Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  A good few Hollywood eyebrows would be raised over New Line’s decision to commit to The Lord of the Rings and the sheer, mind-boggling scale of the project.

  ‘It was risky!’ admits Mark. ‘It was bold! And there were people within New Line and definitely outside of New Line who thought we were insane! There was one person who, behind my back, referred to these movies within a New Line context as “Mark’s Folly”, which was a little mean – or maybe it was a lot mean! But in any case, I understood how that could be: after all, in the history of cinema, no one had ever made three movies simultaneously and no one has made sequels to a non-existent first-film! So, because the films were so big and so frightening and so inconceivable to so many people, I was given amazing amounts of autonomy to supervise them because I was the only one who really understood: I understood the books and I understood Peter.’

  At the time, Mark made a prediction: ‘I said, “One day, this will be seen to have been the most visionary business decision in modern cinema.” Normally, when a film succeeds and sequels are called for, everyone’s price goes up. But we are going to have two sequels in the can at prices that would never be achievable any other way. But aside from that business consideration, sequels require actors to “re-plug” into their original roles. This cast will have to live their roles for more than a year and that commitment must inevitably result in powerful and convincing performances.’

  By the early months of 2002, Mark’s prediction had proved true. Back in 1998, there were no guarantees…

  ‘When I said, “Yes, we are going to do it,”’ remarks Bob Shaye, ‘what was implicit was “Let’s see if you really can deliver!” We didn’t just go ahead and sign a piece of paper the next day!’

  What did happen the next day, as Ken Kamins recalls, was that the negotiations began: ‘Nine o’clock to the minute the next morning, I got a phone call from Mark Ordesky; Peter Nelson got a call from somebody else at New Line; Miramax’s lawyer got a call and Saul Zaentz’s lawyer got a call! New Line moved on three fronts at once: with us for Peter’s deal, with Miramax for the turnaround and with Saul Zaentz’s people because there were aspects to Saul’s deal that, if Miramax sold the rights to a third party, automatically came up for review.’

  At that point, Saul could probably have stopped the whole thing in its tracks, if he had wanted. But fortunately Bob Shaye and Saul Zaentz knew each other and had a good rapport, so Bob was able to reach out to Saul who was really supportive of the project’s move from Miramax to New Line.

  Within a week, New Line appointed the now-late Carla Fry as executive in charge of production and she flew to New Zealand to look at Peter’s facilities to see if he could do everything he said he could do.

  ‘Basically,’ explains Michael Lynne, ‘we embarked on a huge vetting process: the initial numbers discussed were Peter’s, not ours, and there were quite a few logistical issues, so we had a team spending close to a month in New Zealand getting their heads around whether the budget would be in the ball-park…I’m not sure they ever did!’

  Although everything moved swiftly from the moment Bob Shaye committed to the film, the four-week deadline set by Miramax was soon reached without anyone having yet signed on the dotted line.

  We had taken a week to make the promotional film, we’d spent a week in Los Angeles and now the two remaining weeks were fast running out. There was a rather nervous period where we had to ask Harvey for an extension, but by then the Miramax and New Line lawyers had got fairly deeply into it, so I think Harvey saw what he had absolutely thought he was never going to see – the possibility of getting his $15million back, and if that wasn’t going to happen at the end of the four weeks, it was going to happen pretty soon after.

  The interim was a difficult time: Miramax cheques had finally dried up and the New Line cash-flow had yet to start flowing. Technically, the project was at an end and, at best, it could be considered as being at a standstill. Everyone involved had been stood down or laid-off; Alan Lee had retuned to England, John Howe had flown home to Switzerland.

  Miramax – hedging their bets in case the New Line deal failed to stick – had representatives in Wellington, making inventories of all the items of research and development, every sketch and model, and preparing to pack them into containers to be transported to Los Angeles for the use of whoever might eventually take over the project.

