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

Undaunted, resolute, the voice of reason: Kamins allowed fevers to cool down then went back to Harvey with a request. ‘At the end of the day, what was the worst that was going to happen?’ he laughs. If Weinstein still said no, the disappointment would remain the same.

These guys have killed themselves for you, he insisted. They have a vision that they had all signed up for. Would he give them an opportunity to make the movie the way they envisioned it somewhere else? You’re not obligated, but I’m asking.

Harvey agreed, but his terms were draconian.

The most aggressive studio turnaround period, in which a filmmaker can attempt to find a new home for their project, might be six months. Traditionally, it’s a year.

‘You have four weeks,’ Harvey told Kamins. ‘If you set it up someplace else, I get all my money back immediately on signature. Not on the first day of photography. I get it all on signature. And I get five per cent of first dollar gross across the board.’

‘Okay,’ said Kamins, icy calm, ‘let me give it a shot.’

*

So the phone would ring again, the shrill, insistent call of fate. Hope was back on the agenda. A fool’s hope maybe — Kamins had been frank: relocating a project in four weeks was unheard of — but for now they were back in the Tolkien business. And that was enough.

‘Exactly four weeks as the clock ticks,’ echoes Jackson ruefully. Twenty-eight days later, if no deal had been struck, Harvey would take back control and offer it to Madden or Tarantino or whoever. You sense Weinstein really didn’t believe it would happen, not under his impossible conditions. That ultimately he was hoping Jackson would learn the error of his ambitions and agree to make one film with Miramax.

Miramax had done a fine job distributing Heavenly Creatures, raising the New Zealand director’s status immeasurably as a commercial filmmaker. They had invested in Jackson and wanted a return on that investment.

‘Harvey didn’t want to give up the movie,’ says Kamins. ‘Harvey had really wanted these films and he wanted them with Peter. But I think Bob didn’t. They weren’t on the same page. Bob was second-guessing the economic investment and was worried that they could really be putting themselves on a bad financial footing.’

Right now, what Jackson needed was a presentation. One that, as Kamins explains, quickly answered the questions, ‘Why these movies? Why now? And why us?’

Of course, they were sitting on a hoard of concept art, test footage, storyboards, animatics, and even props and prosthetics. Richard Taylor admits that even as the mood had worsened with Miramax he and his team had refused to stop working. Frankly, they were in denial. The thought of abandoning the project was too painful to recognize. ‘We were like addicts,’ he says. ‘We couldn’t stop ourselves.’ They went on designing, sculpting maquettes, and forging weapons and armour for a hypothetical Middle-earth. Lee and Howe, at least, would return to England and Switzerland respectively, their brief, wonderful sojourn in the moving picture business over with.

This was far too much material to play show-and-tell with the limited patience of a prospective studio. They would be out of the room before they’d finished setting up their slide show. There was also scant chance of encouraging anyone down to New Zealand to see their nascent operation. Half of Hollywood still couldn’t find it on a map. Jackson’s solution was to shoot a short film, a presentation piece that told their story. Kamins dubs it ‘the making of the making of’.

Jackson still considers it the most important film he has ever made.

Cutting short Walsh’s chaotic birthday trip, they were a good three-hour drive from their Wellington base. And so a story, already fraught, once again gathers the patina of movie melodrama as a storm bowled in off the Cook Strait and two filmmakers thinking of nothing else but the ticking clock persuaded a helicopter pilot to brave the tempest.

Jackson sounds rueful. A bad flier, he was known to turn his knuckles transparent gripping the armrests as 747s drooped into LAX. ‘We had the worst helicopter ride in the world around the coast,’ he remembers. To a Weinsteinian chorus of thunder, pummelled by winds, lashed with rain and plunging between pockets of air it felt as if King Kong had plucked them out of the sky. When they touched down in Wellington, Jackson’s legs almost gave out, but it never occurred to either of them they were now risking their lives for the sake of these films.

