Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © Ian Nathan 2018

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photograph © Paul Stuart/Camera Press London

Ian Nathan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008192471

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008192488

Version: 2019-03-27

Dedication

For Kat, who can’t abide hobbits.

Epigraph

‘The artist-initiated epic is an obsessive testing of possibilities … It comes, too, from a conviction, or a hope, that if you give popular audiences the greatest you have in you they will respond.’

Pauline Kael

‘It would be easier to film The Odyssey. Much less happens in it.’

J.R.R. Tolkien

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword by Andy Serkis

Prologue: Journey's End

1: Sillification

2: An Unexpected Director

3: Many Meetings

4: Words and Pictures

5: Concerning Hobbits

6: Heavenly Creatures

7: Jamboree

8: Miramar’s Mecca of Merry Souls

9: Proof of Concept

10: The Monsters and the Critics

11: To the Edge of the World

12: Junkie

13: MASSIVE

14: Return to the Edge of the World

15: The Music of Middle-earth

16: King of a Golden Hall

17: Legacy of the Ring

18: There and Back Again

19: Augmented Reality

Afterword

Picture Section

Footnotes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

About the Author

Also by Ian Nathan

About the Publisher

Foreword

It feels like there was life before and life after.

I can remember the first time I saw Gollum. A finished Gollum. It was the sequence by the Forbidden Pool where he turns around to see Frodo, and he knows that something’s going on. It’s almost like an animal instinct; he can sense it. It was absolutely extraordinary.

You don’t know, you could never know. Here, finally, was the first proof that a level of psychological and emotional detail could be conveyed through ones and noughts. That thought could be conveyed through the combination of my performance and what they were doing at Weta Digital. I could sense that thought. I could feel that was exactly as I played it. That was incredibly gratifying.

Then I remember seeing The Two Towers for the first time. It was in New York, I was with Miranda Otto, Bernard Hill and Karl Urban. It was mind blowing. I knew every single frame.

I sensed that my life was never going to be the same again.

I supposed that was true for everyone who shared in The Lord of the Rings. The actors, the crew, everyone. None of us really knew what we were letting ourselves in for. And we went through so much together. Filmmaking is life. Every day you’re making a film is as important as the end result, because it feeds into the fabric of that film. That counts tenfold for The Lord of the Rings. That’s what attracted me to go back and do so many projects with Peter, Fran and Philippa, and all those guys down there, because it is a way of life. You don’t go to work; you’re living and breathing it.

Nevertheless, it certainly wasn’t the journey I was expecting for a second. Not for a second. Adding together both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, I have celebrated seven different birthdays in New Zealand. The first one was literally only days after I arrived. We were up at Ruapehu, shooting Mount Doom. That was pretty cool. We were staying at the Powderhorn, which looked like an alpine chalet. It was lovely. They made me a cake. The most memorable one was when Pete gave me the Ring for my birthday and on the same day asked me to be in King Kong. That was on an Easter Sunday. Other ones came and went, in so many beautiful places.

I still feel deeply connected to New Zealand. The beauty there is almost overwhelming. I was very into the outdoor life, walking, hiking and kayaking whenever I could. The whole experience was very spiritual. That country, root and branch, mountain and valley, is the soul of the films.

Moreover, I also can’t express how honest and open the people are. How much they made us part of their community and gave us such a good time. I made so many great friends.

So many people migrated there to take up jobs on The Lord of the Rings, it created a film industry there.

In the end, though, all roads lead back to Pete. And Fran and Philippa, of course. Pete is the most fearless director I’ve ever met. He has shared so much with me, taught me so much. I have said it often, but there is something truly maverick about him, an indie filmmaker working on the biggest scale possible. That’s what it always felt like. We were shooting these personal little indie films. These extraordinary films are an expression of who a person is. Pete is also such a visionary, just breaking barriers all the time with this marriage of technology and artistry.

I remember the glint in his eye when I first met him, so many years ago, in London. I could sense, even then, his vision for Gollum; neither of us really knew what we were letting ourselves in for but it was definitely going to be an unexpected journey. After principal photography on The Lord of the Rings ended, Pete signed a poster for me, which said “Many thanks for all the fun … and the fun to come.” It was then, and for the next decade, and hopefully always will be just that …

Andy Serkis

PROLOGUE
Journey’s End

Monday, 1 December, 2003 was a typical summer’s day in Wellington. The sun was doing its level best, but the eternal, maddening winds were already scuffling over the bay and muscling their way inshore to ruffle pennants and hairdos but never spirits. Not on this day.

The red carpet was less familiar but not unexpected. Over 500 feet of imitation velvet swerved up Courtenay Place to the doors of the Embassy Cinema, recently refurbished at a cost of $5 million to a fetching cream and caramel Art Deco scheme. One of the myriad cinematic gifts Peter Jackson had bestowed upon his hometown. Fittingly, fifteen years earlier, his debut film, Bad Taste, had premiered at the Embassy, albeit with less salubrious décor and a smaller turnout.

Less in keeping with the old movie-palace aesthetic was the cowled Nazgûl astride a fell beast that had landed on top of the cinema virtually overnight to take up silent watch over the day’s festivities.

That full-size model, or maquette, with its great-scooped neck and outspread wings, sculpted by the imperious talents of Weta Workshop, still exists. Like so many Middle-earthian relics, it has been squirrelled away for posterity in one of Jackson’s dusty warehouses, the Mines of Moria of the Upper Hutt Valley.

Jackson might have to still undertake the mandatory global press tour on behalf of his new film, with its procession of glad-handing and crowd waving, but he had been adamant that the official world premiere for The Return of the King was to be in Wellington, the city at the heart of the production. This was the victory lap for a filmmaking triumph that, even in his innermost fantasies, he could never have imagined, and he wanted to share the moment with the people who had contributed so much.

Naturally, it was to be a party of special magnificence.

The good folk of Wellington were beginning to line the streets, bringing picnics and an unusual air of excitement for such an imperturbable race. Some had even camped out overnight. It felt like a public holiday, or a homecoming parade. And in some senses that is exactly what it was. By the afternoon, over 125,000 locals were crammed ten rows deep on either side of the streets — quite something for a city with a population of 164,000 — their ranks swelled by out-of-towners (decreed honorary Wellingtonians for such an occasion), many wearing homespun wizard hats and Elf-ears, who had crammed themselves onto long-haul flights from every corner of the world just to be here on this day. You could hear the noise halfway to Wanganui.

Soon enough the stars and filmmakers would glide through the city, setting off from Parliament House on Lambton Quay in a fleet of Ford Mustang convertibles, soaking up the adoration of the crowd with a royal wave, flanked by Gondorian cavalry, enshrouded Nazgûl on stoic horses, pug-ugly Orcs hefting Weta-made swords, beefcake Uruk-hai, supermodel Elves, and dancing hobbits trying not to trip over their outsized feet. At their head, in deference to the country that had become Middle-earth, was an outlier of Māori warriors with florid tā moko tattoos and waggling tongues. They might as well have been another extraordinary tribe dreamed up in leafy Oxford, a million miles away, in the mind of a pipe-smoking don.

When Orlando Bloom wafted past accompanied by Liv Tyler, there was screaming of a kind that was once the preserve of Beatlemania. There exists a framed photo of the four young actors who played the heroic hobbits — Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan — that they had made for Jackson’s birthday. They are in their hobbit wigs, Shire garments and prosthetic feet, but playing instruments and posed exactly like John, Paul, George and Ringo. ‘The Hobbits’ is emblazoned on the bass drum. The Beatles are Jackson’s favourite band, and had themselves once pondered making their own version of Tolkien’s epic as a musical extravaganza.

New Line had reputedly spent millions on the last official world premiere of the film trilogy they had staked their future on. What an inspired decision that seemed now. Had any film in history received a welcome like this? Bob Shaye, the tall, graceful, slightly bohemian CEO of New Line, would sit alongside Jackson in the lead car, the man who had taken the chance on this young director. It hadn’t been the easiest relationship. Hollywood’s risk-averse mentality was not an ideal mix with the natural Kiwi courage to take on the odds. There would be further tensions to come. For now, Shaye and his partner Michael Lynne’s gamble on the impossible book, which had seemed so foolhardy if not outright suicidal to their peers, had that shimmer of Hollywood history about it. That sense of divine obsession on which the movie industry was built, where for every Gone with the Wind there was a Heaven’s Gate.

Figurative tickertape was raining down on Wellington; it was the stuff of dreams with the city’s favourite son capturing it all on his video camera. He knew he would never remember it all, it would pass in a blur.

They had made it to the Moon and back again in filmmaking terms. The Return of the King, a fantasy epic, that laughably unsophisticated genre, would soon pick up eleven Oscar nominations. This was the culminating chapter in a staggering, and staggeringly successful, adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, considered for so long as impossible to capture on film.

Helen Clark, New Zealand’s prime minister, the day’s host, would give her thanks for all the films had brought to this country. Not only Hollywood dollars and employment — when the accounting was done the films would have utilised the talents of 23,000 Kiwis — but the tourism boom his trilogy of marvels had launched. With the help of a different world Jackson had put New Zealand onto the map.

How proud his country was of him, she said. How much she hoped his success would continue on into the future.

Jackson too would address the crowd, giving his thanks and saying how humble he felt that so many of them would turn out. He wasn’t even an All Black.

Everyone would give speeches. Each roared on by the crowd. It was like a wedding or a coronation, with 2,500 specially invited guests. Only this time Viggo Mortensen wasn’t expected to sing.

*

Earlier that day, amid the bustle of party business, with various planners and executives clamouring into walky-talkies and lumpen Nokias, Jackson had dutifully arrived on time at his allotted meeting point. Then, he hadn’t had to travel far. His home in Seatoun was barely ten minutes away, twenty if you caught Wellington at rush hour when the tailbacks can stretch to as many as ten cars long.

Seatoun lies on the seaward side of the quiet Wellington suburb of the Miramar Peninsula that plays home to Jackson’s filmmaking empire — studio, offices, post-production facilities, Weta Workshop, Weta Digital. Hollywood visitors still had trouble seeing past the corrugated iron roofs, brick warehouses, and general disrepair of the former paint factory on Stone Street. Outwardly, barring the immediate beauty of the landscape, everything here seemed so … Well, so unlikely.

How unlikely too that, in all their planning, no one had thought what to do with their director, the man who had made all this happen, while the final arrangements for the premiere were being made. So it was that Jackson had been guided to a perfectly nice hotel suite to wait in a celebrity holding pattern while the more rigorous demands of readying film stars for a public appearance took place elsewhere.

The memory still strikes Jackson as strange. ‘I thought, well, that sounds nice. I thought there would be the actors, but it was just me, and they shut the door. And I was sitting in this hotel room for at least an hour and a half. I was lying there thinking, this is pretty weird. Why aren’t we having a drink down in the bar?’

