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

‘Everything was always bigger than I thought, and better,’ he says. The artists, rooted in Tolkien’s grandeur, would always go way beyond what was in his head. Design meetings became thrilling symposiums where the world expanded before his eyes. Not to be outdone, he soon started pushing them for even bigger and better.

He had become fascinated by Lee’s cover painting of a flooded Orthanc on his well-thumbed copy of The Two Towers: the black, angular walls ascended out of frame, carved with vertical crenulations like the scratches of a blade and wreathed in moody smoke. But the picture only covered the lower four stories. Like many readers, Jackson longed to know what the top of the tower looked like. Only he got to ask. ‘I was able to show Alan the picture, which I had lived with for years, and say, “Just create the rest of the tower.”’

Lee unveiled an awe-inspiring Gothic skyscraper whose riven sides tapered to a flat summit with blades jutting from each corner like the peaks of an iron crown. Orthanc was fixed in our minds for ever more.

This search for the real in the unreal was a universal obsession. No individual in the swelling ranks of the production was prepared to let their corner of Middle-earth go by unverified by a form of collective integrity. Lee would go through a sequence of sketches that gradually ‘crystallized’ into the ideal image by ‘natural selection’. In other words, he would keep drawing until it made sense, imagining himself inside the picture examining every possible angle for the scene to come.

‘Each image was a virtual place that had to be completely consistent.’

They could exaggerate, but Lee and Howe would know intuitively if the credibility of the story was threatened. ‘You wanted people to suspend disbelief for the time that they’re there,’ says Howe — there were points you could assume magic was at work. ‘In the case of Barad-dûr, you can’t build stone that high. It falls down. So I assumed Sauron has put some dark power into the foundations.’

Indeed, when Sauron is destroyed with the Ring, the tower disintegrates like pie-crust.

The two artists would design every facet of a building inside and out far beyond the bounds of what we see on screen, satisfying their own insistent logic. Imagining Orthanc’s summit, Lee provided the outline of a doorway in one of the fins to explain how Saruman gained access to the roof. ‘There are stairways leading all the way up,’ he maintains. ‘You don’t see it because it is so dark.’

Like the writing and the designing of the film, how it would be made on the levels of lighting and planning shots, practical and computer-generated effects, editing, music and sound design, would be answered by varying degrees of near scientific research and making it up as they went along. The belief they would find a way to work wonders. But it was a practical magic.

Jackson was to an extent letting Middle-earth guide him. Storyboarding and pre-visualization had the same aura of experimentation. As the scripts were being written — and rewritten — he and a young protégé named Christian Rivers began to storyboard the film. The affable, multitalented Rivers had become a permanent fixture in Jackson’s inner circle after his fan letter led to an invitation to lend a hand on Braindead (Rivers insists that he called). A gifted artist, he has storyboarded every Jackson film since, as well as branching out in both divisions of Weta (he was a digital artist on the Contact effects sequence).

In layman’s terms, ‘pre-viz’ denotes the mapping out of camera moves ahead of time on a computer, usually concentrated on the more complicated sequences. Today, pre-viz is done within virtual environments — as it would be on The Hobbit films — but in 1999 the only sequence planned with animated pre-viz was the fight with the Cave-troll (they would later digitally pre-viz the mûmakil attack for TheReturn of the King). Otherwise, their unofficial, analogue variation of pre-viz amounted to Jackson crouched over Weta’s growing portfolio of miniatures holding a tiny ‘lipstick’ camera.

‘You always have a perception of what it could be in your head when you write a script. But it gives you a chance to play around with it. I am always looking for other angles. It gives you an ability to actually explore and experiment.’

With the thirty-foot miniature of Helm’s Deep, complete with the Hornburg keep, Deeping Wall and polystyrene cliffsides recently constructed with Lee’s assistance, Jackson went out and bought 5,000 1/32nd scale plastic soldiers. ‘Sort of Medieval guys with pikes,’ he reports happily, having cleaned out Wellington’s toyshops. A poor soul spent two weeks laboriously gluing them down in groups of twelve to blocks of wood so the director could move formations of Uruk-hai around like Napoleon.

*

Meanwhile back in Hollywood, following the fateful meeting with Bob Shaye, lawyers’ phones began to sing. Three separate deals had to be struck: one with Miramax, a new one with Saul Zaentz and one with Peter Jackson. Most pressingly, Miramax were due to be reimbursed their development costs. Kamins had been clear about Harvey’s terms when setting up the meeting. He wasn’t going to be accused of ‘buffaloing’ anyone; getting everyone excited then springing the exorbitant catch on them, which included executive producer credits for the Weinsteins. Shaye admitted the terms of the deal had almost dissuaded him from the meeting, but forty-eight hours afterwards he was on the phone to Harvey.