So while Kamins began a preliminary round of the studios, armed only with the scripts and a basic animatic of the story, Jackson enlisted Allun ‘Bolie’ Bollinger, cinematographer on Heavenly Creatures, and roused his team to help create a forceful ‘documentary’.

What immediately impresses is how confidently the thirty-five-minute pitch answered Kamins’ questions. It demonstrates an affinity with the material and the certainty that technology had not only caught up with Tolkien’s imagination but this New Zealand operation was more than capable of wielding those advances. With a youthful Jackson in the starring role (bearing no ill effects from his recent dalliance with death), the film makes explicit how this vast world would be brought to life.

Talking heads extoll the need for realism. A mythical reality that is ‘lived in, sweated in’ says Howe. Using the power of the Lee-Howe artwork and behind-the-scenes footage from Weta Workshop, they describe how hobbit stature would be achieved using forced perspective, motion-controlled cameras and body doubles with digital face replacement. There are beautifully lit maquettes by the sculptural magician Jamie Beswarick: powerful, redolent versions of Orcs, Ringwraiths and the Balrog exactly as they would appear in the finished film.

At Weta Digital they talk up the Cave-troll as their test case for digital biology, modelled on a real human skeleton and musculature then distorted into a troll’s frame. Motion capture is discussed but not yet in relation to, at this stage, a more alien-looking Gollum. Software magician Stephen Regelous reveals prototype footage of the MASSIVE software program that would allow them to mount battles with thousands of computer-generated ‘thinking’ soldiers.

There is also a slender tally of things later abandoned or used limitedly: large puppets to scale up humans alongside hobbits, demonic horses for the Ringwraiths and the idea of giving all the Orcs digitally enlarged eyes like Gollum.

Local actors including the steadfast Jed Brophy (whose involvement with Jackson goes back to Braindead), Craig Parker (who would play the elf Haldir, as Frodo) and Peter Vere Jones (from Bad Taste, as a touching Gandalf), perform choice segments from an animatic of the entire film — something else that had displeased Miramax. Familiar passages from The Council of Elrond, Moria and Mount Doom relayed over cycling storyboards. The scores of Braveheart and The Last of the Mohicans are used throughout.

The footage is so thorough and ardently mounted it became the prototype for Jackson’s vaults of DVD extras. This wasn’t a desperate plea it was a fully strategized battle plan.

To complement the video, Taylor’s team provided a set of their finest maquettes to accompany Jackson. Something meaningfully tactile that would hopefully serve a better purpose than the sculpture of King Kong sent and then retrieved from Universal.

The idea was that when they got to LA there would be a slew of meetings with their dog-and-pony show raring to go. However, they landed to the news only two meetings had actually been confirmed.

On the other side of the Pacific, Kamins had been burning a hole in his contact book trying to get Jackson through the door. To give the studios a taste of how serious a proposition this was, how good. But he was drawing blank after blank; it was terrifying.

Notoriously, Decca turned down the Beatles, nearly every publisher in London passed on Harry Potter and Western Union spurned the chance to spend $100,000 on the patent for an ‘interesting novelty’ called a telephone. History is littered with bad calls. But in Hollywood commercial misjudgements are an inevitable side effect of the business where every movie is a swing at a curving ball; you can only hope to hit more often than you miss. In Hollywood, as screenwriter William Goldman immortally pronounced, ‘Nobody knows anything.’ However popular the book might be, The Lord of the Rings held no guarantees. It was too long, too tricky and — cue: siren — too expensive. Add in Harvey’s prohibitive conditions and Kamins knew he had a hard sell on his hands.

But he hadn’t counted on the politics. The obvious objections weren’t even raised. That Jackson didn’t have the track record to support this kind of venture. That fantasy struggled at the box office. That this sounded like Willow or Labyrinth. ‘It wasn’t any of those things,’ says Kamins. This was an industry-wide jeremiad against the viability of Tolkien.

Paramount was developing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the bestselling children’s fantasy by Tolkien’s friend and peer C.S. Lewis. They felt they were tonally too close (a nonsense). Lewis’ book would eventually be adapted by Walton Media and released by Disney to capitalize on Jackson’s triumph.

Disney was already in the middle of things with Harvey and had spurned, or been denied, the chance to be involved.

‘Regency was interested.’ Kamins is referring to independent production house Regency Enterprises, run by the billionaire and former Israeli spy Arnon Milchan — another colourful character in the echelons of Hollywood. With distribution deals at Warner and 20th Century Fox, they can boast hits as varied as JFK, Pretty Woman, and LA Confidential. Milchan had gotten as far as approaching his partners at Fox to say he was keen.

‘What’s Saul Zaentz’s involvement?’ Fox had shot back.

‘Well, he gets a fee,’ Milchan responded carefully. ‘He doesn’t get a credit, but he gets a fee and a participation on the back end.’ Wherever they went the basic terms of Zaentz’s deal with Miramax would still stand.

Kamins shakes his head philosophically. Where once The English Patient had opened doors, now it was slamming them shut.

‘Fox had fumed, “If he gets one nickel, we’re out.”’

The year Fox walked away from The English Patient, Zaentz had given the keynote address at the American Film Market. Even though the film had been revived with Miramax, this turned into a twenty-minute denunciation of the evil empire, Fox. How they hated movies, hated filmmakers and were anti-artists.

‘It was a rant,’ says Kamins, ‘a very public rant.’

So Fox was out. And Regency.

Amy Pascal, the head of Sony, openly told Kamins she didn’t care for the scripts. ‘I don’t know if there was more to it, but that’s what we were told.’

After The Frighteners and King Kong, there was baggage with Universal. They were better to hedge their bets by going back through their old friend Zemeckis. He could surely relate: every studio in town had turned down his pitch about a teenager who accidentally travels back to the 1950s, before Universal agreed to make Back to the Future. Sadly, they weren’t buying now. Recent history couldn’t be rewritten.

Kamins goes on. They tried Roland Emmerich, who had used his newfound clout to set up a production company called Centropolis, but he claimed not to like the scripts either.

‘So that left us with New Line, because Peter had a longstanding friendship with Mark Ordesky, who worked for Fine Line, their arthouse division.’ It was tenuous, but they were desperate. ‘And we went to PolyGram and Working Title.’

Both agreed to listen to Jackson’s pitch.

They flew to Los Angeles troubled less by turbulence than a growing sense of dread, and landed to the news that a baggage handler at LAX had dropped one of their flight boxes and a precious maquette of Treebeard had smashed on the tarmac.

‘We just felt like fate was against us,’ recalls Taylor.

First came PolyGram (who had distributed Braindead in the UK) represented by their British production arm, Working Title. ‘I believe it was Eric Fellner and Liza Chasin from Working Title,’ says Kamins. Stewart Till, the CEO of PolyGram, the man with the power to greenlight the films, wasn’t at the meeting but had read the screenplays. Kamins had them delivered to his hotel room and Till had given his corporate blessing to Working Title to pursue the project if they were as keen as him.

Led by the charming, savvy producer Fellner, they couldn’t have been more enthusiastic; but he had no idea they were one of only two last-ditch possibilities. ‘Really? We got no sense of that,’ he says, remembering a very impressive pitch. Being able to handle those beautiful maquettes left a real impression. ‘God, if we’d only done it,’ he laughs. ‘But we were never going to be able to. At the time, it was two films, and I think Jackson wanted $180 million. We just weren’t in a place to do that. PolyGram just didn’t have $180 million dollars to put into a project.’

In fact, PolyGram was in the process of being sold (it finally folded in 1999) and couldn’t make any commitments until the sale was done, let alone one of this magnitude. Realistically, it was going to be two to three months before they could properly talk.

‘We have seven days,’ replied Jackson.