THE WORLD IS CHANGED
Back in 2001, we headed to Cannes to talk to a little-known New Zealander and a cast that included a Hetty Wainthropp Investigates regular about their upcoming take on THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Here’s an abridged version of the resulting cover story
FRAMED BY A gigantic stone troll and the spherical, wooden door of a hobbit hole, Peter Jackson shrugs with the amiable air of a man immune to the forces of hype and begins with a shocker: “You know, I never really harboured an ambition to make Lord Of The Rings... ”
Empire and this most affable of directors are currently basking in the Cannes sunshine, where most of the cast have joined their boss for the film’s launch party. From this delightful spot our tale will venture to the wilds of Middle-earth and its earthly surrogate, New Zealand. But, for the moment, let’s take a brief detour to Kazakhstan.
In this strict corner of the former Soviet Union, there has been a recent crackdown on so-called “Tolkienists”. Thousands of Kazakh fans, it seems, have been dressing up as hobbits and re-enacting pivotal moments from the Godfather of fantasy fiction (very popular since perestroika granted its first translation in 1988). However, the local authorities take an extremely dim view of such “bohemian lifestyles”, accusing the wannabe Bilbos of “being Satanists and conducting dark rituals”. Regular “meets” are typically met with the iron boot of discipline.
Dark times, indeed, in deepest Asia, but it goes to show. With 100 million near-pathological readers, this story of a ring, a heroic short-arse and an imminent apocalypse has become a global brand to rival Coca-cola or Microsoft.
The Lord Of The Rings is big business, but wasn’t it meant to be unfilmable?
“Tolkien’s writing is so vivid, you can imagine a movie, you can imagine the camera angles, and the cutting. You can just sort of see it playing itself out” — PETER JACKSON
DURING POST-PRODUCTION on The Frighteners in 1995, Jackson was mulling over the possibilities of this new computerised technology. His own special-effects company, Weta (named after a Kiwi bug), were completing the elaborate CGI on the movie and he mused how easily these malleable pixels could lend themselves to a movie like his hero, Ray Harryhausen, used to make. With his proposed remake of King Kong about to falter in pre-production, he thought he could really go for a Lord Of The Rings-type movie. Hold on, what about The Lord Of The Rings?
“I read the book once when I was 18,” begins Jackson, inspired to pick it up after watching Ralph Bakshi’s animated version in 1979. “I thought, ‘No-one’s made a live-action version.’ The key is that ultimately you cannot make one film of it, you have to lose too much. You couldn’t call the movie Lord Of The Rings with an honest face.”
With the idea of making two movies, he set about discovering who owned the rights. This alone would take a year. Tolkien, it transpired, had sold the rights to MGM at the end of the ’60s. After a couple of abortive attempts and the author’s death, producer Saul Zaentz (who’d won an Oscar for The English Patient) bought out MGM and did nothing. Okay, he produced Bakshi’s ill-fated ’toon, but became convinced it could never happen. He hadn’t counted on Jackson’s vision. “Only because of him, I gave away the rights,” he gushed.
They took the deal to Miramax, who offered to stump up for one film. With limbo threatening, Jackson turned to Bob Shaye at New Line. Shaye, a passionate fan of both the Kiwi director and the late Oxford don, flatly refused to make two films.
He would do it only if they made three. Giving him $270 million ($90 million a film) and total creative freedom to do so.
The deal done, Jackson picked up the book and began to read.
TOLKIEN’S MAGNIFICENT EPIC runs (depending on the edition) to 1,008 pages (not
“The most difficult thing has been the script. Without any doubt, the scriptwriting has been a total nightmare” — PETER JACKSON
including maps, introduction, prologue and appendices). It’s a big book, a whopper. Embarking upon a read is to enter a long-term relationship with pages teeming with myriad detail and imagination without equal. It also serves as an excellent doorstop. And while three films, running from two to three hours a piece, is very generous, things were going to have to go. Here, of course, lay potential quicksand; the danger of aggravating those millions of disciples for whom the mythos is nothing less than a religion.
Jackson did not embark on the task alone. His wife Fran Walsh — a collaborator on all his films — and friend and playwright Philippa Boyens formed the fateful troika who would set about the impossible.
