Jackson takes 'Rings' to the screen the right way
Martin A. Grove
Hollywood Reporter

Jackson's journey: With its 13 Oscar nominations, New Line's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" goes into the homestretch with support from more Academy branches than any other best picture nominee.

"More than anything, I think I feel like a proud father because the 13 nominations really cover the breadth and scope of the entire film," Peter Jackson, who directed co-wrote and co-produced the film and its two simultaneously shot sequels, told me. "There's the cast. There's all the design of the film. There's post-production, included as well. It seems those 13 nominations have touched in one form or another everybody that worked on the film. We had a crew of some two and a half thousand people on these movies and all of those people are in some way touched by these noms, so it's fantastic."

After seeing "Rings" last November at one of its first showings in Los Angeles, I anticipated it would enjoy major boxoffice success, but thought that probably meant $200-250 million rather than the $300 million or more that now seems likely given its Oscar nominations strength. It was the film's special effects that made the greatest impact on me back in November. But looking at it again now on DVD, what I'm finding is that it's the performances Jackson has gotten from his cast -- particularly from Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen -- and the film's well structured story that really resonate to generate its emotional impact. "Rings" turns out to be a big scale epic film that also plays impressively on the small screen.

"Rings'" screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens and Jackson is based on the book by J.R.R. Tolkien. Produced by Barrie M. Osborne, Jackson, Walsh and Tim Sanders, it was executive produced by Mark Ordesky, Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, Robert Shaye and Michael Lynne. Its cast includes Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Cate Blanchett, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving and features Sean Bean, Ian Holm and Andy Serkis.

When Jackson called Wednesday morning from New Zealand we talked about his long journey to bring "Rings to the screen the right way. I observed that when "Rings" first opened it didn't really sound like the sort of film that typically gets serious Academy consideration. "I know what you mean," he said. "I think that's because of the pre-conception that people have of a fantasy film. A lot has been written and said about the handicap the trilogy of the 'Rings' has because of the fantasy kind of label. I think what we deliberately did when we set out to make the movie was not to really think of it as a fantasy film. I think we ultimately ended up making something that's better described as a drama than fantasy. Fantasy has cliches and conventions that you would normally expect to see and we deliberately tried to avoid those. We tried to give the film an emotional resonance to give it some depth and dramatic integrity that you don't do if you're making a fantasy film. In other words, we were breaking the rules. We were trying somewhat to reinvent the genre in a slightly different form. The 13 nominations somehow indicate that we succeeded. I think the film surprised people in the sense that they cried or they felt emotional. They felt the power of the drama that the actors were playing where they didn't expect to. They went into the movie with totally different expectations and came out surprised."

I asked Jackson to think back to how he felt after that by now much written about moment when New Line co-chairman and co-CEO Robert Shaye asked, having just heard Jackson's pitch, why he'd want to make two "Rings" films when there are three books. "We felt complete joy because at this point in the process Fran Walsh and I had been working on it for probably two and a half years," he said. "It had had its original home at Miramax and we'd written drafts of the screenplay of the two film versions. We'd done a huge amount of design work. We had done computer r&d. We'd done location scouting. The film had had a life for a long time and it was enough time for us all to have got very emotionally engaged in what we were doing. Ultimately, with any movie project -- and, especially, one that's long -- you have to put your heart into it. If it's worth spending years over, then your heart has to go into what you're doing. So you become very emotionally engaged in the process of making the film.

"We got to the point that Miramax decided that they didn't want to shoot two movies back to back. They wanted just to make one. Harvey (Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein) tried very hard to raise the money for us to do the two, but Disney, who owns his company, said no. So Harvey really had no choice but to have to say to us that the only way (he could) get 'Lord of the Rings' made is if we reduce it down to one film -- which we refused to do."

Why wouldn't Jackson and his team tackle "Rings" as one film only? "Because it wouldn't have been 'The Lord of the Rings,'" he replied. "It would have been like filming Cliffs Notes of 'Lord of the Rings,' not filming the book, itself. It just would not have been 'Lord of the Rings.' I think if you're taking one of the most famous titles that exists, you have to produce a film that goes some way to meeting the expectations of the hundred million people that have read that book. And if you make a film that is so truncated and so reduced and loses so much of what people love in the book, you can get to the place where there's absolutely no point in doing it because you're guaranteed to disappoint anybody that comes to see the film. It's guaranteed to disappoint and there's going to be no debate about it. We just felt it was a pointless exercise making 'The Lord of the Rings' in a very truncated form. It wasn't certainly something that we were prepared to be part of."

