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

*

In early 1997, Michael Palin was in Wellington for a one-man show, and Jackson wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to go backstage and meet a hero. They shared the usual pleasantries. Jackson telling the erstwhile Python how much he appreciated his work. Palin enquiring after what the director was currently working on. They got talking about The Lord of the Rings. Then it occurred to Jackson to ask a pertinent question.

‘Do you know where Alan Lee lives?’

Jackson was desperately trying to get hold of the seemingly reclusive artist’s expertise, but so far in vain. It had occurred to him that Palin had worked with Lee on an illustrated children’s book called The Mirrorstone — he may have even got hold of a copy — about a boy travelling to a wizardly realm via his bathroom mirror.

‘Ah, he’s a funny chap, isn’t he?’ Palin recalled. ‘I’ll find out for you.’

A few weeks later an email arrived bearing Lee’s Devon address. ‘It’s true,’ laughs Jackson. ‘Michael Palin came to the rescue. No one could figure out how to contact him.’

While re-reading The Lord of the Rings, Jackson found himself eagerly anticipating the next of Lee’s wonderful illustrations. He was struck by how utterly removed the pictures were from that juvenile vogue for muscle-bound Conan-clones draped in a buxom wench that adorned heavy metal albums and Dungeons & Dragons boxes. ‘They were sort of pastoral, with these elegant pastels. Sort of historical, I suppose,’ he says. ‘We fell in love with those pictures.’

As he surveyed Middle-earth with his internal camera it was Lee’s version of the world he would likely see. So he began to gather together as many of the artist’s calendars, book covers, posters and compendiums of Tolkien artwork as he could lay his hands on. This was pre-internet, pre-eBay, so it was a matter of trawling second-hand bookshops, collectors’ fairs, jumble sales and nagging friends to scour their attics.

‘I was tracking down calendars going back to the seventies, trying to see who the other artists were. That was how we saw John Howe’s work — in calendars.’ Howe had contrasting strengths. Lee was good at the gentle whimsical, hobbit stuff — it was very beautiful. The more dynamic Howe, in Jackson’s opinion, ‘did really great Nazgûl’. His paintings were ‘like freeze frames of a movie’.

Jackson wallpapered an entire room with the two visions of Middle-earth, hoping to absorb the poetry and drama of the images. Then it occurred to him that osmosis was unnecessary. Why not put your inspirations on the payroll? And the decision to involve Lee and Howe as guiding lights was another piece of applied Kiwi logic that bled into the visionary. In a stroke, the films became a continuum of what for many was the definitive Tolkien aesthetic.

However, despite the best efforts of Miramax, Lee had proved elusive. All they could ascertain was that he lived in the middle of Dartmoor — the insinuation being he was some kind of mad hermit. They were also rather suspicious he was a minion of the Tolkien Estate.

Fusing Bruegel with Arthur Rackham, Lee is arguably the greatest of the Tolkien school. Howe is exalted too, and the likes of Pauline Baynes, Ted Nasmith, Ian Miller and Michael Foreman. But Lee, certainly in recent years, is largely responsible for shaping our perception of what Middle-earth looks like.

‘I get that, I get people saying my work is exactly as they imagined it,’ he says. ‘But it’s interesting because often it is not exactly as I imagined it when I read the book. But that is the way it turned out through the process of drawing. I would say it is in the right ballpark.’

In conversation Lee speaks in hushed, careful tones as if you’ve surprised him in a library. Silver-haired and bearded with an intense, indecipherable gaze, he is well cast in a silent cameo as one of the nine kings (second from the right) in the prologue. The immediate impression is someone both reassuringly adult and somewhat mysterious.

Lee had moved into illustrating paperbacks from art school in the late 1960s, gravitating toward anything ‘slightly weird or ancient’. He was responsible for the first fourteen covers of that young reader’s rite-of-passage TheFontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. Through renowned publisher Ian Ballantine

he contributed pictures to two best-selling anthologies: Faeries and Castles. Lee had first read The Lord of the Rings when he was seventeen and working in a graveyard, but it wasn’t until Castles he first attempted Tolkien with versions of Barad-dûr, Cirith Ungol, and Minas Tirith. These drew the approval of the Tolkien Estate who agreed to his being commissioned to paint fifty watercolours for the 1992 centenary edition of The Lord of the Rings. In 1996, he was asked to illustrate The Hobbit.

Like a portent, in 1997 a producer from Granada television approached him about providing concept art for a proposed twelve-part television adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. ‘The script actually read quite well,’ he remembers. ‘But in the end he couldn’t get the approval for it.’

