Peter Jackson: A Film-maker’s Journey

by Sibley, Brian

  Shooting scenes like that with so little preparation is the stuff I have nightmares about. In the end, you just have to rely on your instincts, and if that fails you…guess! You get your head down and get on with it. Sean was fabulous and at the end of that day’s shoot we had every angle on Sam in the can and were expecting to be shooting the Frodo side of the scene on the following day.

  It was not to be: the next day dawned sunny, the floods had abated, roads that had been closed were reopened and the crew had to get back to location filming. The other angle on the scene was not filmed until twelve months later. ‘During the whole of that time,’ recalls Fran Walsh, ‘the Cirith Ungol set occupied the hotel’s squash court – which is probably one reason why our budget went up!’

  A year later, we were back in the squash court, and this time the heat was on Elijah. He had to get his head back into a scene that had been half-filmed so long ago. He knew that he had to deliver a performance that matched the emotion of Sean’s takes, and that he did to perfection. What is amazing, when you look at the finished scene in The Return of the King, is to think that every time we cut to and fro between Frodo and Sam we are actually jumping back and forth across a year-long gap.

  Although there were a good many of them over the fifteen months’ shoot, few, if any, of these setbacks were ever granted the status of ‘dramas’.

  There is always a way round things, and Caro Cunningham, the first assistant director on Rings, is an absolute genius at figuring out how to get the movies shot. She and I have a similar attitude to problem solving.

  ‘Nothing is really ever a drama,’ says Carolynne. ‘Occasionally, there are slight bumps in the road – the odd gale, snowstorm, landslip and freak flood – but life is too short to take those too seriously, because they’re awfully easy to fix, generally. Anything’s fixable. Peter and I are great believers in anything being fixable. I don’t think there was a problem that we weren’t able to solve. That’s all they are: they might be large, expensive problems, with a lot of people involved, but in the end, they’re just problems. And you sit down, you think about it and you solve it. And some of the problems were really very exciting!’

  Again and again during the filming of The Lord of the Rings, problems – exciting or mundane – needed solving. Most of the time, Peter’s optimistic nature and his Kiwi determination to make a difficult situation work, whatever the odds, carried him through. Although, now and again, there were moments when it seemed as if making the biggest motion picture project ever ought to have had a few more Hollywood-style resources.

  There was a period when we were getting up while it was still dark and setting off on the one-and-a-half-hours’ drive from Queenstown to Closeburn near Paradise, where we were filming the scenes at Amon Hen that form the climax to The Fellowship of the Ring. The road had only just been re-opened after the floods; we’d lost days of filming and were desperate to try and get back on schedule. Every day we would film for as long as the light held and then drive back again in the dark.

  All the time we were fighting to keep our expenses down because this was a tightly budgeted film and I’ve never forgotten how, on that daily drive to and from Paradise, we used to pass the base camp for another film crew who were down there shooting Columbia Pictures’ Vertical Limit. In contrast to us, they had stacks of equipment, vast catering tents, trailers for the cast: everything, it seemed, they could possibly need…I always thought that they looked rather pityingly at us as we drove past – like we were the poor relations. And, to be honest, I was really pretty envious of them and would be thinking to myself, ‘Yeah! That’s what it’s like making a real film!’

  There were a variety of scary moments when people or property were endangered, such as the night when a fire caused by combustible foam polystyrene broke out in one of the studios and partially damaged the Minas Morgul set; or the day when they were filming the approach to the Black Gates on a tract of Ministry of Defence land that had been cleared of unexploded mines and shells, but suddenly realised that Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli seemed to be galloping beyond the rigorously defined bomb-free area…

  For the director personally, there was the plane trip from hell!

  We had chartered an aircraft to fly us down to Nelson but when we arrived at Wellington airport, we looked at what was waiting for us on the tarmac and froze. There was a terrible silence and then Orlando said, ‘You’ve gotta be f***ing kidding!’ Sitting there was an old, Second World War DC-3 Douglas Dakota transport plane – still with its WWII markings! I guess someone must have decided that it was cheaper than a regular plane – a piece of madness resulting, no doubt, from what are called ‘budgetary considerations’!

  We had a mountain of boxes and equipment and there was no one to help us load it, so we formed a human chain and began passing all

  This picture says a thousand words. The sight of Dom, Eiljah and Orly helping to load our WWII transport plane neatly sums up the wonderful, slightly chaotic, family atmosphere of The Lord of the Rings production.

  the stuff on board. Elijah, Orlando – all of us were pitching in to load all the gear. While this was going on, the pilot came out to meet us and began looking more and more concerned at the number of boxes that were going into his aircraft and the increasing number of people who seemed to be getting out of cars. Eventually he said, ‘This plane is only meant to hold 12,000lbs as a safe weight – do you know how much all this gear weighs?’ No one did, of course.

  We made some rapid decisions about what might get us to 12,000lbs and what could be sent down the next day on the ferry, and then started pulling everything except absolutely essential gear back off the plane. Then we all piled on board and the pilot started taxiing this thing out.

