There and Back Again

by Sean Astin

  Then Star Wars came along, and I loved that, too, especially when I saw how George Lucas had created some of the special effects using miniatures. When I worked on Memphis Belle, I felt like I really understood the process and appreciated it. Miniatures were used to re-create World War II. There were assembly lines of B-17 miniatures, all destined to be blown up in one fashion or another. And they all looked so real.

  So now, walking into this room, meeting Richard Taylor and seeing his miniatures, which were obviously the crème de la crème, I was nearly overcome with emotion. Imagine a kid who likes building models and hanging them over his bed. Imagine saying to that kid, “Where do you build your models?” and hearing him say, “I use the dining room table.” Now imagine taking that kid, who loves making model trains or rockets—a kid with an extraordinary attention to detail, for whom building models represents a method of artistic and personal expression—and saying to him, “I’m going to give you a big factory and all the tools and all the time and money you need to build the greatest model ever.”

  That kid was Richard Taylor.

  I tried to build a replica of the USS Nimitz when I was a boy, but I failed miserably. I tried to make a glider and failed. I wanted to be good at making models and miniatures, but I wasn’t. I did like remote-controlled cars and got fairly adept at making them, but that’s about it. Here I was, though, looking at Richard Taylor and a staff of about twenty-five guys who were spectacularly good at it. They’d been hired by Peter and given seemingly unlimited resources. This paint factory was vast, and the miniatures housed within were almost beyond comprehension. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but I knew it was a representation of a city. I saw orc mines, surrounded by a wall twenty feet high and a couple of hundred feet wide. There was an unbelievable level of detail in these miniatures: like a visitor admiring Renaissance paintings at the Louvre, you could stand and stare at them for hours and not grow tired of the experience. So striking was the level of detail that the cinematographer could take a 35-millimeter camera, put it right next to the miniature, and film it, and the human eye would have no idea it wasn’t full-scale.

  The experience was nothing short of stunning, and it took my breath away.

  Wow! Peter Jackson gets it. He really, really gets it.

  In hindsight, that sounds like such an ungracious, stupid thing to say, but everyone has their level of skepticism about how things can or should be done. What got me down to New Zealand was the possibility, not the certainty, that The Lord of the Rings would absolutely be done right. It’s one thing to look at pictures, one thing to know there’s a franchise, one thing to understand the potential of a director. It’s another thing entirely to look and feel and smell and hear the results. The armory, the weapons, the leather, the level of detail in every inch of the production was exactly what I would have wanted it to be. The actors were just arriving, and already Peter had accomplished so much. He had assembled a legion of artisans and craftspeople so devoted and committed that you’d get a little wave of anxiety just watching them at their stations: God, I hope when it comes time for me to do the thing I’m here to do, I can produce a fraction of the integrity, talent, and emotion that all these other people bring to their work.

  There was so much to see and soak up. Richard was talking nonstop; Peter was chiming in whenever the mood struck him. At every stop on the tour, someone would interact with us intensely and briefly, just long enough to provoke a sense of wonder and confidence, to give us the feeling that we were all going in the right direction and that it was going to be an unforgettable ride. So much was thrown at us at once, so many bewildering tidbits of information—“Weta has ordered more foam rubber than any other company on the face of the earth!”—that the effect was almost disorienting. Each person we met seemed to have some specific, almost arcane area of expertise, and each was utterly and completely thrilled to be on this production. They were devotees of the literature, experts in their field, and they were totally committed to the dream of actualizing this movie.

  Some people on the production had only the slimmest of connections to the film business, yet they possessed particular talents that merited inclusion. Others used The Lord of the Rings as an opportunity to break out of a box, to demonstrate themselves worthy of a landmark project. Consider the case of Ngila Dixon, who would win an Academy Award for her costume work on The Lord of the Rings. Ngila had been working on Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules, a pair of campy, good-looking television shows, but representative of a specific type of entertainment. I wouldn’t necessarily expect the wardrobe people to take their jobs too seriously on those programs, but you know what? They do. They absolutely do, and you realize after watching them work that the people who do Hercules can also do The Lord of the Rings, provided there’s the right leadership and resources. All in all, extraordinarily talented people were working at every level of the production, but often the lines just got blurred. It became nearly impossible for me to tell who was responsible for something or who deserved credit, because it was such a gigantic, cooperative venture.

  “Authenticity” was a buzzword. Peter wanted everything to be based on a kind of history, even if that history existed only in the mind of J. R. R. Tolkien. That’s one reason why Alan Lee’s illustrations provided more guidance than did those of John Howe. Similarly, the armor worn during battle scenes was not simply the product of a designer’s imagination, but was based on real armor. The amount of intelligence and sophistication applied during the research phase of the project, coupled with the money that was invested, allowed everyone to do their jobs at a level I had never seen on a movie set. Still, there was always a sense that cash was being burned. And while $270 million may seem like a ton of money, it goes fast. So fast, in fact, that at each level people felt they didn’t have quite enough money to do their jobs. Even so, they were doing more with what they had than anyone else would have been able to do. Why? Because they cared. They knew they were part of something extraordinary.

