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

Astin remonstrated that there was no way he could be ready by Thursday. It was already Tuesday. Come on, could she push it back a couple of days? He would be so much better prepared.

He was met with a barbed silence.

‘Nikki?’

‘Thursday, Sean. Be ready.’

You have to admire Astin’s honesty. He completes the tale with a chastening visit to a nearby Barnes & Noble where he walked up to the counter and asked if they had anything by J.R. Tolkien?

‘Yes sir,’ the assistant replied from behind his impregnable Californian sangfroid. ‘It’s J.R.R. Tolkien.’

Faced with the cacophony of editions occupying an entire wing of the fantasy section, deep in Astin’s brain synapses began to flare like beacons on distant mountaintops. This was something far more than a big, plump fantasy trilogy or fleshed out comic book. This was literature.

Purely on aesthetics he opted for an Alan Lee version.

A year earlier, Harry Knowles, the Austin-based internet pioneer and zealous Jackson advocate at the helm of Ain’t It Cool News, dropped by the set of Robert Rodriguez’s alien-parasite-loose-in-a-high-school B-movie pastiche The Faculty. Wherein Frodo Baggins was playing the school newspaper’s klutzy photographer Casey Connor. On a break, Knowles wandered over to Elijah Wood.

He and Wood had become fast friends. On the actor’s days off he often headed over to Knowles’ house to eat barbecue and geek out over movies.

‘I just heard that Peter Jackson’s going to make The Lord of the Rings into a feature film,’ announced Knowles, whose own allergy was to not giving the world the benefit of his opinion. ‘You should play Frodo.’

Knowles emailed Jackson shortly afterwards to tell him so as well.

Wood had seen Braindead, Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners. He’d loved the boundless energy and raucous sense of humour, but there was drama too. Having read The Hobbit as a kid, he was tangentially aware of what The Lord of the Rings was about and the idea of Jackson directing an adaption made perfect sense to him. With its showcase of human drama with fantasy, Heavenly Creatures was a perfect template for what Tolkien required, albeit on a much lower budget. Jackson, he could see, liked to play in that sandbox. The notion of him being attached himself to such a famous series of books was exciting.

Beyond that he had no sense of who Frodo might be or why he was so right to portray him. At that stage, he admits, ‘It was an abstract thought.’ One he paid no more heed to until almost twelve months later when he read that Jackson was travelling to London, New York and Los Angeles in search of hobbits, and it turned out that seed Knowles had planted in his head had taken root.

Wood’s agent made the appropriate introductions for him and he met with the casting director, Victoria Burrows, who was running the Los Angeles end of the operation. He read an early draft of The Fellowship of the Ring (which was not to leave the room). Burrows suggested he come back in a day or two to put something on tape.

But the idea of Frodo was now too important to chance on some identikit audition against the featureless wall of a casting office. ‘I wanted to do something that would showcase my enthusiasm and passion, something that would push me in a different direction and be more visible. Something I would have more control over.’

Wood had never been bold enough to shoot his own audition tape before — not an unheard-of tactic for zealous actors — but that is what he was going to do, using the three audition scenes he had been given for Frodo. One was a prototype scene between Gandalf and Frodo that never made it to the movie and two were scenes from film three where Frodo has to varying degrees succumbed to the Ring’s psychic tentacles. The idea was to show the actor’s range across the gamut of Frodo’s decline. As two of the scenes were exteriors he headed out the pine-strewn slopes of Griffith Park for a quasi-Tolkien backdrop.

But not before heading to the bookstore and grabbing a pile of illustrated editions of Tolkien’s thick tome, Alan Lee’s among them. Equipped with a general idea of what constituted hobbit attire, he hired a waistcoat, knee high pants, braces, that kind of thing. Then with his friends George Huang, who had directed Swimming with Sharks, behind the camera and Mike Lutz reading the parts of Gandalf and Sam out of shot, he filmed the first ever live-action scenes of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Edited into shape, the tape was Fed-exed to Jackson, who was in London becoming increasingly despondent that he may never find his ideal Frodo and Sam.