He was as nervous as anyone would be about to speak in front of hundreds of thousands of people. A drink, a laugh, simply passing the time with someone would have helped.

What might have struck him as strangest of all, however, was that he had been left to his own devices. As long as he stayed put. New Line’s army of wedding planners weren’t going to let their prize catch wriggle free. They virtually put him under lock and key. Gandalf imprisoned on the roof of Orthanc.

Only hours before, with the eleventh hour disappearing in the rear-view mirror, had he completed his adaptation of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. With a running time of three hours twenty-one minutes, long even by his own extended standards — and even then he knew that fans would bemoan the loss of lovely sequences that wouldn’t be retrieved until the Extended Edition a year from now — The Return of the King was ready for its heroic debut. For the first time in five years, maybe longer, Jackson didn’t need to worry about his films.

There was no need to approve any fresh artwork from the peerless and tireless pencils of John Howe or Alan Lee; or clear an effects shot, a music cue, a sound edit, a costume alteration, a set that had sprung up overnight, a mooted location or schedule, a poster design, or indeed head to the edit suite, because when all else was done he always needed to head to the edit. No actors would need to call upon his wisdom; no lighting set-up or shot trajectory was open for discussion. No stunt team needed marshalling. No new script pages needed to be wrestled into submission; as he no longer needed to fine-tune the sometimes-cumbersome complexities of Tolkien’s world toward the dynamic world of cinema — to choose this path or that, often depending on which one smelled the better. Even those public relations folk, who had called upon him to speak to the press when he could least afford the time, were now busy elsewhere.

The constant background noise inherent in this awesome undertaking had finally been silenced — all he could hear was the crowd a few blocks away, cheering even the carpet sweepers.

Jackson was left alone with his thoughts.

He turned on the television and found a telemovie, whatever was playing. He can’t remember what it was about let alone what it was called; he doubts it was any good.

Lying there on the bed, some cheesy, low-budget melodrama in the background, his mind must surely have wandered back through the forest of days, the miraculous events and unaccountable toil that had brought him here to this moment of triumph and farewell.

CHAPTER 1
Sillification

In June 1958, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien put pen to paper. Without letting his scrupulous English manners slip, he still made his feelings quite clear. The story, he claimed, swelling in his indignation as the letter wound on, had been ‘murdered’.

The year before, three American producers sounding not unlike a law firm from a film noir movie — Forrest J. Ackerman, Morton Grady Zimmerman and Al Brodax — had approached Tolkien’s publishers, Allen & Unwin, proposing a feature film of The Lord of the Rings. Having decried the ‘sillification achieved’ by the BBC in a 1955, twelve-part radio serial based upon his epic, written and produced by the poet Terrence Tiller (a close friend of Tolkien admirer W.H. Auden) — since lost to the mists of BBC deletion — he couldn’t see that dealing with a film version would be any less painful.

However, if not won over, he had begun to be persuaded that these filmmakers were at least responsive to the needs of the book. In the box of notes sent to the author’s house in the Oxford suburb of Headington, the trio outlined an ambitious mix of live action and animation running to three hours, including two intermissions, with the aim of shooting among the untamed expanses of the American landscape. Tolkien had been especially impressed at the quality of the concept art. How unlike Walt Disney it was, he noted appreciatively.

A few weeks later, as he had begun to read the story treatment, his heart had sunk. He simply couldn’t detect ‘any appreciation for what it was about’. Gandalf does not ‘splutter’, he contended, the Balrog does not speak and Lothlórien does not have shiny minarets. All moral import had been lost. The entire tone was childish, more of a fairy tale. And his book was most certainly not a fairy tale. The treatment did, incidentally, include Tom Bombadil.

His response goes on for several pages. Each documenting a significant narrative failing in the laissez-faire approach Zimmerman, the nominal screenwriter, had taken with the original text.

Wizards can be quick to anger.

Such a maladroit effort, if not rank trivialisation of Tolkien’s great adventure, is disappointing for fans of the genre. Not that the book wouldn’t suffer an arduous journey through a litany of scrambled attempts before it would be done justice. It was more that one of the prospective producers was meant to have had a keen respect for fantasy fiction.

Ackerman is known as the godfather of geek. He had helped fashion the concept of the fan convention; arriving at the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York in 1939 clad in a ‘futuristicostume’, he effectively invented cosplay to boot. On a business footing, he served as agent for many of the great Fifties horror and science fiction writers whose imaginations were running rife beneath the shadow of the nuclear age (and the influence of Tolkien). Writers like Ray Bradbury, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Isaac Asimov, the latter of who would create the star-spanning Foundation trilogy.

In 1958, Ackerman began his lifelong tenure as editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, a lavish, bustling monthly devoted to genre movies. Within its awe-struck pages were features celebrating King Kong, the 1933 classic, including the discovery of a fabled shot of a spider lurking on the cavern roof that fans had thought to be the stuff of myth. It also curated the kind of pun-heavy vernacular that saw the letters page christened ‘Fang Mail’.

For Tolkien, used to the unhurried discussion of philological esoterica among collegiate friends and the woody scent of pipe smoke at The Eagle and Child, he may as well have been from Mars.

For Peter Jackson and those filmmaking peers who shared a taste for the fantastic and the macabre, kindred visionaries like Guillermo del Toro, Fantastic Monsters of Filmland would become a friend in the dark. Here was proof that there were likeminded, monster-mad souls everywhere. Without it they may never have discovered their calling. In his old office, the secret one behind the bookcase that contained his most prized memorabilia, Jackson had his collection of back issues proudly on display.

With a rakish, pencil-thin moustache, high forehead and large horn-rimmed glasses, Ackerman suggested Vincent Price playing an insurance salesman, and he would appear in many of his beloved B-movies. He also dabbled a little in film production. And, together with his partners, was the first recorded prospector to engage with Tolkien about a film version of his great work.

We should respect the fact that Ackerman was ahead of the curve. In 1958, The Lord of the Rings was only four years old. While selling respectably, it was a long way from the cult prominence that made it a fixture of late-1960s campuses across America. An unauthorised ACE paperback edition had wriggled through America’s insubstantial copyright rules in 1965 and sold in phenomenal quantities. Indeed, by 1966 it was out-selling The Catcher in the Rye at Harvard. Students formed Tolkien societies, dressing up as their favourite characters and feasting on mushrooms. A scholarly lapel was naked without badges exclaiming ‘Frodo Lives’ or ‘Gandalf for President’.

Once official editions were issued (through the paperback imprint Ballantine Books) Tolkien would taste remarkable success. This in turn led to conspicuous quarters of the literary establishment scoffing at something they saw as childish. Among academics, to express affection for Tolkien was deemed as ‘professional suicide’.

In 1956, in his sarcastic essay, ‘Oo, Those Awful Orcs!’ Marxist critic Edmund Wilson called it ‘balderdash’.

Decades on, Germaine Greer claimed that the book’s popularity was like a ‘bad dream’.

Tolkien had never expected to start, as he put it, a ‘tide’. He only wrote the book for those who might like it.

Nevertheless, Frodo’s quest to rid the world of a magical ring by tossing it back into the volcanic fires from which it was forged had touched readers around the world. By 1968, three million copies of The Lord of the Rings had been sold worldwide. A 1999 poll conducted by Amazon judged it to be the Book of the Millennium. By 2003, once again much to the chagrin of the literary establishment, and perhaps catching a tailwind from Jackson’s films, a poll on behalf of the BBC’s Big Read named it Britain’s Favourite Read. According to recent calculations the book has sold upwards of 100 million copies.

Let us not tarry too long on the history of Tolkien and his literary genius. Reams have been written on the provenance of hobbits and the entirety of Middle-earth. Reams more will come. Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1892, where his father died when he was three, he was raised by his mother in the bucolic Worcestershire village of Sarehole (since consumed by greater Birmingham). She would die when he was only twelve, leaving him and his brother, Hilary, orphans. An early fascination with ancient languages and their mythological roots would lead to his creating his own, and eventually to an Oxford professorship in English Language and Literature, a journey interrupted by enlistment and the First World War.

In the dreadful lulls between fighting on the Somme (where Jackson’s grandfather also fought), and while recuperating from trench fever in Staffordshire, Tolkien began to conceive of the vastness of his fictional world, a world that would have its origins in the languages he had devised. He never felt he was writing fantasy but a form of history, a record that would reveal who might have spoken such words and where they might have lived. He saw his book as an attempt to recover a mythology for Britain, which lacked the equivalent lore to that of the Germanic, Nordic and Icelandic sagas he loved. Through a process he called ‘sub-creation’ grew a backdrop for his later books, a world of intricate construction: races, languages, myriad tales of wars and upheaval and a vast, vital geography against which it all played out.

‘I always had the sense of recording what was already “there”, somewhere, not of “inventing”,’ recalled Tolkien.

Philippa Boyens, who would work so closely with Jackson and Fran Walsh on the writing of the adaptation to come, always valued the ‘wholeness’ of Middle-earth. ‘That you can escape into something that feels utterly real,’ she says. ‘I like that obsession. I like all the detail.’

Laughing, she recalls that whenever any questions from the cast or crew became too entangled in the brambles of Tolkien’s mythos they were always fielded to Boyens as the trio’s Tolkien nerd. She always impressed upon her fellow filmmakers how much underpinned the books.

‘It’s such an immersive thing, because as much as he delved into and loved those languages, he loved them because of their connection with who the British are as a people. And that profoundly affected him, and that probably has a lot to do with his childhood.’

Watching the encroachment of industry and the concomitant loss of a tradition; the stark impressions of the battlefront that stripped bare notions of class; the devotion to nature (especially trees); learning; fine company; a dignified, if antiquated properness in his relationship with women: all were ingredients in the wholeness of the book. But deeper still, in Tolkien’s early loss of his parents, Boyens sees the loneliness of Frodo expelled from the childlike idyll of the Shire to venture into the adulthood of Middle-earth.

Composed first for his children, Tolkien would publish The Hobbit in 1937, a lighter, charming prelude to The Lord of the Rings, which would eventually follow in 1954. He never intended his second novel to be divided into three books, or considered a trilogy. This was a necessity brought on by soaring paper costs following the Second World War (another global conflict that overshadowed his writing). It was a single, epic story, over 1,000 pages in length, made up of more than half a million words.

His response to Ackerman and co. provides an insight into how the author generally perceived the idea of transforming his work into film entertainment.

Tolkien had visual sense. In among the treatment’s atrocities, he could appreciate, ‘A scene of gloom lit by a small red fire with the wraiths approaching as darker shadows.’

