Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth

‘They were excited by it, and, needless to say, they actually put it in their front foyer,’ he reports.

Four weeks after that the film fell apart.

Taylor doesn’t hide the amusement in his voice. ‘And Peter, in true Kiwi form, asked for it back. And we got it back.’ And there it sits, a warning to all-comers: you need to be resilient in this game.

Looking back from the vantage of having finally made his version of King Kong in the wake of The Lord of the Rings, the undoing of their first attempt is viewed by Jackson and Taylor as a lucky escape; the river of fate taking another turn. Beginning again from scratch in 2004, Jackson dusted down the 1996 script. He didn’t like what he read. It was the tone. It was too flippant, too jokey.

‘We were desperately trying to write an Indiana Jones type of film. It was lightweight, a silly kind of Hollywood script.’ The Lord of the Rings had taught him that fantasy must be treated as if it was reality not a movie.

‘I think ultimately we weren’t prepared to do justice to such an incredible story,’ concludes Taylor.

But it was impossible to be philosophical at the time. It was heartbreaking.

Things had started to fragment with the release of The Frighteners. Zemeckis’ instincts hadn’t served him well. The reviews were uncertain, and the film felt too autumnal and spooky to sit comfortably in a summer wiped out by Roland Emmerich’s defiantly inane mega-B-movie Independence Day. The fact their opening weekend coincided with the start of the Atlanta Olympic Games hardly helped.

Jackson and Walsh learned a great lesson not only about marketing campaigns but how crucial was a film’s release date. Thereafter, they would maintain an influence on a film right through to the promotional popcorn bucket.

The Frighteners flopped, eventually taking a little under $30 million worldwide. According to the ruthless cause-and-effect of Hollywood physics, you’re only ever as good as your last film, and Jackson’s lustre was instantly tarnished. Virtually overnight, the conversation changed once more. Who was this guy again?

Still devotedly banging the drum for The Frighteners, Jackson had flown non-stop to London in early 1997 to do some promotional interviews— the international release date had been delayed to regroup after the film’s failure in America, not that it did any good — from there he would fly to Rome and proceed on a European tour.

When he reached his hotel room the phone was already ringing. It was Kamins.

‘They’re pulling the plug on King Kong.’

Universal’s change of heart wasn’t only due to the failure of The Frighteners. Disney were putting out a (as it turns out ghastly) remake of Mighty Joe Young, the King Kong copycat from 1949, and now the all-conquering Emmerich had announced that for his next trick he was planning to remake Godzilla. ‘And Universal didn’t want to do another monster movie,’ laments Jackson.

How could he stay where he was, promoting a film for the very studio that put his next film so abruptly into turnaround? Moreover, he now had twenty or thirty staff working on King Kong and no salary to pay them. He had to figure out how the hell they were going to survive. Weta was back on a knife-edge.

He booked himself on literally the next plane home.

‘It is the only time in my life I have ever done that,’ he laughs ruefully; although, nothing about it at the time felt funny. ‘I did not sleep at all as I was dealing with all of this. So I went there and back.’ Again.

Before leaving he called Walsh. ‘Don’t tell the guys. I will tell them when I get off the plane.’

Touching down at Wellington, the sleepless Jackson drove straight to Weta Workshop. He gathered the staff together and told them the film was no more. As always with the death of King Kong, tears were shed.

Harvey, true to form, was spitting mad. Only this time it was on Jackson’s behalf. Universal hadn’t told him — he heard the news via Kamins — and he was supposed to have a fifty per cent stake in the film. He let it be known to Jackson that, in his humble opinion, The Frighteners deserved a better fate, and had Universal and Zemeckis stuck to the Halloween release date he was sure it would have done far better.

Then he got into fighting mode. ‘We are going to do Rings. We are going to do Rings,’ he bellowed. ‘And they are not going to be involved.’

The whole half-and-half deal between Universal and Miramax was split asunder with the end of King Kong, but, says Kamins, ‘Harvey was just excited now to have Peter all to himself.’

