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

‘Fran remembers this stuff much better than I do,’ says Jackson stoically. ‘It’s like a car crash, I tend to sort of wipe out all the bad memories. Fran hangs on to every detail.’ However much he may wish to forget, their dealings with the brothers grim are sewn into the fabric of this story …

With their initial treatment completed, Jackson and Walsh flew to New York to begin their script meetings at Miramax, and get their first taste of the Weinstein way. There would be three script meetings in all, principally with the two executives Cary Granat (inevitably dubbed ‘Cary Grant’), the head of production at Dimension, and John Gordon, a Miramax production executive who had survived as Harvey’s assistant, who were managing the project. Harvey and Bob were, as Jackson ominously puts it, ‘floating around’. It had been decreed that this was to be the first Dimension-Miramax co-production and both brothers would make their presence felt.

Meetings at Miramax’s Tribeca office were conducted in a small, unventilated room walled in frosted glass, known among browbeaten indie filmmakers as the ‘sweatbox’. From the very first it was clear the Weinsteins were going to subject the project to the full glare of their nervous scrutiny. The honeymoon of getting the deal sealed was over; this was now about how their money was going to be spent. Jackson had a genuine feeling that it was only now that the brothers were truly rationalizing what was involved.

While Harvey had read the book in college, it became clear many of the executives, including Bob, had not. They were faced with the same frustration that confronted John Boorman and Ralph Bakshi — how could you drill down into the fine print of Tolkien’s world when everything you talked about was met with various degrees of bafflement?

Bob took almost malicious pride in playing the incredulous audience member who had never heard of Mr. J.R.R. Whoever. Any script was going to have to pass the Bob test. Indeed, having submitted an early draft, Jackson remembers Bob slamming his hand down on the table in triumph.

‘I know what this is!’ he declared. ‘The Fellowship of the Ring, these nine characters, are all expert saboteurs. They all have their specialties. It’s the fucking Guns of Navarone!’

‘Really? The Lord of the Rings?’ laughs Jackson, recalling his own incredulous reaction — and he couldn’t be a bigger fan of the fucking Guns of Navarone. ‘He had figured it all out. He now had a filter by which he could understand this thing.’

Harvey would generally give good notes, nothing too crazy. Bob was big on the fact they had to kill a hobbit. ‘Pick one,’ he kept telling them. All they could do was keep deflecting this stuff: ‘Well, we will certainly think about that …’ It soon became a slog. They were rewriting and rewriting, then flying to New York to play Tolkien tennis with the Weinsteins. Jackson started to suspect that the brothers might be stalling.

The budget, Harvey insisted, was not to exceed $75 million, which based on the $26 million The Frighteners had cost with all its CGI, Jackson naively thought was achievable. Then the whole process was like a whirlpool of elusive possibility in which they were increasingly likely to drown.

Amusingly, if only in hindsight, the Weinsteins revealed a good Harvey-bad Bob routine. Whenever Bob was out of the room, Harvey would tell them to ignore his brother, who was just crazy. Stick with his ideas.

‘But you know that is not really the truth,’ sighs Jackson. ‘You’re lulled into thinking Harvey is the one you can talk honestly with. But the real truth is he is really tight with Bob. It’s an illusion.’

On occasion this Abbott and Costello routine would explode into full theatrics. For instance, after another of Bob’s ill-informed ideas, it was Harvey who slammed his meaty fist onto the table before storming out of the sweatbox. They watched his silhouette retreat down the corridor while Bob carried on regardless. Within moments Harvey’s silhouette, as unmistakable as Hitchcock, came back down the corridor clutching an Oscar. The one his half of Miramax had received for The English Patient. He burst back into the room and thrust it in front of Bob.

‘I’ve got one of these; you haven’t got one of these. So who the hell do you think is the smarter one? Shut up, Bob!’

Looking back with a less jaundiced eye, Jackson likens Harvey’s tricks to Tony Soprano or what it must have been like to work for one of the old, bullying Hollywood moguls, a Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn or Harry Kohn, who would rage or weep to get their way. Everything had shifted into a different register, one of emotional extremes utterly alien to a New Zealand temperament. It was all so bipolar: tantrums followed by largesse.

During the darkest hours, as relationships fragmented, Harvey had called Ken Kamins and began to rant down the cell phone. Eventually Kamins got a word in edgewise, ‘Harvey, I just don’t want to hear this. I am with my wife giving birth.’

The next day a huge gift basket arrives care of Miramax.