He revealed actorly qualities too. In the 1950s, disappointed by that 1955 BBC version, he recorded his own radio play The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm’s Son, in the poem’s full alliterative Anglo-Saxon metre. There is a little existing footage of him from a BBC documentary from 1968. He plays well to the camera: warm, curious and knowingly dotty, throwing in an occasional faraway look in his eye as he gazes off into the distance, perhaps to Middle-earth.

Even so, Tolkien didn’t regard movies, or drama in general, as legitimate art. We are left to wonder if Sir Ian McKellen’s wry Gandalf or Viggo Mortensen’s robust Aragorn might have swayed him, but he considered the idea of acting to be a ‘bogus magic’. It was pretending.

Nevertheless, as early as 1957 he had written to his publisher Stanley Unwin that he wasn’t opposed to the idea of an animated version of the book — evidently having no faith that live action would stand up to the exotic creatures and fantastical locations therein. In another oft-quoted letter to his publisher, in his qualified way he even welcomed the idea.

‘And that quite apart from the glint of money,’ he added, ‘though on the brink of retirement that is not an unpleasant possibility.’

He was no fool about the business.

Tolkien reasoned, with a foresight that would have made him more adept at dealing with Hollywood than his quiet, donnish persona would suggest, that he could either strike a deal through which he would lose control but be correspondingly compensated financially, or retain a degree of control but not the fiscal win.

‘Cash or kudos,’ he explained to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter.

With few signs of either cash or kudos emerging out of granting a six-month option to Ackerman and his associates, as the biography succinctly puts it, ‘negotiations were not continued’.

*

From that enshrined afternoon when, bored by marking uninspired English papers in his Northmoor Road drawing room, Tolkien had turned over a sheet and quite from nowhere written the line ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ a river of events will flow and churn over the years toward a quiet backwater in New Zealand. Those of a mystical bent might call it fate.

But there was a long way to go yet.

Nigh on a decade had passed when, in 1967, Tolkien was approached for a second time about the film rights, this time for both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

While he welcomed the financial security the popularity of the novel had granted him, Tolkien had grown guarded if not threatened by the side effects of his success. He had no interest in fame and its attendant adulation. Especially wearisome were those fans who arrived on his doorstep uninvited with all their infernal questions, which he patiently endeavoured to answer. He took to setting an alarm clock in another room. When it rang, he politely claimed this signalled another appointment. Unwisely still to be found in the Oxford telephone directory, he would get calls deep into the night from faraway readers with a poor grasp of time-zone differences.

When United Artists came to him with this new offer, he may have seen it as a chance to deflect attention. Now seventy-five, and lacking the energy to deal with another adaptation he was always going to find fault with, he most likely wanted to wash his hands of the whole business. He could use the money to establish a trust fund for his grandchildren’s education. So he agreed to part with the filmmaking rights in perpetuity to both books for what now looks like a parsimonious £104,000.

It was a remarkably generous contract. To paraphrase the pertinent details: ‘Filmmakers had the right to add to or subtract from the work or any part thereof. They had the right to make sequels to, new versions, and adaptations of the work or any part thereof. To use any part or parts of the work or the theme thereof, or any instance, character, characteristics, scenes, sequences or characters therein …’

In other words, the studio was legally entitled to do just about anything it wanted with the books. It remains entirely permissible for the current rights holder to devise a sequel to Frodo’s journey.

Six years later, in 1973, Tolkien would pass away without having seen a single frame of his work on screen.

UA, as it was known, certainly in Hollywood, seemed a suitable berth for Tolkien’s books. Proudly founded in 1919 by the collective of actors Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and, granddaddy of the movie epic, director D.W. Griffith, it was an attempt by the artists to control the means of production. To resolve, they hoped, the eternal ‘art versus business’ conflict that had dogged, and goes on dogging, the film business from its very inception. A similar philosophy would later underpin Jackson’s filmmaking collective.

UA stutteringly lived up to its billing. While the great dream of artists at the wheel would falter — they were too busy acting and directing to find time to steer a film company — and the company would gradually be run along more traditional Hollywood models, it nevertheless endeavoured to maintain a veneer of artistic intent.

Among its library of adaptations are definitive versions of Wuthering Heights, Of Mice and Men, Around the World in 80 Days, West Side Story, the James Bond movies (cherished by Jackson), Midnight Cowboy, Fiddler on the Roof and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. The latter produced by Saul Zaentz, who will prove significant.

Former head of production at UA, Steven Bach, who tells his fateful tale of Hollywood hubris and artistic ambition run amok during the making of Heaven’s Gate in the book Final Cut, reports that from the time they made the deal with Tolkien those rights languished for a further decade. They just couldn’t find a way, or at least a way they considered commercially viable.

Eminent playwright Peter Shaffer (who wrote the stage play of Amadeus) had written what Bach considered an elegant script for a single film version, but it never gained momentum.

In 1969, the English director John Boorman was a hot property. Born in London’s studio suburb of Shepperton, the debonair former documentary maker had made an instant impact with the gritty, modernist Lee Marvin thriller Point Blank, and a brutish tale of duelling Second World War veterans in Hell in the Pacific. His films, thus far, were steely and masculine, but with a touch of the metaphysical at their fringes.

Filled with the zest and fearlessness of youth, and considerable talent with which to wield it, he had approached UA with the ambition of creating an epic out of the Grail legend and King Arthur.

‘Well, we have The Lord of the Rings, why don’t you do that?’ they replied.

Boorman embraced the challenge put before him and over six months, squirrelled away at his tumbledown rectory in County Wicklow, he and co-writer Rospo Pallenberg conjured up something dizzyingly strange and knowingly sacrilegious. The finished 176 pages¹ shatter much of the book’s grandiosity.

Boorman had a taste for the lusty and pagan, and while Tolkien may have admired his evocation of nature (Boorman would go on to make The Emerald Forest) he would have been appalled by all the sex. Before he is ready to look into her mirror, Galadriel seduces Frodo, informing him, ‘I am that knowledge.’ Boorman is dragging chaste Tolkien towards puberty, but completely overcompensates: Aragorn revives Éowyn with a magical orgasm, and even plants a hearty kiss upon Boromir’s lips at one point. The director also gets carried away with the book’s reputation as a hippy totem. Wild flowers are a chronic leitmotif, and the Council of Elrond turns into a Felliniesque circus performance with dancers, jugglers and a lively dog that symbolizes fate. To read it all is to be mildly disturbed yet mesmerized …

Gone are hobbit holes, Bree and Helm’s Deep. Gimli opens the doors to Moria with a jig, while Merry and Pippin are played as a Halfling Laurel and Hardy. There is much cavorting and way too much singing. Sillification lies perilously close. But there are some striking inventions, such as the Fellowship discovering they are walking across the bodies of slumbering Orcs in Moria. And Boorman goes some way toward taming the book’s gigantic architecture into a single, three-hour film.

UA didn’t understand a word of it.

During his seclusion, there had been a major reshuffle at the studio. The script, which had cost $3 million to develop, was tossed out. Boorman later claimed such shortsightedness mainly came from the fact that, ‘No one else had read the book.’

Boorman is too rich a filmmaker to dismiss outright what might have been, however provocative and untamed. After briefly attempting to keep his live-action vision alive at Disney, he would channel much of the effort he put into The Lord of the Rings back into the Arthurian legend with the altogether splendid — and altogether grown-up — Excalibur. Bursting with Boorman’s visual exuberance, it is earthy, witty, fantastical (at times surreally so) and highly libidinous. It is also an ‘absolute favourite’ of Jackson’s — he has Mordred’s golden armour (made from aluminium) in his collection. Visually, it would have a huge influence on him as director and, coming full circle, on the sensibility he would give to The Lord of the Rings: the exotic contours of the armour; the scabrous weaponry; the mossy, lyrical Irish landscapes. It has the heft of the real.

Nicol Williamson’s whimsical, meddling Merlin has more than a touch of Gandalf about him.

Jackson has never had the opportunity to meet Boorman, who at 84 still lives in rural Ireland, but his manager Ken Kamins once represented the English director and has stayed in contact.

‘John sent a nice note through Ken once,’ recalls Jackson, ‘saying that he loved The Lord of the Rings, and he was very happy that I got to make it.’

Boorman has gone on record saying how grateful he is that he didn’t get to make his film. That may have prevented the project from ever passing to Jackson, whose trilogy he thought was a marvel akin to the construction of the great cathedrals of medieval Europe. There was something secret and vast about the films, a work of almost divine providence.

Then there was the tale of the Beatles. How the Fab Four, at the height of their own impossible fame, had sought out the great Stanley Kubrick at his St. Albans estate to help create a multimedia musical of The Lord of the Rings in which they would star and, naturally, provide a backbeat.

Testament to Jackson’s lifelong passion for the Beatles can be found in the vision of a homemade cut out of the Sergeant Pepper-era foursome found in the sky blue, wheelchair-enabled Ford Anglia in Bad Taste. Jackson had wanted to spot Beatles songs throughout the score, but the rights were far beyond his debut film’s paltry budget.

One of the unforeseen spoils of his success would be a chance to meet a genuine hero. When Jackson encountered Paul McCartney at the Oscars following The Return of the King’s glorious haul of trophies there must have been a thousand questions stored away in his head, but he ‘pinned him down’ about that story of a Tolkien adaptation.

Like Boorman, McCartney had praised Jackson’s interpretation of Tolkien’s book. He was a huge fan of the films. Each Christmas, as was the habit of many families, he would make a ritual outing with his kids to catch the next instalment. Quite how McCartney, one of the most famous faces on the planet, managed to frequent what sounded like his local multiplex so casually raises a sceptical Jackson eyebrow. The director suspects the pop icon probably found other means of seeing the films, but the compliments were sincere. And now he had McCartney’s undivided attention, he decided to see if there was any truth to the Beatles’ attempt to bring their youthful brio to Middle-earth?

It was true, said McCartney. The band had been on the third film of a three-picture deal with UA. The deal had thus far proved fruitful with the success of A Hard Day’s Night and Help!. Considering where to go next, and having collectively read the book, The Lord of the Rings seemed a perfectly sensible avenue for the band. It was John Lennon who was spearheading the concept.

‘Paul was going to play Frodo, George was going to play Gandalf, John was Gollum, and Ringo was Sam, I think,’ Jackson can’t help but chuckle. ‘And he said that they all showed up at Stanley Kubrick’s house to try and persuade him to be the director. I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that.’

During his lengthier dalliance with a potential adaptation, Boorman had wondered if he might cast the Beatles as the hobbits.

Kubrick, with four Liverpudlian superstars standing on his doorstop uninvited, did the decent thing and asked them in for tea. He listened to their offer, was very polite, but admitted it wasn’t for him. He was in the middle of planning a colossal life of Napoleon, which would eventually be scuppered when MGM decided that epics were no longer commercial.

‘Did you try another director?’ Jackson asked. There was also talk that Lennon was going to approach David Lean next.