Says Kamins, ‘Harvey must have dropped the receiver, I don’t think he believed for five minutes this would happen.’

He came around quickly enough. Scenting he could both reclaim his investment and land five percent of the gross with no further risk on his part, he switched back into street-dealer mode. And saw the wisdom in allowing an extension to his initial four-week stipulation for a signature.

Room to breathe.

The reality of New Line’s commitment to the project becomes stark when you consider that, according to Ordesky, they spent in ‘the low twenty millions for the rights’ not only to pay back the Weinsteins but to fund Jackson, Walsh and Boyens to redo the scripts and begin preproduction. This was to even get to a place where they could say yes to backing three films.

The first in the trilogy of deals was the trickiest. The production had to be extracted from Miramax and then employed by New Line, who first needed to instigate a process of vetting Jackson’s filmmaking outpost. Thankfully, the vibrant and intelligent Carla Fry, head of physical production at New Line, arrived to tour the facilities, get a sense of his capability and to come up with a credible budget.

Ordesky’s double-edged reward for bringing Jackson and his ambition through the door was for Shaye to position him as executive producer on the project. After all he knew the book and the director. ‘Bob and Michael both believed in the pride of authorship, that if you were an advocate of something then you’d work harder and smarter for it because you were invested in it. So I was surprised and pleased when Bob said, ‘Listen, you’re going to work on this. You’re the Tolkien fanatic, you’re the Peter Jackson advocate, you can be there to steer us through this process.’

What Ordesky didn’t yet know was how often he would play messenger, mediator and meddler between an irresistible force and an immovable object. He would have to play Gríma Wormtongue one day, Gandalf the Grey the next.

As sums were done and fine print parsed, Jackson and both divisions of Weta were plunged back into a familiar period of uncertainty. The cheques from Miramax had ceased, and New Line had yet to conclude a deal. Knowing it could easily fall apart again — you could smother LA County with the paperwork from collapsed movie deals — Miramax had their own team of bean counters in Wellington totting up everything from artwork to Orc prosthetics, which they considered bought and paid for — something Jackson disputed.

Taylor is haunted to this day by the memory of Miramax suits, scurrying around like Goblins, discussing how to best package up their assets to be shipped back to America. If a miniature didn’t fit the shipping crate — as was the case with Helm’s Deep — they concluded it should be chain-sawed up into portions that would fit. ‘I felt sick,’ he admits.

Lee had surreptitiously been taking photographs of all his pictures in case they disappeared.

By contrast, Fry — who passed away from cancer in April 2002 having only seen a completed Fellowship of the Ring — like Marty Katz, became a great advocate of the films. ‘Carla was a real unsung hero of the whole process,’ says Ordesky. Jackson had been pushing for $180 million to make two films, and Fry would stand up for the fact that three films could be made for $207 million.

It was a bold assertion. There were still so many uncertainties. No studio had ever made three films simultaneously. There was no precedent to fall back on, no one to ask how it could be done. As Ordesky explains, a number of what they call ‘critical assumptions’ went out the window. ‘Assumptions about transportation, about lodging, about all kinds of things involved in making films, because no one had ever shot anything on that scale in New Zealand.’

There had to be a hybridization of the Hollywood way with New Zealand culture. None of this was necessarily cynically driven, they were intent on enabling Jackson to make the films, and it was at this time the very capable Barrie Osborne was hired as producer.

Jackson had been keen for Katz to stay on. They had been in the trenches together and Jackson had come to depend on the wisdom beneath the Hollywood tan. More importantly, Katz had shown his ‘loyalty’ to the production. But he had family commitments. What would amount to five years away in New Zealand was too big an ask. So he never did get to roast his chocolate-coloured Porsche around the leafy avenues of Miramar.

Roughly four weeks after their first meeting with Shaye, $12 million was wired through to Miramax and The Lord of the Rings was officially the property of New Line Cinema.

In the interim, a deal was swiftly reached with Zaentz. This was now a simpler process both because it retained much the same legal framework as had been agreed with Miramax and the fact Shaye and Zaentz, in another impossible stroke of fortune, were old friends.

