Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  When we started out on Rings, a lot of people had a perception that this was going to turn out to be a bit of a Mickey Mouse project. For example, we had originally hired a very experienced Englishman as chief lighting technician, or ‘gaffer’, right-hand man to director of photography Andrew Lesnie. Despite a string of credits on big films, he was only with us for two weeks prior to filming and then quit – we didn’t seem to live up to his high standards.

  Suddenly, we were frantically trying to find a new gaffer. The only one we could locate at a moment’s notice was Brian Bansgrove, a New Zealander who’d lived in Australia most of his life and worked on a slew of interesting Aussie pictures including Mad Dog Morgan, My Brilliant Career, Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously and the Crocodile Dundee movies.

  The only trouble was that Brian had something of a reputation as a roistering, hard drinker. We were also told that age had caught up with him somewhat – he was in his late fifties – and that he was far from being the fittest guy in the world. But we had a disastrous situation on our hands and didn’t have much choice; so, literally within days of the start of the film, Brian showed up.

  The lighting department was in a state of disorganisation, but this loud, tough-talking, no-nonsense – but very funny – character stepped into the midst of the chaos and, with quite a lot of sergeant-major-type swearing, had the crew whipped into shape in pretty much no time!

  I was on the Weathertop set rehearsing when Brian arrived; I shook his hand and thanked him for coming. He’d been given a bit of a tour and I remember him saying: ‘Well, this job’s going to sort the men from the boys – and I intend to finish a man!’ Brian’s comment spread and immediately became a mantra for the entire crew. We all intended to ‘finish like men’ – even the girls!

  Viggo with our ace focus puller, Colin Deane. With a shoot spanning nearly four years, the cast and crew bonded in a way that we will probably never experience again.

  And so he did, seeing the crew through principal photography and endearing himself to everyone, despite his gruff manner. In spite of predictions that Brian was past his prime and wouldn’t stay the course, he worked tirelessly and, say those who grew to know and love him, came off the project like an invigorated young man.

  He was a real rough diamond – as rough as guts – but he was also a very sweet person and as funny as hell! He never observed the usual protocols in dealing with actors and wasn’t very interested in the names of the various characters. I remember we were on Mount Victoria filming the scene where Sam is cooking and Frodo is sitting, smoking, in the crook of a tree. Brain was bawling out orders at the guys setting the lights on Frodo: ‘Right!’ he bellowed, ‘I reckon you’d better poke another light at the little bloke in the tree!’

  Brian died at the end of 2001, the day before going to see Fellowship and was much missed during the pick-ups over the next two years. Fran’s favourite Bansgrove line was: ‘We’ll use available light for this scene…’ Beat. ‘Every ****ing available light!!’

  By the end of the second week, I’d shot parts of the scenes at Weathertop and Bree all of which were fine but not really great. I was concerned that I really hadn’t got into my stride. Then on Friday the 22 October we took a two-hour drive to a lakeside location and shot the scenes with the hobbits racing to the Bucklebury Ferry and, for the first time, I really felt I had go the hang of what I was doing! I still remember the enormous sense of relief…after four years away from a set, I had captured the spirit of what these movies needed to be.

  The following week Viggo arrived and was pitched straight into costume fittings, make-up tests and sword training.

  The first thing we filmed with Viggo was a low-angle shot after he has finished fighting the Ringwraiths and comes running over to tend to the wounded Frodo. The next day, we moved on to film the fight and Viggo was superb, battling with the Ringwraiths, setting them on fire. You’d never have believed he’d only been sword-training for a couple of days. I remember thinking, ‘This is one cool guy!’ Looking back on it now, Viggo’s last-minute addition to the Lord of the Rings team was a turning point. It feels like fate steered us there, since he has come to embody the heart, soul and spirit of the production. He was the perfect Aragorn, and although the path was fraught with anxiety and emotion, he eventually walked onto our set – and that was a great day for us.

  We’d been told to send over a 35mm print of that day’s shoot to New Line, because they wanted to see Viggo on film. Maybe they weren’t 100 per cent sure about him, because normally they viewed the ‘dailies’ (the footage we had shot the day before) on videotape, rather than 35mm film footage; or maybe, having lost one Aragorn, they felt the need to be doubly sure about his replacement. Anyway, when they saw him fighting with all those burning Ringwraiths, they thought he was great and were really happy. By then, of course, he was already under contract, so I don’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t liked him!

  So much had happened; it was only Shoot Day #12; there were still 262 more days to go.

  9

  RING-MASTER

  This book began with a question posed by Peter Jackson: ‘How on earth did this guy ever come to be making The Lord of the Rings?’

  Hopefully, the preceding pages have provided something of an answer to that question. Essentially, it has been the story of a film-maker’s journey from his origins and youthful passion for film through to the point at which he began work on the biggest, most ambitious movie project in the history of cinema.

  ‘Nothing ever turns out the way you think,’ reflects Mark Ordesky. ‘Getting New Line to take on The Lord of the Rings was challenging, but it was nowhere near as hard to get Bob Shaye to buy the idea of making these films as it was to actually make them!’