At that point, he explained, "Harvey basically said, 'You're forcing me to have to hire another filmmaker. I'll take the project to another director and I'll get another screenplay written.' Harvey had spent a lot on the film at that stage. It almost got too far that Harvey couldn't afford not to make any film (of the book). He now had us refusing to make the film that he felt that he needed to make. So it was a really difficult scenario. There was a day when we walked away from the project, when we literally just had to look Harvey in the eye. We had to fly over to meet him and we had to look him in the eye and just say, 'Look, Harvey, we cannot be part of what you're proposing here and if you have to get another filmmaker then so be it. But it certainly can't be us.' We left thinking that the project had come to an end at that point.

"What happened while we were flying home (to New Zealand) -- because we had like a 22-hour flight to get back home -- Ken Kamins, our agent, called Harvey and said, 'Why don't you, at least, give Peter and Fran a window of opportunity to take the film somewhere else on the condition that we set up a two film project? That if we could find somebody interested in taking on the two films and repaying the cost that Harvey had spent back to him, can we at least have an opportunity to do that?' So Ken and Harvey agreed that we had a four week window to do that. This was news that we discovered when we arrived home. It was a very strange emotional time because we'd spent that plane ride back to New Zealand sort of emotionally disengaging from the movie and thinking that it just wasn't going to happen, which was a very sad journey. But when we arrived home there was this ray of hope. The deal was that in exactly four weeks time if we had somebody to take the film over, they had to write Harvey a check for the entire cost up to (that) date."

Asked how much that was, Jackson replied, "I think it was somewhere between $15-and-$20 million. It would seem like fairly formidable or impossible task. But, nonetheless, we'd been on the film for two and a half years and we felt that it deserved four more weeks of our efforts to at least try to make it happen. So we threw ourselves into this task and luckily for us we had a lot of material because that money had been spent doing many, many designs, many drawings (and) sculptures of the monsters. We'd even done some computer effects where the cave troll that's in the movie existed. We had the finished cave troll moving around and swinging his hammer. So we had a lot of quite striking visual material and our script. We decided that rather than just go to L.A. and walk into a series of meetings and just pitch the concept of 'The Lord of the Rings,' we thought that the greater strength that we had was the visual material that we'd already done. So we thought that making a short movie would be the best way to present that to people. We spent the first week of our four weeks in New Zealand making a 36 minute film. We made a documentary style film that was on the making of 'The Lord of the Rings.' We interviewed our designers. We interviewed me. I sort of interviewed myself. I interviewed Alan Lee and John Howe (conceptual designers). I interviewed Richard Taylor (special make-up, creatures, armour & miniatures). I interviewed computer people explaining how computer effects would be achieved. We showed computer effects. We showed miniatures we'd made. We'd made models and we lit the models in a really evocative way. We just made this incredibly visually lush 36 minute film.

"Towards the end of the second week of our four weeks, we got on a plane and took our film to L.A. We took a series of meetings. Ken had gone to every studio in town and every possible independent producer that might want to get finance for it. Most of them had passed on the phone. Most people didn't even want to meet. The script went out to a few people that asked for it and some people called back having read the script and passed. So we were getting a fairly bad strike rate. But we did have a few meetings to go to. We went through them one at a time. Polygram was one. Polygram announced to us that they would love to do it, but they were in the process of being sold at that time. They were right in the middle of the company being sold and they said, 'Look, if we weren't being sold, we would do it. But we're being sold, so we can't.'"

By then, Jackson explained, "We were at the end of week three now and we only had one more week to engage somebody for the check to be written and sent to Harvey. It was the day that we were due to fly home. We'd sort of essentially done all the meetings and the New Line meeting was the last one. It was literally a case of go to New Line at three o'clock in the afternoon for the meeting and then get in your car and drive to the airport and fly home. That was the schedule. And New Line was, in some respects, the most unlikely of the companies to take on a project of this size. To be completely honest, we didn't have hugely high hopes. Mark Ordesky (who heads New Line's specialized distribution arm Fine Line Features) was an old friend of mine. Mark, I knew, was a huge 'Lord of the Rings' fan. That was the only sort of ray of hope, really. If Ordesky could make the decision all by himself, he would say yes because he was a huge fan of the book. I sort of knew that. But, obviously, Mark's not the guy who makes decisions there (at New Line).

