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

‘Well, it’s not going to be easy, Harvey,’ Jackson warned him, ‘because it is this guy called Saul Zaentz.’

Jackson laughs. ‘Harvey was the man who had saved The English Patient. We were talking to the right guy.’

If you put it in a script it would sound corny and contrived. No one would believe a word of it, but then so much of Jackson’s career has been decreed by what you would call fate.

Says Kamins, ‘It’s the big theme for him. He has always believed that fate was going to point him in the right direction.’

Jackson’s manager cannot think of a single conversation in all the time he has represented him where they have sat down and discussed what he should or shouldn’t do with his career. ‘Peter sort of functions by his own compass — that fate will deal him the right set of cards. And in this particular instance maybe more than any other, he was proven completely right.’

There are things that can be seen with the naked eye when you’re trying to achieve something in the motion picture marketplace and there are the things that lie hidden. You can’t ever see what’s going on behind the boardroom doors. The business decisions, the politics and agendas, the history, or the simple expediency that can come with good timing: all those invisible but significant factors that allow you to be able to do the unexpected. Otherwise known as fate.

‘Saul?!’ Weinstein boomed, his thick New York vowels reverberating down the transpacific line, more excited still by the chance to demonstrate the extent of his magical largesse: the beneficent Harvey, fulfiller of wishes. ‘I’ll call him straightaway. He owes me a huge favour.’

*

Print the legend, and the inception of Jackson’s great adventure occurred on an unspecified morning while The Frighteners was in post-production. He and Fran Walsh had got chatting about how to follow up their spectral comedy-horror. In spring 1996 things were moving for Jackson: he was now working on a Hollywood stage, with Hollywood budgets at his disposal, and to a large extent still on his own terms and staying put in New Zealand. More than ever, they needed to maintain their momentum.

‘So how about a fantasy film?’ proposed Jackson. Something like Ray Harryhausen once made, the spectaculars he had been whelped on: no irony, but a cornucopia of fantastic beasts. Only they would use the growing digital capabilities of their own visual effects company, Weta, to conjure them up rather than the chronically slow minutiae of stop-motion. Perhaps, Jackson suggested, something more classically swords and sorcery than the Arabian Nights or Greek myth that had been Harryhausen’s metier. He searched the air for an equivalent …

‘Something like The Lord of the Rings.’

At that point, he had still only read it the once, when he was eighteen. It was simply what sprang to mind.

‘Well,’ Walsh replied, ‘in that case why not do The Lord of the Rings?’

Except it didn’t go like that. Not exactly. The reality behind the decision to attempt Tolkien was a lot more complicated and painful. The river of fate had many twists and turns to negotiate.

*

In the 1950s, Kamins, eldest of four New Yorker brothers, always played the dutiful son and did whatever he was told. This was the reason Jackson’s manager so loved the Marx Brothers of Duck Soup and Horse Feathers. He longed for their utter sense of anarchy, their disrespect for authority.

‘They managed to play by their own set of rules, which I never could,’ he says wistfully.

Short-haired and snappily attired (the opposite of his client), with a calm, observant, thorough manner, Kamins is a Hollywood man without the pretension. He sees the world keenly through his rimless spectacles. From his hardwood-floored, glass-walled, art-adorned eyrie that gazes down upon Sunset Boulevard, he has been Jackson’s eyes and ears in the movie-town since 1992. It is also easy to see why the Kiwi director has remained loyal to his Hollywood minder. Kamins is no mere facilitator or dealmaker; he is a great storyteller, who parses the madness of the film industry with wisdom and wry humour, and stood in the eye of the hurricane of the trilogy’s storm-tossed beginnings. There were times when the future of the project depended on Kamins’ gift for talking down dragons.

He openly admits the books had meant very little to him. ‘They were not, like, seared on my soul. I mean, I knew of them. But I was in no manner, shape or form an aficionado, or a hardcore fantasy fan for that matter.’

Rather than King Kong, Kamins is a ‘Godfather-fanatic’. Film class at college had introduced him to films like The Grand Illusion, Klute and Rio Bravo. That is where his tastes lay. He believed in his client’s project without it having to be a religious experience.

Out of college, Kamins had climbed onto the lower rungs of the film industry, reaching the nascent home entertainment business at RCA Columbia at exactly the time his mentor Larry Estes began backing low-budget film productions, laying off theatrical and television rights while retaining the video rights.

Under that paradigm they backed Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape, which had caused a stir at the Sundance Film Festival. Every independent theatrical distributor had come running in. They ended up making a deal with Harvey Weinstein.

Using this business model, home video specialist LIVE Entertainment would back Reservoir Dogs and begin Tarantino’s journey toward the sun. Another promising indie named New Line Cinema also began to see significant profits care of its home entertainment investments.

It was while at the now defunct talent agency InterTalent, a few rungs higher in his career, that Kamins’ boss, Bill Block, couldn’t get a ticket to the Batman Returns premiere. Tim Burton’s shadowy superhero sequel was the seen-to-be-seen-at golden ticket of the week. In his frustration Block had glanced over the many invites, requests and pleas for representation yet to be cleared from his desk and a letter caught his eye. It came from an attorney. ‘Hey, I have this client. He’s going to be in LA. He’s holding a screening of his new movie.’

Block walked down the corridor and into Kamins’ office. ‘I’m going to this screening and you’re coming with me.’

It was called Braindead.

Jackson was stopping in Los Angeles on his way back from Cannes, where he had been endeavouring to sell the distribution rights to his great ode to the flinging of viscera. The film that a mesmerized Guillermo del Toro once claimed made ‘Sam Raimi look like Yasujiro Ozu’. While in town, Jackson was hosting a screening at the Fine Arts Theatre on Wilshire Boulevard. Despite clashing with the big-budget antics of The Penguin and Catwoman, every agency in town was sending someone.

