Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey

by Brian Sibley

  The biggest anxiety, it now seemed, was realising the hype and meeting everyone’s expectations in seven months’ time.

  The party the following night at the hilltop Château Castellaras was a justifiable cause for celebration presented with flair and élan. The inspired concept of taking Middle-earth to the south of France was the work of Dan Hennah and his wife, Chris, and triumphed over the difficulties of transcontinental transportation and the French workforces!

  Gondorian banners and pennants fluttered in the courtyard of the château and the hall was decked out with horse-head beam-ends, tapestries, braziers and Théoden’s throne from the Golden Hall at Edoras; Galadriel’s swan boat shimmered on the swimming pool, the Doors of Durin revealed and concealed their Elvish inscription and a Stone-troll loomed out of the trees.

  The three hundred guests were served food by hobbit-footed extras from gaily coloured tents on a re-creation of Hobbiton’s Party Field, and had a chance to be reduced to the size of Merry and Pippin in order to get their drinks from a giant of a barman in a replica of the large-scale set from The Prancing Pony before visiting the smallscale set for Bag End where, like Gandalf, they banged their heads on beams, and negotiated Hobbit-sized doorways and protruding tree roots.

  The cast were there in force and demonstrating for the first of many times what an indefatigable team of advocates they were for the film and its director. John Rhys-Davies told the world that The Lord of the Rings was going to be bigger than Star Wars, Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee traded wizard-lore and the four Hobbit actors ran around like kids let out to play.

  ‘It was a reunion,’ says Elijah Wood. ‘For us, it was like The Lord of the Rings vacation! It was quite bizarre to have invaded France like we did, with our set pieces and memorabilia, but it was an incredible experience for everyone involved with the film because the reception from those who’d seen the footage was so exciting. It felt like the party was our own celebration of how far we’d come and what we’d accomplished.’

  Among the guests was Harvey Weinstein…

  I hold no bitterness towards Harvey because, in his heart of hearts, he wanted to do it but he couldn’t…The proposal for a chopped-down, one-film version that he had concocted was really the action of somebody who was desperately trying to justify the $15million that he’d spent to that date and trying to make a film out of it. I actually believe that if he’d been able to get the money then Harvey would have made The Lord of the Rings.

  At the party, I gave Harvey a hug and he was very gracious and said that we had ended up at the right place. He was right, however unworkable the relationship may have looked at times…

  ‘Peter and Fran’ and New Line are very strange bedfellows. When you think of the cultural differences, it was a very odd thing to have happened: New Line with its American sensibilities and Fran and I with our more English, New Zealand sensibilities making a movie based on a cult British classic in a country half a world away from Hollywood. But somehow it happened.

  I was with Bob Shaye when Harvey came over and said to him, ‘You guys have done the films exactly as they should be done!’ It was a cool thing for Harvey to do.

  Indeed, Variety quoted the Miramax chief as saying, ‘I think Mark Ordesky and the whole New Line team deserve to be applauded. They were willing to bet their house…’

  For Mark it was the justification of his wild promise upon joining New Line that he would make a Peter Jackson movie, and a testament to his work on the project.

  ‘Mark was our mentor and guiding light,’ says Fran, adding with a laugh, ‘and I think it’s either a reward or a punishment for his having spent most of his teenage years closeted in his bedroom reading Tolkien!’

  Mark Ordesky and me with our agent, Ken Kamins, at the Oscars. It was Ken’s phone call to Harvey Weinstein back in November 1995 that had started us on the road to the 2004 Academy Awards.

  A passionate Tolkien fan, Mark was very protective of the property, understanding what these films should and shouldn’t be. Whenever we’ve been asked whether American audiences would understand certain things, Mark’s always been the sounding board. He has strong creative instincts, was always very respectful of our process – apologising if ever he felt he was getting in too deep – and terribly anxious to make sure we didn’t feel pressurised.