‘No, Tolkien killed it,’ McCartney replied. The author’s misgivings were never given, but can perhaps be assumed.

According to UA, it was Yoko Ono. The Beatles split a year later.

*

So it wasn’t Kubrick or Boorman or the Beatles, or even Walt Disney — rumoured to have craved the rights in the sixties, only to be met with Tolkien’s disdain for his pretty fairy-tales — who first brought the book to the big screen. Instead, it was a maverick animator named Ralph Bakshi, an artist determined to rattle convention. That is except when it came to The Lord of the Rings, which he treated almost as Holy Writ. However, the flawed results still spoke more about the titanic complexity involved in both bringing the book under control and getting Hollywood to grasp its potential.

While he had loved Disney, the grown-up Jewish street kid who once fished comic books out of dumpsters, set himself the task of tearing down the fairy-tale edifice of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and the parade of pearly classics that followed. He had learned his trade on children’s cartoons like Deputy Dawg, Mighty Mouse and the 1967 Spider-Man TV series, but he hungered to take animation into adult realms. Offbeat, darkly funny and controversy courting films of the 1970s like Heavy Traffic, Coonskin and America’s first X-rated cartoon, the cult favourite Fritz the Cat. When it came to fantasy, he showed pedigree. The impressive Wizards is set in a post-apocalyptic future where the powers of magic and technology battle for supremacy — it’s elves versus tanks — which Bakshi insisted was an allegory for the creation of the state of Israel. It is a film Jackson much admires.

An avid science-fiction reader, the curly-haired, Slavic-featured Bakshi had cherished the idea of transforming The Lord of the Rings into an animated epic since the fifties. He was convinced he had an understanding of Tolkien that outweighed any other suitor. Learning that Boorman and UA were attempting to condense its three books into a single film, he declared it to be madness.

‘Or certainly a lack of character on Boorman’s part,’ he added sniffily. ‘Why would you tamper with anything Tolkien did?’

With Boorman’s version slain, he approached UA with his own offer to adapt what the studio was beginning to suspect was unadaptable. It should be an animated film made in three parts, he informed them. They had offered him Boorman’s script to read, but he wasn’t interested. Bakshi would begin again from scratch and, aside from a few necessary nips and tucks, remain faithful to Tolkien’s quest.

In a vivid picture of Hollywood dealing at its most wilfully entangled, with UA unconvinced by his overtures the headstrong Bakshi decided MGM would be a much better fit for both him and Tolkien. A fact that occurred to him in part because they were literally down the hallway. Since its heyday, UA’s West Coast operations had occupied a wing of MGM’s Irving Thalberg Building in Culver City. Dan Melnick, head of production at MGM, was a man he knew had actually read The Lord of the Rings. Melnick would surely have a grasp on the potential of his project. He was right. Melnick paid back UA’s $3 million outlay on Boorman’s script, and the deal was struck. MGM would make the film, UA distribute it.

UA were evidently relieved to wash their hands of Middle-earth making. Bakshi and MGM were welcome to the meadows of the Shire, Rivendell, Rohan, enchanted Lothlórien, sulphurous Mordor and all those other bafflingly named locations that poured incessantly out of that accursed book.

Except Hollywood is more than a match for Middle-earth when it comes to internecine warfare and figuratively hurling heads over the battlements. Within weeks, MGM had gone through a violent takeover, changing ownership, firing Melnick and delivering the news that ‘they weren’t going to make that fucking picture’ to Bakshi.

Here the tale takes a significant turn. The unflagging animator turned to another friend, onetime music mogul turned movie producer Saul Zaentz, whose relatively small investment into Fritz the Cat had paid off nicely. The titillating tale of a tomcatting tomcat had made $90 million around the world.

Fiercely independent, and like Bakshi of East Coast Jewish immigrant stock, Zaentz had come from a music industry background and held no truck with the rigmarole of studio politics. What he did have a taste for was the grandeur of the ‘important’ literary adaption. Through his company Fantasy Films (named for the jazz label Fantasy Records he joined in 1955 rather than anything heroic), Zaentz had invested some of his Fritz the Cat rewards into One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was nominated for nine Oscars (including one for Brad Dourif, Wormtongue to come, as Best Supporting Actor), winning five, including Best Picture. Something he would repeat with an adaption of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus and, pertinently, The English Patient.

Stout and bearded, with a high domed forehead and glasses like window panes, Zaentz came with ironclad convictions, especially about art, and could spin from charm to confrontation mid-sentence. Once described as a ‘buccaneer’, he was a deft and deadly dealmaker.

In 1976, spying an opportunity, Zaentz readily agreed to back Bakshi’s film.

With their hands full with the ensuing calamity of Heaven’s Gate (currently grinding through its monumental production in Montana, overschedule, overbudget and by 1981 a flop of such epic proportions it effectively destroyed the studio — a warning to any who dared let the inmates run the asylum), UA relinquished the rights to Zaentz for $3 million. Through his newly fashioned Middle-earth Enterprises, Zaentz now retained the film, stage and game rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit as per Tolkien’s original agreement in perpetuity. The Tolkien Estate retained all literary rights.

In an absurd hangover from the project’s brief tenancy at MGM, which would have a huge bearing in the future, the rights to make a filmed version of The Hobbit remained with the studio. The rights to distribute such a film were now the preserve of Saul Zaentz.

Reconsidering his version as two films — Zaentz’s financial largesse went only so far — Bakshi still intended to embrace the volume of Tolkien’s book, capturing the scope and violence of Middle-earth. He felt children would want to be scared, and adults appreciate the sophistication of Tolkien as seen through his eyes.

As was his wont, Bakshi’s approach was far from traditional. For the heft of the world, the ranks of Orcs and men, he pursued a technique known as rotoscoping. In simple terms the animator traced over live footage for added realism. Live-action scenes of extras made up with animal horns, teeth and dressed in furs as Orcs and Nordic-looking riders were shot on the plains of La Mancha in Spain before animation began (Belmonte Castle stands in for Helm’s Deep). While static, the heavy, inky backgrounds have the gothic imprimatur of Gustave Doré woodcuts. Slashed with brushstrokes, the intensity of Bakshi’s apocalyptic imagery can be hard to shake.

In the portrayal of evil he revealed his grasp of Tolkien. The Nazgûl snuffle like bloodhounds, their limbs convulsing in their drug-like craving for the Ring. The interpretation of an alien-looking Gollum, voiced with an unforgettable toddler’s wail by the English actor Peter Woodthorpe was, until Andy Serkis coughed up his hairball performance, definitive.

But Bakshi would later wail that he had been under intense pressure over time and budget (estimated at $8 million). He was forced to cut corners, compromise his vision. The clichéd foreground figures are often no better than Hanna-Barbera cartoons: Frodo, Merry and Pippin are virtually identical; Sam looks like a melted gnome; and the Balrog is a laughable bat-lion hybrid. The script by Chris Conkling and fantasy author Peter S. Beagle (who had written an introduction to an American edition of the book) is faithful but abbreviated. Frodo sets forth with the Ring with barely a summary of what is before him, the film chalking off the major pieces at an unseemly gallop before it all grinds to a confusing halt after The Battle of Helm’s Deep, awaiting a sequel that would never come.

Perhaps Bakshi should have been forewarned of growing indifference when the studio removed any mention that this was Part One of two films, which only contributed to the general confusion. The $30 million his film made around the world was deemed insufficient reward by Zaentz and UA and the sequel was postponed forever.²

‘I was screaming, and it was like screaming into the wind,’ lamented Bakshi. ‘It’s only because nobody ever understood the material. It was a very sad thing for me. I was very proud to have done Part One.’

Was the book impossible to adapt? The sheer size of it could have filled out a mini-series. This was War and Peace set in a mythological universe. Scale was an issue on many levels for a live-action version. The lead characters, though fully grown, stood four foot tall at most. There was a host of exotic creatures: Orcs, trolls, mûmakil — elephants on growth hormone — giant eagles, Ringwraiths, grouchy arboreal shepherds called Ents, and fell beasts like winged dinosaurs. Then there was Gollum, who was less part of the peregrine biosphere than a fully rounded character, arguably Tolkien’s most vivid creation. And what of those battles, swarming with untold armies? Sergei Bondarchuk’s 100,000-strong 1966 adaptation of War and Peace had the Red Army at its disposal.

If animation was the only realistic approach, it almost inevitably reduced Tolkien’s grandeur to something childish.

Bakshi would have his part to play. In 1978, the seventeen-year-old Jackson raced into Wellington after school to catch the New Yorker’s animated vision. Spectacled, permanently wrapped in a duffle coast and movie mad, he wasn’t any kind of serious Tolkien fan but he was obsessed with fantasy. Like so many who saw it, parts impressed him but he left baffled. Was there to be another film?

‘My memory of the movie is that it was good until about halfway through then it got kind of incoherent,’ he says. ‘I hadn’t read the book at that stage so I didn’t know what the hell was going on. But it did inspire me to read the book.’

Weeks later, due to attend a training course in Auckland before commencing his apprenticeship as a photoengraver, Jackson paused at the concourse bookshop to pick up some reading matter to fill the twelve-hour train journey. There he spotted a movie tie-in edition of The Lord of the Rings.

‘It was the paperback with the Bakshi Ringwraiths on the front. That was my first copy of the book.’

He still has it somewhere.

‘In some respects if I hadn’t seen his movie I might not have read the book, and may or may not have made the film …’

*

In 1996, Jackson’s career was going places. Quite literally: he had made it to the Sitges Film Festival, thirty-five miles southwest of Barcelona. In a satisfying sign that his reputation as a filmmaker was reaching beyond the shores of New Zealand, the annual jamboree devoted to fantasy cinema had invited him to screen his new film, a zombie comedy (or zomcom) called Braindead. Back home, after three peculiar horror films, he was still regarded warily by the establishment.

‘You’ve got to understand that, until Heavenly Creatures, he was an embarrassment in New Zealand. He wasn’t someone to celebrate,’ says Costa Botes, a friend and frequent collaborator through the early days. ‘Because of the films he was making there were certain factions of the industry actively gunning for him.’

Not a natural explorer, Jackson had been reluctant to go. He was persuaded when he saw the guest list. Here was an opportunity to meet some of his heroes in the flesh. Talents who had helped shape him as a filmmaker like Rick Baker, the genius make-up effects specialist feted for the still-extraordinary werewolf transformation in An American Werewolf in London. Or Freddie Francis, the cinematographer who had created the ghoulish, sweet-wrapper hues of the Hammer Horror movies (that cherry red blood that ran down Christopher Lee’s chin). Or Stuart Freeborn, the English make-up artist who had helped design Yoda. Or Tobe Hooper, the young director who had shocked the establishment with his debut horror movie The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

‘At that time Tobe Hooper and I looked quite similar,’ recalls Jackson. ‘Dark, shaggy hair and beards. And Stuart Freeborn couldn’t figure out who was who. I would go down to breakfast, and Stuart would go, “Hello Tobe.” And I would just go, “Hi Stuart.” I didn’t even bother to correct him. It was kind of fun, there was all these interesting characters. That was the only time I ever met Wes Craven.’

