Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  It’s part of a philosophy that’s based on always trying to improve things. It encompasses all the characters and any aspect of the story and is to do with asking, ‘Is this the best idea? Can we do something better?’ It’s not really based on anything else. We come up with ideas all the time; write scenes as we’re shooting.

  We found ourselves in the fortunate – and, in the case of most film productions, rare – position of being able to do this; normally it’s so buttoned down and so tightly organised that if you suddenly said you wanted to shoot a new scene you’d be lengthening the shoot, but because we had three or four crews and second unit directors who quite often had free days, we were always able to absorb new ideas within our scheduled structure. This sometimes meant that Fran would direct a scene that we wanted to ‘squeeze in’. The key ‘Gollum talks to himself’ sequence from The Two Towers was conceived and shot this way.

  For Andrew Lesnie, Peter and Fran’s approach to the script is simply a reflection of the entire film-making process: ‘Making movies is an organic process. On any conventional film, the script undergoes changes and in actually filming a picture the project undergoes more

  Sir Ian McKellen learning lines that might possibly have been slid under his door the night before.

  changes, just as it will do in post-production. What happens is that the film develops a personality of its own: a personality affected by everything from the casting to the weather. Additionally, on any film today there are dozens of people coming aboard a production with their suggestions and demands. In the midst of that, the director has, somehow, to try and maintain a singular vision, to bring the project through to something close to how they saw it in their mind’s eye. I can definitely say Peter is a control freak in terms of pushing through his vision in spite of various obstructions. At the same time, being a smart director, he will capitalise on a happy accident, find a way of turning an obstacle into an improvement on the original vision.

  ‘For me, working with Peter as Director of Photography was about finding a way of making a contribution to Peter’s vision. During the shoot that involved a certain amount of sparring: he would throw up an idea or say, you know, we could do this or we could do that, and then I would think about it and if I could come up with some way to

  enhance that idea, I would toss that back at him. Sometimes he’d run things by me days or weeks ahead, other times when we were on set and filming the shot.’

  A number of sequences – often quite elaborate and now thought of as key sequences in the completed movies – were literally devised and developed on set. One of these was the wizard’s duel between Saruman and Gandalf.

  This sequence was one of the opportunities we had to indulge our own storytelling. Tolkien ends his description of Gandalf’s visit to Isengard with Saruman saying that his fellow wizard is to be imprisoned on the pinnacle of Orthanc without providing any details of what exactly happened next! The idea of Gandalf being Saruman’s prisoner was interesting and we wanted to create a scene demonstrating how the senior and more powerful of the two wizards succeeds in overpowering his lesser adversary. Essentially, we took something that Tolkien left off the page and developed it as part of the movie story.

  However, we were actually feeling under a bit of pressure over our so-called ‘wizards’ duel’ because, in one of the pre-production meetings with New Line, Bob Shaye had made a comment that we hadn’t quite expected. At the time, The Matrix had just been released and was the hot new thing in the cinema and Bob said that he hoped the battle between Gandalf and Saruman would be presented in as inventive, original and dynamic a way as the fights in The Matrix.

  That throwaway comment from a year earlier had stayed in the back of our minds, and the nearer we got to production, the more it began to generate a degree of stress. The difficulty was that, unlike The Matrix, we were dealing with two old guys who didn’t have any weapons other than their staffs!

  One of the things that bothered me about the idea of the confrontation was that it was essentially a magical fight and I really didn’t want to resort to those fantasy clichés of the wizards’ staffs emitting lightning bolts or having flashes or sparks and smoke coming out of their fingertips! Even though there would obviously be a magical quality to the fight, I essentially wanted to do it ‘dry’, rather than relying on pyrotechnics.

  Because I didn’t really know what could be achieved, I left the ‘choreography’ to the stunt team and it was, more or less, made up as we went along. They came up with ideas for two old guys hurling each other around the room and smashing into the architecture, then they would try them out and we’d see what worked.

  For first assistant director Carolynne Cunningham, working with Peter is, above all, about being adaptable: ‘I’m so used to working with Peter – and everybody who works around him now knows him so well – that we’re generally prepared for anything to happen. He might turn up in the morning and we’ll be talking about what we’re doing that day and he will say, “I need forty Gondorian soldiers for that scene…” and I’ll look at the call-sheet and see that we’ve only allowed for ten! I’ll just say, “Oh, really…Okay…” and get on the phone. No one panics. There’s forty suits of Gondorian armour hanging out the back and the extras casting people ring up thirty people and in they come and off they go.

  ‘If, on the other hand, I say to him, “Look, Pete, I’m sorry, we just can’t do that,” he’ll say, “Oh, okay…We’ll make it work another way.” Forty Gondorians would be better, but if there’s only ten he’ll use the ten in an imaginative way. That’s what I love about him: he can think in so many different ways, and will always make things work for him.’

  There’s always a way around any difficulty. When we filmed the retreat into the Hornburg, we really didn’t have sufficient extras, so we filmed those that we had as charging Uruk-hai and then they went off and changed costumes and we filmed them again as fleeing Rohan soldiers! There was another day where we had people playing Ringwraiths in one scene and, later in the day, playing Elves. A Wraith in the morning, an Elf in the afternoon – typical day for an extra on The Lord of the Rings!

