Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  Ken Kamins describes what happened next: ‘Mark walks into the conference room, kind of white-faced, and we looked at him and said, “What’s wrong?” “Bob wants to see Peter, in his office, alone,” he replied. “We don’t know why.” So Peter dutifully gets up and leaves. He’s in there for the better part of twenty-five minutes. Fran was saying, “What’s going on, why is he in there?” And I said, “Well, maybe he’s letting Peter down gently, letting him know he’s a big fan, but that this is not something he can tackle; or maybe he’s offering Peter another movie…”’

  Peter went to Bob’s Shaye’s office (Bob’s partner, Michael Lynne, was in New York at the time) and they met for the first time since Peter had worked on the prospective Nightmare on Elm Street script.

  Bob greeted me warmly, told me that he had seen Heavenly Creatures and really loved it and thought that was a wonderful film, but that he hadn’t liked The Frighteners at all – which I remember being delighted to hear – seriously! In Hollywood everybody tells you how much they love your movies, and to hear somebody say they didn’t like a film was refreshing and wonderfully honest. Bob says what he thinks, and that honesty has given him something of a reputation in a town not used to people telling the truth.

  Then he said, ‘I understand you’ve got a video to show me and I’m going to look at that and I’ll give this some thought; but if we don’t want to do this film, I just want you to know that the door at New Line is always open to you and if you ever have a project and are looking for a studio, then you are were welcome to bring it here.’

  I got the impression that he wanted to be friendly but, at the same

  In the middle of our seven-year project…

  During a production as long as The Lord of the Rings, with a crew so large, it’s inevitable that marriages, births and divorces will occur (not necessarily in that order). Unfortunately, we also lost some close members of our extended family. Brian Bansgrove (above), our beloved gaffer, died just one day before he was due to see The Fellowship of the Ring at his home in Bangkok. Carla Fry (below) was the head of production at New Line Cinema, and had to weather much of the tension between studio and film-makers. She handled it all with grace and a sensible level-headedness, and became a real friend to Fran and myself. Carla lived to see The Fellowship of the Ring open successfully, but died after a short illness many months before The Two Towers was released. She was one of the real unsung heroes in the making of the trilogy.

  Sir Edmund Hillary came to visit The Lord of the Rings set and he attracted a large group of awestruck actors and film-makers at lunchtime.

  I’m always interested in young directors, but coming across genuinely talented kids is a rare thing. Cameron Duncan was an incredibly skilled film-maker – he was born to make movies. He had made a few stunning short films and was destined to become a leading film-maker of his generation; I had no doubt about that. However, Cameron also had a very aggressive cancer. Fran and I did what we could to help him, but his disease was unstoppable. He made his last movie, Strike Zone, a few weeks before he died. We put a little tribute to him on The Return of the King extended DVD. If you haven’t seen it, you should borrow a copy and have a look at the work of a remarkable young man.

  Viggo the day after a slight mishap with a surfboard. The day this was taken we had to shoot the section in the Balin’s Tomb sequence where the Orc drums are heard after Pippin knocks the skeleton down the well. I shot Aragorn’s close-ups as a right to left profile…and now you can see why!

  This is the evening of the release of The Fellowship of the Ring. The main cast had each got a tattoo a year or so earlier, and now it was the turn of Richard Taylor, Barrie Osborne, Mark Ordesky and myself. Here I’m getting tormented by Orlando, who I suspect was one of the principal ring leaders.

  RIGHT: In true support, Wellington’s newspaper, the Dominion Post, went so far as to rename itself for the Wellington/World Premiere of The Return of the King.

  LEFT: An estimated 100,000 people lined Courtney Place to catch a glimpse of the stars for the premiere.