Craven was the horror maven who began the Freddy Krueger phenomenon with A Nightmare on Elm Street at New Line.

Grouped in the same hotel, guests would congregate for breakfast and dinner, guaranteed to find an available seat alongside a fellow traveller. Jackson and Fran Walsh instantly bonded with Rick and Silvia Baker. They would head out for walks along the cliff-top where the views of the Mediterranean were stunning.

‘But there was this really pushy American guy who would tag along with us,’ says Jackson. ‘We’d be literally heading out the door and he would be there: “Do you mind if I come too?”’

Naturally, there were a lot of fans around, begging signatures and photos, proof that they had met their heroes (or heroes to come).

‘We got to the point where we wanted to sneak out of the hotel and not have this guy follow us. I didn’t know who the hell he was.’

Then one afternoon he asked if they were coming to see his film.

‘Oh, you’ve got a film?’ said Jackson, taken aback. ‘You’re not a fan?’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ he replied, the words rattling out of his mouth like winning coins from a slot machine. ‘I’ve got a film! It’s called Reservoir Dogs.’

Twenty-five years later, Jackson howls with laughter. ‘It was Quentin Tarantino … I remember that when it got to the ear-cutting scene, Wes Craven stood up and walked out because he couldn’t handle it. And Quentin was saying, “This is the greatest thing in the world, Wes Craven walked out of my movie.”’

Reservoir Dogs would be picked up for distribution by a small American indie, Miramax, named after the owners’ mother and father, where this Angelino video-store clerk turned frenetic, inspired, outrageously brilliant filmmaker would be nursed toward greatness. That same company would swoop for Jackson as well in the not-too-distant future.

Also on the list of that year’s festival was Bakshi.

They didn’t socialise. Bakshi showed no interest in that side of things, remaining aloof from the gaggle of eager filmmakers, his career in the doldrums by the early 1990s. Maybe it was because he was more distant than the others that Jackson requested a picture with the director of The Lord of the Rings. It wasn’t something he asked of anyone else — he was a peer now not a fan.

‘He didn’t have a clue who I was.’

Years later, he would. However, unlike Boorman and McCartney’s gracious approval, Bakshi responded to Jackson’s success with indignation. Why hadn’t he been sought out for the benefit of his wisdom? Asked to be involved? He turned bitter in interview whenever Jackson’s films were brought up. Some wounds never heal.

‘I heard reports that they were screening it every single day at Fine Line,’ he smarted, erroneously citing New Line’s arthouse division as having been voraciously cribbing from his film. Which wasn’t true anywhere in New Line.

Jackson remains perplexed that there should be any ill will between them. ‘I’ve read those interviews with him and he is incredibly angry. These really bizarre interviews where he said, “I’m insulted that Peter Jackson never consulted me, because I am the only other guy that had done The Lord of the Rings and he didn’t give me the courtesy of talking to me.” Why would I do that? What was there to gain from it? It was odd. I can’t even understand it from his point of view. Why would I need to speak to the guy who made a cartoon version of it? And conversely why would he expect me to?’

Maybe it was simply envy: he got to finish the story.

‘I know,’ says Jackson not unkindly.

It was also while in Sitges that he and Walsh heard that the New Zealand film commission had finally agreed to finance Heavenly Creatures. And Heavenly Creatures is where everything changed.

*

New Zealand first heard the infant cries of Sir Peter Robert Jackson on 31 October 1961 — Halloween, no less — in Pukerua Bay, a sleepy coastal town frozen in the 1950s some twenty miles north of Wellington. His doting parents, Joan and William ‘Bill’ Jackson, by every account delightfully forbearing towards the whimsical pursuits of aspirant filmmakers, were first-generation New Zealanders, emigrating from England in 1950.

Pukerua Bay offered an embryonic Oscar-winning filmmaker few outlets for his furtive, restless imagination. He forwent university, film school was unimaginable, and after some aborted attempts to involve himself in the New Zealand film community, he began his professional career working as a photoengraver for the Evening Post in Wellington.

According to legend, the biggest inspiration to Jackson and on his determination to become a filmmaker (if not yet a director) was encountering Merian C. Cooper’s and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 King Kong at the tender age of nine on the household’s humble black and white television. It was late to be up, nine o’clock, but he was enraptured by the wonder of it all: this tale of a giant ape on a lost island that also happened to be populated by dinosaurs, who was then captured and brought to New York — Eighth Wonder of the World! And how he perishes, plunging from the Empire State Building. For Jackson, changed forever, it was everything an adventure story should be.

To gain a measure of how much King Kong means to Peter Jackson, leap forward to December 1976, about the time Bakshi began half-making The Lord of the Rings. At seven o’clock on a sleepy Friday morning, the fifteen-year-old Jackson had caught the first train into Wellington worrying over the length of the queue that would be forming outside the King’s Theatre cinema on Courtney Place.

He was there for the first showing of the remake of King Kong, a production he’d been following for months in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. But the cinema was still locked up and Courtney Place was as deserted as it would one day throng with delighted thousands as Jackson made his lap of honour in an unforeseeable future.

‘I kind of bought into the hype,’ he laughs — that boy was such a dreamer. ‘I convinced myself there would be crowds and crowds of people. There weren’t. And, like most people, I was disappointed by it.’

The film is a wreck. Big-talking mini-mogul Dino De Laurentiis, cut from similar cloth to Saul Zaentz, had boasted of using a forty-foot robotic gorilla that could scale buildings, but the technology had failed him and its motion was never captured. In the finished film it is Rick Baker in a suit. The modern setting, the absence of dinosaurs, the flat, un-wonderful ambience generated by journeyman director John Guillermin (The Towering Inferno) bespoke of all that could fail in a film.

The disappointment of the King Kong remake would teach Jackson a valuable lesson, and he saw it six times. You must never forget that fifteen-year-old, too early, waiting in the cold.

The presence of Kong would cast a huge shadow over Jackson’s career, but even having finally made his own spectacular remake in 2005 (another long, wending, troubled journey to the screen), it is to The Lord of the Rings the fifteen-year-olds of all ages and sexes came back again and again, breathless in anticipation.

It was actually the year before he first saw King Kong that an eight-year-old Jackson began shooting films. With a growing interest in special effects already stirred by a steady diet of Thunderbirds, television’s Batman and the epochal moment his neighbour Jean Watson, who worked at Kodak, gave him a Super-8 camera, he also looked upon King Kong as much as a technical triumph as an emotional journey.

‘A year after we met, he showed me a Bond parody called Coldfinger that he’d made when he was fifteen or sixteen,’ remembers Botes. ‘He’d copied the editing of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And he played James Bond himself. I thought, “This is uncanny — he actually looks like Sean Connery.”’

Jackson built a filmmaking career with his own hands. A fleet of homemade shorts, inspired by his love of King Kong, Ray Harryhausen and James Bond, would grow (or perhaps the word is mutate) into his first feature film — Bad Taste.

Made in fits and starts over four years, and because of day jobs, only on Sundays, Bad Taste began life as the short, Roast of the Day (the powerful tale of an aid worker encountering cannibal psychos in deepest Pukerua), and slowly sprouted into a feature film. Doffing a windblown forelock toward Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead, Jackson’s unhinged tale of a group of aliens plotting to turn humanity into fast food, would be a test of his native ingenuity and fortitude to rival that of The Lord of the Rings.

Roping in friends and colleagues from The Evening Post, cast and crew came and went over the ensuing years, written out then written back in again, Jackson more or less making it up as he went along. His parents provided the $2,500 to buy a 16mm Bolex camera. Everything else — prosthetics, special effects, Steadicam rig, props, alien vomit, stunts, acting — was homemade.

At one stage, Jackson, in the prominent role of the nitwit alien investigator Derek, would dangle himself upside down over a local cliff, a rope tied around his ankle the other end attached to a wooden post. Health and safety were for those who could afford them. He only hoped his friends would pull him back up again. If that post hadn’t held, The Lord of the Rings may linger to this day unmade.

‘It crushed all the nerves in my foot,’ he laughs; ‘it took about six months for the sensitivity to come back.’ Which might account for his nonchalance toward going barefoot on the roughest terrain.

Halfway through, they all went to see Robert Zemeckis’ thriller Romancing the Stone, then almost killed themselves replicating the sequence where Michael Douglas plunges downslope through the bushes.

Eight years later Jackson would be working with Zemeckis.

There were also times it tested Jackson’s emotional reserves. One Sunday, dropped off on location by his parents with all the props and costumes, no one else showed up. He just sat there all day. When his parents came to collect him at 5 p.m., he was close to tears. It was a lonely lesson in always working with people you could depend on.

Bad Taste would be his film school. And a film would emerge, half-crazed but hilarious, gurgling with its own outrageous pleasure at the raw act of creation. Following another arduous test of his patience, it would find distribution and stir up a cult following that exists to this day, hanging on to the hope that Jackson will eventually make good on his promise to make a sequel or two.

Significant to this tale were two key friendships that Jackson formed because of his Bad Taste. Richard Taylor, who along with his wife Tania was making puppets for a satirical Spitting Image-style New Zealand television show called Public Eye, had heard about this guy out in Pukerua Bay who was making a sci-fi splatter movie in his basement. ‘We really wanted to meet him. It turned out that his sci-fi movie was called Bad Taste. He was baking foam latex in his mum’s oven.’

Taylor would join forces with Jackson on his very next film, and begin his own journey toward The Lord of the Rings.

And this was when Jackson first met Fran Walsh. To be exact, he first saw Walsh on the set of the series Worzel Gummidge Down Under, the television offshoot about a talking scarecrow, for which he had been hired to do a few little special effects. She was one of the writers, but they hadn’t spoken. Then out of the blue Botes asked if he could show the unfinished Bad Taste to a couple of his screenwriter friends, he thought would appreciate it. They happened to be Walsh and her then boyfriend Stephen Sinclair. Walsh remembered being bowled over by how uninhibited the film was, and on zero budget.

She would volunteer her services to help complete the film, and would become not only the most important creative partner in Jackson’s life but the story of this book.

Completing Bad Taste, says Taylor, ‘Peter was bitten by the bug.’ Up until then he had thought he might get by in special effects. In New Zealand the thought that you could follow a career as a director was preposterous. But the response to Bad Taste was so powerful that it convinced Jackson this was his calling.

Jackson also committed himself to gore, and ruffling the strait-laced New Zealand film community. In 1989 came depraved puppet musical Meet The Feebles (shot in a rat-infested warehouse) followed in 1992, after a salutary false start, by Braindead, his blood-bolstered, period zomcom. The film that would take him to America — if only for a visit.