  Being a nervous flyer, I asked a couple of questions about the aircraft and took a look at the logbook, which revealed that its first flight had been taking American troops to the Philippines in 1943! By then, it was too late to do anything about it, because we were heading for the runway…

  The plane turns around, the guy throttles the engine and the tail lifts off the ground, the actors are yelling, ‘Come on! Come on!’ Meanwhile, I’m thinking, ‘We’re in a life-and-death situation and these guys are treating it like it’s a rollercoaster ride!’

  The plane feels heavy, but we begin to get up speed and the pilot pulls back on the stick. Then, like something out of an old comedy film, the plane lifts into the air and immediately bounces back down again! By now, I’m a nervous wreck, but Elijah and the others are screaming, ‘Yeah!!’ The pilot has another go and the same thing happens; all I can see is the end of the runway coming up and, beyond that, the waters of Evans Bay with, at that point, absolutely no certainty of our getting airborne.

  Somehow the pilot gets up enough speed and we finally lurch up into the air and – with twenty-odd people hooting and cheering – this old, heavily-laden plane swings out over Wellington harbour and lumbers off down towards the South Island with me wondering if we’ll ever reach our destination!

  Remarkably for such a big production, relatively few accidents were sustained during the shoot. Orlando Bloom got unhorsed and cracked his ribs; Bruce Hopkins as Gamling, to his great distress, accidentally sliced Théoden’s ear during the fray at Helm’s Deep, resulting in Bernard Hill having to have stitches; in another fight, Viggo Mortensen lost a tooth and, as is immortalised on film in The Two Towers, broke his toe while kicking an orc helmet in the scene where the three hunters find the smouldering remains of the Uruk band that adducted Merry and Pippin.

  As everyone is aware who has viewed the DVD extras on The Fellowship of the Ring, Sean Astin sustained a deeply unpleasant injury when, running into the River Anduin in pursuit of the departing Frodo, he stepped on a shard of glass that pierced right through his stick-on hobbit foot and into his own. Costa Botes’ documentary team, who happened to be filming the film-makers at the time, captured the whole bloody episode for posterity, from the cutting off of the prosthetic foot to Sea
n’s departure for hospital by helicopter. There was a lot of blood, a good deal of genuine stiff-upper-lip bravery on Mister Astin’s part and a morbidly amusing interest in examining the wound by Elijah and the other hobbits.

  Rather surprisingly, Sean was also subject of an accident on the not-especially-dangerous Rivendell set.

  Sean had gone off to read a book on part of the set. Standing behind him was an Elven loom with a half-woven rug on it. A gust of wind came along, picked up the loom, and it toppled over and hit Sean on the head. On one level, it was deeply funny, but he was really anxious about possible damage to his brain and he insisted on having a CAT scan to see if there was any internal damage. Fortunately everything was fine, but the most safety-conscious one amongst us did rather seem to attract the accidents! He’s undoubtedly the only person ever to get brained by an Elven loom!

  Apart from physical accidents there were occasional mishaps in filming which only became painfully obvious when the rushes were viewed the following day. As with all film-making, the process is one of setting high expectations and hoping that the realisations don’t fall too far short, and Peter and Fran, particularly in the early days of filming, had to endure watching a number of ‘Not Quite How I Saw It’ moments.

  There was the first attempt to show Frodo and Sam watching the Elves departing Middle-earth when, instead of a procession of exquisite beings, the parading Elves were notable for having bad teeth, ears that didn’t look right and beard stubble showing through their make-up. Or when shooting the Ringwraiths’ arrival at Weathertop, an attempt to choreograph the tall, gangly actors swathed in black resulted in them shimmying over the ridge doing what Peter describes as ‘a bizarre Hawaiian hula-dance’!

  I remember, during the first week of Rings, we were worried about all kinds of things: the make-up on the Wraith-horse – there was so much pus around the eye that it made the creature look more sick than scary – and a really curious problem with Pippin’s ears. It was Fran who spotted it during one of the dailies: the wind machines were blowing so hard that Pippin’s prosthetic ears started filling up with air until they looked like a couple of little kites. So those had to be redesigned straight away and, in editing, we had to cut around those shots where Billy had too much of a ‘wing nut’ look about him!

  Naughty Sir Ian.

  Despite whatever moments of depression clouded the brows and the horizons, there were also light-hearted moments that allowed a laugh or two: the Middle-earth equivalent of an urban legend sprang up about a monster eel, which had allegedly been sighted in the lake where Thomas Robbins was going to have to film the scene where Déagol is pulled out of the boat into the water while fishing. The eel got longer and longer in the telling until it was the size of a crocodile and Tom was totally terrified.

  There was Ian McKellen’s playful quip during Christopher Lee’s first day of filming in the Isengard gardens. In a scene later dropped from the film, Gandalf

  spots a couple of orcs scuttling amongst the trees. ‘Orcs?’ Gandalf was to have asked in astonishment. ‘Servants of the Enemy in Isengard?’ To which Saruman replied, ‘Not his servants – mine,’ a first indication that Saruman the White was not all that he seemed…On one take, Ian revised his line to ‘Orcs? – And so far from Auckland!’

