There and Back Again

by Sean Astin

  “Listen,” I said, “even though there are rules about turnaround and set time, if you’re there because you want to be there, what’s the problem? Do you like the movie?”

  He shrugged. “Sure, it’s fine.”

  “Then what’s the problem? Why not just give the director what he needs?”

  But Brendan’s attitude seemed pretty sour, and I remember thinking that the pendulum had swung to the other side, that he seemed a bit harsh and cocky. “They’ve got me for ten hours a day; that’s enough.”

  I was honestly concerned for him, but I have to admit that my concern wasn’t entirely benevolent. A part of me worried that Brendan was changing, not necessarily for the better. But another part of me was envious that I wasn’t in the same situation. Studios weren’t backing up to my front door with truckloads of cash; I didn’t have the luxury of taking such an aggressive position on the set. Not that I would have, because it’s inconsistent with who I am as an artist and a man. I think I’m at my best when I’m working with a director who is passionate and driven. In that atmosphere, the hours slip away, and it doesn’t really matter, because you’re both trying to create something meaningful. There are limits, of course, as I would discover in New Zealand. It’s complicated that those lines have to become blurred sometimes. On a union shoot, it’s easy to be there and be fresh and give a thousand percent, because union guidelines govern how many hours you can work. But there are times—and The Lord of the Rings was a perfect example—when the guidelines become an almost insurmountable obstacle.

  All of those things were running through my mind as I absorbed the reality of being a part of this project. Whether or not the film would be a “success,” with all that term implies, did not enter my thinking. Wait, that’s not quite true. It didn’t dominate my thinking. After the initial shock and delirium wore off, which took at least a few days, I began to think about the more practical aspects of the job: it would swallow a year and a half of my life, and all the other projects I’d been developing through Lava Entertainment were now in limbo. I didn’t want them just to stop, so we generated a postcard for all our current and potential business partners saying, “The volcano is going dormant for a year and a half. Then it will explode again!” I had thought—again, naively—that perhaps when I got to New Zealand, I’d be able to continue to develop projects. The world had become a much smaller place, right? I’d have cell phones, access to the Internet. Most important, I’d have plenty of downtime. Samwise Gamgee was an important character, but not the star of The Lord of the Rings. The “story” was the star. This was to be a true ensemble piece, and as such it was likely to provide plenty of opportunities for individual actors to pursue outside interests.

  As it turned out, there were gaping holes in my strategy. First of all, I didn’t have enough money to be a bi-hemisphere mogul. That became clear right away. Second, and most important of all, there was almost no free time. After the first thirty-six hours of boot camp, it was obvious that my life was not my own. I didn’t think that my services would be required twelve hours a day, every day. I was wrong.

  I was part of the Fellowship.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I still couldn’t read the book.

  I tried. Many times. Not having the job or fretting about not getting the job was no longer a valid excuse, so I came up with another one: There’s no time to focus on it. This was true to the extent that in the month between getting the job and leaving for New Zealand, Christine and I had innumerable tasks to keep us busy.

  Even though we were going to be out of the country for the next year and a half, we had made a decision to take up residence, however briefly, in our newly acquired home. That proved to be another major strategic mistake, for it needlessly complicated lives that were already complicated enough. We did this for reasons that were largely sentimental. First, we wanted to convince ourselves that everything would be fine, that I could pay for the house, take possession of it, and treat it like a home. And second, we wanted to teach our daughter, Alexandra, what we hoped would be a valuable lesson—that moving from house to house is a natural part of life, and not necessarily traumatic. We wanted her to see her new room, sleep in it, and feel comfortable there. Christine and I didn’t have it in our hearts (or heads) to tell her, “We’re going on an adventure, but you’ll have your own room in New Zealand.” We wanted Alexandra to feel like her real home was in the United States, in Los Angeles. That was probably not as important as we made it out to be, since she was only two years old at the time. But I wanted her to recognize her room when we came back, which I thought would happen far sooner than it did.

  We’d been warned that the production would require us to be on location for eighteen months, with very few breaks, but I didn’t really believe this. Although I had feigned belief in the warning, I honestly felt that things would work out differently, that at some point we’d all be furloughed for a month or six weeks, and in that time the whole family would return to L.A. and get reacquainted with our new house. The home I felt I deserved to be in, which, I know (and I knew it then), is such a ludicrous idea—it’s amazing the power of the human mind, the way you can convince yourself that you are entitled to stuff.

  It was a neat house. Situated in the Encino Hills, it had a long, private driveway and a serpentine wall and a courtyard with Spanish tile. It wasn’t terribly big, but it was a really cool, interesting house, with white shutters on the doors and a sturdy granite-topped island in the kitchen. It felt like the kind of place an artist would live in, and I was proud to be one of its new owners. Sometimes we’d see deer nibbling outside the window, which in Los Angeles is not a common sight. It’s easy for me to understand why people in Nepal or any great mountainous region like to live high in the hills. You wake up in the morning and look out over the vista, and you can’t help but feel alive. Such a view can have an intoxicating effect. I’d go out in the morning and stand there like General Patton, looking out over the valley—my valley—where I had lived for eight years, and to the hills beyond. The mountain I was standing on was where I’d spent the first twenty years of my life, and I felt some silly kind of power that wasn’t real at all but that somehow gave me a sense of security and value.

