There and Back Again

by Sean Astin

  Unfortunately, it’s part of my personality to miss things on the first pass, so when I started reading The Lord of the Rings, I barely noticed the hobbits’ feet. There’s an excuse for that, I suppose: feet aren’t a big issue in The Lord of the Rings, having been explained and detailed rather thoroughly in The Hobbit. But I hadn’t read that, either. When they started applying the feet prosthetics, however, it sort of dawned on me: Hey! Feet are of special significance to hobbits! Sounds ridiculous, but that’s the way it was. Something about placing my feet in a gelatinous goop caused an awakening, and I thought, I’ll bet Peter and Fran realize how special the feet are, and I’ll bet Tolkien gave it an immense amount of consideration. That was the first moment when I appreciated the tenderness and the sense of humor and the twinkle in the eye of the author. (By the way, when I arrived in New Zealand, I found it immensely amusing that some folks seemed to have little use for shoes, including Peter, who routinely showed up on the set barefoot and bedraggled, much like a hobbit.)

  My ignorance of such things, things that are so familiar to fans and devoted readers of Tolkien, might seem incomprehensible, even offensive, but I had only my particular vantage point. I was looking at the role as an actor for hire, so in the beginning at least, I didn’t immerse myself in research. That’s not meant to be an excuse, merely an explanation. I can recall my stepmother, Val, who had been corresponding with Fran and Peter off and on for years, sending me pictures of the hobbits and of Gandalf via e-mail. She understood the importance of feet in Tolkien’s world. And I’m sure my father did, too.

  You see, John Astin actually auditioned for a major role in The Lord of the Rings. While I was fighting for the part of Sam, he was asked to audition for the role of Gandalf. Ian McKellen now owns the role, of course, and it will forever be hard to imagine anyone else in his place. But my father was in contention for that part, and I wanted in the worst way for him to get it. There had been talk of Sean Connery playing Gandalf, and Ian, of course, was involved in the process from the very beginning. Those two actors are heavyweights, and while on the surface it might seem that any sensible director would prefer either of them to John Astin, that isn’t necessarily the case. My father is a classically trained Shakespearean actor. Yes, he’s most famous for starring in The Addams Family and Night Court, for doing the Killer Tomato movies, for being this goofy goober of a guy. And he’s good at that sort of thing. But he’s a serious man who has given extraordinary and powerful performances. Ultimately, I think I was probably more innately right for Sam than my dad was for Gandalf, although I’ve totally muted this thought in my interactions with him.

  My dad was ambivalent at the time because he was gearing up for his one-man show about Edgar Allen Poe. He is also always fielding offers for TV shows, theater parts, and films. But he knows Peter and Fran, and he respects them immensely. To that end, he was more than willing to prepare an audition for them. I’m a little fuzzy on what took place in the actual room, but according to my dad, Peter gave him a note that represented a real challenging adjustment given the research he’d done and his first take on the character. Peter once said to me that my father was great in the audition. Dad told me that he considered shooting a videotape of himself as Gandalf once he was able to reconcile what he knew of the character with what Peter had wanted. If memory serves, time was short and there was a lot going on. I think it’s fair to say that my dad didn’t want to complicate matters for me with Peter, because he knew how much I wanted the part and what it would mean for my career. I think he also knew better than I did just how all-consuming an endeavor it would be, and he was reluctant to give up all that he’d been working on. The point of the story is simply this: it is possible for thoughtful, talented people to work and thrive in a complex emotional or “political” environment.

  I felt a little awkward when my dad came to my house to congratulate me and celebrate, because I wasn’t sure if he was more disappointed than he was letting on. To be sure, he was extraordinarily proud of me, happy for me, and excited for the adventure we were certain to have. If I sensed a little hint of disappointment, perhaps I was projecting my own guilt at having gotten a golden part in a charmed project when he had not. It may seem like a confusing contradiction, but I can also say that I sensed a little relief in him that he didn’t get the part. Did Dad know something I didn’t know? Something about how grueling an experience it was going to be? Seriously though, I never would have gotten the chance to play Sam if it wasn’t for my father—and for the contributions of a lot of other people. But if I had to pick the single most influential person outside of the project, the individual most responsible for my being prepared and capable of doing the job, it would have to be my father.