A career had been born in a deluge of sheep brains, farting hippos and a zombie baby named Selwyn. Middle-earth was another world.

‘When he finally made enough money to move into town,’ remembers Taylor, ‘it was into the tiniest house in Wellington. He bought the biggest television I have ever seen and we’d sit in his front room, dwarfed by this gigantic thing. When you stood up to make a cup of tea, there’d be half a dozen people out on the pavement, standing there watching the movie!’

*

There is one other adaption of The Lord of the Rings we have yet to mention. Indeed, it was the most comprehensive and meaningful adaption to date, one that is still held in the highest esteem by fans. It was also the only version of the book to provide any objective lessons — apart from what not to do — in how to successfully dramatize Tolkien, even though there was not a single frame to be seen.

This was, of course, the 1981 BBC radio serialization. Adapted by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell with a fine-edged scalpel, trimming great swathes of the book without any discernible loss of the central story (it still runs to a considerable eighteen hours). They also retained a good deal of Tolkien’s dialogue, while carefully negotiating the demands of radio dramatization. Events that are reported in the book are transformed into first-hand scenes (a trick Jackson and his writers would apply). Even the battle scenes, inevitably reduced by the medium, have a dense, breathy, clanging atmosphere. All of it eased onward through the addition of a narrator (Gerard Murphy).

Above all, the vocal performances set an enviable standard: Michael Horden swings appreciably between avuncular and steely as Gandalf; Robert Stephens’ smoky basso makes Aragorn seem older, wiser and immediately kingly. Jackson would seek a deliberate resonance between the serial and his own films in the casting of Ian Holm as his Bilbo; Holm having made an impassioned Frodo back in 1981.

Having made his mark in Bakshi’s adaptation, Peter Woodthorpe would again provide the disturbingly funny duality of his Gollum. Disembodied, that needling, pathetic, hissing voice carries a note of pure heartbreak.

The seminal serial was responsible for bringing another generation to the book. But Hollywood had lost interest or grown weary of its numerous challenges. And for fifteen years the Ring lay forgotten, until it was finally picked up by the most unlikely director imaginable.

CHAPTER 2
An Unexpected Director

The English Patient was dying. Saul Zaentz had pleaded with the studio that they were in the process of forging art. He had protested at their shortsightedness. And he had resorted to good old-fashioned brinkmanship. They were only weeks from shooting, but 20th Century Fox were not backing down. Fox had bought the English language rights to this expensive adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker prize-winning novel for a not inconsiderable $20 million (the full budget was $31 million, including $5 million of Zaentz’s own money) and were insisting it have a marquee female lead.

Accepting Ralph Fiennes as the hero — if such a straightforward term could be applied to the emotionally fraught and morally elusive weft of Ondaatje’s novel — already spoke of a due deference to artistic over commercial merit. This was, they knew, a prestige project. Fiennes was so very English — although his character turns out to be Hungarian.

The Second World War romantic epic came endowed with a tricky structure. It told a story within a story, gradually regaled to Juliet Binoche’s free-spirited nurse, and us, by a burn-ravaged Fiennes languishing within the gorgeous grounds of a Franciscan monastery somewhere in the Tuscany countryside. His tale will sweep us all back to a Sahara on the brink of war where spies and cartographers muster and a great love affair ensues, all simmering in a grand manner not seen since the imperial heyday of David Lean. The kind of film, everyone kept saying, no one made anymore.

When it came to Fiennes’ romantic opposite – the fragile, conflicted, swan-like Katharine Clifton – Fox were thinking of Demi Moore, in the spring of 1995 box office gold following Indecent Proposal and Disclosure. Zaentz and his so very English director, Anthony Minghella, whose determination to steer his own artistic choices mirrored that of Peter Jackson’s, had set their heart upon Kristin Scott Thomas — more traditionally beautiful, more icy and layered.

Bill Mechanic, who was then president of Fox, later promised on his life that the Moore rumours were untrue. Minghella maintained that ‘Demi’s name was always mentioned’.

Whatever the case, the fractious production had reached an impasse. Actually, that was no longer true.

Fox had pulled the plug.

Rallying round the desperate project, already encamped in the desert, two of Minghella’s closest allies, director Sydney Pollack and producer Scott Rudin, put in a call to Harvey Weinstein, the influential co-founder and co-chairman, with his brother Bob, of the independent film powerhouse Miramax.

‘Harvey just stepped in and financed it one hundred per cent,’ confirms Jackson, who has been recounting the story as a matter of significant background.

Cynical Hollywood commentators, of which there are many, suspected that Miramax was already well aware the project was faltering, with Harvey ready and waiting for it to collapse so he could swoop in and save the day.

Akin to Zaentz, this was exactly the kind of project that fitted Harvey’s view of himself as both Hollywood player and indie king, as well as the philosophy of Miramax as a film company: sophisticated, literary, but with mainstream potential, and Oscar-worthy, always Oscar-worthy. Spinning gold on behalf of the inevitable awards campaign for The English Patient, Miramax’s gifted publicists spread a tale of the White Knight who saved great art from studio defilement.

Nominated for twelve Oscars (including one for Kristin Scott Thomas), winner of nine, and making $231 million around the world, The English Patient cemented Harvey’s reputation. By the mid-1990s, he was the new Selznick, but operating from New York headquarters beyond the borders of Hollywood. He wasn’t the kind of studio boss who would demand Demi Moore. He understood the needs of filmmakers. He could manage big, important films outside of the studio system. He also understood the marketplace and how to reach an audience. He could finesse, and he could bully. His methods, often cutting and re-cutting problem films — landing him the nickname ‘Harvey Scissorhands’ — he insisted were always at the service of the film. This was how, alongside Bob, he maintained Miramax’s great duality: cash and kudos.

Not that it was all about literary adaptations. If Minghella was his longing, romantic Sméagol side, then Quentin Tarantino, who wanted to storm the barricades of such strait-laced tradition as The English Patient, let alone The Lord of the Rings, was his expletive-spitting Gollum.

Between Miramax’s multiple personalities, you can also trace Harvey’s attraction to Jackson: the young Kiwi embodied that very schism. He was the director of Bad Taste, Meet The Feebles and Braindead, giddy gore hound and natural wit, predisposed never to abide by the Hollywood playbook. But then he would produce something as finely tuned as Heavenly Creatures.

It is often claimed that the two poles of Jackson’s filmmaking pedigree are what made him so ideal for adapting Tolkien.

The English Patient had finally wrapped production in 1996 when Jackson called his long-standing manager Ken Kamins and casually asked him to find out who might own the rights to The Lord of the Rings. For a certain fee, databases can be consulted. In the litigious universe of Hollywood, it is essential to cover your back. Jackson had assumed they must be with Disney or Spielberg or Lucas. ‘They would all be locked up, as they say,’ he admits. ‘And we wouldn’t have a chance. So we really went into this with no expectations at all.’

Kamins didn’t take long to discover that thirty years after buying them from UA, the rights to both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings still resided with Zaentz. He might not be a Spielberg or a Lucas, but this wasn’t necessarily good news. Having had his fingers burned so badly with the Ralph Bakshi debacle, Zaentz had closely guarded the rights ever since.

It wasn’t as if since Bakshi no one had returned to the idea of adapting one of the most popular books of the twentieth century in the intervening years; they had simply come up against the Black Gates of Zaentz’s resistance.

If by some miraculous chance he was to agree, says Jackson, word came back that he would want to be attached to it. ‘That is just the way he was. He was a producer himself. But he tended to say no. He had done his Tolkien thing, it was a huge disaster for him, and he had lost a lot of money by the sound of it. He just didn’t want to know about it.’

They needed a backstairs route to the rights — a secret way into Zaentz, a chance to try and persuade him. And although he didn’t know it yet, Jackson already had the perfect guide. In fact, that guide was impatiently waiting for the director to call.

Within the parameters of a first-look deal he had recently struck with Miramax, Jackson was contractually bound to first test the waters on any new idea with Harvey Weinstein. And this was a staggeringly ambitious plan.

‘The idea was to do The Hobbit as one movie, then two movies of The Lord of the Rings,’ says Jackson. ‘Still as a package: you make The Hobbit by itself, if it is successful you then get to do The Lord of the Rings films back-to-back. A three-film thing.’

So the initial desire had been to adapt Tolkien’s books in chronological order, beginning with his first, younger-orientated Middle-earth novel: Bilbo, the Dwarves, and dislodging a fire-breathing squatter.

‘I could tell on the phone he was really excited right away,’ recalls Jackson, not yet knowing that this conversation would change his life.

The English Patient may not have yet been released but Minghella had wrought classical wonders with the strange book. Another attention-grabbing, epic production based on a tricky literary source, as directed by another of his self-styled discoveries, played right into Harvey’s view of himself as a promethean, David O. Selznick type for a modern Hollywood.

‘Who’s got the rights?’ he asked.

‘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.

Here too was Jackson and Walsh’s growing felicity for casting. Neither had done any significant acting, and this would be an astonishing exercise in sustained hysteria. Walsh discovered Lynskey at a Christchurch high school near to where the real girls first met. She was looking for someone who in any way resembled Pauline.

‘This girl really loves acting,’ her teacher had said, pointing out Lynskey. ‘She puts on plays that nobody wants to see.’

For the superior, pretty fantasist, Juliet — who had lately arrived from England — Jackson had plucked an unknown British girl from Reading from 600 hopefuls. Kate Winslet had been working in a delicatessen when the call came.

‘I’ll never forget it as long as I live … I actually fell on my knees,’ she admitted. Within four years Winslet would be one of the most famous faces on the planet, star of James Cameron’s Titanic.

Here too is the promise of a cinematic New Zealand being unveiled: the unique light; the vast, primordial landscape; and the confidence with which the local crew rose to the challenges set before them by their ambitious director.

Perhaps most significantly, Jackson would inaugurate a new digital division of his and Richard Taylor’s special effects house, Weta (named after a local cricket-like bug¹), in order to create the abstract world of the girls’ flowering imaginations. Key to understanding Hulme and Parker’s descent into murder is the film’s ability to slip inside the sickly dreamspace of their conjoined imaginations. A similar sympathy for the devil would be applied to the depiction of Gollum (over which Walsh would have a significant influence).

Between them, the girls invented their own fantasy world. Borovnia would become more meaningful than reality: they traced royal lineages back over the centuries and wrote melodramatic adventure stories set within its colourful bounds, thirteen novels’ worth. They dreamed of having them adapted into big Hollywood movies starring tacky 1950s heartthrob Mario Lanza. Movie mad, we catch them watching Orson Welles in The Third Man, and Jackson does a brief rendition of noir in its honour. The resonances — and ironies — are there for all to see.

