Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  There was also a feeling that The Two Towers scenario was seriously lacking in life-threatening peril for the central characters.

  We were very confident about Fellowship, as we got to kill two of the main characters with the fall of Gandalf and the death of Boromir, which made very powerful scenes. In The Two Towers, even though the opposition of the enemy is even stronger, no major characters die. The feeling was that we needed to create more drama than the book. So we pumped up the character of Haldir, who was very much a secondary character in the book, and engineered his eventual death on the battlements of Helm’s Deep to give emotional impact. We also figured that we wanted to create a moment of jeopardy with the Warg attack during the Rohan retreat from Edoras – a major new action scene resulting in Aragorn being assumed dead.

  ‘At the same time,’ says Fran, ‘action all too quickly becomes meaningless if there is no emotional value attached to it and so all the

  dramatic moments were processed through characters dealing with problems particular to them and the story.’

  Whilst working to achieve these aims, the writers were also attempting to keep yet another goal in sight: that of providing a series of entertaining films that would appeal not just to the enthusiasts who read the book every year but also to those who read it once when they were a school, maybe ten or fifteen years before, and only retained the vaguest outline of key characters and main events; not to mention those with unread copies on their bookshelves gathering dust and cinemagoers with no more knowledge of The Lord of the Rings than the title and who really didn’t know their Saurons from their Sarumans.

  It was a plain fact that if the films were not enjoyable movies then it was going to be a waste of time and a waste of the huge amount of money that New Line were putting up. To make films that were worthy but dull would not, ultimately, have been doing anybody a service – including the memory of Tolkien himself. So we looked always for points where we could get little twists and turns into the plot, take audiences’ expectations down one way and then surprise them.

  ‘Having to restructure the scripts,’ says Mark Ordesky, ‘was a really good thing. To this day, I’m convinced that I may have been the only person at New Line that actually read all of the original 291-page scripts before we actually committed to taking over the development of the movie and when I read them, as enthusiastic as I was, I thought, “My God, this can’t work! There’s no way! What have I gotten myself into?” They were unwieldy and, built that way, the story didn’t flow right. But I had complete faith in Peter, Fran and Philippa and as they started to build the two movies into three, suddenly all the plot points seemed to fall into place.’

  The third script carried cover material that maintained the Jamboree joke with a design featuring a further reference to the so-called ‘affectionate coming-of-age drama set in the New Zealand Boy Scout Movement’, the image of a hand raised in the three-finger scout-salute and an additional tantalizing plot revelation. ‘Part III,’ it was announced, ‘reaches a shattering climax at the 1963 Tokyo World Jamboree’! Once named Jamboree, the project would remain Jamboree throughout production.

  We had to write these scripts very quickly because New Line were now committed and once you commit to a film everybody really wants to be pushing through to shooting it and releasing it: once the money tap has been turned on, no one is going to get any money back until the film hits the cinema. So, from the moment when things are ‘go’-mode, there’s always a feeling almost of impatience…

  As the scripts took on their new form, those supervising the production started drawing up a three-movie budget. Mark Ordesky puts it this way: ‘There were no rules. The rules got written as we went along. We made all these assumptions. The film-makers made assumptions. The studio made assumptions. We imagine it will be like this. So the budgeting, the strategy, the schedule, the way we built it, the way we went about constructing the whole scenario around the movie was informed by gut instinct and – and sort of intuitive leaps based on nothing! Inevitably, when we eventually started making the movies, one by one, a lot of the assumptions flew right out the window!’

  Although you could argue that because New Line had paid so much money to get the project from Miramax there was no way that they weren’t going to go through with the movie, the fact remains that, at this stage, they still hadn’t officially confirmed that we were ‘making’ the film. All they had done was pick up the rights and put us into development again; so they were paying us to rewrite the scripts and funding Weta to do their work, but they hadn’t signed off on a final budget, they hadn’t green-lit the movie. As such they were in a position to apply pressure in certain areas and particularly in relation to the casting…

  Whilst Mark Ordesky claims that New Line ‘had made a philosophical decision that we weren’t going to go to huge stars, but were simply going to cast on merit’, Peter recalls that because the studio were going to be partly funding the film from investments by foreign distributors, they were initially looking for casting that would appeal to foreign markets.

  One role in particular had seemed to lend itself to star-casting:

  New Line were indicating to us that casting was going to be very critical and that really wanted somebody like Sean Connery in the role of Gandalf – thinking it was necessary to anchor the movies and keep their foreign distributors happy.

  As a Bond fan, working with Connery was something I would have loved to do – and would still love to do – and because he has international stardom and a huge following it was, from a marketing point of view, an attractive idea. But it wasn’t one that really fitted with our mantra of keeping the films as believable as possible, because I felt Gandalf would take on a Sean Connery persona, with a long beard and robe.