Zaentz later mentioned that Miramax had been facing a large payment to renew their option on the book, which was undoubtedly another motivating factor in Harvey’s willingness to cut a quick deal. The vocal impresario, who came to know Jackson and Walsh at various press events following the films’ release, would maintain that it was only because of ‘their intelligence and enthusiasm’ he ever parted with the rights. His view (in hindsight) on the Miramax situation was ardently pro-Jackson. The thought of a single film of the book was ‘absurdity’. When Shaye called him with the proposal of New Line replacing Miramax on the project, Zaentz had one stipulation: ‘Only with Peter Jackson.’

Ironically, New Line still had to close a deal with the director who had been desperately knocking on their door, which also meant closing a deal with Jackson’s fleet of production subsidiaries: Wingnut Films, Stone Street Studios, Weta Workshop, Weta Digital and his post-production facilities. Positive, businesslike relations tensed when New Line cottoned on to the fact they had been the only players in town. Shaye felt duped, and the pro-forma contract shaped by Jackson’s team would be subject to some compromise. Jackson lost his pay or play deal (which had meant he would be paid even if the films weren’t greenlit). He would effectively only be compensated upfront for one and a half films with backend bonuses. He and Shaye would have to reach an agreement on final cut.

On 24 August 1998, in lieu of any official announcement, the story was leaked to the Los Angeles Times. ‘New Line Gambles on Becoming Lord of the Rings’ ran the headline. Written by film reporter and genre geek Patrick Goldstein, it is curiously off the mark: setting the budget at a conservative $130 million, and claiming that Jackson hoped to have the first film ready for Christmas 2000 (he would still be shooting!) with the next two instalments slated for summer and winter of 2001.

It is a quoted Shaye who proves the most prescient. ‘Having seen Peter’s script and demonstration reel we believe he has the ideas and the technology to make this a quantum leap over the fantasy tales of ten or fifteen years ago.’

Goldstein also noted that on the internet fans were ‘already casting Sean Connery’ as Gandalf.

Between the lines, it was clear that sceptisim still reigned in Hollywood. This was commercial suicide.

Ordesky was actually sent a copy of Final Cut, that book about the catastrophic money-pit of Heaven’s Gate. ‘It was not given in a kindly way. I thought that if anything is going to throw me off my game it is that book; but this was not Heaven’s Gate.’

And Peter Jackson wasn’t Michael Cimino. He was an ambitious and often obsessive artist, true, but he was also a very practical, diligent, open-minded New Zealander. A quality displayed not least in his burgeoning relationship with fans. Then a similar kind of devotion ran in his veins.

In an extraordinarily smart move, the kind of gesture that comes naturally to Jackson, on 26 August 1998 (two days after the Los Angeles Times story) he agreed to take part in an online interview with the website Ain’t It Cool News. He would answer the twenty most pressing readers’ questions, addressing any concerns.

Says Kamins, Jackson wanted to communicate as early as possible that he was up to the task. ‘Ain’t It Cool News was a very vogue site at the time, and Peter’s hope was that he would show people that he understood the world and if people disagreed with decisions he was making at least they would disagree thinking, “Okay, this guy understands the universe”.’

The site’s mailbox was besieged with over 14,000 questions, not just from fanboys but fantasy authors and literature professors. Jackson ended up responding to forty questions covering the budget, special effects, how to create hobbits and mount battles, and how with the help of New Zealand’s glorious landscapes he was going take moviegoers into Middle-earth.

‘I do not intend to make a fantasy film or a fairy tale,’ he declared. ‘I will be telling a true story.’

‘Peter wasn’t a dreamer,’ affirms Ordesky, ‘he had pragmatic plans for how to make dreams come true.’

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_0a4a7c0f-cb8d-5f42-93c8-7686b018d3c2)

Concerning Hobbits (#ulink_0a4a7c0f-cb8d-5f42-93c8-7686b018d3c2)

During the summer of 1998, Samwise Gamgee was conducting Hollywood business from behind the wheel of his air-conditioned BMW. In this town it was advisable to squeeze in a meeting between meetings, and somewhere along an overheated Burbank Boulevard, Sean Astin’s phone had jarred him out of autopilot. It was his agent, whose calls were becoming rare enough to collect. She went by the name of Nikki Mirisch, and like most of her kind Mirisch possessed a crippling allergy to general pleasantries, small talk and complete sentences.

‘Listen … Peter Jackson is doing The Lord of the Rings trilogy for New Line. You’ll need a flawless British accent by Thursday.’

All that shot through Astin’s brain were the words ‘Peter Jackson’, ‘New Line’ and ‘trilogy’. Which was enough to make him pull over.

‘You know … Tolkien,’ Mirisch reiterated as if explaining to a senior aunt. You wonder if this was an approach she often found necessary with her clients. ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ she stressed again.