It was a film about the dangers of losing yourself inside a fantasy world.

Weta was still a single unit at this time. Taylor’s workshop would make the rubber suits for the actors playing the ‘living’ versions of the Plasticene Borovnians the remarkable girls sculpted. Led by George Port, who had worked with Jackson since Meet the Feebles, Weta also ambitiously pursued a series of digital effects shots inspired by the groundbreaking work of Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day. ‘What the Hell,’ was Jackson’s attitude, ‘let’s try.’ Their computer graphics department boasted a solitary Silicon Graphics SGI computer and a scanner. Which thankfully came with an instruction manual. By post-production on The Two Towers, Weta Digital would boast the largest amount of processing power in the Southern Hemisphere.

There are fewer CGI shots in Heavenly Creatures than is generally recognized. Taylor takes it as a compliment that his prosthetics are mistaken for CGI. The true digital shots were localized to Christchurch’s Port Levy morphing into a too-colourful, too-exquisite ornamental garden, complete with giant butterflies.

Extraordinary for 1994, these digital effects now appear charmingly antiquated, but that somehow makes them more fitting for the strange climate of the film. Jackson was using visual effects to express emotions.

‘And all for a three-and-a-half-million dollar budget,’ announces Kamins proudly. Behind him on his office wall there is a framed poster of Heavenly Creatures, with the girls leaping into a pristine lake, a film that remains not only an early marker of Jackson’s prowess, but a minor classic in its own right.

New Zealand might be a long way from Hollywood, and leagues further from New York, where Miramax resided in the hip Lower Manhattan neighbourhood of Tribeca. However, word soon reached Harvey that this was a significant film. There was a scramble to pick up the American rights, and Miramax’s bullyboy sprang into action, elbowing aside competitors and making entreaties to Jackson. Miramax’s Vice President of Acquisitions, David Linde, was despatched to Wellington to see an early cut. Blown away both by the film and the young director, he reported back to Harvey that something major was growing in New Zealand. Linde has remained a good friend to Jackson ever since.

Harvey, wielding his considerable clout, swiftly acquired Heavenly Creatures for distribution and negotiated a prestigious berth for its world premiere — opening The Venice Film Festival.

Being picked up by Miramax had distinct advantages. Founded in 1979 by the two brothers from Buffalo, brash in manner but brilliantly acute in business, it had risen to prominence through films as diverse as My Left Foot; sex, lies and videotape; and Reservoir Dogs. It would rise yet further on the glories of Pulp Fiction and The English Patient to come. Bob Weinstein handled the genre side of the business through the Dimension label, but both brothers always had their say.

The disadvantage was the Weinstein temperament. When things were sunny, all was well. Cross them, particularly Harvey, often over things that ordinarily appear reasonable or, at least, professional, and he would rain down his righteous (or not) fury. It was also a prime negotiating tactic. This was, of course, long before multiple accusations of sexual harassment and worse would bring about an ignominious downfall for the mighty Harvey, sending shockwaves across Hollywood. At this time, he was merely viewed as an industry bully boy.

In 1993, flushed with success, the brothers sold Miramax to Disney for $75 million. They would remain at the helm, with the power to greenlight a film up to the significant figure of $15 million. Any higher and they would require the consent of Disney’s hierarchy. Inevitably, the brothers would come to chafe against such restrictions.

After a lauded run at the box office, and with the assistance of Harvey’s golden touch at the Academy, Heavenly Creatures was nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

‘Boom!’ declares Kamins. ‘The whole perception changed the second the film got nominated. I mean, everything changed — perceptually. Now I got my calls returned and the speed with which I got them returned changed; the kinds of conversations that we were having. Everything shifted. Not even in ways that sort of guided a specific path, but just atmospherically it all felt different.’

Smartly, as well as agreeing a deal to distribute Heavenly Creatures in America, Harvey had insisted on pinning down Jackson to a first-look deal with Miramax. While offering an avenue for any new film idea he might have, it would soon feel like he was tied to Weinstein’s often inflexible apron strings, who now had a prize, Oscar-nominated asset.

Jackson would never bind himself to a studio again. ‘It was sort of a strange thing where they would pay some overheads: an office and some people we could hire. In exchange for that they get first refusal on any script we wanted to do. If they say no that’s fine, you can take it somewhere else. Also if you get offered something you are allowed to go and take it. It is not like an old studio contract where you are locked into MGM.’

He would ultimately never make a film with Miramax.

*

First Jackson met Robert Zemeckis, and together they made The Frighteners, a warped comedy-horror about a spiritual conman (played by Back to the Future’s Michael J. Fox) who can actually behold ghosts. It was to be Jacksons’ first studio picture. Universal were attracted to a commercial-sounding mash-up of Ghostbusters, the Elm Street movies and this New Zealand hotshot revealing a knack for visual effects.

Fox’s Frank Bannister begins to realize the Northern Californian coastal town of Fairwater (actually Lyttleton in New Zealand) where he plies his supernatural scams is also being terrorized by an undead serial killer in the guise of the Grim Reaper — a killer only he can see. The visual effects requirements were bold: Bannister would interact with a trio of quirky, translucent ghosts, as pliable as cartoons, as well as the Reaper figure, which flits across town like a runaway kite (and not dissimilar in appearance to Ringwraiths). It would take six months to complete, with scenes being shot in duplicate to insert the ribald ghosts. Jackson’s Sitges friend Rick Baker would provide the rotting-corpse make-up for the dread departed.

Sprawling and tonally uncertain, yet still underappreciated, The Frighteners tends to be forgotten in the journey between the early splatters to the coming of age with Heavenly Creatures, which is seen to segue straight into Middle-earth. If anything, it is viewed as a backwards step in the direction of the rabble-rousing days of those early horror movies.

To Jackson’s mind, here lies the true point of transition to The Lord of the Rings. Without it spans a different career, one that might have made him less global, but no less valuable; making films with more of a New Zealand spirit like Jane Campion. But Jackson’s instincts were always toward the commercial.

The project had begun life out of desperation. With Heavenly Creatures still awaiting the go-ahead, Jackson and Walsh were badly in need of some work. ‘They needed to make some money,’ clarifies Kamins.

Jackson had sounded urgent on the phone. ‘We need a writing job. What’s out there?’

Fortuitously, Kamins had been in a staff meeting where he had heard about Zemeckis’ involvement in Joel Silver’s portmanteau Tales from the Crypt movie. Different directors would provide their own segments of horror, and Zemeckis, he was told, was still in need of a screenplay. Springing into action, Jackson and Walsh worked up a two-page outline based on an idea they’d had while walking to the shops for milk, the story of a conman who is in cahoots with ghosts. Zemeckis was intrigued. At that stage, he hadn’t even realized Jackson was a director; he just figured they were these quirky writers from New Zealand.

‘I tell you what,’ said Zemeckis, ‘you go write the screenplay, I’ve got to make this movie called Forrest Gump.’

‘Well, that’s fine,’ replied Jackson, ‘because we have this movie we’re going to make called Heavenly Creatures.’ They would work on The Frighteners script while shooting their matricidal drama – the two being closer in theme than is immediately apparent.

Then fate got involved: Forrest Gump became an Oscar-winning phenomenon and Zemeckis lost his taste for a Tales from the Crypt movie. Now very much aware of Jackson as a director, Zemeckis suggested he direct it as a standalone film, which he would produce for a budget of $26 million.

‘The Frighteners matters for two key reasons,’ says Kamins. ‘Number one: it allowed for the build-up of Weta Digital conceptually, which had been a very small unit on Heavenly Creatures. The Frighteners would require over 500 visual effects shots, even at that budget, and Peter had the vision to say, “We can create a bigger visual effects company.”’

Jackson’s plan was typically practical, typically New Zealand: they would lease more computers from Silicon Graphics, then hire out-of-work animators from all over the world, people who were just sitting at home, and double their weekly salaries to come to New Zealand. The only overheads would be space. They would still be able to create visual effects shots much cheaper than ILM. And, sure enough, that’s what happened.

The Frighteners also matters, adds Kamins, because Zemeckis and his partner Steve Starkey would give Jackson and Walsh invaluable tuition on how to navigate the political waters that come with a studio project: ‘What they need to know and when; how to manage their expectations; when to get them excited about things; and when to hold back on information; how to keep them confident, but not in your hair.’

So coming full circle, as Weta were revealing their potential on the visual effects on The Frighteners, Jackson and Walsh’s thoughts turned to the future and the potential of making a fantasy film. However, one morning’s casual discussion was actually several weeks of brainstorming fantasy concepts. ‘It had been a long time since I had read The Lord of the Rings,’ admits Jackson. Fifteen years had now passed since he had waded through the Bakshi tie-in edition, and he really couldn’t remember it at all well.

Whatever ideas he came up with, Walsh and her watertight memory would shoot down: ‘No, no, no. You can’t do that — that’s just The Lord of the Rings.’

Jackson sighs. ‘You don’t want to be seen to be stealing stuff.’

His thought had been to do an original fantasy film, but at every proposal he made Walsh kept on repeating it like a mantra: ‘The Lord of the Rings … The Lord of the Rings … The Lord of the Rings.’

‘It was getting frustrating.’

When he was a teen, no more than sixteen, already displaying a rapacious hunger for filmmaking, Jackson set out to make a Super-8 Sinbad film. There was to be a scene of him fighting a stop-motion skeleton in the surf. He shot himself hip deep in Pukerua Bay swinging a homemade sword, but he never got round to putting in the skeleton. Which was down to the fact that, with the tide heading out, Jackson had dived straight onto an exposed rock. Severe bruising led to a pilonidal cyst which led to surgery. He also hadn’t quite yet figured out how to do stop-motion.

During the Bad Taste era, he had considered shooting a Conan-type film on 16mm at the weekends. ‘I never got any further than swords and monster masks,’ he admits. ‘I had never actually sat down and written a script.’

Truth be told, there was no specific, original sword ‘n’ sorcery concept he’d been yearning to make. It was simply that the genre appealed to his sensibility and offered the chance for Weta to keep expanding. So, why not The Lord of the Rings? Frodo’s enduring tale was the ne plus ultra of the genre. It was fantasy operating on an equivalent dramatic level to Heavenly Creatures.

According to prevailing Hollywood wisdom, fantasy, as a genre, was a joke. Jackson agrees. ‘I used to watch all the fantasy films. Things like Krull and Conan … Fantasy was one of those B-grade genres. No quality movies were ever made in the fantasy genre. Right from the outset The Lord of the Rings was always something different. You can’t think of Krull and The Lord of the Rings in the same sentence. While it was fantasy, in our minds it was always something quite different to that.’

And that was when they had put in the call to Kamins to find out who had the rights, and made their approach to Harvey. And even then things only grew more complicated.