  It was almost impossible not to feel that way. I remember during Peter’s guided tour, stopping at a glass case filled with costumes and masks, including those worn by my father as the decrepit judge in The Frighteners.

  “Look, Alexandra,” I said, pulling my daughter close. “There’s Granddad.”

  She didn’t respond, just scrunched up her nose disapprovingly, as if to say, What? That mangy old character?

  It’s funny, when you’re in the movie business, you cycle through stages: awe, then disillusionment, and then hopefully, a new appreciation for it. And then you get lost in it all over again. You go through waves of how you experience reality and fiction. The Lord of the Rings, for me, was a psychological cyclone, an emotional, analytical torture chamber out of which grew something magical: a sense of wonder that I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. And I am so very grateful for it.

  * * *

  The notion that I’d have the opportunity to focus on my numerous entrepreneurial ventures during “downtime” in New Zealand was revealed to be pure folly within moments after we arrived in Wellington. As Peter explained some of the logistics—there would be at least three crews shooting at once, using twenty-four cameras at various locations around the country—it dawned on me: Holy shit! There isn’t going to be any downtime. I realized quickly that work would expand to exceed the time allotted. Indeed, there was never a time, in nearly a year and a half of principal photography, when Peter or any of his assistants were complacent or even satisfied. They rarely, if ever, said, “Great shot, we’ve got it; let’s move on.” Instead, we kept going back and redoing things, rewriting and reshooting scenes that, to even a trained eye, seemed to have been captured in a perfectly acceptable manner. Peter had taken all the money and resources he could extract from New Line, and then he went about the business of doing things his way, the way of a perfectionist. Early on I got the sense that no one at New Line truly understood what was happening on location.

  Sure, they were g
etting all the dailies, but that was practically irrelevant, since no one human being could possibly watch everything that was photographed on any given day. There weren’t enough hours on the clock. Consider that there were nine hundred-plus days of miniature photography, and every day an hour of footage, maybe an hour and a half, could be shot. And that was just the miniatures. Then you had the insert units shooting a half-day, the second unit shooting three hours a day, and the main unit shooting an hour a day with multiple cameras. So while on most films the dailies usually amount to maybe ninety minutes of footage, on The Lord of the Rings, daily footage could average four to six hours a day. That is astounding. At the time, it was also a bit depressing, and not simply because of the exhaustion such a schedule provoked. There was also the nagging feeling that reel upon reel of great stuff would never see the light of day, simply because there was no room for it. Yes, Peter needed a lot of material. We were shooting three movies, not one, and each was going to run for more than three hours. Nevertheless, there was no question that Peter’s schedule was so ambitious, and his vision so broad, that only a portion of what we shot would be used in the final movies.

  There were times when this presented a problem, when Peter asked for a tenth take, or a twelfth take, or a twentieth take, and I wanted to scream, for I just started losing track of what I had done.

  An actor develops a shrewd sense of what’s likely to end up on the screen. On the set of Courage under Fire, I shot a scene in a bar with Denzel Washington, and in the middle of the scene, in between takes, or when they were turning the cameras around to do my close-up after Denzel’s close-up, I had this horrible feeling that the entire plot of the movie was coming to a screeching halt while we indulged in a scene devoted to the backstory of Denzel’s character. I walked up to Ed Zwick and said, “Ed, maybe I shouldn’t be asking you this, but what are the chances that this scene is going to end up in the movie?”

  He laughed. “Pretty much none.”

  “Then why are we shooting it?”

  The reason, Ed explained, was that it was an important piece of the puzzle—not for the viewer, but for Denzel, who was trying to sort out his own character. Actor and director hadn’t arrived at a point where they felt comfortable cutting the scene from the movie, so they filmed it, possibly as a courtesy to the star, or as a way for the director to feel the nuances of the scene. I think they needed to shoot it in order to cut it from the movie. Usually, in cinema, you can put a lot more money on the screen if you get to those answers sooner; similarly, as an actor, you don’t want to get married to such indulgences. I’m not saying Ed was being wasteful—it always happens, but as an actor, you don’t want to show up at the premiere looking for the scenes you fell in love with, only to discover that they’ve been left on the cutting-room floor. That has happened to me on several occasions, and it would happen with The Lord of the Rings.

  Not that I was surprised. I knew the movie was going to be spectacular, but I wondered what would become of those little moments, those nuances that were captured somewhere on take seven, eight, or nine, with a C camera or a D camera whirling around the set, picking up reaction shots, when I was fully in character and emoting like crazy, and something magical, but peripheral, was happening. What were the odds a director could find those? One of the director’s primary tasks in the editing phase is to tell the story, or to search and destroy those moments that don’t work. But finding every little nugget that does work? Who has the time or the energy for that? It’s not the way the process is designed.

