Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  Other intriguing developments in this proposal include a dramatically defined love-triangle:

  ARAGORN and ÉOWYN are asleep in each other’s arms. LOUD KNOCKING awakes them…ARAGORN opens the door, pulling his robes around him. He awkwardly faces ARWEN who flings her arms around his shoulders…ÉOWYN watches from the window…

  And, for Saruman, repentance and final absolution in death:

  The expression on SARUMAN’S FACE transforms from hateful vengeance into one of CONFUSION and REGRET…GANDALF kneels down beside his mortally injured mentor. He forgives him, saying SAURON has used the PALANTÍR to poison his mind. With his last breath, SARUMAN warns them that SAURON is amassing a HUGE ARMY in MORDOR. He intends to march on the GONDORIAN CITY of MINAS TIRITH within two weeks. He means to continue his rampage and take Middle-earth…

  By the time The Fellowship of the Ring was being filmed, there was no question of Gollum being seen other than for a fleeting moment in the Mines of Moria, but the original treatment contained an early, threatening encounter between Gollum and Frodo:

  A LOG quietly floats down the river towards the CAMP…a SLIMY HAND appears over the log…followed by a pair of SHINING EYES…GOLLUM! GOLLUM sneaks towards the sleeping group, muttering softly to himself. He spots the RING glinting from beneath FRODO’S SHIRT! GOLLUM is beside himself with lust. He flexes his fingers and slowly wraps them around FRODO’S throat. GOLLUM suddenly tightens his grip, silently choking FRODO! FRODO’S eyes open and he looks helplessly into GOLLUM’S hateful face! Around him, the others sleep on…

  GOLLUM glances up at a noise…ARAGORN is running towards him from out of the woods! GOLLUM snarls and releases his grip, snatching at THE RING…

  He manages to rip THE RING away from FRODO’S neck as ARAGORN’S boot kicks him. GOLLUM flies towards the water, THE RING spilling into the mud. He reaches towards it…an arrow suddenly pins his hand to the ground! LEGOLAS has leapt to his feet, brandishing his bow!

  GOLLUM screams and rips his hand away from the arrow, disappearing into the water!

  THE RING slowly sinking into the mud…a hand picks it up. BOROMIR stands clutching the RING. He seems to grow in stature, as if absorbing its power. FRODO looks at BOROMIR warily…ARAGORN orders him to hand the RING back to FRODO. For a moment BOROMIR is motionless, then he quietly drops the RING into FRODO’S outstretched palm.

  FRODO rubs his sore throat as he watches BOROMIR quietly wander into the woods.

  The purpose of changes made to the original story are either in line with that stated aim of making the plot understood by those who have never waded through Tolkien’s thousand-page epic, or they are simply a Jacksonian attempt to rack up the action and offer eye-popping amazement that would ultimately compete with that early shot of the 150,000 warriors, ‘the single most spectacular shot ever committed to film.’

  The siege of Gondor was, from the outset, a sequence where the director–who, as a young man, had been fascinated by movies featuring wars ancient and modern–was going to revel in the opportunity of being let loose on one of the greatest battlefields of the imagination. Snatch any few lines from the three pages outlining the scenes at, on and around the battlements of Minas Tirith and the essence of the elaborate action set-piece in The Return of the King is clearly already sketched in Peter’s mind:

  The GREAT ORC ARMY closes in on the city. GREAT SIEGE TOWERS and CATAPULTS are hauled across the PELENNOR FIELDS…

  Thousands of FLAMING TORCHES light the snarling, slathering ORCS. DRUMMERS are beating the DRUMS OF WAR. The winged shadows–the NAZGÛL swoop overhead…

  On the battlements of MINAS TIRITH the ARMY of GONDOR waits grimly.

  A TRUMPETER standing on the PARAPET turns and SOUNDS a MIGHTY BLAST–the signal that the ORCS are in RANGE!