  That is an accurate assessment and much of what followed over the next four years has already been recounted by various voices in sundry forms. It has been reported in the pages of various ‘Making of’ books as well several dozen issues of The Lord of the Rings Official Fan Club Magazine, crammed with in-depth articles on every facet of the film-making from armoury and jewellery to prosthetic make-up and digital computing techniques.

  Peter himself and many of those most intimately involved in the films have been seen reflecting on and reminiscing about their achievement in several hours of DVD ‘extras’ (or ‘appendices’) that accompany the theatrical and extended versions of the trilogy.

  There have been, in addition, legions of articles in national and international newspapers and periodicals from film journals to celebrity magazines as well as publications catering to every conceivable specialist interest, from film effects, music and screenwriting to art and design, fantasy gaming and even fashion and philately.

  Aspects of the story have also been ceaselessly catalogued and commented on by the internet spies and scribes on TheOneRing.net and numerous other websites.

  All in all, The Lord of the Rings became a breathtaking cinematic coup staggeringly realised and exhaustively – and often exhaustingly – chronicled!

  During more than thirty hours of conversation, Peter Jackson reviewed the daily call-sheets that are a record of what was shot where, when and with whom during the 274 days of principal photography on The Lord of the Rings.

  It is a saga filled with elation and the exhaustion: the moments of creating inspired movie-making and the desperate frustrations when things went awry; the endless struggling with a gruelling schedule that was repeatedly hampered by mishaps, accidents, crises and disasters – actual, near and averted.

  Obviously, the daily call-sheets for a film are not intended as a historical record; rather they are an essential means of communicating vital information to everyone involved on the project: names of personnel and cell-phone contacts; useful addresses, telephone- and fax-numbers, as well as information on emergency services; details of where filming is to take place (together with maps if locations are involved); times when everyone is required – or ‘called’ – on set
; a list of all the actors, principal characters, doubles and extras, including details of their transportation arrangements; and a breakdown of every scene to be filmed that day, the number of shots involved and estimated timings, which are usually – and perhaps surprisingly – only seconds long.

  Looking back at these call-sheets, remembering all the effort, frequent agony and occasional despair that they represent, it’s not too hard to think to yourself: ‘Thank God we don’t have to wind the clock back and start all over again!’

  To tell that story day by day – sometimes hour by hour – would take a book as long or longer than this one. But in chronicling even a fraction of the highlights and the low-spots, the reader will get a feel for the extremes of experience, physical and emotional, that director, cast and crew went through over the fifteen months of intensely concentrated creativity that resulted in The Lord of the Rings.

  There are thousands of memories connected with all those months of filming. There are the trivial things like recalling the day we filmed Frodo, Sam and Gollum travelling through a pine forest with the crew being required to wear hardhats due to the hazard of falling pinecones – something that alarmed the safety-conscious Sean Astin who obviously couldn’t wear a hardhat! But there were moments when one disaster followed another, like the final days before our first break at Christmas 1999 when, having crushed the schedule for filming the scene at the Grey Havens into fewer days than we had intended, we got fabulous material with the hobbits acting their hearts out – real tears, not fake ones – and creating a mood that was intensely emotional, only

  We originally shot for 279 days, and no two were ever the same. After shooting a lot of drama, I’d always relish a day or two with Orc armies!

  to find that, due to a technical complication with one of the cameras, all the shots were out of focus. The set was about to be demolished, the cast were only hours away from flying home for the holiday and we had to film the sequence over again from scratch…

  Hardly any movie is ever filmed chronologically, but in the case of Rings the shoot often leapt back and forth across a story that, in the original book, spans ten months of accelerating intensity with prefiguring events dating back thousands of years. This led to extraordinary juxtapositions such as shooting the Battle of the Last Alliance for the prologue only a few hundred yards away from where Frodo and Sam were beginning their final ascent of Mount Doom; or moving from scenes in Hobbiton before Frodo sets out on his quest and, on the same shoot day, filming the final shot in the film as Sam returns home from the Grey Havens.

  Inevitably in all accounts of the Rings shoot, various crises have loomed largest – particularly those caused by the forces of nature: the acts of God that repeatedly impacted on the schedule. There were through-the-night drives with storms closing in, petrol tanks running on empty and no town or villages in sight; and there were landslides that famously left Sean Bean and Orlando Bloom marooned miles from anywhere for days culminating with a white-knuckle helicopter rescue!

  Queenstown, on the South Island, was hit by floods, unprecedented in a hundred years or more of local history, which apart from reducing the town to a state of civil emergency also left a Rings construction crew cut off at a remote location and swept away an entire set – effectively ensuring that an elaborately planned Orc attack on the Fellowship as they navigated the Sarn Gebir rapids on the River Anduin was washed right out of the film.

  We had all kinds of action planned with boats flipping over and Sam ending up in the water and Gimli struggling to keep his and Legolas’ boat afloat as it bucks and tosses, while the Elf – standing with a foot on each of the gunwales – would be firing arrows at the attackers. It was going to be pretty cool stuff…

  The sets were now gone and would have had to have been rebuilt, and the river was still a raging a torrent and too dangerous to film on. So, that was the end of the Sarn Gebir ambush: a sequence that only exists in storyboards and photographs of the set before it disappeared down the river!