“I like to think of it, and the choices we made,” Boyens opines of the cuts, “that we chose to leave some things untold, rather than left out. Unsaid.” It wasn’t just trimming, though; the plot needed massaging for the screen. For starters, the book is very boyish, the female characters are marginal at best, while the singular love story — between Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and Arwen (Liv Tyler) — is relegated to the appendices. Solution: whip it back out again, thread it in and give Tyler something to get her chops into.
“For me as a girl and that kind of girl,” says Tyler, “one of the main things that attracted me was the power and beauty of the love story. It is the most dreamy, classic kind of love story — classic struggles and decisions.”
The point is, Aragorn, a man, is mortal, and his beloved Arwen is an elf and therefore immortal. To stand by her man she has to give up on eternity. In Tolkien’s turbulent universe, happiness comes with a price.
An even trickier problem was the lack of a meaty bad guy. There are bad guys per se, just not very visible ones. Sauron, the Dark Lord, the main mother, is manifest as a giant, red eyeball who never leaves his hideous fortress, Barad-dur — his malign influence more pervasive than physical, cinematically a no-no. Saruman (Lee) is a corrupted wizard who really throws a wand in the works, but he too is fairly static, never leaving his evil sanctuary of Orthanc. Not to forget the reams of twisted minions — Orcs, Black Riders, Balrogs — but, in Hollywood terms, there was no supercharged villain. Their solution was ingenious.
“We made the Ring a character,” explains Jackson. “It speaks, it sings, it calls. When we were filming the Ring we always shot really close, filling the entire screen, to give it kind of a presence.”
THE VERY MOMENT the movie was made public, we all knew it was going to be Sean Connery to play Gandalf, the aged wizard typified by his waist-length beard and pointy hat. That was a given. Except it wasn’t. Instead, they chose Sir Ian Mckellen; add one stick-on face rug and grey cloak, and the wizard was alive.
“I didn’t know where Ian Mckellen began and Gandalf finished,” marvels Jackson. “He just gets absorbed in the role.”
They soon hit a snag, though. They couldn’t find hero and Ring-bearer, Frodo. The original idea was that all the hobbits would be played by Brits; after all, Tolkien had imagined the denizens of the idyllic Shire as diminutive Englishmen. Over 150 young British actors were auditioned. A process that delivered up Hetty Wainthropp’s Dominic Monaghan (as hobbit Merry), Scot Billy Boyd (as hobbit Pippin) and Kent-born Orlando Bloom. But no Frodo.
“You knew within two minutes whether they were right or not,” says Jackson. “And Frodo hadn’t walked in the door.”
Then a package arrived from Los Angeles. One Elijah Wood had got wind of the project and taken some pages, rummaged up some makeshift hobbit garb and headed for some nearby greenery to video-tape his own ‘audition’. “We were at a desperate point in trying to find Frodo and we put this tape in the machine and it was extraordinary. There he was.”
Once the non-american rule had been dispensed with, Samwise — Frodo’s
“His casting is impeccable. I have never walked into a first reading of anything before and looked around and identified all the characters: ‘That’s got to be Frodo... That’s got to be Legolas the elf... That’s got to be Sam’” — JOHN RHYS-DAVIES
indomitable sidekick — was soon filled by Sean Astin. The other pivotal role is that of Aragorn, the heroic, rugged king-to-be. The answer: 28-year-old Irish actor, Stuart Townsend. Right? Err, wrong. The second major hitch arose two weeks into shooting when Townsend was let go.
“Stuart is a huge Tolkien fan,” admits Jackson, honest enough to acknowledge his own mistake. “He said to us, ‘You’re crazy, I’m too young. Aragorn should be a rugged man in his forties.’ We came to realise this wasn’t the character in the book.” Enter Viggo Mortensen.
“I’m a great believer in fate,” the director philosophises, “and fate can either be kind to you or not kind. I do believe there are forces at work. And the moment Viggo became part of this project was marvellous. I’ve never seen a guy became a character more than Viggo; he became Aragorn.”
The principal cast was rounded out by Sheffield stalwart Sean Bean as Boromir, the most complex member of the team. And the splendid John Rhys-davies, a barrel-chested thesp with the mightiest voice in Christendom, who plays Gimli, an outspoken Dwarf.
Peter Jackson had formed his Fellowship.
PETER JACKSON, UPON whose broad back this entire, unfathomable enterprise has rested for over five years, owns one pair of shoes and two shirts of identical colour and design. He wears knee-length shorts no matter what the elements choose to hurl at him. Indeed, the cast members assembled for the Cannes shindig are stunned to see the squat Kiwi actually wearing long trousers.