  ‘Peter knows what he wants,’ says second unit director of photography Richard Bluck, ‘but will always listen to ideas. In the end, you trust to the knowledge that he’ll know when you’ve got it right – and that he will keep on till you do!’

  He has been described as ‘an ideas sponge’ and miniatures unit director of photography Chuck Schuman, sums it in the following analogy: ‘Peter doesn’t feel as if you are painting on his canvas – he welcomes and encourages it!’

  ‘Peter is extremely demanding,’ says Alex Funke, visual effects director of photography. ‘He can keep in his head just about everything he’s said or seen and remember what he told you a year ago in incredible detail. He is a perfectionist with a fantastic vision and knows exactly what he wants to see on the screen, but he also absolutely understands the nature of compromise in film-making. A lot of directors say, “I’m a perfectionist, that’s what I want – keep going!” Peter will say, “I see what the problem is here, we’ll fix it another way…” He knows where he’s going, but also realistic about how to get there. He has made so much of this stuff himself – hands-on – that he knows where you can bend the rules, and how to look for solutions.’

  So what makes people do what they do for Peter? ‘He’s immensely inspirational,’ says Ken Kamins. ‘He is fond of talking about the Kiwi way, which is, “We have no choice but to work ten times harder in order to show that we are capable of producing great results.” That has lived and breathed within Peter as long as I’ve known him.’

  Peter also had to cope with a great many political situations that were taking place off set and behind the scenes. Inevitably, once the first flush of marriage had worn off, New Line looked at the project they had picked up without the benefit of rose-tinted spectacles…

  Peter has described the story of how he came to make The Lord of the Rings as being
, in part, a political story; and the ups and downs and ins and outs of Hollywood politics did not cease from the moment that New Line came on board the project, particularly since the budget – posited on those ‘intuitive leaps based on nothing’ – inevitably began to rise. Four months into filming, Shoot Day #67 Friday 4 February 2000, came a day that is forever wedded in Peter’s mind to a memorably dramatic shot in The Fellowship of the Ring. Taking the envelope from Frodo containing the Ring, Gandalf throws it into the fire at Bag End.

  I was shooting the shot with a camera behind the fire; Gandalf and Frodo were there, leaning over with the tongs. I’d lined up the lens and then had to go and take a telephone call. Bob and Michael were calling from the States and they really laid into me on the phone about the latest budget increase, yelling at me: ‘This is terrible…You’re betraying us…What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ They had every right to feel that way. Everyone was under different pressures – theirs as potent as ours. There was nothing that could really be done. Nobody, in the history of cinema, had attempted to do what we were doing. They calmed down – we just had to get the movies made. Looking back on it, I was able to make the films I thought we needed to make – which was obviously a wonderful – and unusual – freedom!

  But the problem did not go away. Three months later, Mark Ordesky was on the case, telling Peter that the number of effects shots was now increasing beyond an acceptable tolerance level.

  It was a conversation that sent me into a tailspin towards depression. He said, ‘We have to cut back on shots and obviously you’re able to select exactly what shots you want to cut and how you want to do that, but I’ve gone through the script and looked at everything and the Watcher in the Water sequence outside the gate to the Mines of Moria…We haven’t started work on the monster yet, so if we cut that out it would save us a bit of shooting time and it would save us having to build and animate the creature…’ So I said, ‘Yeah? And don’t you think that would disappoint the fans? Isn’t the Watcher important because he ultimately causes the landslide that traps the Fellowship inside the mines?’ By the time I got off the call I was in a pretty bad way, because I guess I just don’t respond very well to that sort of thing, having somebody telling me what to do – even if it was done in the politest possible way. Of course, from that day on, I was determined that the Watcher wasn’t going to get chopped out!

  As he so often does, Peter found a way around the problem, striking a deal with the studio that he could shoot the Watcher on the understanding that it didn’t take up any of Peter’s directing-time. The solution was that second unit director Guy Norris directed the Watcher scenes while Peter ploughed on with other sequences in order to keep to the schedule and, somehow, the monster stayed in the picture!

  There were initial concerns not simply about the budget being expended on special effects, but about whether the effects would be good enough. Despite Bob Shaye’s comments on how impressed he had been by the tests he had seen of the Massive software, and an appreciation of the fact that Weta promised to be considerably cheaper than ILM, there was a clear level anxiety as to whether the key CG figures would be able to match the standards set by the American special effects studios.

  Bob Shaye told me that he considered Gollum to be way beyond Weta’s capabilities. So I instigated Gollum development a long time before we needed him. Weta started doing tests so that we could prove ourselves. The shot we tested was the long crane shot from The Two Towers, when Gollum sneaks out and takes the lembas bread and throws it over the ledge.

  I screened the shot for Bob and he agreed that it was fine, although, looking at it today, it’s embarrassing to realise just how crude it seems and that it’s really nothing like the finished Gollum. Still, it was the first ever attempt to create what we all knew was going to be a key CG figure and it at least proved that we were able to deliver.