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Martin Scorsese once said that ninety per cent of any film is casting. And who are we to doubt the master? He is one of Jackson’s chief inspirations as a director. But Scorsese has never been burdened with finding a hobbit. One of the keenest pleasures in contemplating a live-action adaption of The Lord of the Rings was that game of mentally casting the Fellowship and the host of other named parts.

Who was best for Frodo or Sam or Gandalf or Ted Sandyman? In practice, locating the perfect Fellowship and beyond became a quest littered with false starts, frequent despair and pure fluke.

In his prologue (paraphrased by Bilbo in the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring) Tolkien alludes to hobbits’ ‘love of peace and quiet’ and ‘good tilled earth’. They were clearly a romanticized version of the country folk the writer had known from his rural childhood. The twist of course being they grew ‘not taller’ than four feet and had extremely large feet ‘clad in thick and curly hair’.

In the pitch documentary, Jackson is determined his hobbits were to be, as Tolkien said, ‘little people’. They were not children, or any of the grotesque garden gnomes fancied by less faithful artists. Bakshi had fallen headfirst into that trap. Jackson wanted his audience to relate to them, and be equally as unsettled by big folk.

The director also explained in his pitch how the problematic issue of scale would be achieved via a variety of cunning visual tricks: forced perspective, slaved cameras, crosscutting between differently scaled sets, digital face replacement, distinctively tall and small stand-ins and the (in the end limited) use of giant puppets.

Ian Holm noted the ‘great satisfaction’ Jackson derived from mastering what the actor called this ‘Brobdingnagian event’.

Once shooting, Jackson became increasingly willing to trust the audience to assume the distinction naturally. They could shoot a hobbit actor from over a human’s shoulder and we would unconsciously rescale the scene. The sequence where Boromir tries to claim the Ring from Frodo features no trickery at all (excepting the Ring’s). Jackson uses the slope of the hill to fool our eyes.

Each hobbit they cast still had to match the others as being of the same species. Within a certain range they were to be uniform in size, features and an elusive hobbit sensibility. Through the bulk of the writing process, this was as far as Jackson’s thinking had gone. He had methodically resisted the temptation to indulge in premature casting.

‘I would never have guessed at that point that we would have Elijah Wood as Frodo or Sean Astin as Sam. It wouldn’t have even crossed my mind. I was seeing fantasy characters. Hobbits that were this tall.’

The worldwide search for hobbits along with all the species of the cast began in the summer of 1998.

A process, Ordesky insists, that was filmmaker driven. ‘It was exactly what you would hope it would be. New Line waited until Peter had between five or half a dozen finalists for any give role. Then I would get sent a videotape of the options.’ Jackson would always hint which of the five or six he liked the most. It was an effective way of clarifying his thoughts.

Ordesky sighs. ‘I should have realized then that this was going to be my task through the whole thing — to run around New Line showing them all the options and basically getting approval for Peter’s choices.’

Not that the studio was always going to be entirely accommodating either.

While faceless, Jackson convinced himself that the four lead hobbits at the very least would be actors who ‘corresponded’ with Tolkien’s description of little English gentlemen.

The Shire’s general population of Baggins, Boffins, Tooks, Brandybucks, Grubbs, Chubbs, Hornblowers, Bolgers, Bracegirdles and Proudfoots would, in the case of the party sequence, be filled with a gaggle of up to 100 eccentric New Zealand extras.

Producer Barrie Osborne remembers that, on the day he met Jackson in Wellington, the director invited him along to watch Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. He was considering the English actor Nick Moran as one of either Merry or Pippin. Not that he was wedded to established actors. If anything, unknowns would help sustain the reality of the world, and Merry and Pippin would emerge from hundreds who tried their luck on the audition tapes stacking up at Stone Street.

Away from the trials of the Ringbearer and his faithful servant, Frodo’s lighthearted hobbit cousins provide a comic reminder of what the little folk are all about. This will ultimately give way to a stark depiction of shattered innocence.