Kamins was impressed at the inventive use of effects in what was clearly a ‘modestly budgeted’ horror film. He certainly had never seen a hero lawnmower his way through a zombie horde. Indeed, it was the film’s sense of humour that spoke to him. The director was winking at the audience, egging them on. ‘Can you believe this level of madness?’

Kamins was reminded of the Marx Brothers.

‘I think that Peter unwittingly tapped into that same sense of anarchy,’ he says. ‘“I’m going to do things my own way. I’m going to challenge norms.” And I don’t know that I even understood it that clearly at the time. But it resonated for me.’

There was a spate of lunches for Jackson that week. Held at jazzy, star-spotted joints like Spagos or Chasens where the would-be agents reeled off a blur of inane advice. Oh, you should do a Friday the 13th. Oh, you should do a Tales from the Crypt. Oh, you should do a Freddy movie. All they could see was Braindead the horror movie, Jackson the New Zealand Sam Raimi.

Theirs was the last lunch of the week. And Kamins took a revolutionary approach. ‘I remember asking him, “Well, what do you want to do?” And he said, “Well, Fran and I are working on this project about matricide. About these two girls growing up in New Zealand, a true story …”’

It was called Heavenly Creatures.

The next week, Kamins’ phone rang. Jackson’s chirpy voice came on the line: ‘Fran and I have had a chat. We would like you to represent us.’

Kamins wasn’t the first agent-manager of Jackson’s career. Shortly after finishing Meet the Feebles, he had ventured to Los Angeles and found representation with a good-sized agency and a very good lawyer in Peter Nelson, who has stayed the course to this day (and would be another important figure in the many, many negotiations to come). Nelson had sent out the invitations to the Braindead screening with the objective of landing Jackson fresh representation. As he put it, the previous agency had ‘fallen asleep’.

Speaking to Jackson over lunch, Kamins was impressed by how purposeful and business-like was this young director. ‘For somebody who did not grow up here, but who clearly was a fan of movies and had aspirations to be a filmmaker, I was struck by how not-awed he was by the town. He had a fearlessness or a blindness to the reality of what he was walking into. All of which seemed to serve him really well.’

*

Heavenly Creatures changed everything. Heavenly Creatures got Jackson out of the horror ghetto where Hollywood would be happy to confine him. ‘Oh, he makes those low budget splatter movies that have some humour in them.’ Typecasting, Kamins could see, that didn’t project ‘a vision that he could do bigger films’.

Disney had offered him a supernatural rom-com called Johnny Zombie, which he wisely turned down. It was made by Bob Balaban as My Boyfriend’s Back in 1993, and swiftly forgotten thereafter.

He had so much more to him than Bad Taste.

Jackson followed Braindead by winning the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice Film Festival. Head of the jury David Lynch had quickened to a queasy portrait of small-town murder where schoolgirls turned out to be the perpetrators not the victims. There were further festival awards to follow at Toronto and Chicago, and nine New Zealand Film and Television Awards.

‘There was a sophistication to Heavenly Creatures,’ says Kamins proudly. ‘This was not a horror film in the traditional sense.’

Tellingly, in terms of the influence Walsh has had on the trajectory of both their careers, it had begun as her passion project. Jackson hadn’t even heard of the real-life murder case, and worried at first that the story was too grim to make a satisfying film.

In 1952, two New Zealand schoolgirls, more than a little emotionally maladjusted, fell into an intense friendship that spilled into a mania for one another. Their relationship was like an addiction. Threatened with separation, they conspired to literally dash the brains out of one of their mothers with a brick. For all the bloody mayhem of his career, this remains the most disturbing sequence Jackson has ever filmed. The shift in mood and moral accountability from Braindead is astonishing. They had shot in the footsteps of the actual scene of the crime in Christchurch’s Victoria Park. In truth, a few hundred feet further along the wooded path after Jackson had become unnerved by a lack of birdsong at the exact murder scene.

The Pauline Parker-Juliet Hulme case shook the stiff veil of propriety that 1950s New Zealand had inherited from Britain. In fact, it tore it down. This was the scandal of its day, portrayed in lurid, tabloid details by the excited papers and true crime accounts; there was even a novel. Author Angela Carter had written a screenplay inspired by the events called The Christchurch Murder, which Walsh had read. When she and Jackson were developing the idea, two rival film projects were already underway: one produced by Dustin Hoffman, the other to be directed by fellow New Zealander Niki Caro (Whale Rider).

What makes the Jackson-Walsh script so evocative is the decision to concentrate on the friendship rather than the sensationalist furore of the court case. They were two schoolgirls, barely sixteen, with hints of lesbianism to their unnatural bond — until 1973 homosexuality was still considered a mental malady in New Zealand. However, Hulme (who as an adult was later revealed to be crime author Anne Perry) flatly denied this was so.

Jackson and Walsh strove to interpret what lay behind this dangerous dependency. Individually, Parker and Hulme may have grown into functioning members of society. Together some moral constraint went missing, as if they were spurring each other on, waiting for one or the other to say no.

Scrupulous in their research, Jackson and Walsh burrowed like detectives into the cuttings and court transcripts; dialogue was lifted verbatim from Pauline’s florid diary entries.

‘The way they worked together was an incredible thing to see,’ said Melanie Lynskey, who as dumpy, brooding Pauline witnessed the Jackson-Walsh double act at first hand. It was a true creative partnership, the distinctions of writer and director far less defined than the credits suggest.

Here was a clear signal of the maturity they would bring to Tolkien: the concentration on character, the unhurried but intent building of story and the way in which the camera became a participant in their fantasies. The Parker-Hulme friendship also crossed class boundaries, a theme explored to a more positive outcome with Frodo and Sam.