  ‘The final deal’, as Peter Nelson recalls, ‘took a lot of negotiating. I’ve never worked harder in any period of my life than during those four weeks! It was a non-stop negotiation: first with Miramax to extract the project, then with New Line to set up the project.’

  In what seems to have been a euphoric beginning to the relationship, New Line appeared to be going to agree to contract Peter on what is called a ‘pay-or-play commitment’, which would have meant that, had he been dropped from the project for any reason, they would still have paid his director’s fee in full. ‘Then,’ says Peter Nelson, ‘as New Line sobered up during the couple of weeks that were rushing by, they thought, “We don’t necessarily need to do that…” New Line, despite our best endeavours, started to realise that it was either going to go out with them or wasn’t going to go out at all, so some of the terms they originally put on the table started to leave the table, which made us a bit upset to say the least.’

  Whilst Peter retained his right to make the final cut of the movie, he had to give up some of his financial participation as a result of the 5 per cent share that was one of Miramax’s terms for the turnaround. ‘Nevertheless,’ says Peter Nelson, ‘with a bit of our pride still intact, we were still able to extract a deal that propelled the movie forward. New Line calculated Peter’s directing fee by multiplying it by three and dividing it by two, so that he effectively made three movies for the price of one-and-a-half, which was eventually a complete understatement of his value, but it didn’t matter for a variety of reasons relating to the other parts of his financial package, as well as the fact that the movies were, at last, going to get made.’

  Eventually, within about a month of the meeting with Bob Shaye, New Line wrote Miramax that cheque and The Lord of the Rings became a New Line film.

  From the moment in August 1998 when it was announced that Peter Jackson was to be filming Tolkien’s epic, the book’s legions of fans, given a forum by the ever-growing community of the world-wide-web, started voicing their hopes and fears, pleading – even demanding – that the film-makers do this or don’t do that, clutching at every scrap of hard-to-come-by information, hoovering up the dust of rumour, gossip and speculation and generally revelling in the excitement and nervous trepidation resulting from knowing that a dearly-loved friend (and often lifetime companion) was to become the subject of a Hollywood-backed movie made by a director whose apparently unlikely back-catalogue contained several gory splatter-fests!

  There was lot of nervousness at the beginning – partly because the fans didn’t know who I was. If you have a beloved book that some unknown guy is going to make into a film, fear is really the first emotion that jumps in. You always imagine the worst-case scenario; you’re not thinking that what these people are going to do might actually be good, you’re thinking, ‘How can they stuff this up? They’re going to simplify it, dumb it down, change everything…’

  I had never felt that Miramax had any real understanding of the fans, as was borne out when they eventually presented us with the idea of how to reduce the entire story into one two-hour movie; to gut it of half the characters and half the events and still call it by its title. We knew that the only thing that was guaranteed if we had done that was that every single fan of that book would have felt let down and would have turned their back on the film.

  Even though Peter was now making the film in a format that would allow him to do far greater justice to Tolkien’s work than would have been possible with the Miramax one-film proposal, a palpable ripple of anxiety was still sweeping through the Tolkien/fantasy/movie websites. Peter cannily decided to seize
the opportunity and use the internet to introduce himself to the fans and attempt to reply to some of the early concerns that were being, sometimes hysterically, expressed. Peter agreed to answer twenty questions for the Ain’t it Cool website of the larger-than-life movie fan-boy, Harry Knowles. Within a very short time Knowles had received a staggering 14,000 questions.

  I was very open and honest in answering those questions and in trying to quell people’s fears, settle everybody down and say, ‘I am a fan, too. I love these books as well and I am going to do my best to honour them…’

  Peter’s opening comments when his twenty answers appeared on 30 August 1998 were certainly not the stiff-and-starchy response of some remote Hollywood director: ‘I must thank Harry for allowing me to commandeer his site. It’s a bit like a scene in a war movie when a French family gets booted out of their farmhouse because the Allied Forces need to set up a command post! Using Harry’s site was the only way I could imagine reaching all of you in an efficient way…After this brief warm shower together, Harry and I return to our different sides of the line – us trying to maintain secrecy…and he using his low-life methods to publish it all on the net.’