  Also memorable was the day when it came to shoot the dead Saruman impaled on the machinery in flooded Isengard:

  We laid Christopher on top of this great barbed wheel and attached the end of a spike, covered in blood, as though it was sticking out of his chest. I then tracked the camera over the top of him to simulate the turning of the wheel.

  Christopher was in a good mood: I don’t think, at that stage, he’d dwelt much on the ramifications being shown in such an obvious a stake-through-the-heart pose, because we had an amusing exchange: I said, ‘This is an historic occasion, your lying here like this.’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I’ve been here before!’

  I thought it would be fun to capture the moment for posterity, so I rolled the 35mm camera, and asked him to give me his thoughts on his moment of death. He opened his eyes and said, ‘Twenty-eight years ago I was in this position, I looked up and I saw Peter Cushing standing over me, and now here I am in New Zealand all these years later and I look up and Peter Jackson standing over me!’ Later, Christopher would get quite anxious about Saruman’s Dracula-style death and then about the fact that we decided to cut his death altogether! But on the day it was a funny, cute moment and he was in excellent spirits about it all.

  There were many bizarre moments, such as standing on a remote mountain location and watching the approach, suspended on a line beneath a helicopter, of the La-Z-Boy reclining armchair used by John Rhys-Davies when in full costume and prosthetics. Then there were shooting days at Mount Ruapehu when conservation concerns about damage to 300-year-old moss growing in the area dictated that the ground had to be covered and rolls of second-hand carpet were bought and transported to the location.

  The whole area was covered with shag-pile carpeting. It looked really very weird and we had to keep stopping to make sure we didn’t get any carpet shots! Whilst I was only too happy to do everything to make sure we didn’t harm the National Park, what was really strange was that while the cast and crew were only allowed to walk on the carpet, there were masses of members of the public clambering about all over the place! Anyway, the moss didn’t get damaged and everyone was happy – including some second-hand carpet dealer!

  Things could be as fraught with unexpected complications in what might be expected to be the ‘controlled’ environment of the studio, as the day of filming Bilbo’s Birthday Party demonstrated.

  Standing on a table behind Bilbo was his birthday cake with its lighted candles; a great many candles – in fact all 111 representing Bilbo’s age. During one take, the cake, which was made out of polystyrene, caught fire and started to burn!

  As the fire took hold, the hobbit extras were all staring at it and Ian, who was trying to deliver Bilbo’s speech, realised that they were being distracted by something. He glanced back and saw what was happening, but remained totally in character as Bilbo and integrated the blazing cake into his performance: making a gesture towards it, raising his eyebrows and carrying on with the speech! There’s no way we could use the shot, but it was a triumph of professionalism!

  On the subject of actors continuing against overwhelming odds, Peter recalls the day on which they filmed the scene of the parley with The Mouth of Sauron, Mordor’s Black Lieutenant. The shoot became near farcical as Bruce Spence bravely attempted to control a skittish horse that had not taken kindly to being encased in armour. Since Bruce was wearing a helmet that showed only his mouth and left him totally unable to see or hear, the actor had absolutely no idea where he was meant to be going or where the horse was trying to go!

  None of the several equine challenges – including having to use rubber horseshoes to prevent the horses slipping on the steep slopes within Minas Tirith – can compare with the problems posed by Bill the Pony:

  For a long time we left Bill out of drafts of the script because we knew how difficult – even impossible – it was going to be to physically get a pony into the middle of a marsh or halfway up a mountain.

  The obvious answer was to forget the pony, but that was easier said than done because I knew that, for every reader of the book, the key image of the Fellowship on their journey from Rivendell to Moria was of the Nine Walkers – and a pony!

  That’s when I rashly suggested building a ‘panto pony’! Of course, the Americans didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about, because they don’t have pantomimes. So I had to explain that it was actually two guys in a costume: one playing the head and front legs and the other poor bugger having to bend over and play the back legs!

  You can imagine how this proposal went down with the studio: a high-tech movie full of CG effects and a pantomime pony! Anyway, Richard Taylor got Weta to construct this creature and it made its first

  Bil
l the Pony came very close to being written out. We had so much to film on location, it soon became clear that transporting a real pony by helicopter, along with the difficulties of taking a foreign animal into national parks, would make it virtually impossible to film him. However, we resolved it at the eleventh hour by falling back on the oldest trick in the book – the pantomime pony!

  appearance on film in the Midgewater Marshes.

  Playing the pony were two people, young and very enthusiastic: a girl in the front and a chap at the back; they may have been a couple but, if they weren’t, then they certainly came close to it after spending days together in that costume! We had a terrible struggle to get the pony to walk through the marshes because the performers were completely blind, buried in this costume and up to their waists in a real swamp. Bill would try to walk and then would start to wobble and everyone would have to rush in and catch him before he fell over! There was one hilarious moment when the front legs moved without the back legs and Bill got stretched into a sort of long sausage dog!

  One of Peter’s favourite scenes is that of Gimli sitting on the body of an Orc, with the dwarf’s axe still embedded in its central nervous system. He acknowledges that the occupants of Middle-earth were probably not aware of the concept of a central nervous system but enjoys the anachronism. However the scene – for actor and director – is more memorable because of a problem over John Rhys-Davies’ make-up.