  MIDDLE LEFT: Fran and me at the Golden Globes for The Return of the King. Award nights are blurry, giddy occasions after the ceremony, but in the hours leading up to it, you really wish you could watch it on TV at home. And then right at the moment the envelope is torn open, you pray it’s not your name that’s read out! I was really happy to see Fran win for her work on the lyrics of ‘Into the West’, a song directly inspired by our friendship with Cameron Duncan during his last months. Those lyrics came from the heart.

  BOTTOM LEFT: Receiving the Best Picture Oscar from Steven Spielberg, with Bob Shaye looking on. When Steven opened the envelope, his first words were, ‘It’s a clean sweep’, since we had won all thirteen categories we’d been nominated for. However, that threw our son Billy into a few seconds of despair. He was watching the ceremony on TV in New Zealand and thought a film called Clean Sweep had beaten us.

  LEFT: Jack was always our first choice to play Carl Denham in King Kong, the obsessive, driven film-maker with a humorous wit.

  ABOVE: I shaved my beard off to play a gunner and for a couple of days nobody recognised me, including my kids! I did harbour thoughts about keeping it off for a while – but they wouldn’t even consider the idea, and wanted their dad back as soon as possible.

  LEFT: The digital New Yorkers had to be animated. Billy, Katie and I spent a few hours in motion capture suits, playing a variety of pedestrians to provide natural movement for the huge crowd scenes. A computer follows the little glowing markers in space, applying whatever motion we do to the fake computer-generated people.

  The King Kong premiere in New York. Actually a very cool photo – between George Lucas and myself are the ‘Three Kongs’: Andy Serkis, who performed Kong in our version; the 1933 armature; and Rick Baker, who played Kong in 1976. Quite historic – and a moment where self-control is quite hard to maintain. The inner geek is trying to bust out.

  Fran and I snuck out of the Golden Globes party and sought refuge with our friends, Sylvia and Rick Baker. The party was on the rooftop of a hotel, and we asked some complete strangers if we could hang out in their room for a while. I find parties – especially Hollywood ones – become very overwhelming, very quickly. People I don’t know are constantly coming at me in a never-ending flood. The shy, Pukerua Bay only child wells up, and I need to escape them quickly. Must be something like a panic attack, I guess.

  What I love about movie making is the research. I don’t know how else I would ever get to fly in a Lancaster bomber – unless it was something to do with a movie. I’m in Canada here, researching Dambusters, a World War Two movie about the top-secret RAF mission to bomb German dams that we’re producing for Christian Rivers to direct. I think it’s one of the most astonishing true stories of the entire war and our hope is to make their heroic exploits known to a whole new generation. And by harnessing Weta’s state-of-the-art visual effects, we’ll be able to bring to life the events of these desperate days of 1943 in a very visceral way.

  Here’s Christian enjoying the flight. Christian started writing fan letters to me when he was a schoolboy; I quickly realised he was a very talented artist and asked him to do storyboards on Braindead in 1991. He has been with us ever since, designing great sequences on The Lord of the Rings and working his way up to Animation Director on King Kong – he deservedly won an Oscar for his work on that film. Christian has now reached a point where he wants to direct films himself, and I leapt at the chance to help him.

  time, was warning me that they might feel they had to pass on The Lord of the Rings. It certainly increased the anxiety, but at least he was being straight…

  So, we went to the boardroom together and Bob met Fran and Marty and sort of grunted a greeting at Ken, because he doesn’t much like agents! Then Bob said, ‘Okay, let’s get started…’ and we made our presentation and, all the time, I was remembering Mark’s warnings and waiting for Bob to leave…

  Having finished
his ‘show-and-tell’ performance on the project with the display boards and models, the videotape was finally put into the player and as Ken Kamins remembers, ‘We were all of us holding our collective breath…’

  I sat watching Bob watching the film. He was totally attentive; following everything closely but in absolute, stony silence and showing no reaction to anything on screen. He didn’t say a single word throughout the entire thirty-five minutes; but then, thank God, nor did he get up and go!