"So we went to New Line and met up with Bob Shaye. Bob asked to have a private discussion with me first. He took me into his office and Bob's discussion with me was basically along the lines of, 'We'll have a look at this tape that you've got, but I just want you to know now that if we decide that we don't want to do this project you're very welcome to come to us with other things in the future.' I just thought this was a classic case of me being set up for a no. So I thanked Bob and we went in and we sat and we played this tape. Bob sort of sat there in stony silence, like completely silent for the 36 minutes that the tape played. And at the end of it literally the first words out of his mouth were, 'Why would you want to make two films?' And that point, when he said that I thought that this was it. This was the end. I was literally (thinking) that the project had no died for us at that point. But then he turned to us and said, 'Isn't it three books? Shouldn't there be three films?' And with that statement, I suddenly thought, 'Well, hang on, what's he saying? What's the code there? And then he just proceeded to talk and say if we were interested in this, 'I think three films would be the way to go. I've got to talk to (New Line co-chairman and co-CEO) Michael Lynne, but we are interested.' That was the moment that we felt that maybe we would be continuing on this journey."

That was back in August 1998. "They immediately started to negotiate with Miramax," Jackson said. "There wasn't really much negotiating to be done because what Harvey was asking for was simply for his costs to be refunded and his costs were real costs. They had to talk to (producer) Saul Zaentz because Saul Zaentz had done a deal with Harvey to sell Harvey the rights (to the material). So Saul still retained, obviously, some ownership and control. Bob Shaye had to talk to Saul Zaentz about the concept of the rights shifting. Saul was very supportive in the process. The New Line lawyers and the Miramax lawyers started to engage in (negotiations). The deadline sneaked past four weeks, but Miramax were fine. They basically extended the deadline to enable the legal work to be done. But certainly by the end of the fifth week, the check had been written and it was a done thing."

Clearly, Jackson had seen how to turn the books into two films. How did he and his colleagues feel about now being faced with doing three movies? "It was exciting," he replied. "We didn't feel overly daunted because (of the great) excitement about being able to do 'The Lord of the Rings' in the way it should be done. We had lost sequences. We had lost characters that we didn't particularly want to lose. We had had to truncate the story just to fit it into two films. So we now were looking at the opportunity to expand our screenplays to return to the structure of the books, because there are three books, and that sense that we're doing 'Lord of the Rings' exactly the way it should be done overrode any concern about what we were facing in terms of the work. We were just creatively excited. We immediately set about revising our scripts. We essentially had to start again because the narrative structure that we had devised for the two scripts now no longer functioned in any way, shape or form because to split the story into three demanded an entirely different structure.

"So we started all over again with the screenplays. It was probably another 10 or 11 months of scriptwriting to now do the three whilst all the other pre-production was commencing -- the real pre-production. We sort of shifted from a three year r& d phase into proper pre-production whilst we were doing the screenplays. I don't recall ever feeling concerned, worried or daunted about the fact we were doing three. It just seemed like the perfect way to do it and we felt immensely lucky that we were involved in it at all at that point in time. Having flirted with disaster on a couple of occasions, we felt that the project was in the hands of a guardian angel. We really did feel that somehow fate was smiling on us. So we went into the actual making of these movies with a very good spirit."

The film's ending is one that has left some moviegoers saying they wished it was more definitive than the stopping off point in the ongoing story that it is. "The endings were always a concern," Jackson pointed out. "It's a difficult situation because, in a sense, to wrap up the story is impossible because, ultimately, the story of 'The Lord of the Rings' tells the tale of Frodo Baggins carrying a ring to Mount Doom and he doesn't arrive at Mount Doom until the third book. And so it's obviously impossible to provide any decisive wrap-up if you're making the book into three films. Also, we were in a fairly unique position where we were making three movies at the same time, which enables us to release them one year apart. So unlike a movie in a sequel, which inevitably would be two or three years apart, we had the gap down to one year. We felt that one year was short enough to be able to leave the audience in the middle of the story and return in 12 months time. We ultimately didn't really feel concerned about the event that we were creating.

"We were very determined that it had to be marketed as three films. The one thing that we did say in all of our discussions was that there's no way that we should hide the fact that we're making three films and that people will have to come three times to see the whole story. If we tried to hide that we would certainly would be having audiences feeling dissatisfied if they somehow had felt that this was 'The Lord of the Rings' and they were going to see the whole thing in this one film and we sort of kept secret that there were two more (films to be seen). That would have been a really bad idea from a marketing point of view. So what New Line has done is to really try to make everybody aware that it's a trilogy of films so that when you go to the first film you don't really have an expectation that you're going to be seeing the end of the story."