  At the time, however, New Line were indicating that having a major name like Connery was necessary in order for them to green-light the film. They asked us if we would agree to send a copy of the Fellowship screenplay to Sean with a view to trying to entice him to play Gandalf. I couldn’t imagine him wanting to spend eighteen months in New Zealand, and I didn’t think they could afford his fee, but Ordesky told me New Line were going to offer a small fee in exchange for a large slice of the gross. I’ve no idea what was offered to his agents at CAA, but Mark said New Line were prepared to give him between 10 per cent and 15 per cent of the films’ income. Some kind of offer must have gone in because in April 1999 the script was bundled off to Spain, or wherever Sean was at the time. He read it – and declined the role.

  That then is the origin of the many stories that circulated that Sean Connery was going to be cast as Gandalf and had been seen on various occasions in and around Wellington.

  There were people reporting Connery sightings in, among other places, a well-known café, The Chocolate Fish. In fact, it got so silly that The Chocolate Fish got a cardboard cut-out of Sean Connery and they sat it up in one of the chairs!

  Somebody else told us that they had spoken to a friend of theirs who was so excited because they had been to a one-day cricket match at the Basin Reserve cricket ground in Wellington and were convinced that they had sat next to Sean Connery throughout the eight hours of the match! The city was gripped in this hysteria that Sean Connery was in town: it was hilarious but untrue!

  Meanwhile, over at Weta Workshop, they were, once more, gearing themselves up to undertake the phenomenal and truly formidable task of creating the diverse and extraordinary cultures of Middleearth – including sequences and characters that had never, originally, been envisaged as being part of the film.

  For so long, we had been haunted by this niggling doubt as to whether it really would go ahead. The happy moment happened when Carla Fry came down to New Zealand and signed off on the logistics and production structure. For so long, Fran and I had held back from getting too excited. We had been burnt one time too often, and were feeling superstitious – as soon as we gave everything to the project, it would die. Now, at long last, we were able to fully and unreserv
edly throw ourselves into the task.

  Richard Taylor reflects: ‘New Line not only picked up the project, they embraced it at a level that really excited us. They appreciated that The Lord of the Rings was an important piece of literature and how entrenched the story was in English popular culture and, therefore, how important it was that it was done properly and done well.’

  Alan Lee and John Howe had barely made the journey back to Europe, before they were repacking their cases and heading for New Zealand once more! Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger began grabbing back some of the Weta talents whom they had had to let go and Jamie Selkirk began gearing up the editing and post-production departments for what was going to be a marathon commitment. Peter was also re-assembling his team including production designer Grant Major; art director Dan Hennah; costume designer Ngila Dickson; and first assistant director Carolynne Cunningham.

  Carolynne – or Caro – had first worked with Peter on Heavenly Creatures and relishes the opportunity to work for a director with inventiveness and vision: ‘He just comes up with ideas off the top of his head – which is marvellous with any director, but with Peter it is generally pretty cool and sometimes pretty crazy! He can even decide that he wants to change everything, in the middle of whatever we’re doing, but that is fine, because change is good – and fun! Otherwise, things can be very boring. Of course, you have to be flexible to work with Peter, but that’s not something unique to him. Any good film-maker will want to seize a great moment when they feel it, think it or see it; you have to be prepared for that. And it’s only the boring, nongreat film-makers who don’t do that and they’re the ones that are, sadly, generally doing movies of the week! As for Peter, he’s a great director and never boring.’

  Rick Porras, who had first worked with Peter as Robert Zemeckis’ post-production supervisor on The Frighteners, and had been an associate producer on Contact (the Zemeckis film that had thrown Weta a lifeline following the collapse of Kong), joined the Rings project as a co-producer. He would serve the film series in myriad ways, from being an indefatigable ‘fixer’ of problems to an occasional second- or third-unit director.

  Director of photography Andrew Lesnie and myself with our Elven beauties, Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchett.

  Rick brought not just great post-production experience, but a cheerfulness that infected everyone around him. He has a great spirit that makes him a delight to work with.

  Peter had invited Alun Bollinger to be director of photography on the project but, despite their fine collaboration on Heavenly Creatures, Forgotten Silver and The Frighteners, Alun had not wanted to commit to such a lengthy schedule – although he later helped out behind the camera when extra film units were required. The task of ‘lensing’ The Lord of the Rings went, instead, to Andrew Lesnie, an Australian whose previous films had included the sumptuously photographed Babe.

  In May 1999, responding to an invitation, Andrew flew over to Wellington for a meeting: ‘I was ushered into a room with the producers and a whole lot of people – and Pete, who had his bare, hobbit feet up on the table. I figured that how I reacted to this was my first test!’

  Andrew Lesnie was given the three scripts to read and, on being taken on a tour of Weta Workshop, quickly got the measure of what was being aspired to with the project: ‘I was actually one of many people who believed that it was impossible to turn The Lord of the Rings into a film, simply because every person who reads the book imagines Tolkien’s world in their own individual way. However, looking at what was being done at Weta was very impressive and anyone could see the meticulous amount of work going into the project. Despite this, I said that I wanted to have another meeting with Peter on his own, because it’s only in a one-on-one situation that you can suss whether you can work with someone. Ultimately, once you’re on the studio floor and filming, the principal relationship, as far as I’m concerned, is between the cinematographer and the director. And if you don’t think the same way about things then it’s not going to work.’