Beneath all of Harvey’s volatility was a stealthy manipulation. As the mists began to clear on a workable structure for the two films, it became starkly apparent that $75 million was vastly short of what was required. Experienced Australian producer Tim Sanders, who had worked on TheFrighteners, had come on board at Jackson’s behest expressly to draw up a budget. Realistically, he estimated the two films would cost $130 to $135 million. The news didn’t go down well with Harvey, who had already invested in the region of $12 million toward serious development costs. A fact, Jackson says, ‘that was driving him nuts’.

What Harvey wasn’t telling Jackson was that he couldn’t get Disney to let him greenlight anything beyond $75 million. He later claimed he had tried to entice them onboard as partners, but they turned him down flat.

Kamins isn’t so sure that Disney had been so dismissive. ‘I have since talked to [then Disney CEO] Michael Eisner and he tells me that he wanted to engage, but Harvey wouldn’t show him anything. Wouldn’t show him scripts. Wouldn’t show him artwork. Wouldn’t let him talk to Peter. I don’t know if this is history being rewritten by the different participants, but he claims that he had asked Harvey for the ability to talk to Peter and the answer was no. And so when the answer was no, it was kind of like well, “Okay, no to you too.”’

Harvey had even ventured to other studios in an attempt to offset the swelling costs. Whether it was the uncertainty of getting into the Miramax business, the pervasive scepticism over the viability of the project, or good old-fashioned schadenfreude, no one was buying.

In desperation, Harvey dispatched the ‘executive from hell’ to New Zealand charged with rationalizing Sanders’ estimates back to $75 million. Jackson had looked up Russ Markovitz’s credits and ‘it was all a bit bloody dodgy’. With loose ties to Dimension through risible straight-to-video horror sequels for The Prophecy and From Dusk Till Dawn, Markovitz aggravated one and all by showing scant interest in the movie but a great obsession with Jackson having a medical in order to be properly insured. His increasingly paranoid imagination concocting nefarious plots to bump off the director for the insurance money, Jackson kept coming up with excuses to get out of it, before flatly refusing. ‘It was a screwy time,’ he admits. After two months, the mysterious Markovitz returned to from whence he came and was never heard from again.

With better judgment, Harvey then sent down Marty Katz, a more genial, square-jawed old-Hollywood type fresh from trouble shooting on Titanic, who expended a lot of energy trying to get his Porsche shipped over from Los Angeles. Katz, who was an old friend of Zemeckis, got along well with Jackson. He was impressed by what they were achieving in Wellington and reported back to Miramax both his enthusiasm and the confirmation that, ‘If you’ve only got seventy-five million you can only do one film.’

In the end, his Porsche would never get to Wellington. Jackson, Walsh and Katz were summoned to the looming Orthancs of New York for a crisis meeting

‘That is when it all sort of went pear-shaped,’ says Jackson.

They were sat in the sweatbox. But there were no theatrics, no double-act. In fact, there was no Bob. Which was a very bad sign. Harvey was about to give them the benefit of his feelings and this time the fury wasn’t an act. Jackson had betrayed them. He had broken their agreement. He had wasted $12 million of their money. Wasted his time, squandered his good will. Now the director had to do what was right and make a single film of The Lord of the Rings of no more than two hours in length for $75 million otherwise he was going to get John Madden to direct it.

Courtly and intelligent, a similar man in some respects to John Boorman, Madden was the very English director currently finishing up Shakespeare In Love to Harvey’s satisfaction. The featherlight period rom-com concerning the famous playwright’s romantic distractions would soon give Harvey another Oscar with which to berate his brother.

Kamins recalls a more radical threat. ‘Harvey was like, “You’re either doing this or you’re not. You’re out. And I got Quentin ready to direct it.”’

Mad as that sounded, there was no way to know if it was a bluff. At the time he took it as gospel: Quentin Tarantino’s fucking Middle-earth.

Harvey had already sent Jackson’s two-film draft to British screenwriter Hossein Amini, another talent in good standing at Miramax having adapted Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove. Amini remembers being baffled by the peculiar cover: ‘Jamboree, The Life of Lord Baden Powell.’ Turning the page, it evidently had little to do with the Scout Movement.

Amini was a huge Tolkien fan and had been following the rumours about an adaptation. Now, here in his hands, was the secret script for The Lord of the Rings. He knew nothing of Harvey’s ultimatum to Jackson that either Madden or Tarantino was waiting in the wings. ‘They mentioned it might need some work, but I couldn’t really see why. I read it and loved it,’ he recalls.

When Miramax suggested converting it into one film, Amini’s mind shot back to Bakshi’s animated effort. A single film version would do nothing but alienate the massive fan base. ‘I believe at the time budget was the biggest stumbling block,’ he says, remaining convinced he was a bluff to get Jackson to rethink his approach toward the single film option.

