Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  Each night, in theory, you are supposed to be watching the dailies but with three units shooting this was no easy task. We’d wrap on set at around 6.30 in the evening and, an hour later, we’d be in our cinema at Weta Workshop, running up to three hours of footage. So every night, before we could go home to sleep, we’d be watching something that ran for the equivalent length of Ben-Hur or Gone with the Wind – or, come to that, one of The Lord of the Rings movies!

  It was exhausting! Brian Bansgrove, the gaffer, was usually the first to go: I’d hear him start to snore about forty-five minutes into the screening and Barrie Osborne would usually go next! Though I couldn’t have imagined it at the beginning of the shoot, a time would come when I became so tired that I had to give up watching dailies on screen and would watch them at home, on videotape – for as long as I could manage to keep awake.

  Even when Peter finally got home, the day’s work was still not yet done.

  One of the things I regard as being the responsibility of a director is to make sure that the day kicks off well; to be fully prepared, to hit the floor running, to show up on set knowing what you want and then be able to convey that to people.

  The moment I got in at night, I ought to have started thinking about the next day’s filming, but often my mind was so full of the vivid images I’d been looking at for hour upon hour through the camera lens or on the screen, that I couldn’t think of anything other than what I’ve shot that day. The memory was so fresh that I’d find myself making a mental notes: ‘Take six was best take of that line, but the next line was better in take eight…’ or ‘Take three, on the wide-shot, was the best because the smoke was just right…’ That’s when I’d start editing the film in my head, piecing it all together as I’m lying in bed until, eventually, I’d fall asleep…

  Whenever I’m shooting, I have a recurring dream: I’m lying there, incredibly tired and sleepy, and I drowsily wake up – in my dream – and find that the film crew have come in to my bedroom and are standing around the bed, demanding instructions about what to shoot and how to shoot it. That’s when I always realise with horror that I don’t know what to say to them – that I don’t actually know what scene we are filming!

  So, after the stress of being on set all day, my nights were also full of stress. On almost every film I’ve made, this dream has afflicted me virtually every single night and I become incredibly disturbed at confronting the realisation that I’m shooting a movie but don’t have a clue what it is that I’m filming.

  As the shoot wore on and we got into the final months of the year I was running on very low reserves, finding it harder and harder to come up with inventive ideas and realising that my imagination was literally seizing up. It is very scary how tiredness begins to shrink your imagination.

  Sleep deprivation eventually took its toll: one day, on the Rivendell set, while waiting for the lights to be set up, Peter decided to have a lie down on Frodo’s bed and fell into a deep sleep for a couple of hours.

  Philippa Boyens recalls: ‘Sometimes, Pete would be so drained that he would get depressed. Nothing depresses him more than when he cannot bring to a scene his normal energy and vision and he just shoots it in the most conventional way. That makes him feel really down, and really depressed. On these occasions he can get quite dark. I don’t know how he copes. I think sometimes he doesn’t and he just quietly goes off and de-rails somewhere…He never burdens other people with it. If he burdens anybody then it will be Fran. She’s got broad shoulders and he’s got the same for her stuff; they’ve got broad shoulders for each other’s baggage.’

  I think if I had a partner who wasn’t involved or didn’t understand then I really would de-rail and very quickly. You’d have all this tiredness and exhaustion and the other person wouldn’t understand. It’s only because Fran and I know the pressures we’re both under that we’re able to keep on top of them.

  ‘It’s about understanding,’ says Fran, ‘and it’s about problem solving, if we weren’t in it together it would be that much harder to help. I remember it becoming obvious we weren’t going to get through everything and I started lobbying to bring in extra help to direct the other units.’

  The sheer volume just kept mounting. I’d be thinking that somehow we’d figure it all out but Fran was saying, ‘We need somebody else; you need help…’ She was the advocate. And she was right.