  A half-hour meeting was scheduled for the following day and Andrew went back to his hotel and read the scripts. ‘I came back the next day,’ he recalls, ‘and expected there to be a prearranged signal – a buzzer underneath the armrest of Pete’s chair or something – that would bring someone into the room to terminate the meeting after the half hour! As it was, we ended up talking for several hours and it quickly became apparent that Pete had a good sense of humour and was very measured in his emotional response. By the end of that meeting, I felt that he was someone with whom I could have a good working relationship.’

  An extraordinary level of preparation was begun on the films that would span the entire pre-production period and run throughout filming. Numerous miniature environments would be designed and constructed, each presenting its own unique challenges to Weta’s model-makers, whether it was Minas Tirith, the ancient, seven-levelled city of Gondor; Lothlórien, the tree-slung kingdom of the Elves; or Barad-dûr, the towering fortress of the Dark Lord of Mordor.

  On a far larger scale, Hobbiton – the hobbit village of the Shire that is the haven of rural peace which Frodo is obliged to desert in setting out on his perilous quest – was designed and constructed on farmland in Matamata, south of Auckland, a full year ahead of filming, so that the broad sweep of the landscaping and the individual detailing in the gardens of the hobbits’ homes would have the realistic appearance of a long-established community by the time shooting was due to begin in autumn 1999.

  A huge amount of effort went into creating this one location and what still surprises me is that all this work was done for what, eventually, would be just nine days shooting with the First Unit and a few extra weeks with the Second Unit.

  There is, however, no question that it was to prove well worth all the time and trouble, because, when we came to film there, it had the look of an established, lived-in community as opposed to a movie set; this helped us present Middle-earth as a real, rather than fantastical, place. That was very important to me: I was determined that I didn’t want anyone sitting through the opening twenty-minutes of Fellowship thinking that they were watching anything other than a real world.

  The logistics that were being tackled on a daily basis from the moment the project got underway were staggering: exploring means of making armour and weapons using skills with the forge and anvil that were centuries old. At the same time, the Workshop was devising a method to produce authentic-looking, lightweight chain-mail in sufficient quantities for the hundreds of extras to be enlisted into the armies of Middle-earth, as well setting up systems for the manufacture of daily supplies of prosthetic hobbit feet, Elf ears and Orc body suits.

  The boldness of Weta’s ambition in taking on so many aspects of the production would be realised with incredible commitment and with a bravado that characterises the Workshop’s rigorous ethic of excellence.

  Under Grant Major’s supervision, the film’s style – so much of which had already been established during the Miramax period of production – was consolidated and began moving towards three-dimensional realisation. As Alan Lee and John Howe sketched designs

  Standing around between takes on our Edoras set.

  for every conceivable artefact from ancient tapestries and banners to fire-irons and door furniture, Dan Hennah and colleagues were scouring the country for such artisans as rug-weavers, candle-makers, boat-builders, glass-blowers and saddlers, as well as potters capable of producing hand-thrown pottery in small and large sizes depending on whether it was to be used by a hobbit or a wizard.

  The breathtaking locations, which had made such an impression on Bob Shaye, had each to be transformed into a place that combined nature with structures that looked as if they belonged in that environment and which were constructed to serve the needs of the film-maker. The creation of Edoras, alone – with its ornately decorated buildings of wood and thatch – proved an astonishing artistic vision realised by an unparalleled exercise in set building. The hilltop city of Rohan was both a
visual highlight in the films and, in its creation, a metaphor for the dedication with which Tolkien’s world was to be brought to the screen.

  People often think of Middle-earth as being a completely mythical place – a different world or another planet – but Tolkien thought of it as being our world in a historical period that predates ancient history. We wanted landscapes that felt real but slightly heightened: an English landscape that hasn’t really existed for thousands of years and New Zealand really fulfils that brief because we have the rolling hills, forests, mountains, rivers, waterfalls and lakes so that it actually feels like a slightly skewed version of Europe.

  There were numerous legal and environmental issues to be settled, since many of these locations were situated on tracts of National Parkland that are subject to rigorous controls; and statistic-crunching schedules had to be drawn up in order to facilitate the moving of large numbers of people about the country – often to remote areas – and provide necessary catering, accommodation and sanitation.

  Dozens of specific disciplines were required from horse-trainers to sword-masters and stunt-coordinators; while Ngila Dickson was busily sourcing unusual fabrics from fine silks and rich velvets to sturdy corduroy and rough broadcloth with which to create the robes, gowns, embroidered waistcoats, Elven cloaks and tattered Ore rags for which no historical references existed.