  Had I only known that for eighteen months my dream house would become little more than an expensive and glorified kennel for our dog and a temporary residence for an assortment of house sitters (including my brother Tom, who helped defray some of the costs and gave a real sense of family to the house), I might have exhibited a bit more common sense.

  * * *

  The scripts landed with a thud! smacking the granite countertop like a bag of wet cement. It was the first time I had seen them, three great slabs of paper, each bound separately by large metal hoops, each fat enough to represent not just a single film, but a four-hour miniseries, hand-delivered by a studio emissary. This was a sacred moment, one I had anticipated with escalating enthusiasm, the grand unveiling of the story. Before the studio would agree to deliver the scripts, I, like all of the actors in the movie, was required to sign a confidentiality and nondisclosure agreement. In no uncertain terms, it stated that the material I was going to read, and the events I would witness while in New Zealand, were industry secrets and thus proprietary in nature.

  On a superficial level this was not unusual. Scripts and story lines are the subject of intense secrecy in Hollywood. Warren Beatty wouldn’t give a full script to anybody; he would only issue a few pages at a time, and then he’d pull them back and have them destroyed. Why? For reasons known only to him, although one can reasonably presume that it was so that no one would know what was happening in the story. We liked to joke that no one ever seemed to know what was going on with Warren, or what he had in mind with the screenplay, or even if there really was a screenplay. He had an assistant who always seemed to be at his side, and we wondered whether she was privy to information that no one else had—like what the hell the story was about—and if so, did she carry cyanid
e capsules to be taken in the event she was captured by someone who might want to interrogate her and leak crucial plot points to an eager moviegoing public?

  Why such secrecy? I don’t know. To maintain the element of surprise, perhaps. On The Goonies, Steven Spielberg wanted to promote a sense of adventure, so he and Dick Donner once blindfolded several members of the young cast and backed us onto a set that had been designed to look like a pirate ship. The feeling the two wanted to capture on film was the feeling they wanted the audience to have: the feeling of surprise, of wonder and awe. For Warren, though, I think it had more to do with his political ideas driving the movie, and not wanting other people to sabotage the process. To that end, he keeps everyone involved a little disoriented. For many directors and studio executives and writers, it comes down to the twin issues of privacy and piracy. No one wants their ideas stolen, of course. And it’s important to control the flow of information, to mount a public relations and marketing campaign on a schedule that best suits the needs of the people who are most heavily invested in the process. True or not, if word leaks out that a script isn’t what it should be, the subsequent wave of negativity can stop a project in its tracks. The paranoia is even more palpable now, thanks to the incredible scope and power of the Internet. Information and misinformation, not to mention actual words from a script, can go worldwide in a heartbeat.

  The power of the Internet is best reflected by a man named Harry Knowles, who runs a Web site called Ain’t It Cool News. A self-proclaimed (and widely acknowledged) ambassador for the fans, Knowles is a movie lover who somehow manages to get his hands on almost everything: script synopses, the latest deals, actors’ and directors’ salaries, behind-the-scenes gossip from movie sets. He predicts which movies are likely to be successful, and which are likely to fail, not merely by guessing, but by using the mountains of legitimate information he accumulates. As a result, Harry Knowles, despite living in Texas, is considered one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, and the studios, which once loathed and denigrated him, now actively court him.

  As I understand it, Peter Jackson and Harry Knowles are fairly tight. Despite his newly acquired status as a Hollywood titan, Peter remains something of an iconoclast, and I think there is a mutual respect between Knowles and him. Each had a genuine desire to see The Lord of the Rings done right, and to sincerely enoble the efforts of the fans. After all, Peter is a fan, too. He wanted to stoke the flames of the fans’ passion, so he gave them little things, tidbits of information to whet their appetite. But not too much. Amazingly enough, almost nothing appeared on Knowles’s website that Peter did not want to be there. That’s one of the many admirable things about Peter: he understands and appreciates the fandom, and so he interacts comfortably with people like Harry Knowles. They complement each other in a power corridor, and there’s nothing the studios can do about it. Nor should they. Peter and Harry operated in the interest of the fans, and Harry, grateful for a bit of early access, honored his friendship with Peter.

  In a much broader sense, Peter develops important relationships with important people based on trust and mutual respect. I don’t think Peter gives trust too easily, and yet in my case, once I arrived in New Zealand, I felt as though he trusted me almost completely—and almost instantly. Of course, he would have known that I had signed the nondisclosure agreement by then, and that knowledge would most certainly assuage any fears that I or anyone involved might betray his confidence. But, I’m talking about a feeling between people, one of openness and honesty, a sense that not only are you free to express yourself, but that your thoughts and opinions are encouraged. Granted, the sword cuts both ways, because what you say counts with Peter and Fran, and if your thoughts are insincere or poorly developed, it won’t be lost on them. I say this from personal experience. More than once I’ve stumbled into a conversation or found myself making utterances that I’ve not wanted to stand behind upon further reflection. Peter and Fran can be very understanding and forgiving, but I’ve also seen what happens when people try to take advantage of them or behave too selfishly. I’ve watched Peter make a mental note and resolve to guard himself more closely in the future. I find it extraordinary that Peter doesn’t seem to hold grudges or to act out of malice or revenge. I like to think of him as a somewhat benevolent and more fully evolved creature than most, who by sheer force of will accomplishes spectacular feats and by the grace of his talent can afford to be generous of spirit. He can be exacting when he needs to be and rewarding when it’s earned.