Focusing on how the first film ends, he pointed out, "The story of 'The Fellowship' does pretty much follow the books. We end the movie at the point that the first of the books finishes. So we are following that in terms of the basic action structure. But we did want to provide an emotional climax to the film. We did want people to feel that emotionally Frodo had arrived in a place where he could continue on into the next two movies. We spend a lot of time -- and this is not in the books, this is something we sort of added to the film -- to really have a sense that Frodo, who has been uncertain and unsure of the job that he has to do and relying a lot upon his friends to help him -- that by the time our first film comes to an end he has emotionally come to a place where he's now able to continue by himself, which is the decision that he obviously has to make in the climax of the first film. We felt that if we get to a place where there's a sense of emotional closure on Frodo, that one chapter of his life is closed and he's now able to go into the next two movies, then that would be enough to have audiences coming out of the movie feeling that they've seen a film not half a film."

What Jackson is working on now is an addition to the end of the last reel of the first film that will give moviegoers an advance look at what they'll see in the next picture, "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," opening this December. "A lot of people have asked when there's going to be a trailer for the next film," Jackson said. "And a lot of people have said that they really wish that they could have either have just stayed in the cinema and gone straight into film two or, at least, could have had a glimpse of what was in film two. I think the fans actually missed that. So I figured that towards the end of the theatrical run of 'The Fellowship,' a lot of the fans are going to go back to the theater to see it for the final time on the big screen. We're expecting in our last week or two that there's going to be one last trip by all these people just to see it before it leaves the theaters. I just thought it would be a great way of saying thanks to all of the fans who supported the film. Some of these people have seen the film four or five or six times.

"I thought it would be a nice thing to do in the last week or two of its run to actually give them a glimpse of the second film. So we've created what I'm calling a preview. It's not really a teaser or a trailer because it doesn't quite feel like a teaser or trailer and it's longer. It's three and a half minutes long. Basically, it's a preview of the second film. It's entirely made up of footage of part two. It hasn't got the conventions of a trailer. It hasn't got a narration or a voice over. It doesn't have titles and graphics and things. It doesn't have all the jazzed up stuff that trailers and teaser trailers do. It's just simply a sequence of shots of what people can expect to see in the next film. It includes a few surprises. I think people are going to see things in this preview that they don't expect that they're going to see because we're seeing them some of the special effects shots that we're doing for the second film."

That glimpse of the second "Rings" film, however, won't be available anywhere but in theaters at the end of the first film's run. "What I've said to New Line is that I don't want this to be released to TV," Jackson said. "I just feel that the fans that come back for the last time to see the movie should be the only people who see this. It would only be shown this once (in theaters) and not be released to any other outlets (like DVD or home video)."

While much has been written about Jackson making three "Rings" films simultaneously in New Zealand, I asked him to clarify how he worked in terms of shooting material for each picture. "We mixed it up to some degree," he said. "We did concentrate on shooting the first film mainly in the first four to five months of the shoot. We shot for 15 months. We shot everything out of sequence, so when I say we shot the first film, we shot obviously completely out of sequence. We did certainly jump around a bit. There was a couple of occasions. The scene of the Hobbit village that obviously features heavily in the first film, that's also where the story finishes at the end of the third film. So when we were shooting that early in our shoot, we also filmed all of the sequences that we needed for the third film at the same time. We also had a situation at the end of the first couple of months of shooting back in late 1999 that was pretty weird. It was very hard for Elijah Wood and Sean Astin where we went down to the south island of New Zealand to shoot some location footage for the first film. We arrived in a place called Queenstown and there was a huge storm that had occurred and Queenstown was basically flooded. The entire streets were underwater. Some of our sets that we'd built on the side of the lake had been swept away, flooded away. Roads had subsided. We couldn't get to where we needed to shoot. So we had a real problem."

Under the circumstances, he recalled, "We looked around for what we could actually shoot. Because it was raining, we had to shoot indoors. We hoped that we could shoot outdoors. Even if it was wet, we were intending to shoot in the rain. This wasn't even a case of it raining. It was a case of the roads being swept away and we couldn't even reach the location that we needed to be at. So we were in a real bind. We looked at all of the sets. Queenstown had no studios and has no way to actually build sets. But there was a squash court in a hotel that provided the biggest space that we could find. So we rented the squash court of the hotel and we looked around at what set we could build. It had to be something relatively small. We picked a set from the middle of the third film. Fortunately we had all of our scripts and we had all three films planned so we knew precisely what we needed.

"So we very quickly in the space of like 24 hours constructed a set from the middle of film three that is part of the story that's very emotionally powerful with Frodo and Sam (Sean Astin). It's when they're reaching Mordor and it's very intense. So poor Elijah and Sean Astin had to suddenly take their characters from film one, which we'd been shooting, and had to suddenly jump right into the middle of film three when they're in a very, very different head space. We found ourselves having to shoot these scenes from the middle of film three while we were waiting for the roads to be repaired. All sorts of little things like that happened to us. But we generally shot out of sequence, but concentrating mainly on film one first."