There and Back Again

by Sean Astin

  In many settings Viggo used The Lord of the Rings as a pulpit. At some point he decided that he was not going to promote the film purely to promote the film. Instead, he was going to use it as a platform to espouse his political discontent, in service of his humanitarian ideals. And he really is an idealist when it comes to his commitment to peace, which is somewhat ironic, considering he’s done more than a few movies that seem to contradict that stance, G.I. Jane and Crimson Tide being the most notable. But I know he is genuinely committed to a liberal ideology, and I feel a kind of kinship with him in that. Emotionally, I’m pretty close to where he is. Politically, he wants to be one of the voices on the fringe, someone who is committed to pushing the extremes of the discussion; he doesn’t really want to make his views accessible to the broadest number of people. Viggo probably thinks I sell out too quickly or drift too close to the middle, but that’s okay. I think the world is big enough for guys like Viggo and guys like me to operate.

  As an actor, it’s hard not to admire Viggo. Ninety-nine percent of the time, he was totally in character. And he was a constant body in motion. If I was a sedentary blob because I was fat or had the feet on, or because I was depressed about not having enough to do, Viggo was always moving, creating things, stirring up shit. He was a catalyst, and people enjoyed his spirit and energy. Sometimes, just for the sheer hell of it, he’d pass out chocolate to the hobbits, because he knew it made us happy. He was like the chocolate fairy. And he was always coming and going. He’d jump on a plane and fly back to Los Angeles to go to his son’s graduation, then turn right around and fly back—a thirty-six-hour trip!—and go right to the set. If this left him exhausted or grumpy, you’d never know it, in part because it worked for the role. Viggo was Strider, right? The valiant warrior on an endless journey. Who cared if he had bags under his eyes? It made sense.

  From the beginning, Viggo seemed pretty comfortable and confident about what he was doing. That night at the Green Parrot, we didn’t talk too much about the part of Aragorn. Rather, we focused on the fact that we were both approaching the craft with confidence and goodwill. Once that was understood, there wasn’t much left to say. When I heard that Viggo would be joining the cast, I thought back to the first time I had seen him, in a film called Perfect Murder, starring Michael Douglas. Viggo was the villain in that movie, but his character was also an artist. I remember thinking not only that he was going to be a star, but also that there was a connection between actor and character. I remember thinking, Wow, I’ll bet he’s a lot like that in real life (the artist, I mean, not the murderer).

  And so he is.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I’ve frequently used the word “faith” to describe the attitude required to survive the filming of The Lord of the Rings. Faith in the process, faith in the adventure, faith in the director and writers and producers. Faith in fellow cast members. Faith in the technicians and artists and crew who brought Tolkien’s Middle-earth to life.

  Faith was required because, for the actors, at least, there was no control whatsoever. There was simply an eighteen-month roller-coaster ride that we hoped would somehow result in a film worthy of the work that had gone into it. Sometimes it was hard, if not downright impossible, to envision the outcome or to imagine that anyone, including Peter Jackson, had a clear picture of what the finished product would look like. I’m quite sure now that that wasn’t the case, that in fact Peter knew exactly where he was going and how he wanted to get there. Like soldiers in a battle, though, the actors were more concerned with the mundane task of placing one foot in front of another, slogging onward day after day.

  In a typical production, once you complete a scene and break a set, there is no going back. It’s in the can. It’s history. If you don’t get it quite right (and it’s never quite right, incidentally), well, too bad. Time is money, and rarely does it makes sense to reset the scaffolding, reposition the camera, the crew. So if you’re not happy as the director or the actor, once you break it down, you’re out of luck. That was not the case with The Lord of the Rings. We’d go back again, and again, and again.

  Sets would be rebuilt, cast and crew dispatched, scenes rewritten. Sometimes this would happen days or weeks after the scene had been originally shot; other times it would happen months, even years later, when we returned to New Zealand for pickups. There was constant reworking, and thus a constant sense that it was never, ever going to be finished. You’d finish a scene, get it right, or so you thought; then you’d look at it in dailies, and if it wasn’t perfect or almost perfect, you’d go back. This approach was at once exciting and frustrating, because as an actor you had to reprogram your internal clock, your truth meter, your way of knowing if the director is shooting straight with you. We’ve all been asked many times, “How did you keep everything straight?” The answer is, we didn’t. Or at least I didn’t. Certain people kept certain things straight at certain moments, I’m sure, but a lot of stuff seemed to me impossible to comprehend.

  A normal day for the hobbits involved getting to the set at, say, 4:30 in the morning and spending a couple of hours in the makeup chair, having prosthetic feet applied, as well as ears, wigs, and costumes. Then, as on any movie set, there was a lot of “hurry up and wait,” as the crew prepared sets or as thousands of extras marched into place. Then, all of a sudden, you were thrust into Middle-earth, ready to fight a Balrog or a cave troll or a giant spider or ten thousand orcs. Although we set out to shoot chronologically, that approach was essentially discarded early in the process. Every site, every location, was used in every possible way. So it wasn’t unusual to be filming three scenes from three different movies in a single day.