The possibility of adapting Tolkien was soon to be one of three potential fantasy projects for Jackson.

For all of Harvey’s confidence in calling in a favour with Zaentz, it would take eight perilous months of negotiation for a deal to be struck. Zaentz had held the rights tight to his chest for three decades; whatever Harvey had done for him on The English Patient he wasn’t going to part with them lightly. Tribes of rival lawyers were making proposal and counterproposal, putting in calls, arranging meetings, filing memos, coming up with offers, rebuffing counteroffers, and charging by the hour. And Harvey showed zero inclination toward allowing Zaentz any active participation in his project.

Another problem was the weird, bifurcated rights situation surrounding The Hobbit. Harvey had endeavoured to go direct to MGM, which had purchased the crippled UA in the wake of Heaven’s Gate. Ironically, MGM was itself a studio in decline and in one of its many cycles of bankruptcy, reorganization and sale, nobody was about to give away one of its chief assets — even if they were only partial rights to The Hobbit.

‘The hell with it,’ cried Harvey, ‘let’s forget The Hobbit. The Lord of the Rings is a better-known title anyway. Let’s just go right to The Lord of the Rings. Two movies shot back-to-back.’

Still, with no sign of an agreement with Zaentz being reached, Jackson was growing increasingly nervous. The clock was ticking on his Weta project, even his career. It was becoming increasingly clear they were going to have to make something else in the meantime.

‘I will never forget it,’ recalls Kamins, and true to his word he can remember the exact day: ‘Monday, April first, nineteen ninety-six, I went to a premiere of Primal Fear at Paramount. I come home and there’s a message from Peter on my answering machine. This is like eleven p.m. at night. And he never calls me at home that late.’

Jackson’s recorded voice carried a seriousness Kamins had heard only rarely. ‘I need to know what my next movie is by the end of the week, otherwise all these great people that I put together to do the visual effects for The Frighteners are going to leave …’

As is standard practice, six weeks before the end of any movie the freelance visual effects team — and any other department employed on a film-by-film basis — is entitled to start looking for their next job. The buzz had gotten around about the visual effects work on The Frighteners, and the more established effects houses were reaching out to the Weta team, trying to entice them back to LA.

Meanwhile, Kamins was maintaining a constant vigil for any opportunities for his client, as he puts it, playing ‘backstop’ on Jackson’s career. Given the mercurial nature of the film business, any director would be foolhardy not to have more than one plate spinning at a time. He swiftly engaged a strategy to push forward on any one of the projects he and Jackson had in various stages of development.

Besides The Lord of the Rings, two other noticeably non-Miramax movies were to emerge. Confirming that this was a defining period in Jackson’s life and career, each would have a significant influence on his future. That first-look deal with Miramax notwithstanding, Jackson headed to LA to begin discussing the alternatives. He didn’t see himself as acting in bad faith. The Lord of the Rings had been his priority, but despite Kamins urgent pressing of Miramax it showed little sign of being resolved.

‘So we spoke to Universal about King Kong,’ says Jackson, ‘and I did a lot of meetings with Fox about Planet of the Apes.’

A Planet of the Apes reboot had been jostling about in development for a number of years. Spreading its allegorical net to include the fear of atomic destruction and the civil rights movement, Franklin J. Schaffner’s biting, apocalyptic, 1968 Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston, could fairly be considered a classic (if not its diminishing sequels). Jackson certainly thought so — he has some original John Chambers’ prosthetics in his collection and once designed his own set of ape masks for another of his novice ventures into filmmaking, The Valley, which paid homage to the first film’s devastating ending.

By the early 1990s, 20th Century Fox were keen to revive the idea of a future where the evolutionary order has been upended and apes have subjugated humanity. Some big directors had toyed with the hair-brained mythology, with all its juicy metaphorical potential, amongst them Oliver Stone, Sam Raimi, Chris Columbus, Roland Emmerich and Philip Noyce.

Jackson and Walsh had initially become involved as screenwriters in 1992, before Heavenly Creatures, only for their concept to fall out of favour with a regime change at Fox. But in 1996, following another bloody succession at the helm of the studio, the project was back on the table with Jackson potentially directing.

Ever the traditionalist, central to Jackson’s enchanting simian vision was the return of actor Roddy McDowell, who had played the pro-human chimp Cornelius in the original. He’d even gone to lunch with the actor and producer Harry J. Ufland to pitch his concept. McDowell had been resistant to doing another Apes film: decades might have passed but he could still remember itching beneath those prosthetics. Unbowed, Jackson pitched him Renaissance of the Planet of the Apes. It was to be a continuation of the first line of movies, and the apes have had a flowering of their artistic ability. ‘Like Florence or Venice, the Ape World has gained artistic beauty,’ he explains. McDowell would play an aged Cornelius-type character, sort of a primate Leonardo da Vinci. McDowell was enthralled. ‘Count me in,’ he told them.

Amid this renaissance of ape culture, the gorillas would cover the police patrols, the chimps were the artists, and, Jackson laughs, ‘I was going to have a big, fat orangutan with all the jowls as the Pope. It was a satirical look at religion.’ Everywhere the camera turned we would see statues of apes; then in one twist a statue gets knocked over and beneath the marble, which turns out to be plaster, we glimpse a human face.

‘It is all a façade!’ enthuses Jackson, the old excitement returning. ‘And we were actually going to have a half-human, half-ape character too that Roddy’s ape character had in hiding, because he would be killed if the ape society found out that there was this hybrid. It was quite interesting …’

Re-pitching his idea (for which, working on spec, he and Walsh had never earned a cent) to Fox’s new studio heads, Peter Chernin and Tom Rothman, he was informed the studio were also in talks with James Cameron to produce and Arnold Schwarzenegger to star.

‘We got an offer from Planet of the Apes, aggressive up front,’ says Kamins. ‘Not on the back end, because they couldn’t afford it because of Jim and Arnold.’

Jackson and Walsh had their qualms: this would be a big studio film and prey to big studio interference. Their natural independence, the very way they worked, would come under intense pressure.

Still the mind boggles a little at the notion: Peter Jackson directing Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Planet of the Apes movie produced by James Cameron, set in a crumbling ape Renaissance shot in New Zealand …

Jackson wouldn’t meet Cameron until 2005. Getting along straightaway, the Kiwi found himself wondering what might have happened if they had said yes. Tim Burton would eventually step into the project in 2001 for a tepid reverse-engineered spin on the original 1968 film with Mark Wahlberg; although the prosthetics masks, created by Rick Baker, were fabulous.

Many moons later, the legacy of the Apes would return to Jackson’s faraway kingdom. Following Weta’s industry-transforming breakthroughs not only with motion-capture but the filigree textures of digital fur through Gollum and then Kong, when Fox rolled the dice on the Apes saga once more with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011, it was Weta who created the now stunningly lifelike digital simians, with Andy Serkis starring as the sentient chimp, Caesar.

*

Since the 1976 debacle, King Kong had remained in the keeping of Universal, the very studio where The Frighteners was about to be released sooner rather than later.

The plan had been to lean toward its horror credentials and release the undead comedy around Halloween in 1996. Despite Jackson’s best intentions to make a family film, The Frighteners had been landed with an adult R-rating (15 in the UK). In the meantime, however, Daylight was running late. Universal’s tunnel-bound Sylvester Stallone disaster movie, featuring a young Viggo Mortensen, had gone overschedule and was going to miss its 17 July release date.

Seizing the opportunity, Zemeckis called Jackson: ‘I want you to put together a short effects reel for me so I can take it into the studio.’ He intended to make a move to put The Frighteners into the more lucrative summer slot in place of the delayed Daylight.

When Weta’s visual effects proved to be on a par with ILM, Universal got excited and agreed to the July slot, and set about repositioning The Frighteners as a new visual effects extravaganza featuring Marty McFly!

Hollywood was becoming greatly intrigued. This wunderkind from over the ocean kept changing hats. First, he was the horror bandit, gorier even than Sam Raimi. Then he was the Weinsteins’ arthouse darling who brought such dark sensitivity to Heavenly Creatures. And now he was the new George Lucas, nurturing his own visual effects company.

‘So now the narrative’s starting to unfold very differently,’ says Kamins intently. Fox are making their overtures about Renaissance of the Planet of the Apes, The Frighteners is all of a sudden a summer movie and whispers of Jackson’s devotion to the great 1933 stop-motion marvel have reached Universal’s vice-president Lenny Kornburg. It was Kornburg who slyly tempted Jackson with his heart’s desire: ‘Would you have an interest in doing King Kong?’

What a moment of infinite possibility this must have seemed. And it would prove too good to be true. Yet, for a few weeks, Jackson had in front of him the chance of adapting Tolkien’s beloved bestseller, reviving Charlton Heston’s dystopian talking ape thriller, or remaking the film that had, in many ways, charted the course for his life. Which would, in fact, count as his second attempt to remake King Kong.

A twelve-year-old Jackson had constructed the Empire State Building out of cardboard boxes and turned a bed sheet into a cyclorama of New York that featured the Chrysler Building, Hudson River and assorted bridges for an aborted version of the classic. He still has the jointed model of Kong built from wire, foam rubber and a fox stole his mother no longer wore (at least, she didn’t now). When he finally came to remake King Kong in 2005, Jackson flew out the original 1933 eighteen-inch armature of Kong designed by Willis O’Brien and sculptor Marcel Delgado, along with its collector Bob Burns, to set in an act of quasi-holy symbolism.

Jackson was fired up by the possibility of any remake of King Kong, but his own? Astonishingly, given the company she kept, Walsh had never seen the original. An oversight that was swiftly put to rights, and she was convinced enough for the talks to intensify with Universal.

While the projects circled like 747s awaiting permission to land, Jackson’s long-time lawyer Peter Nelson drew up a pro-forma contract that could apply to any one of them. Together Nelson, Kamins and Jackson were determined to set the terms of engagement. There were two significant stipulations. Firstly, that a ‘considerable sum’ be guaranteed by the studio for research and development into special effects. Secondly, that Jackson become a ‘first dollar gross participant’ meaning he would receive a percentage of the gross earnings of the film — not the net profit, which according to the elusive magic of studio accounting seldom seemed to materialize. He would also get final cut.

By autumn 1996, still undecided over which pathway smelled fairest, Jackson and Walsh took a holiday, driving around the South Island, taking in the stunning scenery that would so readily lend itself to Middle-earth. ‘We decided that during this trip we would figure out which film we were going to make,’ he says, and, essentially at this stage, it was a choice of two. Waiting for The Lord of the Rings to be ‘absolutely nailed’ by Harvey was too risky, too frustrating. Unless there was a radical breakthrough in the Middle-earth standoff, it was a case of which ape movie?

‘Both Fox and Universal were happy for us to jump into one of their films.’ And for Jackson it was the personal connection that finally told. ