Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  Harvey had a number of proposals for the eventuality of Peter proving uncooperative. The first was to announce that he was relieving Peter of any involvement in writing the screenplay.

  Harvey said I was no longer writing the script, presumably because I was hostile to the one-movie version and wasn’t going to trust me to compress the material. So, I was sacked from the screenplay and he then announced that Fran–whom Harvey saw as the writing talent, as, in many respects, she is–was going to work on the new version of the script with Hossein Amini.

  Hossein Amini had already adapted two major literary works: Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure for a film directed by Michael Winterbottom and, for Miramax, Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.

  So, that was Harvey’s plan. It wasn’t a case of our debating the merits of the idea or even expressing any opinions about the proposals; it was simply a case of Harvey saying, ‘This is what is going to happen!’ It was laid out for us and we were just expected to agree…Then at the end of the meeting, we asked, ‘What’s the scenario if we say that we don’t want to do this, Harvey?’ Which is when he dropped his next bombshell: he said, ‘I’ve got John Madden lined up to direct the movie.’

  John Madden had directed Mrs Brown, the Judi Dench film about Queen Victoria, and was about to direct Shakespeare in Love, the film title Harvey Weinstein had got from Universal as part of the aborted King Kong deal…

  Who knows whether Harvey really had this guy lined up or whether he was bullshitting names; one thing was clear: if we didn’t agree to Miramax’s terms, they intended to go ahead with The Lord of the Rings without us. Harvey said, ‘I’ve come too far, I’ve spent too much money and I’m not going to see that money go down the drain. One way or another, this film is going to get made. So, you’d better go away and think it over!’

  We were due to be flying back to New Zealand the following day, so we promised to give it serious thought on the plane home and let him know what we decided to do.

  Marty Katz observes, ‘I could only commend Peter for his willingness to walk away rather than do something that didn’t do justice to his vision…’

  Ken Kamins remembers, ‘We knew now that we were in trouble. Peter and Fran were pretty demoralised and I think, at that point, they believed that it was the end.’

  We walked out of the Miramax offices, just Fran and me, Marty didn’t come with us. We walked out onto the street and we were trembling, shaking in a complete state of shock and not knowing what to do with ourselves.

  Eventually, Peter and Fran took a cab to the offices of the production company, Good Machine, where former Miramax executive David Linde was now a partner. It had been David who had secured the foreign distribution rights to Heavenly Creatures and been involved in the decision to offer Peter and Fran a first-look deal with Miramax.

  We didn’t have an appointment; we just stumbled into David’s office and I asked him if he had any Scotch? I’d never drunk a whisky before –if you can believe it–but when anyone’s shocked in the movies, they always seem to have a Scotch, so I thought it might help! David handed me a glass and I knocked it back and, somehow, it seemed to calm me down a bit. That’s how I came to have the first Scotch I’d ever drunk in my life–because I’d seen it in the movies!

  We told David the whole story and it was a relief just to have somebody to talk to. Then we called up Ken and brought him up to speed with everything, and then, later that night, we jumped on the plane for New Zealand.

  As much as they wanted to be home, the prospect of returning to Wellington was, as Fran recalls, a desperately unhappy one: ‘How were we to face all these people who had put their hearts and souls into this project? It was terrible…’

  Although we’d agreed to take time to consider our decision, in our hearts the decision was already made. There was never any way that we were going to make the single film version…

  I mean, there really wasn’t any serious debate but we had to think about it, had to think about what the repercussions would be if we didn’t do it. It wasn’t about the merits of making a one-film version of The Lord of the Rings or whether the fans of the book would be upset, what we were thinking about was what it would do to Weta and to all the people there: we had been going to make King Kong, but we didn’t; then we were going to make The Lord of the Rings, and now we weren’t going to be doing that either…

  How were we going to keep people employed? How were we going to pay them? Would the company have to close? Suddenly, it was as if everything that we’d established here was under jeopardy…

  The reception in Wellington was as bad, perhaps worse, than they had feared. Everyone was in despair and the project seemed all but at an end. The day eventually came on which a final decision had to be conveyed to Miramax and it was one that seemed both easy and impossibly hard.

  Intellectually, we knew we didn’t want to make Harvey’s version of The Lord of the Rings, but having just seen the faces of all these people who’d been working on the film for fourteen months, we kept thinking: ‘Do we owe it to them to make something?’ Was it more sensible to at least do one two-hour movie than to stubbornly stand on our pride and say, ‘This is a stupid idea and we’re never going to do it!’?

  It was the first week of July and Peter and Fran were due to take a few days’ break at Wharekauhau Lodge, a remote luxury hideaway located fifty miles and a ten-minute helicopter flight from Wellington and set on a 5,000-acre sheep station overlooking Palliser Bay. The trip, which had been planned long before the summons to New York, was to celebrate Fran’s birthday on 8 July, though their feelings were now scarcely celebratory.