In the sweatbox, with New York indifferently getting on with life somewhere outside, Jackson had reached the same conclusion. His face taking on a Gollum-like pallor, his hands trembling, he refused to crack. He just couldn’t see how you could make a single film and still do justice to the book.

Harvey engaged the full orchestra of his fury, threatening lawsuits to get his money back once he had kicked them off the project and back to New Zealand.

Says Kamins, ‘Harvey really didn’t want to let go. He didn’t want to be embarrassed. And I think Peter was putting him in an awkward place. There was a mix of a lot of different feelings.’ Indeed, it remains a tricky situation to parse. Jackson had agreed to a $75 million budget, and his plans had vastly outstripped that. Channels of communication had broken down. But he was on a road that would lead to over three billion dollars and Oscars galore. While no one could have quite predicted that, Miramax’s voluble supremo had neither the foresight nor the means to back Jackson’s vision, and in his frustration was pursuing something inevitably inferior. Did he really believe in the single film option?

To Jackson here was irony as bitter as burnt coffee (and he is assuredly a tea man). When they had first come to Miramax, Harvey had actually screened the Bakshi debacle proudly announcing, ‘This is something we are never going to do.’

Jackson had been forewarned. Katz had got wind of the single-film scenario, although Jackson had thought he meant a first part with a potential sequel to follow. Even this thin hope was shredded, however, when a memo arrived at his hotel emblazoned ‘ultra-confidential’. It turned out to be a litany of suggestions on how to crush Tolkien’s novel into a tidy two hours, written without Jackson’s knowledge.

Dated 17 June 1998 and written by Miramax development head Jack Lechner, it began, ‘We’ve been thinking long and hard …’ Despite Jackson’s yeomen’s efforts, the two-film structure was too dense — code for too expensive — and they had a more radical, streamlined approach utilizing ‘key elements’ but still dispensing with many. Among its manifest sins, Helm’s Deep was cut, Théoden and Denethor combined (QED: so were Rohan and Gondor) and Éowyn replaced Faramir to be Boromir’s sister, while the memo vacillated over whether the problematic Saruman should be cut or present at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. The great, subterranean drama of Moria was to be ‘drastically’ shortened: Balin’s Tomb, Orc attack, Balrog and out.

‘It was literally guaranteed to disappoint every single person that has read that book,’ concludes Jackson, still smarting.

Scribbled on the copy of the memo now archived in Miramar, was a note from Jackson to distribute it to all the department heads, ‘so they can see why the project is coming to a sticky end.’

Harvey had cornered him. He understood the producer was doing what he felt was best for Miramax, that was his job, but Jackson and Walsh were shattered. They couldn’t even think straight.

‘We just said to Harvey, “We can’t give you an answer. Please will you just give us time to fly back to New Zealand to think about it?”’

That was when Harvey’s mood got worse.

The filmmakers left Miramax’s office as if escaping Mount Doom, dashing across Tribeca to find a haven with their friend David Linde, the executive who had first gone to New Zealand to see Heavenly Creatures and since left Miramax to start his own production company, Good Machine. Linde could tell at a glance they were in a bad way. He retrieved a bottle of Scotch from a cabinet, stored for such an emergency.

Jackson smiles. ‘It was the first time in my life I had ever drunk scotch.’

Catching the next flight home, Jackson and Walsh headed down the coast for a few days with the intention of celebrating Walsh’s birthday. But on 8 July 1998, the trip was more about decompression; a chance to breathe blessed New Zealand air after all that American humidity.

Reflecting on their situation, it must have felt like they were cursed. They had spent nine arduous months on their remake of King Kong with Universal only for it to come to nothing. Now their even longer quest to bring The Lord of the Rings to the screen was heading the same way, or arguably somewhere worse. Being forced to make a hugely compromised version of the book they knew in their bones, no matter how hard they worked, would only be met with the scorn of fans; who would place the blame squarely upon Jackson’s shoulders. This was no longer about making the best version of the book under the circumstance. This threatened their credibility as filmmakers.

Walking along the beach, you like to think with the sun setting, they accepted that there were forces you could not conquer. Skull Island or Mordor had nothing on Hollywood.

‘I’d been hit too many times,’ says Jackson.

He called Kamins. ‘Just tell Harvey we can’t do it. We’d rather have our lives and do our films and not deal with all this crap anymore. Tell Harvey to go ahead and make his film and good luck.’

Kamins being Kamins, he didn’t actually do that.