  As an actor you want to exist “in the moment.” That’s a cliché, I know, but such a philosophy was absolutely crucial to the success of this production. In fact, since so much was happening at once, there was no other option. You might be at the top of an active volcano at sunrise, and then later in the afternoon find yourself on a tennis court, surrounded by polystyrene boulders, with each scene requiring a completely different set of skills and emotions. A Zen-like approach to acting was required: take a little snapshot of your mind and your soul right before you start whatever it is you’re to do at any given moment and ask, Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing here? And then accept the idea that you’re going along for the ride of your life, and that everything will work out in the end.

  “Controlled chaos” is a phrase that accurately describes the filming of The Lord of the Rings. The logistics accomplishment alone was staggering, as thousands of people had to be moved around the country. At any one time we would have five helicopters ferrying people to the top of a mountain, while Peter monitored three or four different televisions with a satellite link so he could see what the other crews were doing. Meanwhile, he would be talking on the phone and on the radio, calmly and patiently issuing orders and directions. It was almost unfathomable. What started to develop over time was a sense of righteousness and inevitability about the quality of the work, that the whole project was moving inexorably in a direction that was going to yield something magnificent. And that sustained us even in the murkiest of times.

  One of the things fans sometimes fail to grasp about the making of the three movies is that we used the entire country! You say that to some people and they don’t quite get it, for they think of New Zealand as a dot in the South Pacific, located somewhere in the vicinity of Australia and probably encompassing a landmass no larger than Rhode Island. Wrong. Way, way wrong. New Zealand is three thousand miles off the coast of Australia, and it’s as far south as you can go before hitting Antarctica. It’s a diverse region spanning two islands and more than 103,000 square miles. As a point of reference, it is larger than the United Kingdom and only slightly smaller than Italy. And yet somehow we experienced much of what New Zealand has to offer. True, the production was based in Wellington, and we filmed a good deal of the movies on sets and soundstages in and around the city. But we were also all over bo
th islands, and as we traveled I was repeatedly struck by what a wondrous and unique place the country is, with its tropical rain forests, desert expanses, snow-capped mountains, rain-swollen rivers, even active volcanoes. Think about it: we filmed for six weeks on a rumbling mountaintop! How amazing is that? By the time we left the country I’d seen so many spectacular vistas, and said so many wonderful things about New Zealand, that I felt like a poster child for the Ministry of Tourism.

  New Zealand was the perfect place to film The Lord of the Rings. It’s almost as though there’s a tunnel through the center of the earth connecting England and New Zealand, as if Tolkien were alive in one place and wanted to create this mythology in another place. And while that place may have existed only in his mind, it’s hard not to notice the similarities between Middle-earth and New Zealand.

  Tolkien devotes thousands of words to vivid descriptions of the land, incredibly rich and evocative prose about topography. He brings the region to life. You know, you can fly from Seattle to Miami in three hours, and in that time you barely notice the country passing beneath you in a blur. Cities are specks, and mountain ranges are but lumps on the landscape. Imagine, though, what it would be like to actually walk across the Rocky Mountains or to hike the Appalachian Trail; imagine the impact on your feet, on your back, on your mind. Imagine the things you would see and feel and hear. I’m hardly a Tolkien expert, and God knows there are countless scholars who have devoted their life’s work to analyzing such things in far greater detail than I ever could, but I do know that Tolkien loved the natural environment.

  I actually saw more, and experienced the grandeur of New Zealand more acutely, because I was studying The Lord of the Rings closely. I might not otherwise have appreciated the varieties and textures of the land if I hadn’t read the exquisite descriptions of similar places in Middle-earth.

  Peter Jackson articulated to us in a very passionate and specific way what he thought Tolkien was trying to say, that indeed an underlying theme of The Lord of the Rings is something of an anti-industrial message, an appreciation for preserving the integrity of the environment. At the same time, Tolkien couldn’t have written about the dwarves and their industry and their innovation and their capacity for creating mechanical devices if he didn’t appreciate the value of such things. But it’s quite clear that Tolkien believes the dwarves have lost something, that they’ve become preoccupied with things mechanical and technological—to their detriment. A careful reader senses from the books that a heartless commitment to technology may not be the most fulfilling or meaningful way to live. Certainly in battle, the Fellowship is able to use certain elements of technology to its great advantage, but I think Tolkien understood that there’s more to life than that; it’s equally important, if not more important, to appreciate the magic and the poetry of something as simple as tilling a garden. I think The Lord of the Rings is a celebration of the importance of that sentiment, as well as a stark and grim reminder of what can happen if you forget how important it is.