  On Fran’s birthday we went out for a walk. The lodge is on the top of these cliffs on a stretch of isolated coast – a kind of Wuthering Heights setting! – and we walked and thought and talked and eventually made the decision that, come what may, we would just tell Miramax that our answer was ‘No’. We were willing to continue with the two-movie version as we’d originally agreed, but that there was going to be no one-film version and no collaboration between Fran and Hossein Amini. So we rang Ken and told him to give Harvey the doomsday scenario and then we’d deal with whatever repercussions or lawsuits they decided to throw at us. Whatever would be would be. Having made the call, we felt a huge weight lift.

  Burdened with breaking the bad news to Harvey, Ken duly made the call…But he was determined to keep the door open, and during the course of that conversation Ken outlined the situation at hand, and the various obstacles that would be faced by Miramax if they were to proceed with making a one-movie version. For example, a new writer would mean starting again almost from scratch, with an inevitable protracted period of further development, all of which would need to be funded at significant expense. There were also contractual complications that would inhibit Miramax from using any of the structural features that were unique to Peter and Fran’s adaptation.

  As Peter Nelson explains, ‘Miramax knew that to make The Lord of the Rings in a new mould would take more years of more dollars and a better option for them might be simply to give up the project to somebody else.’

  It was at this point that Ken suggested to Harvey that he allow Peter the time to find another studio that would be willing to back his vision and reimburse Miramax for its expenditure on the project. The process, which is not uncommon in Hollywood, is known as ‘turnaround’.

  The difficult task, however, was negotiating that arrangement. As Ken recalls, the negotiations were tough and not pleasant: ‘Miramax were not immediately moving towards letting us have a turnaround; it was much more about, “We gave these guys a chance to make this movie and they’re not going to make it, so to hell with them, we’re moving on!” Our response was, “Don’t say ‘No,’ tell us what the terms would have to be if you would give it to us in turnaround. Come on! The guy’s poured body and soul into this project, it’s his unique vision, give us some window within which we can try and figure it out, no matter how impossible you might thin
k it is…”’

  Eventually, Harvey agreed and Ken Kamins rang Peter to break the good news; it was a lifeline they had dared not hope for, and a precious belated birthday present for Fran.

  Ken then flew to New Zealand to discuss the situation further, by which time he and Peter Nelson were already deep in discussions with Bob Osher at Miramax over the proposed turnaround deal. Since Miramax were prepared to make a one-movie version of The Lord of the Rings, they insisted that any interested studio had to be willing to make two movies.

  As Peter Nelson saw it at the time, ‘Either Miramax really did plan to have someone else direct a one-film version and wanted to make it impossible for us – or it was a clever move to make everyone think that this enormous beast of a movie was actually going to be highly prized in the market. In any event, Miramax’s terms were stringent and financial conditions were attached that were onerous and were going to make finding a new investor a serious challenge.’

  Harvey wanted immediate repayment of the $15million that had been spent to date, the sum of which would have to be banked and cleared within seventy-two hours of a studio agreeing to take on the project. Bob Osher further suggested that Harvey and Bob Weinstein receive 5 per cent of first-dollar gross on the film when it was released and also be given Executive Producer credit to acknowledge that they had got the project started.

  The most serious aspect of the offered turnaround, however, was the window in which the deal had to be accomplished. A typical turnaround period for a movie might be a year; Miramax were only prepared to give Peter four weeks – twenty-eight days to find Frodo Baggins a new home.

  We thought, ‘What the hell are we going to do?’ I think if you, at that point, had spoken to anybody in the film industry and asked what the chances were for us getting anyone to take on The Lord of the Rings on Miramax’s terms, they would have said, ‘Absolutely not a snowball’s chance in hell!’ But it was our only chance and we had to take it and give it our very best shot. We needed a strategy and we needed it quick. And the first thing we had to do was to get back home.

  That, however, was easier said than done. The weather conditions at Wharekauhau when Peter received the news from Ken were not good: it was the middle of a typical New Zealand winter and, looking southwards along the coast, they could see a major storm raging over Wellington and heading towards them.

  Having flown to Wharekauhau by helicopter, Peter and Fran didn’t have a car and they knew that it would take someone two hours to drive up from Wellington to collect them and another two hours to travel back. Their only choice was to get the helicopter to fetch them, whether or not if it would be able to make the trip.

  All we knew was that we had to do whatever we could to try and save our movie: The Lord of the Rings’ fate was being determined by a four-week clock – and it had just started ticking!

  The chances that were taken and the decisions that were made over the next few hours would indeed decide the fate of The Lord of the Rings and, ultimately, secure Peter Jackson’s reputation in cinema history…

  8

  THREE-RING CIRCUS

  ‘We fought so many battles,’ reflects Peter Jackson, ‘and worked through so much politics in order to get those early films made that it ultimately equipped us to take on the challenge of making The Lord of the Rings.’