  Quite simply, our relationship with New Line would not have stayed the distance if it hadn’t been for Mark’s presence.

  Michael Lynne describes Mark as being an ‘emissary and go-between’; Bob Shaye calls him ‘a firewall’! Cannes was a moment of personal triumph, though there were still several years of ‘firewalling’ ahead, beginning with the complex post-production process…

  Over the next few months, many tasks had to be achieved: producing a great many sophisticated effects shots; supervising the colour-grading of the film in order to create or enhance the mood of a scene; re-recording the actors’ vocal tracks; recording the score that would sometimes drive, sometimes under-pin the drama and the emotion; devising sound effects to help generate a series of vibrant soundscapes, such as the snarl of a Warg, the grunt of a troll or the menacing sound of an approaching Balrog. And, before any of those things could be done, the editing of what would eventually become the 178 minutes of The Fellowship of the Ring.

  Fran and I were in the position of having the final cut on the film and we were a bit too strong-willed to allow the studio to dictate what should be in the movie and what shouldn’t be there – we felt we knew the movie and the characters better than the studio did. You got feedback from all sorts of people, from the producer, the editorial team and from other crewmembers, and you listened to it, filtering out the good ideas – but, ultimately, you had to make your own decisions.

  The studio’s attitude was that they would advocate cuts and explain it through Mark, and we would either agree or disagree. Mark would gauge the temperature with Fran and I and explain our decisions to the studio and, when necessary, fight those battles on our behalf, which took any direct conflict out of the situation. New Line always let us have final say, but you have to be fair-minded and use your instincts; it’s easy to be defensive and stubborn. When the studio had a good note, I’d want us to be smart enough to recognise it – not get lost in some stubborn-headed nonsense.

  ‘If Peter digs his heels in,’ comments Marty Walsh, ‘you need a lot of facts and logic to get him to un-dig them!’

  ‘Sometimes, Peter seems to like to push things to the very brink,’ says Barrie Osborne, ‘but I’ve also observed him pushing things to the brink and then pulling back and compromising when he knew he had to, when it was absolutely clear.’

  Philippa Boyens observes, ‘Yes, Peter is incredibly wilful! He can be immovable and then suddenly he’ll surprise you and change his mind. So, what everybody wants to know is how do you change his mind? You leave him alone. You cannot rush him. He either comes to agree with you, either understands what you’re saying, sees it and embraces it – or else he doesn’t. Peter may change his mind. You don’t ever change Peter’s mind.’

  For Peter, the editing process is, like the writing, organic.

  You experiment; things come and go – you look at things again – you change your mind – sometimes you go back to what you tried the first time – it continually transforms and develops.

  In the process, many shots – even entire scenes and sequences – would be left on the cutting-room floor, sometimes because the pace of the storytelling now required a different rhythm or possibly because the footage had subsequently been overtaken by later changes in structure, script or characterisation. This happened with Arwen’s presence at Helm’s Deep and an elaborate episode set in the Glittering Caves, in which Éowyn delivers a child born to Morwen, the mother of the two refugee children who carry the news of the Uruk-hai attack on Rohan to Edoras.

  Shortly after the birth of Morwen’s baby, the Uruks invade the caves, marauding and killing, while Éowyn – swiftly changing role from midwife to
swordswoman – singlehandedly fights off the enemy with much slaughtering. As one of the Uruk-hai is about to seize, and presumably eat, the newborn child, Éowyn wields her sword and deftly decapitates the assailant!

  It was what Peter describes as ‘a hangover from us thinking that The Two Towers was the weakest story in the trilogy and attempting to compensate for the lack of any heroic deaths!’

  There was the love triangle between Arwen, Aragorn and Éowyn; and, at one point, we were to have had Arwen rescuing Morwen’s children from an attack by a pack of Wargs during their journey to Edoras as well as having Éowyn saving babies and chopping the heads of Uruks in the Glittering Caves. We didn’t use any of this as we realised that it was cheap and cheesy: Hollywood spewing itself over Tolkien’s book, via us!