Then one morning a package arrived by courier all the way from New Zealand containing two videos, two scripts, and a letter of introduction from a fellow named Peter Jackson. He helpfully included a number to call. The videos were Heavenly Creatures and Forgotten Silver. ‘He had neglected to put in Bad Taste,’ notes Lee. He watched the brilliant Heavenly Creatures first. Then he read the letter, in which Jackson explained that the scripts were for another potential adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and would Lee like to be involved?

Jackson, meanwhile, had been following the package via his courier and knew it had been delivered, satisfying himself that he wouldn’t hear back for weeks. Hours later his fateful phone rang. It was Lee’s quiet, gracious tones announcing that he would love to be involved. As luck would have it, he was finishing up a project. With no pressing family ties, he was ‘kind of free’.

The artist laughs at the memory. ‘I went down to New Zealand for six months. I ended up staying for six years.’

Howe had heard the odd rumour about a potential adaptation of the book, but knew little else. Born in Vancouver, Canada, he had since settled among the chocolate box lakes and mountains of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, no less removed from Hollywood than deepest Devon. Growing up in a rural outpost he had known ‘ever since he could remember’ that he wanted to live off his artistic talents, but never dreamed it was possible. He should finish high school — get himself a normal job.

His life changed when Tolkien-themed calendars started appearing in the town bookstore in the mid-1970s. It wasn’t that he was an avid fan. He read The Lord of the Rings during high school, having visited The Hobbit as a child. ‘They didn’t really strike me as anything,’ he admits, enjoying the irony. An opinion that might have been shaped by the fact he read the trilogy in the wrong order. Someone had always beaten him to The Fellowship of the Ring in the local library. So he ended up reading The Two Towers and Return of the King before the first part. ‘I was a bit confused,’ he laughs.

The calendars showed that it was possible to have a career painting pictures based on fantasy novels. Suddenly Middle-earth came alive as a world of infinite possibility; he still remembers his first attempt: ‘It was from the Pelennor Fields and had a Frank Frazetta-like touch — a reptilian creature and Nazgûl rising up to tackle Éowyn.’ Howe would pick up the latest calendar and each month do his version of the picture.

Over the years, as he established himself as an illustrator, Howe diligently sent samples into HarperCollins for their Tolkien calendars. Until, in 1987, he finally had three pieces published.

Rather than a package, Howe received a phone call in the middle of the night. Jackson had tracked down the artist’s number with relative ease but in his excitement had forgotten about the time differences. Ten days later Howe was on a plane to New Zealand.

‘The commitment was extremely light at that stage. The project had yet to be confirmed, and if things didn’t work out, you have your ticket home.’ While his wife and son would follow him, Howe never relocated with any permanence to Wellington. Conscious of his son’s education he would exit the project when production finally got underway in 1999. ‘We were back home once sets were being built.’

Howe shares the same meditative delivery of his colleague but is more eccentric. Where Lee is almost serenely composed, Howe has an undercurrent of energy that can’t be stilled. With his thin frame, flowing brown hair and beard he cultivates a little wizardliness, that or a mad professor. He too is one of the nine kings (second from the left), but harder to recognize beneath his wig and frown.

Jackson laughs. ‘We did Alan first and then we did John. Then we figured out that they had never met each other, and I thought, “God, I hope there’s no rivalry here.” They literally met each other on the aeroplane.’

They knew of one another’s work, of course, and had vaguely corresponded. But it was on the middle leg of their journey from Singapore into New Zealand in 1997 that they became acquainted. Howe had been sitting downstairs when one of the stewards approached him.

‘A Mister Lee wants to meet you.’

‘I didn’t even make the connection,’ he says. So it was midway over the Indian Ocean the two artists were introduced, and found they got on very well. Which was a relief.

Although, while changing planes at Auckland, Lee — and the airport ground staff — was startled to discover Howe had packed a suit of armour. As a serious medieval re-enactor he was keen to bestow his historical expertise in forging suits of amour on Weta Workshop, sceptical they were up to the task.

Howe still has a ‘laser-sharp image’ of arriving into Wellington for the first time, following the coastline as it snaked along the southern hem of the North Island. ‘It was an extraordinary feeling.’

From the airport they were driven straight to Jackson’s house at Karaka Bay and over the kitchen table, adrenaline keeping overwound body clocks ticking, began to understand how the director saw them working with the production. They would, Jackson informed them, design everything, with the division of labour laid out as per his appreciation of their respective gifts: Lee the light side, Howe the dark. Naturally, lines were blurred. Howe would design the vestibule of Bag End and Lee created Orthanc. Still, it was a place to start and this way they could cover more ground.

