There and Back Again

by Sean Astin

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Copyright

  The making of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy was the greatest personal and professional experience of my life. This book is dedicated to Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and the entire cast and crew. Without their courage, creativity, and professionalism, I would never have been able to learn so much about myself. The thoughts and experiences related in this book are from my heart and try to answer, in as thoughtful a way as possible, the many questions that people have asked me over these past few years. I will forever be grateful to my wife, Christine, as well as to my daughters, Alexandra and Elizabeth, for their enduring love and support. The road goes ever on.…

  CHAPTER ONE

  I sensed from the very beginning that The Lord of the Rings had the potential to be something extraordinary. Not merely extraordinary in the way that, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark was extraordinary—as pure, cinematic adventure, a thrill-ride of the highest order—but as something even more. I’m talking about epic filmmaking not seen since the days of David Lean or John Ford. I knew that the director, Peter Jackson, was a man of prodigious talent and vision, an artist capable of creating a film that might one day be mentioned in the same breath as Lean’s desert classic Lawrence of Arabia. The Lord of the Rings, I thought—I hoped—could be like that: Oscar-caliber art on par with the best films ever made.

  How did I know this? Well, sometimes you just get a gut feeling. It’s as simple as that. As a journeyman actor I’ve survived by seeing an opportunity pop up on the radar screen, guessing kind of intuitively what the odds are of success, and then determining whether I want to be part of that project. Sometimes, for practical, real-world reasons, I’ve made decisions knowing full well what the cycle would be, and that my association with a given film might even have a minor negative impact on my image or marketability. As in any field, you calculate the odds and make a choice, and then you live with it. You can only wait so long for Martin Scorcese to call; sometimes you have to take the best available offer. I’ve done any number of low-budget movies in which my participation was based primarily on the following logic:

  All right, it’s a week out of my life or six weeks out of my life, the money is pretty good, and I don’t have to audition. Let me take a look at the script. Does my character have a banana sticking out of his ass? No? No banana? Well, then, how bad can it be? It’s a third-tier knockoff of a Die Hard movie, but the morality is reasonably intact; the violence is kind of sophomoric, but not gratuitous, and for the most part everyone keeps their clothes on. Most important of all, is anybody in the business ever going to see it? Not likely. Okay … where do I sign?

  Ah, but old movies never really die, do they? Not anymore. Thanks to video and DVD, the Internet, and late-night cable television, they live on forever, seeping inevitably into the public consciousness whether they deserve to or not. Case in point: a cold winter day on the south island of New Zealand, back in 1999. One of many days on the set of The Lord of the Rings when things weren’t going quite as planned. The kind of day where the scene called for filming six hundred horses on the top of a windswept deer park, so the crew was furiously washing away snow with fire hoses to make it look like it wasn’t wintertime—resulting, of course, in a veritable sea of mud. In New Zealand we traveled almost everywhere in four-wheel-drive vehicles, so thick and persistent was the slop. At times it felt like what I have read about soldiers fighting in the trenches in World War I. We couldn’t go anywhere without getting muck splattered all over us. On our shoes, our clothes … our capes. (We were hobbits, remember?) No hyperbole or disrespect intended, but there were times when it almost felt as though we were part of a military operation. It was that rugged, that spartan, that precise. Mountainside locations looked almost like battlefields, dotted with tents and armies of workers. The general, of course, was Peter Jackson.

  Well, on this one particular morning I saw Peter sitting in his tent with a bemused look on his face. Now, protocol on movie sets often dictates that directors, even those as approachable and thoughtful as Peter, be given space in the morning hours—it’s a time for preparation, not long conversations. But, as I approached, planning to offer no more than a cheery “Good morning,” Peter began to nod ever so slightly. With his unruly hair, stout frame, and generally disheveled appearance, Peter has often been described as “hobbit-like,” and certainly the impish grin coming to his face now supported that notion.

  “Sean,” he said dryly. “Guess what I saw last night?”

  “What?”

  “Icebreaker.”

  Oh, boy …

  Icebreaker was the rather benign result of one of those “business” decisions I just mentioned. Some two years earlier I had accepted what most people would consider to be a princely sum of money (sixty thousand dollars) for roughly two weeks of work. I had a good time making Icebreaker, which was filmed at Killington Ski Resort in Vermont. While there, I dined at a couple of nice restaurants, discovered a lovely antique bookshop, and made a few good friends. Peter Beckwith, the producer, and David Giancola, the director, are genuinely nice men who treated me well. One of my costars was the incomparable Bruce Campbell, regarded as perhaps the king of B-movie stars. If you’ve seen The Evil Dead or any of its sequels, you’ve seen Bruce. You know his work and his ability to bring a certain campy grace to almost any project. I wasn’t really familiar with Bruce’s work at the time, but most of the people I worked with were, and they said things like, “Oh, man, you have no idea how cool it is to work with this guy.” In truth, Bruce was pretty cool. And a total pro, I might add. I had fun working with him.