  Dad has spent the better part of the last decade steeped in the richness of an extraordinarily artistic life. He has returned to his roots at Johns Hopkins and the city of Baltimore, where he spent much time in his youth. Now he is a guest lecturer at that hallowed institution. He has a condo near the campus (bicoastal, you know), and he thrives on the energy of his students. He travels with his one-man show, Once Upon a Midnight: An Evening with Edgar Allen Poe, and performs in many other plays. I think he is deservedly enjoying one of the most fulfilling and exciting chapters in his life. I’m not sure all of that would have been true if Peter had offered him the part of Gandalf, and he had spent the better part of five years focused on The Lord of the Rings. Regardless, I will be forever grateful to him for all that he has done for me and given me, and what is more, I’m probably more proud of him than he could ever be of me.

  If you, the reader, learn anything about me in this book, I’ll be happy. But I’m sure that my father would prefer that I spend my time developing myself as an actor and not pouring through the subtleties of deal making, money issues, and the mechanics of building a career for the sake of a book. He is a purist when it comes to craft, and in that respect he is wiser than I ever will be. He is my inspiration and my conscience; in a sense, he is my own personal Gandalf.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I arrived with my family in New Zealand on the last day of August 1999, and along with the other actors portraying members of the Fellowship, immediately began an intensive training period. With war movies it’s not unusual for actors to be subjected to a ten-day boot camp; our boot camp for The Lord of the Rings consisted of six weeks of training, from dialect coaching to fight training with Bob Anderson, one of the great sword masters of Hollywood (he tutored Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks, among others). Then there were canoe training, weight training, and organized bonding sessions with the cast. It was baptism by fire, inculcation into a regimentation, watching Peter and his crew learn how to organize a vast movie machine.

  From the second I got off the plane, I knew making this movie was going to be unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Usually if you travel halfway around the world to film on location, you’re given time to adjust, to get comfortable. There’s a welcome basket and a meeting, maybe a massage or a nap. You talk about stuff and just sort of sit around for a while. You get the movie-star treatment. Not on The Lord of the Rings. Basically, we got off the plane in Wellington and were whisked away to an industrial part of town. You would think that with a $270 million trilogy, filming would take place on something that at least looked like a Hollywood sound set. Uh-uh. There were no wrought-iron gates, no Warner Brothers water tower, no Hollywood sign, nothing. New Zealand, especially in less developed areas, is a breathtakingly beautiful place, but Wellington is a city, and like any city, it has its industrial side. And that, mixed with a nearby quaint neighborhood, is where we set up shop. Specifically, in an old abandoned paint factory.

  Peter was there on the day we arrived, and the atmosphere was a little reminiscent of Willy Wonka. There was all this ambient energy and nervousness about the arrival of Peter. “Peter is going to be here now, and his schedule is very tight, so don’t expect too much.” When he came in, bounding around the corner in bare feet and mangy h
air and a rumpled T-shirt, looking like a mad scientist who sort of giggles his way through life, I couldn’t help but be amused—and impressed. We shook hands or hugged, and he gave us a quick tour.

  A few words about hugging. I was raised in a family and in a culture where everyone hugs—a lot! As a greeting, a parting salutation, or a simple expression of goodwill, hugs have been a big part of my life. I have even used hugs as a way to ask for forgiveness or as an act of reconciliation. As far as Peter Jackson is concerned, I think I chose to hug him more readily and more frequently than he may have been initially comfortable with. But I’m proud to say that over the five years of our working relationship and friendship, he has been willing to enjoy more than a few good hugs!

  Peter was the proud papa of an extraordinary display of creativity, and every second I was with him, whether I wanted to or not, I found myself studying him. Not just the way he handled the technical aspects of directing a $270 million production, but how he interacted with people, what it was about his personality that prompted people to be drawn to him, what it was in his decision-making process that made him so much smarter than I was. From the moment I met Peter, I thought, If I can earn the respect of this cat, if I can get him to see me as an equal, I will have achieved what I really want to achieve on this movie. That he was disappointed in me, or frustrated with me, or not willing to use what I had to offer the process, was at times mortally frustrating to me. But that’s more my shortcoming than his. It’s funny: as smart as I sometimes think I am, it’s amazing how stupid I can be when it comes to the way I perceive other people.