‘It was also pretty clear Pete wanted to get going on the bigger environments,’ notes Lee, who spent his first two weeks in Helm’s Deep.

For Howe it was all entirely new, Lee at least had some experience creating concept art for another Python, Terry Jones’ Erik the Viking, and Ridley Scott’s Legend. There was only one strict instruction: don’t curb your instincts in any way for a film. ‘They told us quite quickly that if you can draw it we can make it,’ says Howe.

Everything from Minas Tirith to door hinges fell into their remit. There would be no hand-me-downs from old epics. Stationed amid the inspiring bustle of the Workshop, they were going to design this ancient world inch by inch. Recalls Howe, ‘We weren’t working on computers at that time. That sort of kicked in later. All you needed was enough good paper and enough pencils.’

On a workaday level nearly all of their design work was pencil, colour was too time consuming and too prescribed. They soon understood they were cogs in a giant mechanism that would have to churn out Middle-earth on an industrial scale.

Says Jackson, ‘Usually in design meetings you’d been talking about some location: “Maybe there is a bridge here and a building here.” Then everyone would go off and come up with stuff. But Alan or John would have their pads and as I was talking they would sketch up something. By the time I had finished describing it they could show me a sketch. It was like instantaneous design.’

‘Peter’s also somebody who likes looking at artwork,’ appreciates Howe. ‘He enjoys artwork. He’s art literate in that sense.’

The one exception to the no-colour rule was when Howe, whose work would be more legibly dynamic to a studio, was asked to paint a dozen ‘great moments’ for the pitch meetings in Los Angeles. Lee added large pencil drawings and sketchbook material. They mounted them into a slideshow using Photoshop, something they were only beginning to figure out. ‘It was all a bit naff really at that stage,’ admits Lee.

It was a strange time. As Miramax wound things up in Wellington, Lee and Howe simply went home. That was that. But they had barely had time to unpack their HBs and plate armour when news came that the presentation had worked, a deal had provisionally been struck with New Line and the artists were back on a plane to New Zealand. ‘Peter’s no slouch,’ notes Howe, approvingly. ‘He’s a clever man and managed to pull it out of the fire.’

*

Why, when, where and with whose money Jackson was going to direct the films was decided. The question now confronting him was how was he, personally, going to direct so much story? What would his Lord of the Rings look and feel like? What would it sound like? What style would he bring to Middle-earth?

While Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners had shown there was more to the director’s repertoire than splatter satires, The Lord of the Rings was a leap of faith. Would he have to curtail his natural excesses to be epic? Was there a nascent Cecil B. DeMille or John Ford or David Lean beneath the crash zooms and wacky angles?

Perhaps the better question to ask is what was there in the flare and versatility of Jackson that so befitted The Lord of the Rings? As the pitch documentary proclaimed, he couldn’t have been more thorough in his development of the films. The labour of screenwriting was providing him a narrative roadmap — quite literally in terms of location — as well as inspiring camera moves. But Jackson’s instincts split between groundwork and natural daring. He was a thrilling stylist who had seen as many slasher movies as Lawrence of Arabias. He was a technically brilliant storyteller guided by an inner Einstein with no space or time for formulaic thinking.

Nevertheless, his governing principle possessed a Kiwi-like directness: ‘I was trying to make it feel real. It wasn’t so much thinking about what can I do differently, rather than what can I do for the story? We really approached it like it was real; this is authentic, it is not fantasy, it is a piece of the past.’

Jackson is the artist who once cooked special effects in his mum’s oven. Who made ‘realistic’ alien vomit out of yogurt, pea green food colouring and baked beans. When he found the consistency too runny he added handfuls of soil before his Bad Taste actors dug in. Back in those early days he even made puke by hand. He loves the tactile — the texture of the world. Braindead is an orgy of sensation. The sheer blood-drenched chaos pours off the screen until you feel sticky just watching it. Inches out of shot you sense the gleeful filmmaker caked in his own stage blood laughing till his lungs burst. When he watched Harryhausen it was as if he could reach out and touch those strange creatures.

‘That’s what I loved about Pete’s approach,’ says Boyens, ‘and made me feel this was the right person. This guy who did Braindead and Meet the Feebles — no matter what he did he wanted it to feel real and earthy, and there’s a lot of earthiness in Tolkien’s work.’

It was Lee and Howe who revealed the dizzying scale of Middle-earth, and warned him not to giggle.