  Yet I can’t deny that I was somewhat nervous about signing this particular confidentiality clause, containing as it did some of the most onerous language I had ever seen. The agreement essentially stipulated that if I disclosed anything I’d seen in the process of making The Lord of the Rings, the studio could sue me for the entire cost of the movie, a figure that was estimated to be $270 million! That was slightly more than I had in my savings account, so you can understand my trepidation.

  “Jesus! Should I sign this?” I asked my attorney.

  “Well, that depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether you want the part.”

  Knowing I was in no position to demand a softening of the language in the confidentiality clause, I adopted the attitude of a soldier in a covert military operation and signed the agreement. However, I made it clear that I would remain true to the spirit of the contract only until the movies were released. I can understand and appreciate trade secrets and rights and all of that, and I did sincerely want to protect the movie. So I signed. But there was an ominous feeling to it. I was on the inside of this organization, and I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if the door suddenly slammed and I couldn’t get out. That’s a silly feeling, of course, because it was after all just a movie. I was going to work for New Line Cinema, not for the Pentagon or the CIA. Nevertheless, I felt like I was taking a chance by signing that agreement.

  Any doubt that the stakes were higher than on a typical film was laid to rest when I got to New Zealand, and it became instantly apparent things were going to be done differently. Great sums of money had been invested, and the result was an unusual alliance between the production and the New Zealand government, from the department of immigration right down to the local law-enforcement officers. It was all done with great aplomb, mainly because Peter has such an easygoing, hippified personality, but you knew, if you were intelligent and reasonably observant, that things were different than they were in Hollywood. You realized when you passed the gate and the guard looked you in the eye that there were people who were not getting in. It didn’t feel like the studios in Los Angeles, where I can always talk my way onto a lot because I’m a child of that community and I’m not a threat, and they recognize me or my parents. Not in New Zealand. Uh-uh. When you crossed the threshold that separated the city of Wellington from the city within a city that served as the headquarters of The Lord of the Rings, you felt like you were entering the vortex. You felt like you were in Peter Jackson’s domain.

  * * *

  I had signed the confidentiality agreement, had agreed to play by the rules. Next came a series of clandestine conversations, the subject of which was the transference of information—specifically, the scripts. Typically, the discussions went something like this: “You signed the agreement? Good. You’ll have to talk to Jan next. She’s Peter’s assistant. She’ll tell you precisely when the scripts will arrive—right to the minute. You’ll have to be there to sign for them.”

  I’d respond with a guttural, “Understood,” as if I were an undercover agent. Really, though, what I was thinking was: What’s the problem here? It’s just a script. But there was a culture of secrecy about it. When the scripts arrived, I opened the package and noticed immediately that the title page did not reflect the title of the movie, which caused me more than a little confusion. I spent five minutes trying to figure out the title page, at the center of which, in big bold letters, was the word “Jamboree.” Finally it dawned
on me that this was a deception: a fake title on a fake page! Why? Well, imagine you’re an actor sitting in a coffee shop or some other public place, trying to combine a little work-related reading with some relaxation. That happens, although it’s not usually a great idea. The fake page allows for a degree of privacy. A fan might know you’re looking at a script, but at least this way he or she won’t know the name of it.

  All in all, it was an impressive package. Most scripts are held together with brads, but this one had big circular binders, so the pages couldn’t be easily ripped out. There were watermarks, too, on every page. This in itself is not all that unusual: important scripts, those attached to “name” directors, or propped up by fat budgets, often have watermarks. But not like this. I had seen Steven Spielberg’s watermarks; I had seen Spike Lee’s. Usually they’re nothing more than a series of numerals: 001, 002, 003. Each person is assigned a particular code. But the watermarks on “Jamboree” were different. Across the first page, in red, were two words: Sean Astin

  Seeing that watermark took my breath away. The notion that I was literally burned into the work of the director and writers left no doubt in my mind that I belonged in the movie. It’s hard to describe how that felt, not just turning each page and reading the story, but also seeing my name, over and over, a constant reminder that I was in the loop. On the first pass I merely looked through the script to see how many lines of dialogue were attributed to Samwise Gamgee, because I really didn’t know yet how vital or visible a character he really was. I had heard from others that Sam loomed large in the story, but having not yet finished the books and not having seen the scripts, I could only guess what that meant. I had agreed to do this movie and accept a specific salary without even knowing who the character was, which was quite a leap of faith, but an appropriate one, I thought, under the circumstances. A quick gallop through the scripts confirmed that belief: “Sam draws his sword and charges!”