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_8cbb3542-f471-5750-ade4-f50cbb0781e6)

Many Meetings (#ulink_8cbb3542-f471-5750-ade4-f50cbb0781e6)

Of course, nothing is ever new to Hollywood. In 1928, the great Erich von Stroheim filmed The Wedding March back-to-back with its sequel, The Honeymoon. In 1966, Hammer Films shot Dracula: Prince of Darkness in concert with the unrelated Rasputin: The Mad Monk so they could make profitable use of the cast and crew, led by the redoubtable Christopher Lee. In 1973, The Three Musketeers simply carried on swashbuckling into The Four Musketeers. And, in 1978, from behind a veil of secrecy, Warner Bros. brought back Superman, knowing they already had Superman II ready for take-off. During the double-production, they even managed to dispense with director Richard Donner and replace him with Richard Lester.

While the rights to The Lord of the Rings were stagnating at UA, David Lean tried to get the studio to bail out his two-part, single-schedule version of The Bounty, which had got as far as building a three-mast replica merchant ship before backer Dino De Laurentiis swam for shore. Attempting to edit down great swathes of Cleopatra in 1963, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz recommended releasing a five-hour version in two halves, but 20th Century Fox vetoed the idea.

Perhaps the most publicized of all hybrid productions was Robert Zemeckis’ back-to-Back to the Futures, two intertwined sequels filmed in one gallop between 1989 and 1990, impressively spinning from a dystopian future to the Wild West.

Less celebrated by the chronicles of Hollywood was Peter Jackson’s avowed intention to make Bad Taste 2 and 3 in one go. This extension to his interplanetary saga of man-eating alien fast food operators, while considerably bigger in scope, was still scheduled to take considerably less than the four years it took to complete Bad Taste. The sequels have yet to come to pass, but here was proof that Jackson had already given serious consideration to the idea of juggling two films at once.

For all the risks involved — you would be doubling down (in gambling terminology, the doubling of an original bet in Blackjack; or, in more general terms, the doubling of one’s commitment to a risky strategy) on a sequel to a film that could stumble out of the gates — Jackson knew back-to-back filmmaking was the only conceivable way to do justice to The Lord of the Rings. To wait on the sequel would result in spiralling costs and a loss in the richness and flow of storytelling. Throughout his early discussions with Harvey Weinstein, he was clear they were telling one long, baroque story artfully sliced in twain.

And despite the best efforts of their lawyers to prevaricate until kingdom come, Harvey had called to say that he had finally struck a deal with Saul Zaentz. Miramax were officially making The Lord of the Rings. Or would be once they had agreed upon the script.

Throughout the endless legal quibbling, Jackson hadn’t even touched a copy of the book. The uncertainty had played on his superstitious nature. He was terrified of re-reading it, getting excited imagining the movie he could make, only for it all to fall apart.

In short, he was not in the business of tempting fate.

So it wasn’t until the spring of 1997, on the day they received the news, that Jackson and Fran Walsh took a momentous shopping trip into downtown Wellington to buy what would be his second copy of The Lord of the Rings. Until that time, as he admitted, it had ‘been a bit foggy’. Years later, interviewers would be staggered to find that Jackson had not spent his puberty pining over Middle-earth. Neither he nor Walsh had ever been Tolkien fanatics. It had been an abstract possibility. Which they now needed to make a reality.

Symbolically, the very copy they bought was the one Jackson would keep to hand throughout the entire production, the margins graffitied with notes. He still has it somewhere: three large paperbacks packaged in a box and adorned inside and on the covers with fifty beautiful watercolours by Alan Lee. The beauty of those pictures the deciding factor in the purchase.

What a pleasure, almost innocent, that moment must have been. Opening it up, flexing the cover back and letting the pages flow past, sensing the film that he might make. Only now realizing the full magnitude of what he was attempting. Only now gauging the thrilling possibility of what lay before him.

However, between the dying breath of King Kong and the dawning of The Lord of the Rings there had been a lull of six weeks where Jackson had been faced with his persistent Weta Digital problem. Their thirty-five Silicon Graphics machines were sitting idle and growing obsolete. Licence payments were due on the software packages, as well as the wages of the operators who were likely to up sticks for an increasingly bountiful digital revolution in Los Angeles. During development on King Kong they had doubled their staff. Mothballing Weta Digital until Middle-earth was ready wasn’t an option.