  There were questions about the look of the film; Peter described it at the time as being ‘something like Braveheart, but with a little of the visual magic of Legend’ and without ‘the meaningless fantasy mumbo-jumbo of Willow’; there were questions about casting (and how to get an audition!); about who would be composing the music; about how dwarves and hobbits would be depicted, what Legolas would look like and whether or not Sauron would be given any physical representation. It was early days and one or two answers were later subject to revision: asked, for example, whether ‘the combat of Gandalf and the Balrog after they fall from the bridge in Moria’ might be shown ‘perhaps in a flashback’, Peter responded: ‘I don’t think so.’

  What Peter tried to make clear was that this was only his take on Tolkien’s book: ‘You shouldn’t think of these movies as being The Lord of the Rings…The Lord of the Rings is, and always will be, a wonderful book – one of the greatest ever written. Any films will only ever be an INTERPRETATION of the book. In this case my interpretation…’

  We were well aware that there were die-hard fans who held the view: ‘There’s no need to change a thing! The book’s perfect, just give us a movie that puts the book – page-by-every-page – on film!’ What we knew at the outset – because we’d thought long and hard about it and had already agonised over it in writing the Miramax scripts – was that it all came down to choices.

  Eventually, people came to see that a 100 per cent faithful film version just couldn’t have been made and wouldn’t have worked because it would have been slow and unstructured and very pedantic. For the most part, they also came to accept what I had tried to make clear on Harry’s website: that what they would be seeing was simply the interpretation of another group of fans.

  Several of the Ain’t it Cool questioners wanted to know in what ways Peter intended departing from the book. ‘This,’ he replied, ‘is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question I guess! Our philosophy is simple. We don’t want to make any radical changes to the basic events or characters in the books. So Sam will NOT become a girl (a piece of rumour-mill bullshit that’s been floating around for a year), or have

  Tolkien’s book was never far away – we constantly referred to it during shooting to try to make sure we didn’t miss the chance to add another little bit of detail to whatever was being shoot that day.

  a gay relationship with Frodo…We will have to remove certain events or characters, but they will be clean lifts…‘An advance warning to Tom Bombadil fans, if ever there was one! ‘Any changes that we do make will be centred on developing characters or events in the spirit that Tolkien created them, but maybe taking them further than he did…’ And a clue that Arwen was going to need some thinking about…

  Question 18 read: ‘How open will this project be? Meaning what types of things will you be showing us fans in the years leading up to this film?’ Peter replied that it would probably similar to the Star Wars movies: ‘Expect the same level of secrecy/revelations. I will try and kept a steady stream of information flowing. I know how frustrating it is.’

  As a movie fan since a kid, Peter knew all about waiting for a movie that you are desperate to see and grasping at anything and everything that will tell you something of what is to come. He can hardly have imaged the extent to which The Lord of the Rings would be followed – and in a sense chronicled by the websites of the internet.

  Only a few months after Peter’s appearance on Ain’t it Cool, TheOneRing.net (‘forged by and for fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’) was up and running and establishing itself as the pre-eminent Rings film site, feeding a global fan-frenzy with news, inside stories, gossip and conjecture. Before long, this or that ‘Ringer Spy’ would be fuelling the fire with daily reports and covert photographs.

  As he had demonstrated in going public on the Knowles site, Peter eventually found ways of harnessing the fan interest and minimising the kind of bad rapport that inevitably resulted from fans with a wilful determination to find things out that a studio is determined not to reveal. While Peter was filming the scenes in Hobbiton, one of TORn’s founders, Erica Challis (or ‘Tehanu’ as she was known on the net), would visit the film set and meet the director and actors – an event that heralded a new relationship between film-makers and fans.

