Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  I guess when we had embarked on the project that the fact that we were making two films meant that there would be some leeway…As the scripts developed and the project took shape, we thought, ‘Okay, $75million is the limit for one film, sure, that’s possible; but how can they really expect us to make two films for $75million?’

  Miramax took a rather different view: it was not simply that ‘a deal is a deal’, the fact was they didn’t have immediate means to increase the budget. Whilst movie history is full of films that, during filming, have gone hysterically over their initial budget and still been financed either to success (Titanic) or to near-ruination (Waterworld), The Lord of the Rings was still a long way off from shooting and was already heading towards double what they had expected to invest in the project. Indeed, by the time aggravations began to arise, the amount already invested in the scripting process and the research and development being undertaken at Weta was approaching US$12million,

  Although Tim Sanders, co-producer of The Frighteners, had joined the project as producer and was drawing up budgets based on the scripts, Miramax–as they were entitled to do–decided to send a representative to Wellington to ‘oversee’ development. To Peter, whose past experiences with Jim Booth and Robert Zemeckis had been positive and creative, the person now despatched to New Zealand was ‘the executive from Hell’.

  This guy shows up and we looked him up on the IMDB. His previous credits included soft-core porn made in South Africa. Some nutter at Miramax/Dimension thought he would be a great addition to the team down here. I guess he was just doing his job, but as I saw it his attitude was one of not caring about the movie, not caring about what we were trying to achieve; it was all about the numbers, about the bottom line, about controlling expenditure, and I butted heads with him straight away and, within days of his arrival, we were actually shouting at one another.

  Acknowledging what was obviously a rapidly deteriorating situation, Miramax decided that they needed to involve someone with whom Peter could establish a more productive working relationship. Bob Osher, Miramax’s co-president of production, decided to approach Marty Katz, a hugely experienced independent producer with a long track record in film and television with, among other studios, Paramount, ABC and Walt Disney Productions where, as Executive Vice President, Motion Picture and Television Production, he had held responsibility for overseeing the studio’s various production banners –Disney, Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures–as well as Disney feature animation and television.

  Films with which Marty Katz had been involved included the feature hits Good Morning, Vietnam, Three Men and a Baby, The Color Of Money, Dead Poets Society, Pretty Woman, The Little Mermaid and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

  In 1997, as ‘production consultant’, he had served as a troubleshooter for Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount when James Cameron’s Titanic drifted into decidedly dangerous waters, a role that doubtless recommended him to Bob Osher as someone who might be able to deal with what, in Hollywoodspeak, were being called ‘internal Miramax issues over The Lord of the Rings’.

  ‘My purpose in going to New Zealand,’ says Marty, ‘was to help Peter and to try to find some answers to what Miramax currently saw as problems. However, the answer to a problem may not be as simple as a studio envisages–or hopes! Sometimes, rather than cutting corners, it is necessary to spend more money in order to realise the full creativity of a film, although, obviously, that probably isn’t what the studio wants to hear. All I promised to do was go and talk.’

  One of the productions with which Marty had been closely involved at Disney was Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which had been directed by Robert Zemeckis, who, in turn, knew and had worked with Peter Jackson on The Frighteners. At Marty’s suggestion, Zemeckis made a call to Peter intended to smooth the way by ‘introducing’ him as ‘the new guy’, who Miramax were going to be sending down to Wellington.

  I was rather surprised to hear this from Bob Zemeckis because, at this point, no one at Miramax had told us anything about Marty coming. I remember Bob saying, ‘Marty is very Hollywood, but he’s basically a good guy…’

  Marty turned up and he was nothing like us: he was a hyper, rampedup guy with a California tan who chewed gum. But he was, as Bob had said, a ‘good guy’–he was someone who was interested in what we were doing, someone to whom we could talk and who would listen to us.

  Marty was impressed by what he saw in Wellington: ‘Peter and Fran were clearly people with a remarkable vision and, for me, it was impossible not to be impressed by their vision, not to fall in love with their project, not to admire the extraordinary New Zealand ability to achieve incredible results with fewer resources but greater resourcefulness and by sticking with a work ethic that says you work till the job is done. It was also immediately evident that the problem was that there was a difference between Peter and Fran’s vision for The Lord of the Rings and that of Miramax.’

  To Marty it seemed that Miramax already knew the answer they wanted to hear: ‘Peter had ostensibly agreed to deliver two films for $75million. Bob Weinstein felt that that was what he had been promised and what he, in turn, had promised to Disney and that Peter was now declining to honour that promise. Whatever the situation at the outset, it was now obvious–from the number of pages in the scripts and the number of visual effects shots that were going to be involved–that it was impossible to tell the story of The Lord of the Rings in two films for $75million when $12million had already been spent.’

  Marty spent four months in New Zealand, becoming increasingly won over to the view that Peter’s approach was the right one for the subject but, at the same time, trying to find a formula to keep the project and everyone on course. Working alongside Peter, producer Tim Sanders and first assistant director Carolynne Cunningham, Marty assessed a realistic budget for the two films as being in the region of US$130–150million. It was not what Miramax wanted to be told.

  Peter Nelson remembers: ‘Miramax started to tell us, “We can’t do this alone, we need to solicit a partner.” Peter didn’t have the right to object to that and, anyway, we were open to that because we wanted to make sure the movie got made. So Miramax went to Disney. This was at a time when Disney might very well have said, “This is the next great franchise, why not do it?” But Peter had a reputation for making darker movies than the typical Disney movie, so they passed.’

  The ironies are enormous since, when Tolkien was alive, he had always refused to consider Disney having any involvement with the film rights to his books; and now, with Tolkien gone, Disney were in the position of being offered the opportunity to become partners with Miramax on The Lord of the Rings, but chose to say, ‘No’! It could have meant so many things: a Rings theme park ride, rubber hobbit feet in the shops at Disneyland…The world could have been a different place!

  It is said that Miramax turned to other possible partners, including PolyGram and Steven Spielberg at Dreamworks. Peter began to feel –and he had seen this happen before–that the prospects for Rings were not good and were getting worse…

  The situation was becoming increasingly difficult with almost monthly cashflow problems when the money we needed to pay people was being delayed. We’d be screaming for the payment and Miramax would be saying, ‘It’s on its way…’ It all suddenly began to feel very familiar: it was horribly like the ‘cheque-is-in-the-post’ days just before King Kong fell over. You could feel it happening: The Lord of the Rings was a movie that was going off the rails.

  As Peter Nelson reflects, ‘There are movies where every minute is filled with doubt and, deep down, you start to feel, “This is not going to happen.” That’s what the Miramax experience became: it went from a place where it was difficult enough to think that Miramax would make a big-budget movie like The Lord of the Rings to one where you started to feel that they didn’t have the confidence to think that they should–or could–make a big-budget movie like The Lord of the Rings.’

  Harvey had never exhibited negativity towar
ds the project or us. I believe, to this day, that if Harvey could have figured out a way to make it, he would have done so; on the other hand, I believe that Bob thought it was probably the biggest, most foolish mistake ever made in the world, and he just wanted it out of the way.

  ‘There were no bad guys here,’ says Marty Katz. ‘Miramax really wanted to make the film–they already had a substantial investment in it and had not walked away from it–but they really didn’t have the stomach to make the film that Peter and Fran had now envisioned. Peter wasn’t willing to make a bastard version of the book; Miramax didn’t feel they could afford to make the full-blown version. It was as simple as that.’

  Miramax’s investment had now risen to $15million and the bottom line, as far as the studio was concerned, was now painfully simple: forget talking about budgets of $130–150million; make two films for $75million or make one movie for $75million.

  Marty had been much impressed by the animatic, which he believed demonstrated Peter’s genius, so it was suggested that the filmed storyboard be shown to Miramax as a way of winning their support for the Jackson vision.

  As we saw it, we had a budget and we needed to know whether Miramax were going to commit to making that film or not. We had to know.

  So, Marty went to New York and screened the animatic. I never really heard the full story but I get the strong impression the animatic screening must have gone incredibly badly. I imagine Harvey and Bob sat there watching storyboards flashing on screen for about two and a half hours and any confidence that they had left in the film wavered and collapsed. I think that was probably the final nail in the coffin…

  ‘In the end,’ says Marty, ‘I think Miramax felt that the animatic proved what they already feared from reading the scripts: that the two-film structure contained too much information, too many characters and too many situations. However, they still thought that, maybe, it could be made as “One Great Movie”–the film Ralph Bakshi had failed to make–a single picture that would give a “taste” of the book for the general audience rather than the Tolkien fans…That, however, could only be achieved at a cost that I doubted Peter and Fran would be willing to pay.’

  In mid-June 1998, Fran and Peter were ‘summoned to a summit meeting’ at the Miramax offices in New York.

  We knew, by that stage, that things were very, very bad: we were in a real crisis situation and the film was clearly in deep trouble.

  We arrived in New York and Marty, who had been involved in preliminary meetings with Miramax, warned us what was going to happen. He told us about the proposal to make just one movie and that a plan had been put together figuring out how it could be done.

  At first, I thought they might be suggesting spending $75million on a first film–ending somewhere around the Battle of Helm’s Deep–and then, if it did well on release, make the second film a couple of years later. I really didn’t relish the idea of being the second guy in film history to make only half of The Lord of the Rings!

  Then an envelope arrived at the hotel containing a memo and I realised that was not what they had in mind…

  Dated 17 June 1998 and marked ‘ultra-confidential!’, the memo came from a senior story editor at Miramax and boldly tackled the thorny issue of how the two-film version of The Lord of the Rings might become that One Great Movie.

  To Peter and Fran, by now so steeped in the intricacies of Tolkien’s story and the various approaches with which they had already experimented in an attempt to deal with the challenges presented by the text, the memo must have seemed unbelievably brutal, just as it must have seemed inconceivable that they could even begin to consider adopting its suggestions.

  For the most avid fans of the book and the most critical critics of the film trilogy, it is salutary to consider the movie that might have been made of The Lord of the Rings.