  Nevertheless, for quite a time, there existed a mood of mutual mistrust that was simply waiting for a situation to trigger a clash. Another such explosive moment came during the unending and unrelentingly exhausting night-shoot for the Battle of Helm’s Deep.

  I was shooting at Helm’s Deep. I remember it was a shot of a soldier that didn’t end up in the movie. The shots stick in my mind because they were linked to these horrible moments. Weta had had another budget increase. New Line was not acknowledging that the primary reason the budget was going up was because the film was now being enhanced – we were doing more and more spectacular things – but New Line was operating on the basis that whilst the budget was going up, they hadn’t seen any effects yet.

  It was something like a $15million increase that really drove them over the edge. There were accusations and recriminations and, for a while, legal threats were in the air…

  Because there was no cell-phone reception in the quarry where we’d built the Helm’s Deep set, Barrie Osborne had been ordered to get me

  On most days during the shoot Alan Lee would drop by with his conceptual art for future scenes. It never failed to lift my spirits and get me excited about the films we were making.

  on a satellite phone. I turned round and saw Barrie standing there with a huge contraption with a great, long aerial, saying that Michael Lynne wanted to talk to me. I said in a loud enough voice for Michael (or his assistant) to hear, ‘If Michael Lynne wants to sue me, tell him to call my lawyer! Tell him I’m trying to shoot his f****** film!’

  ‘New Line had done this extraordinary thing,’ says Ken Kamins. ‘They had put up a huge amount of money to make these movies and because they had so much money at stake, I think they felt it was their duty and responsibility to be concerned and to make sure they were protecting their investment on behalf of themselves and their international buyers. That could have been interpreted by Peter, at times, as a lack of confidence in his ability to achieve them.’

  Following the Helm’s Deep telephone spat, the lawyers talked and that particular situation was diffused. But these run-ins were made all the more difficult and stressful by the fact that the parties involved were separated by several thousand miles and working at a different time on the world clock. There was also, perhaps, a tendency to underestimate the Jackson temperament.

  ‘He’s tough, brave and strong-willed,’ observes Philippa Boyens, ‘and the thing about Peter that anybody working with him had better know and understand is that he will walk away. He doesn’t bluff. If he sticks himself out there and says, ‘Listen, this is going to happen unless that happens…’ then it will happen! You don’t play cards with Peter.’

  There really were no villains…It wasn’t a situation where ‘New Line are bastards!’ The budget was going up and they hadn’t seen any footage. I have some horrific memories from that year of principal photography, but don’t hold resentment towards the studio at all. Michael Lynne was trying to do his job and I was trying to do mine, wanting to concentrate on finishing the film.

  Maybe New Line seriously believed we were trying to mislead them. Perhaps there was a suspicion that it might have been in my best interests for the budget to go higher and higher since I owned the company creating those effects…but the reality is that Weta Digital earned no profit at all. Every cent went up on screen.

  In the end, I dealt with the pressure by thinking that my No.1 responsibility was to make the best films I could. Only by doing that could New Line’s risk be protected. I would battle for what I felt was best for the film, but it was also protecting their investment as well. I’m sure they get this argument from film-makers all the time. I don’t know how these studio executives do it! It would drive me nuts dealing with film-makers like me!

  New Line, like Miramax before them, may well have felt that when Peter got them to commit to The Lord of the Rings, he didn’t tell them about the entire vision he had for the project and that it was only when they were on board that he started to reveal the full reality of that vision. The truth is simpler – or, depending on how you look at it, more complex – in that Peter�
�s vision for any project is constantly developing and expanding. His knack has been to hitch others to that vision and keep them there when it flies into orbit.

  ‘Peter’s got a great ability to get everyone really locked in,’ notes Jamie Selkirk. ‘He brings people into the fold and then starts branching out and getting broader so that people come in with certain ideas and end up with something three times bigger than what was originally planned but, by then, they are suckered in…On Rings, the number of special-effects got bigger and bigger and people began to realise that one line in the script was now a whole page – not 100 horses, but 200 horses; not a hundred orcs, but a thousand…’

  The concerns over the number and complexity of those special effects shots had surfaced very early on – by the second week of shooting – in particular over Peter’s planned shot following the moth as it flutters up over the walls of ruined Isengard and on up the height of Orthanc to be caught by Gandalf.

  The studio seemed to think that my moth-shot was going to be way too hard and far too expensive, and in order to try and keep them and me happy and reduce costs, someone suggested that we just pick up the shot as the moth flew past the top of Orthanc and Gandalf grabs it. I thought, ‘But that’s not what’s cool about that shot; and it’s not how I’m going to do it.’ I guess that was when I began to realise just how much pressure I was going to be under – and it was still early days…

  It was a very difficult situation to deal with: there were more effects shots than were ever planned and they were more complicated. There is no person to blame…If anything, I am to blame because, when I am under pressure, I refuse to be reined in and get very defensive of the film. The simple truth is that we never had a locked script, and therefore never could arrive at a locked budget. Script and budget have to always reflect each other. One can’t keep changing and the other be locked.