  I like the notion that people shouldn’t be afraid of the simple, that they need not look beyond their own homes and their own earth to find happiness. There are certain heroic characters in literature and film who fascinate me, characters who travel the world over, fight to defend their way of life, and meet all kinds of fascinating people, but who ultimately discover that what is important is to have a little piece of earth, a place to work the soil. Sam is absolutely a symbol of that realization. Frodo has a great speech at the end of the book: I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.

  You can’t have paradise saved without having something else lost, and so it’s the journey that really shapes the reader’s commitment to what has been preserved once the battle is over. The irony, of course, is that while demonstrating a commitment to Tolkien’s vision, and a thorough understanding of his message, Peter Jackson presided over the most technologically advanced production in movie history. Nevertheless, one of the great benefits that I received from The Lord of the Rings was the privilege of discovering the literature, and feeling like I was in some way participating in an homage to Tolkien’s appreciation of nature. I’m a city kid. I mean, I’ve traveled around a lot and I’ve camped out, but basically I grew up in Los Angeles. I haven’t really lived in the outdoors, or in a frontier land like New Zealand is to a certain extent, or a place like Middle-earth is described in the books. So to be able to sit in a beautiful hotel in the south island of New Zealand, looking out at the Remarkables, the aptly named mountain peaks rising above us, and to be reading these descriptions of land masses and what it was like for the hobbits to walk barefoot across rocky shale, and then to be able to put the book down, go to sleep, and wake up at four the next morning, put on my prosthetic feet, and go for a long, long, walk … What a gift!

  It didn’t happen this way, I know, but it seemed as though Tolkien had strolled across New Zealand and then sat down and started writing. And here we were, interpreting his vision, in the most appropriate of places. It was honorable work.

  And it was hard work, of course, not just for the cast, but also for the crew, which did a commendable job of making sure that we could actually get to some of the more remote locations. They would use helicopters to transport sling loads of equipment and four-wheel-drive vehicles into otherwise impassable places. There always seemed to be several stages to each journey: a chopper ride, followed by a drive, followed by a hike. Once you got out of the van (or the Jeep or the Humvee, or some other similar rig), there would be a long walk—sometimes as much as an hour—in prosthetic feet. The studio tried to protect its investment (and by that I am referring to the fake feet, not the real feet) by having us wear big green plastic boots, but these looked ridiculous and made walking even more of a challenge.

  Complaining, however, was hardly encouraged. Somehow it seemed generally in the spirit of things to grin and bear it. Not that I wasn’t concerned. I was. Our bodies were put through a lot as a function of making these movies. We all had bumps and bruises and minor injuries; some of us incurred injuries that were a bit more than minor. It was part of the job. But Elijah often seemed uniquely oblivious to the possibility of disaster. I used to call him “Plastic Man” because he looked like a little doll or something; they could do anything with him—fling him from the top of a crane or push him off a cliff or dunk him in ice-cold water. Nothing bothered him. Elijah went through an unbelievable amount of physical stress without uttering so much as a peep. That was left to me, the “Nervous Nellie” hobbit, always driving people nuts with my worrying and fretting that something terrible might happen.

  And not just to the actors. At one point, for example, there was something of a crew mutiny fermenting, which got me really excited, because, hey, I played Rudy! I like to believe that my heart is in the right place, that I’m informed by a working-class, solidarity kind of philosophy. So when I saw the sheer exhaustion of the crew (and to a lesser degree, the cast), I became concerned, and I hoped in my heart that they might rise up and protest. This was a legitimately dangerous production; that no one died making these movies is a fact I found frankly stunning. I was sure we would lose crew members, because there were thousands of people working on The Lord of the Rings at one time, and it just seemed like it wasn’t the safest environment in which to work. I’m not sure what the workplace regulations are in New Zealand, but my guess is they must be less stringent than they are in Hollywood. The kinds of fumes and chemicals that the special-effects people routinely subjected themselves to—my God! Take, for example, Richard Taylor, the special-effects guru, who is one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met. He’s an absolute genius and the movie could not have happened without him, but the man made enormous sacrifices in the name of his art. When he and his wife (and working partner) had a protocol done on their bodies to test for toxins ac
quired over the course of their careers, the results were staggering. I know this is hyperbolic, but I felt like they were in Silkwood territory. But these people were so committed to their craft, their art, that they just did it willingly, knowing the risks.

  (Please remember, these are just my thoughts and impressions, not necessarily reality as experienced by everyone else. Furthermore, I’m not suggesting that Peter, Barrie, and the rest of the leaders on the production were reckless or inhumane or foolish. There were extraordinary precautions taken for safety, and everyone in New Zealand that I came into contact with had as much love for life and safety as any people I’ve ever known. But standards and regulations in an industry historically develop over time as a result of accidents and lessons learned on the job. The film industry in New Zealand is newer and therefore less developed in many regards. So all I’m saying is that during my time on the movies I witnessed smart, hard-working, good people take calculated risks in an endeavor to push the envelope of creativity. Admirable in success to be sure, but dangerous nonetheless and worthy of mention as the industry goes forward in time.)