  I hoped that Peter Jackson would know just what to do, but I couldn’t imagine how anyone could budget their time and marshal their energy to accomplish the mission. What I did know, from the very first day, was that he seemed excited and inordinately confident. Talent and ambition aside, Peter remained, at his core, a fan. During that first tour, Peter joked that he wanted to have his memory erased, so he wouldn’t know how the film was made. He wanted to see it and enjoy it, just like anyone else. That’s when I really understood how unique Peter is. Even though he needed to have confidence and faith and be this titanic figure on the set, there was an overriding sense that he was engaged on a purely emotional, almost childlike level. Despite the pressure and the exhaustion and the sheer enormity of the task, he was genuinely happy to be there. I remember looking at Peter one long afternoon, roughly halfway through the production, and saying, “I’ll bet you can’t wait until this is over so that you can get a good night’s sleep.”

  He laughed softly under his breath. “I’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight, Sean.”

  And he meant it, too.

  Peter’s enthusiasm was infectious, particularly in the early days, when the entire production was bathed in optimism and energy and a sense of limitless opportunity. This feeling extended to the interaction between actors. Each time I met someone, it was like bonding with a fellow explorer. Among the first was John Rhys-Davies, who played the warrior dwarf, Gimli. We met in the Portacom, a ten-by-twenty-foot mobile hut, the kind of thing you might see at a construction site, which initially served as a green room for the cast. I was looking forward to meeting John—I’d been a fan of his ever since I was a kid, watching him as Sallah, Harrison Ford’s comic sidekick in Raiders of the Lost Ark. John was boisterous and funny, not unlike the characters he’s often played. He walked in, extended a hand, and introduced himself. “I’m John Rhys-Davies and I live on the Isle of Man, otherwise known as ten thousand alcoholics clinging to a rock in the middle of the Irish Sea. Hello, my lad!”

  Well, this is going to be interesting.

  To John’s amusement (and sometimes chagrin), I quickly jumped into an accurate impersonation of his voice as Sallah. I’d pass him on the set and say something like, “Indy, they’re digging in the wrong place!” And if he didn’t love it, he was at least tolerant. One day he did sort of raise an eyebrow and say, “You know, my boy … sometimes it borders on parody.”

  I loved being around John, even though we have generally opposing political viewpoints. He’s a very conservative man—the polar opposite of, say, Viggo Mortensen, who played Aragorn. I’m more of a centrist, so even though I don’t necessarily agree with John, I can appreciate where he’s coming from.

  It was difficult not to feel for John, who suffered like Job throughout the entire production. His face reacted badly to the makeup—and it took a long, long time for the artists to apply the makeup for Gimli. John spent countless more hours in the makeup chair than I did, and I admired his perseverance, although his discomfort was so great that his double, Brett Beattie, was called on to do an unusual amount of work—so much work, in fact, that there was discussion about Brett getting co-credit for the role of Gimli. He wasn’t the voice of Gimli and he didn’t appear in close-ups of Gimli, but day in and day out, the amount of time he spent in makeup and on the set was sufficient to prompt consideration of a co-credit from the people who were with him on the set so much. Several more close-ups of John were added in pickups, though, and the controversy, such as it was, faded away. (“I’m not in the habit of giving away the credit for my character,” John once said.) And John was a terrific, if sometimes overzealous, promoter of the film.

  “Rrrrrrraise your expectations!” he shouted at our first press conference, while thrusting an index finger into the air. “This movie is going to be bigger than STAR WARS!”

  To which Peter replied, “Settle down, John.”

  I absolutely love the combination in tone of what John achieved with his character. He strikes the perfect comic bravado and layers it with gravitas. During the premiere in Wellington, I felt like I had achieved some rite of passage when John and I rode in the same car during the ticker-tape parade.

  I met Billy Boyd (aka Pippin) in those first days, too. My first impression of Billy was magical. I was totally enamored of him, in no small part because of his voice. I loved listening to Billy, and even though I could barely understand a word he said through his thick Scottish brogue, I got t
he feeling (borne out over the course of the production) that he was a really appealing, sweet, kind of guy, the sort of man with whom I wanted to be friends. He was gentle and funny and very cool, very comfortable in his own skin. Both Billy and Dominic Monaghan (aka Merry) have a natural grace when it comes to performing humorous scenes, or when improvising for the amusement of the cast and crew. They worked well together, and that was reflected on-screen. The friendship that developed between Dom and Billy transcends description in any book I could ever write. They are unique human beings with exceptional talent. Living in close proximity to them over the years of making and promoting The Lord of the Rings taught me a lot about myself. There are cultural differences between us, to be sure. I think they were much better prepared emotionally to become pop culture figures than I was. Their sense of personal style and their comfort with themselves were qualities I occasionally found in short supply for myself. But the connection we formed was real and permanent.