  Such would be the power of the web in promoting Rings that when, in April 2000, the first internet preview aired, it seized a world record of 1.67million ‘hits’ in the first twenty-four hours. By that time Peter was deep into filming, grappling with some difficult scenes on the slopes of New Zealand’s active volcano, Mount Ruapehu, which was doubling for Mount Doom, and the public reaction proved an enormous morale-booster at a difficult time. Within one week, the number of hits on the web preview – despite being only a couple of minutes long – had soared to 6.6 million. And that was only the beginning…

  The final question addressed by Peter during his Knowles webfan-conference was: ‘When you look at the films, what are you dying to capture on film, and how will you do it?’ Peter’s answer, amusingly framed though it was, went to the heart of his philosophy for the pictures:

  ‘I want to take movie-goers into Middle-earth in a way that is believable and powerful.

  ‘Imagine this: 7,000 years has gone by. We take a film crew to Helm’s Deep…It’s now looking a little older, but still impresses as a mighty fortress. The Art Department set to work, patching up holes and removing tourist signs. The current owner strikes a hard bargain, but New Line money finally gets us permission to film there for six weeks. Rohan heraldry is studied and faithfully reproduced. Théoden’s original saddle is in a museum – far too valuable to use in the movie, but an exact copy is made. Archaeological expeditions have unearthed an incredibly preserved mummified Uruk-hai carcass. We make exact prosthetic copies of these viscous killers [and] use CG to give us a 10,000-strong army. We have cast actors who look like Aragorn and Théoden. In an amazing casting coup, Legolas has agreed to return from Valinor with Gimli to recreate their part in this cinematic retelling of the events at the end of the Third Age. They stand on the battlements of the Deeping Wall, wind blowing in their hair, leading a group of extras proudly portraying the brave garrison of Rohan soldiers…Uruk drums roll up the valley…huge lighting rigs flash simulated lightning…rain towers send gallons of water into the air…on an assistant director’s signal, twenty 35mm cameras start rolling simultaneously…the battle of Helm’s Deep is about to be captured on film.

  ‘Sure, it’s not really The Lord of the Rings… but it could still be a pretty damn cool movie.’

  Having answered their questions, Peter told the Ain’t it Cool readers, ‘I have to go to ground and do some writing…’ And that was, indeed, urgently the case.

  The moment the deals were done, lots of things needed to happen at the same time. One of the most pressing wa
s rewriting our two-film scripts as three films, which was really a throw-it-away-and-start-again scenario!

  ‘Everything had to be re-thought,’ says Philippa Boyens. ‘Material that had been heavily compressed could now be allowed to breathe, entire episodes which had previously been cut – such as the Fellowship in Lothlórien – could now be restored.’

  Fran Walsh reflects, ‘We were constantly striving to make the new structures we were building dramatically sound and emotionally satisfying. We repeatedly asked ourselves “What is this battle about? What are they fighting for?’ Every time we came back to the same answer: it was about the free people of Middle-earth, their lives, their freedom, their future…

  One thing with a film where you have multiple storylines is that it gives you every opportunity to keep people’s interest up and inject a degree of tension because you follow one storyline to a dramatic moment where the audience go, ‘Oh my God! What’s going to happen next?’ Then, while you’re keeping people under a degree of suspense so that they want to go back and find out what’s going to happen, you cut to another storyline and do exactly the same thing! In that way, whenever you’re with one set of characters, you’re still thinking and worrying about what’s happening to the other guys!

  There were major structural considerations. One of the daunting aspects of turning two films into three films was deciding the point of transition from Fellowship to Two Towers and what the climax would be for the first film. For a while it would be the sequence at Isengard in which Gandalf confronts Saruman and, using material from the very end of Tolkien’s story, Wormtongue stabs his master. There were huge issues to be faced over the structuring of the second and third films since the books whose titles they notionally carry are not a chronological account of events, with sequences in Towers (like the encounter with Shelob) actually taking place concurrently with events such as the siege of Minas Tirith described in The Return of the King.