  Miramax were suggesting radical cutting and restructuring. Obviously it was not what Peter and Fran wanted to read, but the writer unerringly put his finger on what, from a film perspective, could be seen as structural weakness in Tolkien’s story: there was, it was felt, no satisfactory way of concluding the first film, since Saruman was patently not Sauron and, however it was cut, it was patently obvious that the story was only half-told. Also Frodo was seen as a difficult character with too little to do and not enough moments of vulnerability with which to secure the emotional investment of the filmgoer.

  Then came the suggested remedy and it proved bitter medicine: cut the Battle of Helm’s Deep; cut or re-work the role of Saruman (on a ‘use him or lose him’ principle) making him more effectively the villain of the piece, ‘Darth Vader to Sauron’s Emperor’; combine the realms of Rohan and Gondor and the cities of Edoras and Minas Tirith; fuse the characters of King Théoden with Denethor and that of Faramir with Éowyn (with a preference for the female character, who would then have become Boromir’s younger sister!); cut the Ringwraiths’ attack on Bree and hold them back for the assault at Weathertop; cut the events at Rivendell by half; drastically curtail the passage through the Mines of Moria (abandoning then Cave-troll on the way); have the Ents prevent the Orc-kidnap of Merry and Pippin and delay Gandalf’s return as the White Wizard.

  The document ended with an astute observation that, ironically, has since been proven by the eventual success of Peter Jackson’s films: if the movie works as a movie, despite whatever knowledge an audience may have of Tolkien’s book, any criticism from the most vociferous fan couldn’t hope to damage its success. If, however, it were to fail as a movie then no degree of faithfulness to the written word could offer any protection.

  Viewed from the point of view of a film studio contemplating a significant financial investment, much of what was said was common sense. Any screenwriter who had offered a script packed with so many episodes, loaded with so much back-history and introducing so many places, races, and characters with jaw-cracking names would, normally, have been laughed out of Hollywood.

  The memo itself was not really a problem. As an exercise in reducing The Lord of the Rings to one film, it demonstrated a lot of common sense. It was the wisdom of doing that in the first place that caused problems for us.

  Peter and Fran, however, were already well aware of the challenges inherent in Tolkien’s book and their aim, throughout, had been to surmount, not sidestep them. For them, the choice seemed clear: it was not about whether to make their version of the film or follow the Miramax outline, it was whether to make the film they believed in or not make it at all.

  How could we contemplate making a picture where we’d be guaranteed to disappoint every single reader of the most widely read book in the world? What would be the point? You couldn’t call it The Lord of the Rings. We’d be defeated before we started!

  It was hardly a good prelude to the meeting with Miramax. Peter and Fran were shown to ‘the sweatbox’, the room where they had had their creative meeting with the Weinsteins over a year before, and Marty Katz immediately left for a pre-meeting-meeting.

  ‘Harvey wanted a magic solution,’ says Marty, ‘and there really wasn’t one. I believe that the proposed one-movie version could have been made. It could even have been a good movie–maybe not a great one, but it could have been done. What I tried to make Bob and Harvey understand was that the film-maker they were working with couldn’t make that version. I felt that it was in nobody’s interests to try and force the issue, but they had reached a point where they were determined to either get Peter to see reason and meet their demands –or to go some other route.’

  What that alternative route was all too soon became clear…

  Fran and me sat in the sweatbox for about an hour, waiting for something to happen. Then Harvey and Marty and others–Jon Gordon and Cary Granat–came into the room. I remember glancing up as they filed in, and noticing that Marty looked really shaken and ashen faced. He glanced at me and made a despairing gesture, like a shaking of the head. It was a look that said that whatever had happened at the previous meeting was not good.

>   Bob Weinstein was not present. Peter has a memory of being told, later, that Bob was ‘so furiously angry’ that he had refused to ‘waste any more time’ on them. Marty Katz’s diplomatic recollection is that Bob didn’t attend the meeting ‘because he had said all that he had to say.’

  As for Harvey, Peter remembers him striving to seek a way out of what was a painfully and expensively problematic situation.

  I think Harvey was genuinely fond of us and it wasn’t a brutal meeting, but the atmosphere was horrible: there was a lot of anger on both sides and threats of lawsuits were hanging in the air.

  I asked whether, if we were to make one film, we could make just the first part and see how it worked and then, maybe, make the second film? But, no! It had to be the whole thing in just one film.

  Then I asked whether, if we were to make one film, it could be the length of an epic like Lawrence of Arabia: a four-hour event. But, no! It would to have to be no more than a two-hour film.

  Harvey’s basic message was that the only way the project was going to happen was as one movie and if it didn’t happen, then things were going to get ugly.

  At the point when Peter indicated that it wasn’t possible to make a single-film version of The Lord of the Rings, as was being proposed in their memo, Miramax made their next move. They announced that they owned everything that so far had been created for the film: models, miniatures, designs, conceptual artwork, as well as the Massive computer software, which had been developed at Weta. This was not Peter’s understanding of the deal, but it was the industry norm in Hollywood and was evidently going to be an issue over which there were likely to be legal wranglings.