  THWAT! 100 CATAPULTS send their great ROCKS high into the sir, over the BATTLEMENTS! Dizzying aerial CAMERA SHOTS of huge BOULDERS flying up close to CAMERA…then falling away towards the ORCS!

  CRUNCH!! BOULDERS flatten ORCS. THWAT!! 100 more…THWAT!! Another 100!! The ORC front ranks are in disarray!

  The ORC CAPTAIN orders his catapults to fire! THWAT! THWAT! THWAT! But these CATAPULTS do not fire rocks…

  HORROR sweeps through the streets of GONDOR as the SEVERED HEADS of the 100 HORSEMEN land amongst the SOLDIERS!

  Having completed their ninety-two-page outline, Peter and Fran flew to New York for creative meetings with Miramax, which took place in a room nicknamed ‘the sweatbox’ after the small airless rooms where in the early days of film, movies got shown and discussed. In the middle of summer, with no windows and no air conditioning and the obvious tensions involved in presenting a treatment for an ambitious movie project, the room lived up to its name.

  It was the first time that Peter and Fran had met Harvey Weinstein’s brother and business partner, Bob, whom Peter describes as ‘the canny number-cruncher’. Bob was the man responsible for running Dimension Films, Miramax’s sister company and genre division responsible for such horror franchises as Hellraiser, Children of the Corn and Scream. Harvey explained that, since The Lord of the Rings was bigger than anything Miramax had previously produced, they had decided that it was to be the first ever Miramax-Dimension Films co-production. The meetings, which were intensive and ran across two or three days, also involved Jon Gordon, Miramax’s production executive, and Cary Granat, then Dimension’s head of production.

  The Weinsteins were highly amusing! Harvey and Bob are very close and there’s a really strong bond between them, which I admire. But there’s this theatrical game that they play, where they argue and shout at one another.

  When Bob expressed some opinion that Harvey didn’t agree with, Harvey stormed out of the room and disappeared while Bob just kept on talking as if his brother was still in the room. Then, a few minutes later, we heard the stomp, stomp of footsteps and, through the frosted glass, saw this Alfred Hitchcock-style silhouette of Harvey, marching back down the corridor.

  He walked into the room holding the Oscar that he had won for The English Patient, which he’s just been to collect from his office, and he slammed it down on the table in front of Bob and screamed, ‘Who knows f****** more about scriptwriting, you or me?!’ We sat there watching this going on and, at first, it was pretty unnerving; then, very quickly, we realised that it is a game; there’s no real aggro in these exchanges; they’re just playing and having fun.

  It also became clear that whilst Harvey had read The Lord of the Rings, or at least had a detailed knowledge of the story and characters, Bob Weinstein had not…

  Bob had never read the book and was sort of proud of the fact! So it was presented to us that, because he didn’t know anything about The Lord of the Rings, Bob was going to be ‘the logic policeman’! We had to deliver a treatment and a script that was totally understandable to Bob, because if Bob didn’t understand it, then it had no hope in the big wide world!

  Having no allegiance to Tolkien, Bob Weinstein also felt free to offer suggestions for improving the original plot.

  At one point Bob said, ‘So there’s these four hobbits, right? And, you know, they go on this adventure and none of the hobbits die?’ Well, no, we explained, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin all survive…‘Well, we can’t have that,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to kill a hobbit! I don’t care which one; you can pick–I’m not telling you who it should be: you pick out who you want to kill, but we’ve really got to kill one of those hobbits!’

  In situations like that, you just nod and smile and say, ‘Well, that’s something we can consider…’ It’s not a very useful tactic to sit there and say, ‘I don’t think killing off a hobbit’s a very good idea…’ because you’d then get into an hour-long debate about why you should or shouldn’t kill a hobbit. It’s better to disengage when the silly ideas happen and say, ‘Well, we’ll think about that…’ and then you go away and hope it will get forgotten!

  There were some entertaining highlights to the meetings that Peter still recalls with amu
sement and affection.