  Eventually came Peter’s closing narration: ‘Here we are, at a point forty-five years after the publication of this book, when, finally, the technology has caught up with the incredible images that Tolkien injected into this story of his. So, this is the time. This is the time that this movie can finally be made.’

  ‘Peter answered two questions directly in that video,’ says Ken Kamins, ‘the first being, “Why was this the right time to make The Lord of the Rings?” The second question it answered was, “All that money – that $15million – that you heard I spent with Miramax: where did it go?” The third, more subtle question, being answered was, “Why am I, Peter Jackson, the right guy to make this movie?”

  So, had it worked, they all wondered? Had they succeeded in selling the show?

  Eventually, the video finished and there was this terrible silence in the room while Mark nervously took the tape out of the video player and handed it back to me…

  What happened next has entered the mythology of cinema and is, like all the best myths, retold with subtle variations:

  Mark Ordesky: Bob is impossible to read; completely inscrutable. The lights came up and I couldn’t read the situation at all.

  Marty Katz: Then Bob said, ‘Why would anyone want movie-goers to pay $18 when they might pay $27?’

  Fran Walsh: We just stared at him, too frightened to try and work out what he meant!

  Peter Jackson: This was really perplexing…Fran and I looked at each other. Was he suggesting an increase in ticket prices and, if so, why?

  Fran Walsh: Then he asked, ‘Why exactly do you want to make two films?’

  Mark Ordesky: He said, ‘I thought there were three books…I don’t understand why you’re making two movies?’

  Peter Jackson: I thought, ‘Oh God, here were go again! Back to the one-movie discussion!’

  Fran Walsh: We sat there, mutely, not knowing what to say…

  Ken Kamins: Bob said, ‘Tolkien did your job for you, didn’t he?’

  Fran Walsh: He said, ‘Tolkien wrote three books – right?’ We nodded. ‘Then, if you’re going to do it justice, it should be three movies – right?’ We could scarcely believe what we were hearing!’

  Mark Ordesky: Peter’s clearly thinking, ‘Dare-I-hope-that-some-one-is-really-saying-this-to-me?’ and he has this look on his face of someone trying not to frighten away an animal that you want to eat out of the palm of your hand. So, Peter finally said: ‘Yes, there are three books…’ and, ‘Yes, three movies would be terrific…’

  And the other participant in the meeting? What is his memory of the historic occasion? Bob Shaye is characteristically frank:

  ‘I think time blurs reality. Between them all, they’ve turned it into a whimsical moment of who-knows-what! When I walked into that meeting, I wasn’t so sure I would like what I was going to see. I did like it – liked it a lot and was very impressed. We already started off with the foundation interest: an incredible piece of material that had worldwide recognition and incredible marketing momentum. In my own mind I had to be pushed over the top, have somebody suggest to me this guy could pull it off.

  ‘The locations looked spectacular; the designs were beautiful, but not overly elaborate; and he had some really good ideas about how to achieve the special effects – we had just come off The Mask, on which ILM had done a fantastic, but very expensive, job. There was also the algorithm that Weta claimed to have created that could make thousands of actors out of a few, each with thirty different motions and no computer repetition. That much impressed me.

  ‘I knew the budget Peter was proposing and was aware that our company’s financial structure could handle it. I was cognisant of my discussions with Michael Lynne about our need for sequels. I knew that, after conferring with Michael – and if, one way or another, when we’d talked with Miramax, we could deal with the numbers – we were going to make three films. But I didn’t say, “Aren’t there three books?” or whatever I’m supposed to have said. I did say, “Why are we talking about two films instead of three?” Because I didn’t know what Peter had in his head but I wanted to have three years of potential security and good business.’

  ‘Timing,’ says Ken Kamins, ‘is everything! All those things that you don’t know or can’t see when you walk in the door are a factor in how your meeting will go.’ What Peter and his associates didn’t know was that New Line had recently spent time and money – perhaps as much as $1.5million – researching a movie project based on Isaac Asimov’s celebrated sci-fi classic The Foundation Trilogy, only to have it fail to develop into the franchise they were hoping for. As a result, they cut their losses and let the option on Asimov’s books lapse. ‘At that point,’ says Ken, ‘in we walk!’