Again it was Zemeckis who arrived in the nick of time. He was in post-production on an expensive, hard-science fiction adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact and offered Weta Digital the opportunity to create the sequence of Jodie Foster plunging through a wormhole.

‘That was the first thing we ever did for an outside vendor,’ reports Jackson. While only a stopgap, this was enormously significant in industry terms. Here was the first, faint signal that Weta Digital would one day operate outside of Jackson’s projects and rival the likes of ILM and Digital Domain as a visual effects house for all-comers. For now, it was a matter of necessity. And Jackson was still serving as go-between with Zemeckis.

‘I supervised it a bit from my end,’ he laughs, amused by his credit as Additional Visual Effects. ‘He wanted me to help visualize it, and sort of supervise. So, I did act like a visual effects supervisor for that scene, you could say.’

While still wary of jinxing the deal by even touching a copy of The Lord of the Rings,

Jackson and Walsh had risked taking one step in the direction of a screenplay. They asked erstwhile collaborator Costa Botes to break the book down scene-by-scene into a working précis. Loading it up onto their computer they could then experiment with different road maps from Hobbiton to the Crack of Doom.

Once they began to re-assimilate the book, the issue of structure became more serious. What of Tolkien’s vast story would they keep? What would they excise? What would they dare add to the precious story? How faithful would they be to the book? It was the biggest question of all. Could they radically alter Tolkien and still be authentic? Ironically, given what eventually transpired at Miramax, at this stage they briefly explored the idea of ‘one long, epic film’. Jackson also wondered whether it really ought to be three films, but Harvey swiftly disabused him of that notion.

Out of these first sessions emerged a ninety-two-page treatment, made up of 266 sequences: the embryo of an Oscar-winning trilogy.

Already mindful of how much interest the adaptation would engender, even in sleepy Wellington, Jackson codenamed the treatment Jamboree: The Life of Lord Baden Powell. You suspect more to amuse themselves, this also involved the adoption of grand but hardly uncrackable nom-de-plumes: Fran Walsh was Fredericka Wharburton; Peter Jackson became Percy J. Judkins.

Says ‘Judkins’, by way of explanation, ‘Jamboree was the codename for the 1933 film TheSon of Kong, and we gave it the scouting theme on the cover.’ The caution to ‘be prepared’ would gain unwelcome prescience.

Not long afterwards came a stroke of phenomenally good fortune. Unable to gauge whether what they were writing was any good, Walsh decided they needed another voice in the mix. So they contacted Stephen Sinclair, a Kiwi playwright who had worked with them on Meet the Feebles and Braindead. Sinclair, who knew little of Tolkien, would in turn seek out the advice of his girlfriend, who knew her stuff. In this understated way, Philippa Boyens became pivotally involved in the project.

Parallel to wrestling the book’s great girth into two palatable films was an extraordinary period of quasi-scientific research into how the two sides of Weta were going to solve a problem like Middle-earth without sillification. Pint-sized hobbits, outsized creatures, epic battles, the magnificent variety of place and people that made the book so popular: Jackson needed to prove that not only filmmaking technology was ready for Tolkien, but Kiwi aptitude as well.

By August 1997, they were storyboarding and generating animatics (a rudimentary computer-based pre-visualization, or pre-viz, of key action). The influential artists Alan Lee and John Howe were installed in Wellington, already turning their intuition for Tolkien into reams of concept art. Locations were being scouted, logistics fathomed and the Gordian knot of scheduling loosened.

The journey of writing and visualizing the films will be tackled in the next chapter, but across Miramar the great beast of preproduction was stirring into motion: eighteen months of great hope and greater strife. Jackson and Walsh were slowly, respectfully and fretfully forming a relationship with a strait-laced Oxford don who had never suffered film people gladly. They were also developing a markedly different kind of relationship with Harvey Weinstein, a film person who didn’t suffer anyone gladly.

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