  Bob Weinstein had obviously read the treatment, or skipped through it, but I remember this moment as if a light bulb had gone on and there was almost a palpable moment of sudden understanding. Bob said, ‘Wait! So the Elf is like a bowman, shooting arrows, yeah? And the Dwarf has got axes and he can throw axes? And Sam, he’s got this magic rope, right? And Frodo’s got this light-thing?’ Then he got really excited and you could see there was this moment of utter revelation and he said, ‘It’s like that movie where they had the explosives expert, and the code expert and the marksman and they all had their own special skill…It’s the f****** Guns of Navarone!’

  The best thing to do in these meetings is try and keep a straight face and, occasionally, kick each other under the table, which Fran and I were prone to doing from time to time!

  Creative meetings in Hollywood are essentially about survival:

  Fran and I like to think we have fairly strong creative instincts and we certainly have strong creative opinions. We also have a certain independent spirit: we never have liked being given edicts or mandates or being told what to do.

  You have to attend these creative meetings with studio people but you would really rather just be left alone to do the job. In our experience, we’ve worked with great studio people whose ideas you respect, but you also can find yourself in the room with…the word ‘idiot’ comes to mind. In these situations, somehow you’ve got to create the illusion that their notes and ideas have been incredibly helpful and that they’ve steered you in a direction that you otherwise wouldn’t have gone. With a bit of luck, their ideas will be ones that you’ve already had yourself, so that you can credit them back to them afterwards and quite often the next time you meet they’ll have forgotten most of what was actually talked about.

  So, basically, you simply play a very political game: you have the meeting, come out, and go and write exactly the same screenplay you would have written anyway!

  By the end of the meetings, apart from some ideas that were clearly never going to find their way into any script, Miramax had accepted that The Lord of the Rings was two films, not one: ‘They blanched at the prospect,’ says Fran, ‘but they nodded

  …’ Peter’s recollection is that, in view of the wealth of essential story material, there was a bid–albeit unsuccessful–to push the project to an even more ambitious scenario:

  Once we had started to get into the book and were working on the treatment, we realised that three films would obviously be the more natural way to do it. We actually shaped our treatment into three parts at one point, but Harvey said, ‘No! Let’s just stick with two!’

  Two movies or three, it is certain that, as far as Peter and Fran were concerned–and regardless of whatever anybody else might have thought or subsequently said–that it was never going to be one movie. Later events suggest that there may have been a prevailing wish that was never truly relinquished, that this epic tale could be despatched in a more straightforward fashion with a single picture. It was an argument that would return, although not for a while…

  What was a known issue from the outset was the budget. The top figure for both movies was not to exceed $75million. At the time, the maximum budget spent on a Miramax picture was in the region of $40million. The $75million was a lot of money for the company to be committing to and, in all likelihood, was a cap imposed by Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s masters at Disney.

  Harvey was very adamant from the beginning that going over $75million was never an option. At that point we had no script and no budget. All we had to go on was the fact that we had just made The Frighteners for $27million and that had involved a lot of computer effects. Looking at it like that, we thought $27million up to $75million was certainly going to pay for a lot more production value, a lot more effects, a lot bigger film, and so we had every reason to believe that we would be able to do it for that. With hindsight, of course, we were incredibly off the mark…

  Back in Wellington, Peter and Fran began work on the screenplay in order to be in a position to draw up a budget for the films:

  We started work, flogging our way through it. Writing any screenplay is hard and this was particularly exhausting because we knew that as soon as we finished the first script, we’d have to start in on the second, because they were going to be shot back to back. It was quite a burden and we began to realise that we needed help and support.

  Now living in Auckland, Stephen hadn’t written any screenplays since Braindead, but was successfully furthering his career as a theatre playwright; he also understood film and the dynamic of working with Peter and Fran. Stephen agreed to go to Wellington for several weeks to collaborate on the scripts for The Lord of the Rings, bringing an individual contribution to the process.