  Everything about my experience in Vermont was pleasant, if ultimately forgettable. But let’s be honest here: the movie is a piece of shit.1 Sorry, Dave. Sorry, Peter. But you know it’s a piece of shit, too. By that, I mean, it isn’t socially edifying, and it doesn’t aspire to be artistic or even particularly clever. It’s just mindless, harmless entertainment. (Check out the movie’s promotional poster, featuring yours truly with a pair of ski goggles perched on his forehead, a revolver in his hand, and a look on his face that fairly screams, “Mess with me, and I’ll kick your ass!”) But we all got along well and had a pleasant enough time, and while we were there we took our work as seriously as possible.

  For me—for all of us, really—it was a smart business decision to do Icebreaker. These guys figured out a formula: how to package and presell the movie, how to raise the money, how to film the thing, and how to have fun doing it. So more power to them. And, frankly, I needed the work and the cash that came with it. Little did I know that two years later I’d be on location in New Zealand, working on one of the most ambitious projects in the history of movies
, a $270 million version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and that I’d be standing face-to-face with Peter Jackson, one of the rising stars of the business. Peter, it turns out, is not just a filmmaker, but a fan of films, all films, with a massive private collection that keeps his garage screening room humming day and night, and a penchant for channel surfing in the wee hours that makes it virtually impossible to hide anything from him.

  Including Icebreaker.

  “Very nice,” Peter said, and left it at that, because nothing else needed to be said. It wasn’t an insult, nor was it meant to embarrass me (well, maybe a little). It was just an acknowledgment of where I’d been and where I was. Most actors (and most directors, too) have such things on their résumés, and part of the obligation of the fraternity is to remind you of that every once in a while. It’s healthy for the ego, if you know what I mean. But in this setting no one else had any idea what Peter was talking about. The cast and crew seemed unfamiliar with Icebreaker, but they understood that the director was gently busting the balls of one of his actors, and that was sufficient, especially since that actor was a bit of an outsider.

  You see, on the set of The Lord of the Rings I think I was sometimes perceived as the Hollywood guy (which is not necessarily the same as a movie star). The director and the vast majority of his crew were native Kiwis, and most of the actors were from the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Even more so than Elijah Wood, who as Frodo was ostensibly the film’s star, I got the sense that I was the American actor. I was the kid who had grown up in Hollywood. I had been raised by a pair of pop culture icons, Patty Duke and John Astin. On a production that had been quite vocal and public in its reluctance to hire American actors (not out of any overt jingoism, but merely as a way to demonstrate faithfulness to Tolkien’s vision), I was the most visible exception to the rule. I was Rudy, for God’s sake. You don’t get any more American than that. Rudy was the underdog. And I guess, in a way, so was I.

  * * *

  Let me say something about the purpose of There and Back Again. Forests have been felled and more ink spilled about The Lord of the Rings than for almost any other film franchise in recent memory. I have talked extensively about how positive my experience in New Zealand was, about the family bonds that were created, and the love and passion and dedication that everyone involved brought to their work. My intent here is absolutely not to disavow any of that sentiment; rather, I want to amplify and explore some of the other kinds of emotions and dynamics that I felt. Furthermore, I want to explain how a lot of my early experiences as a professional actor informed my thinking and attitudes during much of the filming. So …

  To get an idea of how my career has advanced—and sometimes stalled—we should really go back to 1989. Shortly after graduating from high school, I traveled to England to work on a World War II ensemble film called Memphis Belle. It was a good role in a major Hollywood movie, starring a handful of talented young actors, among them Eric Stolz and Matthew Modine, and it figured to help me regain some of the momentum I’d achieved a few years earlier, when I’d starred in The Goonies. I was serious about my life and career, although admittedly lacking focus and direction. I wanted to go to college, but I also wanted to be a movie star and a filmmaker.

  It was an exciting time in my life. I was eighteen years old, had just graduated from high school, and was traveling at my own expense to take part in a Warner Bros. movie. The producer, David Putnam, was one of my heroes. I greatly admired his films and had followed his career as an executive; in short, I wanted to emulate him in some way. I’ll never forget the day that he gathered the American actors together at the Atheneum Hotel in London and told us about his belief in the power of cinema. His words confirmed a lifetime of instincts and crystallized my imagination. We were about to embark on a filmmaking experience of real significance. The story dealt with an important moment in American and world history, and we all wanted to get it right. I loved the idea that I was becoming a global citizen and that I was likely to travel all over the world experiencing new cultures and meeting people completely different from myself. I sensed that I was destined to become a star and that my dream of becoming a filmmaker was about to come true. It had been a long time since The Goonies, but now it seemed as though my career was ready to take off, and I would be able to accomplish the loftiest of my goals. How? I really had no idea.