  There was another of what Peter now calls their ‘often misguided Hollywood moments’ that originally provided an action-packed conclusion to The Fellowship of the Ring. The sequence had Frodo and Sam paddling down the River Anduin in the Elven boat when an Uruk bursts up from under the water, lurches into the boat, grabbing at Frodo, who vainly tries to defend himself with the paddle. Seeing the Ring on the chain around Frodo’s neck, the Uruk seizes it and drags the struggling Frodo overboard and down to the bottom of the riverbed. Following a terrific underwater struggle, Frodo manages to kick himself free, is helped back into the boat by Sam and the boat is carried away by the Great River towards the second film!

  It was almost as if the Ring itself was trying to kill Frodo by literally drawing the Servants of the Enemy to him and, in this attack, pulling him into the water and dragging him under. This was the ending that we filmed during 2000 and had every intention of using until we re-thought the material and decided that it was another misguided Holly-wood moment. We then wrote the present ending to the film, which more closely follows the book, and shot that version while filming our pick-ups the following year.

  On all three of the movies, there were a number of things that we significantly changed during the filming of the pick-ups, which completely justified the time, money and effort that went into those four to six weeks’ work. We were able to focus on elements of the story – or aspects of the way in which we had told it – that, in editing, we had come to realise were either missing or needed explaining, enhancing – or totally re-shooting.

  Perhaps the best example of the way in which we revisited scenes and entirely changed their dynamic is the climactic struggle between Gollum and Frodo at the Crack of Doom.

  When we originally shot the scene, Gollum bit off Frodo’s finger and Frodo pushed Gollum off the ledge into the fires below. It was straight-out murder, but at the time we were okay with it because we felt everyone wanted Frodo to kill Gollum. But, of course, it was very un-Tolkien, because it flew in the face of everything that he wanted his heroes to be. It was three years before we were able to rectify that. Eventually, during the 2003 pick-ups, we re-shot it and did it two ways: one exactly as in the book with Gollum dancing about in glee and falling off himself, which within the dramatic context of a film, seemed like a major disappointment, and as it is now presented with Frodo going for Gollum – not to push him over the cliff but to get back the Ring.

  Even with the re-shoots facilitated by the pick-ups, certain things were beyond that kind of fixing and had to be dealt with by Weta’s computer magicians, such as the Rohan warriors’ mounted charge from the Hornburg in which Arwen’s riding double was clearly visible in the midst of the company and had to be digitally ‘replaced’. There was also the elaborate set-up using a crane shot to show the Elven regiment marching into Helm’s Deep where – when the shot was shown on a large screen – it was noticed that one of the archers had accidentally kicked up one of the bows from the otherwise ordered ranks of Elves and weapons.

  Eventually, the day came on The Fellowship of the Ring – as it would later do on The Two Towers and The Return of the King – when the cut was complete, when the film was locked down and finished.

  At some point there’s some instinct that says, ‘You know what? The film’s done! There ain’t no more work to be done on this!’ You keep on going until that moment in time when you get that gut feeling and you know that the movie has now found its shape and it’s time to leave it alone. Only then does everyone breathe a sigh of relief.

  Across the months, the frenzy of anticipation built and built: New Zealand’s newspapers carried almost daily reports; the world’s press weren’t far behind; every film and entertainment magazine ran Rings features, the more ambitious carried special supplements, while the totally crazed declared their periodical a ‘Special Issue’. Tolkien’s publishers launched an effective sales campaign suggesting those intrigued by the coming film might like to ‘Read it before you see it’, and the BBC released its original radio dramatisation, starring Ian Holm, on a similar aural pretext. Ralph Bakshi’s animated version emerged from the shadows onto DVD with an accompanying ‘Making of…’ book offering a rogue alternative to New Line’s raft of official tie-in books. There was, quite clearly, no excuse for anyone, firstly, not to

  The actors playing the Fellowship had all got special tattoos, designed by Alan Lee to represent the Elvish number nine symbol. On the day of the New Zealand premiere of the first film, they propelled Richard Taylor (shown here), Barrie Osborne and myself into the local tattoo parlour and branded us with an Elvish ten. Actually, it was pretty cool.

  know that a potentially astonishing movie project was being made, and secondly, not to have a pretty keen grasp on the original story and the plot of the film!