  Stephen had read the book when he was young and he read it again before he had started working with us, but he was by no means ‘immersed’ in Tolkien and, as a result, was reasonably cavalier with it: he felt that ultimately you had to do what was best for the film, even if it meant dramatically changing things in the book. So, some of our arguments–and you always have arguments during the writing process–were revolving around things that Stephen wanted to do which would deviate quite a lot from the original, and we’d be saying, ‘You can’t really do that!’ Which was always fine with Stephen and, for us, it was really useful because having someone like that as part of the writing team is actually no bad thing, because it challenges you on your prejudices and opens up a lot of ideas and possibilities that you might easily be locked off from.

  Stephen was also instrumental in introducing someone to the project who would play a pivotal role in the progress of The Lord of the Rings. While living in Auckland, Stephen had formed a relationship with Philippa Boyens, who was an aspiring writer and a former director of the New Zealand Writer’s Guild, an organisation founded in 1975 to encourage and represent the country’s script and screenwriters.

  Philippa also happened to be a huge fan of Tolkien’s books and during visits back to Auckland, Stephen would show Philippa parts of the script, report on the various ideas and developments, and would pick up on Philippa’s fan-based reactions, which he then passed on, in conversation, to Fran and Peter.

  Although it later transpired that Fran and Philippa had met at some industry events, for the most part all Peter and Fran knew about Philippa Boyens was the various thoughts and comments she had made on the scripts, which Stephen had relayed. ‘At one stage, they hit a brick wall with the love story and Stephen and I actually wrote some scenes together. Some time after that, they rang me and asked me to go down and meet them.’

  Recalling the moment when she was handed the ninety-two-page treatment to read, Philippa says: ‘I was frankly worried, because The Lord of the Rings really is one of my favourite books. However, as I read I got very excited, because they had shaped it into an amazing journey and a great movie-story. That treatment remains the backbone of the films and shows that, from the beginning, it was a whole piece: whether two episodes or three, it is–to some extent–one movie.’ Then came the moment of truth.

  Philippa showed up at our house to chat with us about her opinions on what we’d done, which was an interesting experience: someone we’d never met was now going to be telling us what she thought of our work…

  I remember her being rather nervous but she was really very diplomatic and started out by saying, ‘Wow! You guys have done so brilliantly well! You are so fantastic! It’s so great that this is actually happening! You’ve been so clever the way you’ve done this!’ She gushed on like that for about ten minutes and then she said, ‘But you know…’ And that’s when the ‘buts’ started to appear! And the ‘buts’ are the interesting part!

  ‘I was nervous,’ admits Philippa. ‘Here I was offering a critique to a couple of experienced, Oscar-nominated film-makers; while as for Fran, I knew of her as this incredibly bright, gorgeous woman whom I had always thought of as “Stephen’s ex-girlfriend”, which felt slightly intimidatin
g. But when we met we immediately clicked as friends.’ As for her critique…

  We thought the criticism that she was giving us was smart and useful. In fact, we liked everything that she had to say–not because she liked our script, because, as the conversation wore on, it was very clear that she felt we had quite a few shortcomings!–but because her opinions and insights were good and sound, and where she’d criticise something we’d done, she always had a suggestion of how we should fix it. We very quickly gained a huge respect and affection for Philippa. In hindsight, it was a major turning point for the project.

  ‘We really found Philippa’s comments and ideas helpful,’ agrees Fran, ‘and we decided very quickly that we wanted to involve her in the scriptwriting process.’ Philippa was initially made script editor on the project. There were initial concerns about how Stephen would react to this suggestion but he was comfortable with the situation and the work continued on the scripts with Philippa playing an increasingly important role. ‘I had no idea where this was going to lead,’ she says, ‘which is probably just as well! I was just very open to whatever developed because I was having a great time! These guys were fantastic: the four of us got on really well and I was learning a lot: essentially it was four people in a room having a lot of fun!’