  ‘Arguably,’ says Peter Nelson, ‘he’s the director, she’s the co-writer and producer, but, like many partnerships, it’s a seamless line between the two.’ As Philippa Boyens puts it: ‘Theirs is pretty much a single, co-mingled, unified vision. There’s no beginning and no end to the individual abilities or the way those two work together.’ Or in the view of Carolynne Cunningham: ‘It’s not just “Pete” and it’s not just “Fran”; it’s actually always “Pete-and-Fran” to me – they’re a little like a liquorice allsort – a stripey one with different colours.’

  At long last, on Friday 22 December 2000, after fifteen months of filming, they arrived at Shoot Day #274, the final day of principal photography on The Lord of the Rings.

  Fifteen months crowded with memories: the anxieties and tensions, the lost days and the missed opportunities, but also the many moments when cinema magic was being created.

  I remember filming the scene inside Mount Doom at the Crack of Doom: Elijah and Sean delivered amazing performances. We were running out of spaces in which to film and were renting anything we could find. This scene was filmed in a tin-roofed shed used for storing apples near the runway at Wellington airport, with aircraft taking off about 100 feet away!

  It was impossible to build the entire Crack of Doom set, so we built a kind of rock gantry, filmed against a green screen, and used a lot of smoke. I was thinking, ‘I can’t believe it! This is the Crack of Doom?!’

  You feel so far removed from what you are hoping for in the finished film. When we got to the point where Elijah was having his final dramatic moment with the Ring, the whole crew was mesmerised. At the end of the take, the crew gave him a huge round of applause, something that doesn’t happen very often. It is a reminder that, as a film-maker, you rely totally on the power of the actors…This was their moment.

  Unit production manager Zane Weiner’s schedule for the final day’s filming (now in the WingNut files) is scrawled over with thank-you messages from the cast and crew. One from Fran reads, ‘We have rewrites for Saturday!’ and another from Peter, ‘Zane, find me a crew; we’re shooting through Christmas!’ It was, as Peter recalls, not far from the truth…

  On the morning of that last day I shot the Council of War scene: the debate between Gandalf and Aragorn which, in the book, takes place in a tent, but which we staged in the hall at Minas Tirith. In the afternoon, I shot Aragorn in the hall putting on his armour and strapping on his sword before going out to confront Sauron – a scene that isn’t in any version of the movie – which means that, actually, we could all have gone home a bit earlier that day!

  We were shooting some really serious dramatic scenes but it was a fun day: everybody was in a good mood. Someone had brought in a feather boa and, all day long, we had guest clapper-boarder operators – the only proviso being that they had to wear the feather boa while doing it…I remember Harry Knowles doing one!

  Unit 1B were shooting across town with Fran directing the scene at Dunharrow where Théoden and Éowyn have a cheerful little conversation about what should happen if he didn’t return from battle. Viggo was in my scenes and Fran’s and was rushing back and forth across town between the two units all day.

  We wrapped about five o’clock, but word came through that Fran was still shooting, so we drove across to her, snuck onto the set and the champagne finally came out about six o’clock!

  Peter was too tired to go to that evening’s dailies, but he had no choice about being anywhere other than at the wrap party, which was held in Shed 21, one of the original wharf buildings on Wellington harbour. There were limousines; there was a red carpet
and two thousand invited guests including the cast and crew, the mayor and other dignitaries, and a phalanx of press and television reporters.

  I would have been perfectly happy to have gone home to bed! To me, it felt like a symbolic event – I knew that we were still a long way from finishing the film.

  That was, indeed, the case. The New Year arrived and brought with it a new exhausting schedule that would establish the pattern for the next three years: editing The Fellowship of the Ring, filming ‘pick-ups’ – additional footage or re-shot scenes – followed by more editing and, in London, working with Howard Shore on the scoring of the first film. Not to mention having to review a veritable department-store-load of merchandise and begin the seemingly unending task of talking about and promoting a project that was still anything but complete.