“He has nothing to do with fashion,” explains Mckellen, implying this is the very height of flattery. “The world we live in has a lot to do with fashion. His has to do with basics, getting on with making something work, making something happen. He’s very practical and that’s very reassuring. He was always relaxed. And looked like a hobbit.”
That Jackson is possessed with hobbitlike qualities is something on which the entire cast concur. That and the fact that he seems to be some fizzing amalgam of savant, father-figure, genius, husband, warrior and clown.
“He’s as cool as an elf, he’s got the heart of a hobbit and is as mad as a wizard,” chimes Bloom with the neat syncopation of the sturdy soundbite. “I mean, all these characters are within him. It was his baby, his labour of love.”
Throughout 18 months of a gruelling schedule, Jackson never once lost his cool. He welcomed the thoughts of his cast, but always seemed to have the right answer to every dilemma. Before every shot, no matter how small, he would read the appropriate section from the book to make sure the spirit of Tolkien was there to keep it real.
“If he ever said anything twice, it was done,” asserts Wood.
TAKE A GLANCE at the stats involved and the enormity is staggering:
• The film schedule was 274 days over 15 months, from October 1999 to December 2000.
• They used 21 cameras, five studios and 4.5 million feet of film.
• There were 350 different sets, some as large as city blocks.
“Where do you begin with Pete Jackson? He is a complete enigma, There are elements about him which mean he shouldn’t be a director. He’s just too nice, he’s too much of a family man” — DOMINIC MONAGHAN “We always had two units shooting and we had miniature units as well. Another two units made four and occasionally we had a scenic unit going out filming boats on the river, or doubles up snowy landscapes” — PETER JACKSON
• A total of 330 vehicles were used, stretching one km when parked bumper to bumper.
• The crew grew to 2,000, with 22 major roles.
• 30 km of roads were built for the film.
• At one meal, 1,440 eggs and 160kg of meat were consumed.
• 48,000 different props and miscellaneous items were created.
Whichever way you look at it, it was one of the most awesome shoots ever mounted — three movies shot simultaneously out of sequence. A process as exacting as it was fulfilling.
As the shoot wore on and the pressure mounted, Jackson could be seen cycling from set to set at the Wellington studio on an old bicycle, eager to save time. Bloom remembers one miraculous day when he traversed the whole country by helicopter to get to his next shot, complete with stick-on ears and blond wig. Promised breaks came and went, six-day weeks of 14- to 15-hour days became the norm. And somehow throughout it all, spinning every plate, Jackson just kept going.
“I’m totally unfit, but I’m the tortoise guy who can keep plodding on. Mentally I had days when my brain would feel like it was mush,
I felt I had no imagination left. When your imagination starts to lock, you panic. Honestly, there were days when I was just turning to the actors and hoping they weren’t as tired as I was and pointing the camera at them, hoping we were getting good stuff.”
The cast, too, felt the pressure, sick of sticking on their hobbit feet, sick of the outdoors, just completely knackered. Working together under such extremes, in an elemental, beautiful environment like New Zealand, combined with the spiritual rub-off of a storyline about a group of disparate personalities uniting for a common cause, was bound to bring them close. But these were friendships cast in stone.
“Because of the length of time, the unceasing grind of it,” says Mortensen, “we came to know each other’s good and bad points. You became entangled in each other’s lives in a good way.
I felt that I became part of them and they became part of me.”
The hobbits in particular became their own band of brothers. When not shooting they learned to surf together, they took trips to Thailand and Australia, they went skiing, snowboarding, white-water-rafting and bungee-jumping. They referred to themselves as Hobbits.
“We became friends for life,” says Sean Astin, who had his family with him for the duration. “They were like uncles to my daughter. Art imitated life or life imitated art, or something.”
On 19 December 2001, The Fellowship
Of The Ring will be released on 10,000 screens worldwide. The poor Kazakh Tolkienists may get their heads kicked in, but John Rhys-davies, at least, is convinced the biggest opening ever is assured. At the 2001 Empire Awards, he confidently bet Empire a bottle of fine vino on this very issue. Jackson, meanwhile, will not be drawn. He just hopes people partake of some of the joy of his journey.
“Hitchcock gave my favourite quote: ‘Where some people’s movies are slices of life, mine are slices of cake.’ I think that sums up what films should really do.”
This time, though, it’s the whole damn dessert trolley on offer.