  As I see it, Peter Jackson’s brilliance, at least as it pertains to filmmaking, stems primarily from his cleverness and his relationship to power, and the way he can exert his power comfortably and with aplomb. I wasn’t in certain rooms with him when critical decisions were being made. I didn’t see how he built the consortium or how he would build consensus, or how he would strategically machinate toward achieving a particular thing at a particular moment. But I did see some things, and I did hear stories. I know at one point, when he was $11 million into the Miramax deal, he found out that Miramax had misgivings about the way the production would be handled. The Lord of the Rings was originally to be divided into two segments, not three, and the studio was questioning the wisdom of that choice; maybe one movie would be enough. So somehow Peter took the project to New Line, which not only agreed to support more than a single film, but a trilogy!

  Over time these types of stories become somewhat apocryphal or mythologized, and getting at the truth of them is best left to journalists, film students, or the primaries themselves. Suffice it to say that anyone who could pull off such a miraculous feat had to know something I didn’t know. Probably a lot I didn’t know. There is an idiosyncratic part of my personality, a flaw in my attitude, that has informed a lot of interactions I have had with extraordinary people. For some reason, when I was a kid hanging around movie sets or sound stages, I wanted to be in charge of everything. I wanted to feel as though I could, to some extent, control the environment. Of course, I couldn’t actually compel people to do things, but I developed a knack for being persuasive. People used to say I could sell ice to the Eskimos. I’m not sure where this unctuousness came from, but to a greater or lesser extent, it’s been a component part of my life. I used to joke that I suffered from a rare disease called “proximity to scope.” Because I grew up in such close proximity to filmmakers who routinely achieved greatness in their work, I naturally assumed that I was capable of doing equal or even better work. Imagine Patton inhabiting the body of a ten-year-old Hollywood brat and you’re getting close. Now picture me in New Zealand being exposed for the first time to the brain trust and nerve center of Peter Jackson’s outfit. I was in awe and had to admit to myself that I was at least momentarily out of my depth. Then and there, I resolved to learn everything I possibly could about every aspect of this phenomenal enterprise.

  Walking through Weta Workshop, I saw ironsmiths working on swords and shields, and hundreds, if not thousands, of orc masks. We toured the digital workshop, where so much of the films’ groundbreaking computer-generated imagery would be produced, as well as an editing facility and the aptly named 3Foot6 Limited studio, where the hobbit holes had been assembled. There was an oversized hobbit hole, and right next to it, a miniature one, so that when Gandalf walked into the miniature hobbit hole, he would look and feel like a giant. I was struck by the array of techniques being applied to bring Tolkien’s world to life: some of it was clearly on the technological forefront, but some of it was decidedly low-tech. I would learn over the course of the production that anything was worth trying. No good idea would be dismissed as unreasonable.

  That the production design seemed to be driven by Alan Lee’s artwork was also readily apparent. I’d been impressed by his drawings, but here I was in awe of his imagination. The man behind the art is more subdued, but no less impressive, than the work he creates. We met on that first day in Alan’s office, a spare, nondescript little room made distinctive only by the drawings he had tacked to the wall. Standing there, soaking up the atmosphere, I had a sense of understanding and clarity that I hadn’t experienced before. There weren’t a lot of drawings in the edition of The Lord of the Rings I had purchased, so this was the first time I felt a strong visual sense of Middle-earth. I’d read the scripts on the plane and found them exciting—all the fighting and the spiders and the trolls and everything—but this was something else.

  I wondered how we’d actualize this other world I was discovering. Sure, I knew about blue or green screens, but from the smell of fresh-cut wood from the sets, to the paint and the hum of activity of hundreds of crew folks all around us, it was clear that Middle-earth was under construction. And frankly I wasn’t sure how it would look. Now contemporary actors have a lot of history and information to draw on. Our collective consciousness is pretty strong for us in the area of special-effects pictures. We’ve all seen various “making of” videos. I’d seen Sam Neill running away and looking over his shoulder at a tennis ball that would later be replaced by a digital T. rex in Jurassic Park. I knew what sort of environment I was entering, and I thought I could do that sort of work pretty well, because I have a good imagination. But here, surrounded by Alan’s illustrations, it suddenly felt real.