  ‘It was,’ says Marty Katz, ‘the most successful meeting I’ve ever been at – going in to sell two movies and ending up selling three!’

  ‘Suddenly,’ says Mark Ordesky, ‘everyone was getting excited: Peter is saying, “Yes, three films would be the best way to tell the story; the best way to be true to the spirit of Tolkien…’ and so on. And Bob was getting pretty excited because he sees what Peter was saying, artistically, but because he’s also seeing three video releases, three network television sales. It’s Art! It’s Commerce! It’s the perfect fusion of motivation!’

  Ken Kamins remembers Bob Shaye debating what the release pattern would be if it were it be three movies: ‘Would you do all three within two weeks of each other, so you basically sell series tickets, literally dominating a multiplex? Or do you go Summer–Christmas, Summer–Christmas, Summer–Christmas? Or would it be one movie a year for three years? Bob was really concerned that even though it would be three films you could not assume that everybody coming to see these movies knew these books. Nor could you assume that someone who shows up at the beginning of Fellowship is somebody you own all the way through to the end of The Return of the King. Each movie, therefore, needed to entertain in its own right and have a three-act structure with a beginning, middle and an end, so that if you went to the second movie never having seen the first movie and with no intention of seeing the third movie, it would be a satisfying movie-going experience on its own terms.’

  By the end of the meeting, it was clear that Bob Shaye – pending his discussions with Michael Lynne – was committed to a three-film version of The Lord of the Rings. He asked to retain the videotape in order to be able to screen it for Michael.

  We weren’t allowing anyone to have the tape, because all the studios were saying, ‘Just send a copy of the tape over…’ and Ken had been quite clear: ‘The tape doesn’t leave Peter and Fran’s possession; if you want to look at it, they bring it over and they take it with them when they leave. No one gets a copy of the tape.’ So Bob said, ‘We gotta keep this tape, I’ve got to show it to Michael…’ And, at that point, we decided that we weren’t going to say ‘No’!

  ‘I really believe,’ says Ken Kamins, ‘that Bob Shaye thought that he was in a more competitive situation than he truly was, because, after all this hypothetical discussion, Bob looked at me and said something along the lines of, “I don’t want to hear any bullshit; I don’t want to hear any talk about other companies and other meetings; we start negotiations tomorrow morning, nine o’clock. Let’s move this thing along.”’

  Peter and the others gathered up their display boards and their box of models and left.

  Mark Ordesky recalls: ‘As soon as we were on our own, Bob said, “Okay, go make the deal.” I was staggered. When Bob had said, ‘All right, I’
ve heard the pitch. I buy the pitch. Let’s go for it. Let’s make these films.’ I figured my job was done. And now he was telling me to make the deal…

  ‘Shaye has this amazing kind of “authorship credo”: if you bring in a deal, it’s yours, because it is self-policing: if you give someone something that they’ve advocated, then who’s going to be more disciplined and aggressive about managing it than the person who brought it in? Nevertheless, I’m thinking, “This is not my bailiwick. This is not something I know that much about…” Up until this point the only movies I had supervised from script to screen were a few straight-to-video titles and one or two low, low budget art movies; that was about it.

  ‘But Bob put this on me anyway. He said, “Jackson’s your friend and you’re the one who’s obsessed with Tolkien; so who else is going

  Our New Line production executive, Mark Ordesky – he was very much the glue that held the fragile relationships together and stopped them from imploding. He was the one guy we dealt with from New Line who really knew his Tolkien.

  to do it?” So I said, “All right, I’ll do it then…” and that’s how the process started – with my having a hell of a lot of enthusiasm but not a whole lot of knowledge!’