  One day near the end of principal photography on Memphis Belle, I took a walk in the garden at Pinewood Studios with the Academy Award–winning cinematographer David Watkins. This in some way was a rite of passage. David was one of the most revered and gifted cinematographers in the business, having worked on, among other films, Catch-22 and Out of Africa (for which he won an Oscar). He was a legend in the cinematography world, not only because of his artistry, but also because of his personality, which was at once generous and biting. David didn’t suffer fools gladly, nor did he fall at the feet of Hollywood’s gentry. Warren Beatty told me that David once said to Barbra Streisand, when they first began working together, “We’re going to have to do something about that!” while pointing rather dramatically at her nose.

  Anyway, instead of being rude, David decided to offer me guidance and inspiration. I began telling him about an original idea I had for a short film based on nothing more than a single image I had carried with me since I was fourteen years old. It had popped into my head one day while driving with Mark Marshall, Steven Spielberg’s assistant, during the filming of The Goonies. Mark was taking me home, and we were on Ventura Boulevard, with the sun setting, listening to Kansas sing “Dust in the Wind” on the radio, when suddenly I had a vision of two soldiers—one Vietnamese, one American—hanging upside down next to each other, with a burning red sun between them. Why? I don’t know. My best guess is that it had something to do with my having recently seen Francis Ford Coppola’s classic Apocalypse Now for the first time. That, combined with the fact that every day when I went to work on The Goonies, I was escorted to the set by my guardian, Joseph “Peppy” Passarelli. A big Italian man with a bushy mustache, Peppy had been a corpsman in Vietnam, and during our many hours in the car he often shared tales of his time in Southeast Asia. Anyway, between Peppy and Apocalypse Now, and Kansas and the setting sun, I couldn’t get this image out of my head.

  So here I was years later, walking with David Watkins, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and sharing with him my idea for a small personal film, not at all sure how he would respond to it, but wanting his feedback nonetheless. The truth is, I was a bit lost. I knew I had missed a window of opportunity for college. I’d applied to Cal State–Northridge right out of high school, mainly because it was one of the few schools that did not require the SAT for admission. This was important to me because I hated the notion of having my intelligence quantified by a single exam. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should reveal that I did once register for the SAT, and even started to drive to the testing site, only to miss the exam after locking my keys in the car at a gas station while battling a bout of performance anxiety.) I was accepted at Cal State–Northridge, but I knew, based on the filming schedule of Memphis Belle, that I would almost certainly be in England when the fall semester began. If I’d returned immediately upon the conclusion of principal photography, I might have missed no more than a week or two of classes, and I suppose I could have made up the work, but I opted instead to travel. Some of the other guys had cool trips planned, and I wanted to be like them. I took a cruise through Greece, and I paid top dollar because I didn’t know you could do it more cost-effectively than that. To be honest, I didn’t really care. I had some money in my pocket and a small degree of notoriety, and so I had a good time. It was a wonderful experience, but I embraced it knowing full well that it would delay my entrance to Cal State–Northridge.

  It’s fair to say that I was somewhat conflicted about what I wanted to do with my life. Here I was, part of this big World War II movie produced by the estimable David Putnam, who,
a decade before Saving Private Ryan galvanized public opinion, had captured my imagination and made me understand the importance of movies. One reason David wanted to make Memphis Belle was his outrage over the gratuitousness of Top Gun, which a few years earlier had trumpeted the machismo and courage of modern-day fighter pilots in what he considered an almost cartoonish manner. David was after something else, something more subtle, more honest. He wanted to celebrate the “greatest generation.” He understood how critical and important the images of war could be, and so he believed it was a sacred responsibility to portray such behavior in all its complexity. I believed what he told us with my whole heart. I wanted to be an important filmmaker, just like David Putnam. He had been the president of Columbia Pictures, and now he wanted to try to improve the quality of British film.

  The first day I met David, I said, “Mr. Putnam, I’m not going to ask you for anything except, please, let me go to Asia when it’s time to promote this movie.” He said he’d try, and true to his word, he took me with him to Thailand, Singapore, Japan, and Hong Kong. In no small bit of irony, we wound up promoting the movie on the eve of the Persian Gulf War, and I found myself on a dais with David and Matthew Modine, fielding questions about our positions on the conflict in Iraq. Memphis Belle was a celebration of American air supremacy during World War II, and a reflection on the kinds of sacrifices that made Allied victory possible. The Japanese journalists seemed justifiably skeptical about whatever propaganda we were supposedly engaged in. To our credit, David, Matthew, and I took refuge in our roles as artists whose primary mission is to examine and reflect the best and worst of what human nature has to offer. I’ve always had notions of a political future for myself, probably since my mom told me in the fourth grade that I could be anything I wanted to be, even president of the United States. Well, I believed her, and now at nineteen I found myself “on the record” about serious issues at a serious time. But I remember feeling that my country was at war, and I should be at home with my family.