  In January 2001, the promotion began: the official website was launched and – as fans had done for Star Wars I – lines formed outside cinemas days before the trailer was screened on Friday 12 January before Thirteen Days. It was the first glimpse!

  New Line had made the decision to launch The Lord of the Rings with a special promotional event at the fifty-fourth Cannes Film Festival to be held in May in the south of France. The plan was to screen an extended teaser for the films and host an elaborate party for the festival’s media hounds.

  Peter’s response was to propose screening a twenty-minute sequence from the film that would give a feel and a flavour of how the finished picture would look without giving too many glimpses of other sequences, characters and creatures. It was decided that part of the Fellowship’s journey through the Mines of Moria conveyed the excitement of the adventure and the look of the interpretation.

  I felt we should screen more than just a trailer. The tone and style of a film can only be accurately conveyed in something longer than four or five minutes. Looking at the way the movie was shaped, we felt the Moria journey would form an entertaining, continuous twenty-minute sequence.

  Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne viewed the footage and were, it is said, unimpressed, giving it a tepid reaction, which suggested that they might be losing confidence in the product.

  Bob Shaye recalls the event differently: ‘Something I don’t think people know,’ he says, ‘is that Michael Lynne and I and our head of marketing, Rolf Mittweg, went down to New Zealand as this reel was being prepared. Peter appropriately – I guess there was professional grace involved – said, “Listen, I don’t do these things; I don’t make selling material for films…” He showed us what he’d done and we didn’t agree with what he had chosen. It was so dark, it was all interior, it didn’t reflect enough of the rest of the film in order to give a context to the scale and the drama. Our complaint was with what Peter was suggesting showing, not with his skills as a director. So Peter’s reaction was, “Sit with the editor, do what you want to do and we’ll agree together…” As a result, that particular reel – a signal moment in the process of the film – got shaped into a marketing tool as opposed to a directorial sample.’

  Bob and Michael’s lukewarm response to the material led to us adding a three-minute trailer-like prologue to the front, and an epilogue featuring more footage from Two Towers and Return of the King – they were concerned that Moria was a dark, grim sequence and they wanted something that would feature more brightness and colour. It was a good instinctive reaction on their part, and the reel was definitely better with the new opening and closing sequences – almost mini-trailers of their own.

  The fourteen-minute sequence from the Mines of Moria, stopping short at the point when the Balrog looms out of the fiery darkness, was ‘topped-and-tailed’ with a prologue and epilogue that captured something of the other moods in The Fellowship of the Ring – Hobbiton, Rivendell, Isengard and Lothlórien – together with glimpses of the continuing adventure in the subsequent two films accompanied by the orchestral sweep and operatic voice of Howard Shore’s evocative score. The twenty-six minute reel was to prove the most talked-about footage at Cannes and threatened to eclipse even the starry gala mounted for Moulin Rouge.

  The quoted ‘estimated budget’ of $90million a movie was, cumulatively, already more than double the sum that had seemed too much for Miramax, three years earlier. As a result the press described the teaser footage as a $270million film running for less than half an hour.

  The screenings took place on 12 May 2001 at the Olympia theatre where, nine years earlier, the press had got their first glimpse of a film which sported such tag-lines as ‘The rot has set in’ and ‘You’ll laugh yourself sick!’ – Braindead…

  ‘There was a great deal of anxiety that day,’ recalls Ken Kamins. ‘Right before the first screening for the press at the Olympia I remember Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne were really very tense; everybody knew that they’d bet their houses on this strategy of going to Cannes with the huge party and a twenty-six-minute preview. It was a strategy that had not gone terribly well once before when Disney had previewed Armageddon to a less than rapturous response. The question being asked was, ‘Is this New Line’s folly?’

  ‘There were,’ admits Bob Shaye, ‘a lot of fears. Not only had New Line never taken on anything of this scale before but nobody else had either; there was no road map as to how you go about this kind of undertaking. There were fears on the part of our team, whether they’d be able to stand up to the test, which they did with flying colours, and fears on the part of Peter and his team, whether they could stand up to the test, which they did with flying colours! But to say there weren’t any fears wouldn’t be true.’