  A few of John Howe’s paintings were there, too, but somehow I wasn’t as drawn to them. In fact, I worried that if they used Howe’s color pallet for the set design, it wouldn’t be the kind of movie I wanted to see; it would just be a real cool fantasy movie. I didn’t know Peter Jackson’s work well enough to know which direction he would choose. The Frighteners had been visually arresting, but I’d had problems with it. I enjoyed the special effects, but I didn’t really like the campiness of some of it, and the third act disappointed me. (Of course, I hadn’t yet watched the extended version, which I’m sure is more satisfying.) What came through in the early pages of The Lord of the Rings was excellence: storytelling in service of important ideas. Not the world, not the characters, not even the story, but rather the richness of the language and the quality of the ideas as they were being presented. It struck me on an intellectual level, rather than an emotional level, and the challenge, in my mind, was to make sure that my artistry would be able to survive in concert with literary work of that caliber. Ridiculous as it may seem now, I was concerned, maybe even a little worried, that Peter wouldn’t understand that aspect of the book.

  I was wrong, of course. I underestimated Peter, or at least didn’t know him well enough then to understand his cleverness and level of commitment. There’s an old saying by Thomas Edison: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” That’s Peter. Man, he perspires like no one I’ve ever seen. And I mean that in the best possible way. He works at it. Sometimes I think people fail to recognize that trait in artists. They think it’s all about talent or luck or some mystical creative spark. I’ve experienced it myself; I’ve found
my own creativity muted by other people’s genius occasionally, because I look at what they accomplish and I think, “I would never have thought of that. How could they be so smart? How could they be so inspired?” Well, inspiration takes work. I’ve heard Peter talk repeatedly about using the art of Alan Lee and John Howe to gain inspiration. But what does that really mean? It’s more than just saying, “Wow, that artwork is incredible!” It’s deeper. It’s saying, “I’m going to communicate with that artist, and I’m going to convince him to work with me.” That’s what Peter did. He figured out what really inspired him.

  My read on The Frighteners was that the studio wasn’t interested in the dark, psychological stuff; they just wanted the really scary set pieces. So they turned the sound way up and assaulted the audience. I missed a sense of universality or an optimism in The Frighteners. It seemed designed for people interested in cool effects, and in death and dying. It wasn’t a movie for me. Even so, I liked it because my dad was in it and because I could appreciate the artistry. I liked Michael J. Fox, the star, although I was disappointed that he didn’t look quite right. Only much later did I learn that around that time Michael was just starting to suffer from Parkinson’s disease. I admired that both Peter and Fran seemed to care more about Michael the human being than their movie, despite the stakes being so high. That, too, gave me faith.

  Equally impressive was my first meeting with Richard Taylor, whose special-effects work on The Lord of the Rings would be honored with multiple Academy Awards. Richard brought me in to see the “bigatures,” the not-so-miniature miniature sets the crew had painstakingly constructed, and they were so beautiful, so perfect, so real, that I wanted to cry. I had loved miniatures when I was a kid. Not that I was smart enough to figure out how to fashion them or create them. My mother had an assistant, Elaine, who was one of the most artistic people I’ve ever met, and when as a kid I had a brief fetish for Smurfs, she made miniatures for me out of cardboard, the most wonderful, elaborate Smurf houses and Smurf garages you could imagine. She made a train station to go with my train set, a lovingly detailed building based, she said, on the station she often visited near her home in Connecticut. Elaine spent hundreds of hours making these things for me and my little brother, and we’d play with them for days on end. Sometimes I’d film them with my Super 8 camera. Elaine wasn’t just a model maker; she was like a design engineer. And yet she was working as an assistant for my mother, which I found perplexing. Why, I later wondered, hadn’t anyone figured out how to make her a rocket scientist?