Dominic Monaghan was by chance the first member of the cast I ever interviewed. He was in London in the summer of 2001, keen to press ahead with publicity, consciously hip in leather wristbands and torn jeans, a threadbare band t-shirt. He told mystical, ‘living a dream’ stories of a shoot that had changed his life, quite different from Merry in person.

He had been born in Berlin to English parents, a peripatetic infancy that ended in Stockport, an outer farthing of Greater Manchester. That was his vibe: salt-of-the-streets Mancunian, pretentiously unpretentious and a stalwart United fan. A desire to act had guided him to local theatre and a local agent. The twenty-three-year-old Monaghan was by no means green when he auditioned: he had spent four years as the trusty sidekick on amateur sleuth show Hetty Wainthropp Investigates.

When the canny London casting director John Hubbard spoke to him about The Lord of the Rings, he was playing a skinhead on the London stage. Hubbard was managing the London end of casting with his wife Ros, and Monaghan went in to read for Frodo. It was a common feature of Jackson’s casting odyssey that he would discover someone he liked reading the wrong lines. Ordesky remembers Orlando Bloom trying out for Frodo, but everyone else, including Bloom, is certain he had first been up for Faramir.

‘It was a very relaxed process and I thought it went rather well,’ recalled Monaghan during our interview. He had been in France working on Second World War drama Monsignor Renard when he got his fateful call. ‘My agent told me they were interested in me for Merry and that I might have to go to Los Angeles or New Zealand in a couple of days to meet with Peter Jackson.’

That was just sinking in when his agent called back. There was no need to worry — he had already been cast. It was a late decision. Monaghan had a week back in England before getting on a plane to New Zealand.

‘It was one of those few moments when you’re acutely aware of your life turning on a right angle.’

He viewed Merry as a kind of exasperated older brother to the prattling Pippin: smarter, less carefree, but with no suspicion of what lay ahead. There was a satisfying transformation in the role. Merry ends up going to war. ‘No hobbit had ever been to war,’ declared Monaghan as we parted.

At thirty-one, Billy Boyd was the eldest of the quartet of hobbit actors, even though Pippin was supposedly the youngest. It didn’t show: Boyd caught his naïf qualities — how he totters unaware into peril, strained concentration etched onto his face. Pippin became a hero to those in the audience struggling to assemble all the threads of Tolkien’s epic tapestry. But, by film three, Pippin’s naiveté has been put out like a light.

Born in Easterhouse, Glasgow, Boyd’s soft regional brogue was echoed in a fine singing voice that Jackson would put to use. The actor even wrote ‘The Steward of Gondor’, the song he mournfully sings in TheReturn of the King. He came to acting via bookbinding (he actually bound copies of The Lord of the Rings) and a period, he jokes, of finding himself in the Florida Keys, before returning to attend The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, a conservatoire no less, in Glasgow.

With only a hatful of TV appearances and low-budget films, he read for both Merry and Pippin at the Hubbards’ behest, and a tape duly wended its way back to New Zealand. A month later, Jackson and Walsh were in London and asked to meet Boyd specifically about Pippin. There Jackson directed him through a makeshift scene: ‘Merry and Pippin sneaking up to Frodo’s window and seeing him with the Ring, that sort of idea.’

The first of the four hobbits to be cast, Jackson liked the contrast Boyd’s accent might offer. He also sensed audiences would like him. Boyd was a class clown, but sensitive too. He was grounded in person. Not only was Jackson looking for actors and actresses capable of filling the roles, he had to judge their temperament. Were they going to disrupt his way of working?

The Scots and Kiwis share that innate suspicion that acting and filmmaking might all be a bit daft.

Boyd had been busy with a theatre workshop in Edinburgh when he got a message to call his agent back. During a break he found a phone box. Then he heard the familiar voice of his agent saying unfamiliar words.

‘Guess who’s playing Pippin in The Lord of the Rings?’