  ‘We were very excited about what we were showing,’ adds Michael Lynne, ‘but we couldn’t help but be anxious about the undertaking. Never had so much press been gathered in one place to see just twenty-six minutes of this supposed epic trilogy. Bob and I were very confident about the footage, but we were rolling dice. If for one reason or another there was something the press didn’t respond to and the word came out negatively, that would be a burden…You can’t help but have anxieties.’

  ‘You have to remember,’ continues Bob Shaye, ‘that we had also enlisted the support of many international partners; it was as big a commitment for them as it was for us in a commensurate way. A lot of these people had bet their own farms with certain trepidation. Michael and I felt very responsible, not only to our own company but to the twenty different companies throughout the world that had risked more than they had ever risked for a motion picture. Even though the movie business is redolent with risk, it was a big responsibility that we had to shoulder; for me personally this was one of the major things I thought about. We’d recently lost an unfortunate amount of money with two or three other movies; I knew we could shoulder what we’d undertaken on this but wasn’t sure everybody else could. I was really concerned.’

  The lights in the Olympia went down, the film rolled and for those now-famous twenty-six minutes the audience was enraptured: they gasped, they clapped, they jumped in union at the moments of suspense. When it reached its conclusion, they leapt to their feet applauding and cheering. The response both in the theatre and as the crowd spilled out into the blazing sunlight was one of appreciation and delight and, more importantly, of expectation.

  Ken Kamins recalls: ‘The relief after that first press screening was huge! It was as if they’d seen the whole movie. It was indescribable! And it was incredible how word spread across the Plaza like wildfire: “Oh my God, these guys are really on their way to something!”’

  For Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, who were accompanied by many of their foreign investors, the reception came like an answer to a prayer. ‘It was actually overwhelming,’ remembers Bob Shaye. ‘Many of these people had literally mortgaged their companies; they didn’t know what they were going to be seeing. This was not like a bunch of people who had walked in without commitment; there was an emotional component of relief and excitement.’

  Rolf Mittweg confided to Variety: ‘My Japanese distributor said he had a knot in his stomach for a whole year, and
now it has dissolved…’

  It was a gutsy thing to do. If I was marketing the film, I probably wouldn’t have done it – but New Line decided to take the chance, and everyone in New Zealand worked around the clock to complete the best reel we could. It was such a dangerous gamble. However, in hindsight it was smart. If we hadn’t screened anything at Cannes, we’d have been facing another seven months of ‘New Line’s Folly’-style mutterings. This was a do or die attempt to shut those people up and begin a tide of goodwill towards the project. It worked. I’m full of admiration for New Line’s sheer courage in doing that.

  Even before Variety (‘Three “Ring” circus commands attention’) and the rest of the movie media correspondents were overwhelmingly prophesying success for Jackson’s vision of Middle-earth, Cannes was crackling with the word-of-mouth and the internet sizzling with word-of-web.

  Empire magazine’s French website declared, ‘Right from the beginning we feel it is going to be huge. Star Wars looks like a pale TV series compared to that.’ While the indefatigable Harry Knowles was in full flight on his Ain’t it Cool site: ‘…The bridge sequence is ungodly cool…the sort of ungodly cool that…well…I CANNOT EVEN BEGIN TO DESCRIBE HOW COOL THIS SEQUENCE WAS!! I’ve never seen anything like it…This is Cinema, big and showing me things my imagination has never conceived of. I was giggly-happy and dumbstruck all at once. Then I saw the Balrog. No s***! I’ve seen the Thing of Shadow and Fire as it breaks through a wall. My God. The thing is enormous, horns like a black ram from the pit of Hell itself. Old cracked horns. Fire coming out of the cracked skin. Glowing mean-as-f*** eyes…’ And so on in an excited state of euphoria…