  Fran reminded me about the Star Wars set that blew away in a sand-storm in Tunisia and we tried to see it as a good omen. Whether or not the film would have been significantly improved by it, who knows? It certainly wasn’t missed.

  One of the greatest fears to assail any director is that of falling behind schedule: seeing the planned number of shots mounting up and the available days for shooting trickling away and knowing that there could come a point where your movie runs off the track. It was, for Peter, a recurrent nightmare as they battled with rain, gales and several unseasonable snowfalls.

  Drawing on experience borne out of ‘making do’ and ‘fixing things’ during his early years of film-making, Peter invariably soldiered on, doing his best to adapt to situations even as they changed. The crew was on location at Bog Pine Paddock near Te Anau, about a three-hour drive from Queenstown, where they were to be shooting Strider and the hobbits crossing the Midgewater Marshes with Pippin talking about ‘second breakfasts’.

  It started raining, but I thought, ‘We can’t stop because of rain and, anyway, if they’re journeying from Bree towards Weathertop and it’s raining, well that will help give it a nice earthy feel!’

  Then the raindrops begin getting heavier and thicker and, suddenly, the biggest snowflakes in the world are coming down. So now I think, ‘In the book, Tolkien never mentions anything about snow during this part of the journey, but I suppose it could have been snowing…Okay, we’ll shoot in the snow!’ So, we keep filming and get one master shot done, by which time the place is covered in snow, the actors are getting cold and everyone was pretty fed up, except for Viggo who thought it was fantastic!

  In fact, even when the police advised us to evacuate the site and we all went back to our hotel, Viggo was so upset because we hadn’t finished the scene that he refused to change out of his costume in the

  There was unseasonable snow wherever we went, including Edoras, which had a surprise fall that we could not work into the script of the film – I don’t think it snows in Rohan.

  hope that, at some point, the danger would pass and we’d be able to get back out there and complete the scene in the snow. I remember him walking around the hotel in his Aragorn wig and full costume and – much to the bemusement of a party of Japanese tourists – still carrying his sword!

  On another occasion, filming on Mount Ruapehu, filming looked as if it was going to have to stop when mist began rolling in.

  Before long we were in a pea-souper and you couldn’t see a thing. Rather than abandon the day’s shoot, I knew that I wanted some montage shots of Frodo and Sam wandering around lost in the Emyn Muil, so I got Andrew to discard the tripod, put the camera on his shoulder, and told everyone to stay where they were as they’d slow us down – I didn’t want to be dragging fifty people around with me! Sean and Elijah ran up the hill with me and we found interesting places to have Sam and Frodo looking as if they were lost. The trouble was, we needed a wide shot, but for the rest of the shoot the weather was sunny and fine! We ended up waiting for more fog, which never came, tried shooting it with a smoke machine and finally ended up having to add CG fog in post-production!

  Adaptability became the touchstone for survival. When the Queenstown floods made all other shooting impossible, the search was on for a space in which to shoot some interior scenes. The options were few and narrowed down to a squash court in the Coronet Plaza Hotel. The size of the squash court dictated what could be built; while what could be shot was dictated by which actors were available – so whilst eight members of the Fellowship were on site, Gandalf was still being Magneto on X-Men.

  The only sequences in the entire trilogy that we thought we might manage to film were those in The Return of the King where Sam and Frodo have their argument on the Cirith Ungol stairs that eventually lead up to Shelob’s Lair.

  A floor was laid over the squash court to protect it and the set was constructed…

  Elijah Wood and Sean Astin were appalled! They had only been workin
g on this film for four weeks and here we were already talking about moving on to these major dramatic scenes taking place well on into the development of the characters of Frodo and Sam. I understood how they felt. I was appalled – shooting climactic scenes from The Return of the King was not where my head was at!

  We hadn’t filmed a single shot of Sam and Frodo from The Two Towers, let alone The Return of the King and yet we were suddenly having to figure out what they would look like in terms of make-up and costume at this stage of their journey: the Wardrobe department were asking, ‘Just how worn and ripped are their clothes? How dirty are they?’

  We needed two days to shoot the scene: on one day we would shoot with the camera on Frodo and, the next day, with the camera facing in the opposite direction towards Sam. So, I said to the boys, ‘Well, guys, who wants to go first?’

  What an impossible decision for them to have to make! Both actors know the options. The one who is not on camera is going to have the easier time of it, because the camera operator will simply be shooting over his shoulder. The actor being filmed, however, has really got to be ‘up’ – in character, giving it everything he’s got, 100 per cent – because the camera will be on him for the entire scene: not just filming him saying his own lines but also catching every reaction he makes to what the other character is saying.

  In the end, they flipped a coin and Sean won – or maybe lost! We shot the entire scene looking at Sam: from the moment when Sam wakes up after Gollum has sprinkled the lembas crumbs over him, through to his confused and tearful reaction to Frodo dismissing him.