  With just four weeks to try and salvage the film project into which they had poured so much effort, Peter and Fran knew there wasn’t an hour to lose. However, the word from Wellington was not encouraging: the storm was worsening and the helicopter pilot was unsure whether he would be able to make the journey to Wharekauhau. While they waited to see whether the chopper would get through, Peter and Fran began to plan their strategy.

  We didn’t have a commercial success behind us; and worse, we had the stigma of having worked on this project for fourteen months with a studio which had now decided to dump – a situation that immediately gave a bad smell to the project. The question was, how do we convince another studio to write Miramax their huge cheque, pick up the project and continue on?

  ‘We knew we had to go back to Los Angeles,’ says Fran, ‘and we knew that we had to take something with us to show to anyone who would see us.’

  Hollywood is a jaded town. Executives get pitched dozens of projects every day. But what they respond to best is visual imagery. You can get somebody more excited with one drawing than an hour’s talk – and we had thousands of drawings! Our greatest weapon was the huge amount of visual imagery we had created: Alan and John’s conceptual art; Weta’s miniatures and maquettes, and the digital tests. We had a wonderful CG Cave-troll; tests of Massive involving thousands of digital extras. The final miniature of Helm’s Deep was built; so was Rivendell. It was frustrating: on one level we were convinced that if we could get any studio executive down to New Zealand, they would be blown away and pick up the project immediately. But that wasn’t going to happen. So we had to think of an effective way to present this material in somebody’s LA office. We knew that we had to blow people away and that the only way of doing that was to make a film!

  A film that would have to be written, shot and edited in next to no time at all.

  As soon as Ken told us about the four-week period, Fran and I started planning. If Harvey had to be paid in four weeks, we knew we needed to be in LA by week two.

  That allowed two weeks for the deals to be done. But it also meant we had only seven days to conceive, shoot and edit our little film.

  Peter made various calls and set up a meeting – more a council of war – with everyone whose help would be needed if an effective commercial for The Lord of the Rings were to be turned round in a matter of days.

  The helicopter eventually arrived but the pilot was not encouraging about the return journey, saying that it was going to be a rough flight and questioning whether they really wanted to do it:

  I really hate flying and Fran was looking absolutely sick, but I said, ‘Listen, let’s just get back to the city…’

  It was, without doubt, the worst helicopter ride I’ve ever had in my life: the thing was literally bucking around the sky, swinging back and forth like a pendulum. The whole trip we were up-and-down and Fran and I were clutching each other’s hands and clinging to the back seat. But we were on a mission and we weren’t going to be put off by a bad flight! It felt like a Thunderbirds episode: International Rescue rushing to save The Lord of the Rings!

  The analogy is revealing. Ken Kamins notes: ‘There was very little time in which to get the project together and sell it on; it could easily have floundered at that point.’ But Peter Jackson had no intention of letting it founder.

  Reeling off the helicopter in a state of near nausea, Peter and Fran drove home and immediately launched themselves into a meeting with producer Tim Sanders; Weta’s Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger; Alan Lee and John Howe; editor Jamie Selkirk; and cinematographer Alun Bollinger, who had worked on Heavenly Creatures, Forgotten Silver and The Frighteners. Peter and the team drew up a plan of campaign allowing themselves just one week in which to film the documentary.

  Weta started assembling examples of their CGI effects; maquettes of the various races and creatures depicted in the story were placed on a turntable and shot with evocative lighting; and some of the best of Alan and John’s artwork was selected and put under the camera along with examples of the many Tolkien books, calendars, maps and ephemera that indicated the extent of public interest in The Lord of the Rings. It was, as Peter would point out on the film’s final soundtrack, a unique instance where the merchandising pre-dated the movie.

  Peter and Fran drafted a script and chose a few examples of key storytelling moments from the Animatic. To link the material and deliver the selling pitch, they filmed interviews with various people involved in the project: Brian Van’t Hul, Visual Effects Cinematographer, explained and demonstrated some of the film’s special effects such as forced perspective technique for creating convincing scenes in which humans and hobbits wou
ld coexist on screen while Alan and John talked about visualising Middle-earth and the philosophy of making the fantastic realistic.

  I also interviewed myself: sat in front of the camera as if I was answering questions, except I was making it all up as I went along!

  There was a terrible sense of hopelessness: feeling that the project was slipping away from us and that we were desperately trying to save it, trying to say the right things, trying to figure out how to convince some Hollywood guy to want to make this movie.

  Despite the fact that we were all panicking inside, we were sitting there talking calmly, confidently, like it was a film that was actually happening! It looked like a ‘Making of…’ movie, but in reality it was a ‘Saving of…’ movie!

  It was the greatest acting job I’ve ever done in my life and without doubt, the single most important film I’ve ever made.

  That film, resulting from a desperately frenzied exercise in salesman-ship, was a sophisticated promotional-video-cum-movie-trailer that, even viewed today, packs a powerful punch.