  Websites proliferated – with every permutation on Ring and King in their address – and a personal odyssey was recorded by Ian McKellen in his online Grey Book.

  Cartoonists had a field day with sundry world leaders being recast as Rings characters, while Bill Amend’s Foxtrot comic strip featured 10-year-old Tolkien nerd, Jason Fox, who gets cast (in his imagination) in the film. He brings chaos to a cartoon Peter Jackson by constantly criticising the script (‘It leaves some things out…’) and the props (‘This rope should be made of Elven hithlain, by the way…’) and refusing to hand over the Ring at the end of filming – ‘It’s my PRECIOUS!’

  There was the first teaser poster: Frodo, eyes downcast, looking at the Ring lying on his open palm; the second teaser poster: the same but with Frodo looking directly at the viewer with troubles eyes; the third showed the towering carved statues of the Argonath looming above three small Elven boats and the caption: THE LEGEND COMES TO LIFE…

  And finally, it did! As a compliment to the ‘Englishness’ of J. R. R. Tolkien and Middle-earth, the World Premiere, on 10 December 2000, was held in London. The reviews were uniformly ecstatic, confirming both the success of Fellowship and the cult status of a trilogy, two films of which had still be edited and completed, let alone released!

  The epic was up and running and people were desperate for more: books about the movie went straight into the bestseller lists; Tolkien’s original book was selling in numbers that the author could not have imagined in his wildest dreams; while with the first storeful of toys, kits, games and models, the Lord of the Rings Collector was born! It was an instant phenomenon.

  Eighty-one award nominations yielded seventy wins, including four BAFTAs (among them the distinctive accolade of the David Lean Award for Direction to Peter Jackson) and four Oscars – though not yet for Film or Director.

  The ultimate Hollywood gong may have eluded him, but another, rather different award, came his way when he and Fran were included in the 2002 New Year’s Honours List. At a ceremony at Government House, Dame Silvia Cartwright, the Governor General, invested Peter and Fran as, respectively, a Companion and a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

  For Peter and the team, the cycle then recommenced: filming pick-ups for The Two Towers, editing and scoring the second movie as well as editing an extended version of the Fellowship for DVD.

  There were more trailers, posters and hype and another
world premiere – this time New York – followed by more rave reviews (often surpassing those for Fellowship) and another seventy award nominations with two Oscars among the fifty-five winners, but still nothing for Director.

  ‘The second film,’ says Ken Kamins, ‘was more daunting than the first. I remember he called me once during the cutting of The Two Towers and out of nowhere said “I’m utterly lost, I have no idea where I am in the story.” He had been living inside it for so long he couldn’t find a way out. It took him a while. He genuinely struggled, but then managed to break through. The question was, “How do you make a great three-hour movie when its primary purpose is simply to advance the storyline and provide a bridge from the newness of the introduction of the world in movie one to the dramatic conclusion in movie three?” For The Two Towers to have exceeded that expectation and been as successful as it was is an extraordinary achievement.’

  In the early months of 2003, for the third and last time, it was back on the treadmill: more pick-ups for The Return of the King, editing the extended DVD version of The Two Towers and the long, hard haul of cutting the final film in the trilogy…

  Expectations had been that the third film was going to be easier. It turned out to be way bigger and far more complicated!

  The challenge was in editing everything together into something that is as good as it could be but runs for four-and-a-quarter hours and then editing that down, crafting it back to a length that moviegoers are going to accept.