern edge of Wellington Harbour. Well aware that the design process continues beyond the end of the shoot, Major now had a mini art department at Wētā Digital, allowing him to keep a hand in design through post-production.

Keen to explore beyond Wellywood, Major then worked on PBS television series Wired Science and Australian-shot horror movie The Ruins. He also rejoined Niki Caro for the season and nation-spanning The Vintner's Luck, and costume designer Ngila Dickson for comic strip adaptation Green Lantern.

By 2011 he was back in Auckland, working on Mr Pip, based on the acclaimed novel by Lloyd Jones, and Emperor, set in Japan directly after the end of WWII. Next came Hillary on Everest docudrama Beyond the Edge then in  2014 a nomination for his work on te reo action movie The Dead Lands. In 2017 he shared design duties on family friendly tale Kiwi Christmas with Ash Turner. 

Major went on to work on two high profile projects directed by Kiwis: Niki Caro-directed fantasy Mulan, which was shot in New Zealand and China, and Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog. Major got his fifth Oscar nomination for the later film, which veteran reviewer Todd McCarthy described as "the most gorgeous-looking Western set in the early 20th century" since Days Of Heaven, the film which is often cited as one of the most beautiful in history. 

Major has also production designed a run of international productions that were wholly or partly shot in New Zealand: big screen hits A Minecraft Movie and The Meg, Netflix updates of Cowboy Bebop and James Dean classic East of Eden, and forgotten Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel Sword of Destiny.

In 2009 Major wrote and directed moody, dialogue-lite short film Undergrowth. Picked for New Zealand's yearly round of film festivals, the film revolves around an agoraphobic man (Ian Hughes) whose life and house have literally become overgrown.

Profile updated on 10 October 2025

Sources include
Grant Major
'Grant Major: Oscar-winning designer..' (Video Interview) NZ On Screen website. Director Andrew Whiteside. Loaded 31 July 2012. Accessed 10 October 2025
Grant Major website (broken link). Accessed 25 October 2016
Russell Baillie, 'An Angel at My Table: The creation of a Kiwi classic' - The Listener, 17 October 2020, page 30
Simon Gray, 'Beauty and the Beast' - American Cinematographer, December 2005, page 34
Simon Gray, 'A Monster-Sized Production' (Interview) - Cinefantastique volume 38, number 1, January 2006, page 30
Scott Kara, 'Major undertaking' (Interview) - The NZ Herald, 9 July 2009
Tom Lisowski, 'Grant Major' (Interview). Artstars website. Loaded 14 November 2011. Accessed 6 October 2025
Ian Pryor, Peter Jackson - From prince of splatter to lord of the rings (Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2003)
Brian Sibley, Peter Jackson - A Film-Maker's Journey (Sydney: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2006)
Todd McCarthy, 'Venice Review: Jane Campion's 'The Power of the Dog' Deadline website. Loaded 2 September 2021. Accessed 6 October 2025
Angela Walker, 'the production: grant major' (Interview) - Pavement 50, December 2001, page 128
The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring press kit
The Lord of the Rings - The Two Towers press kit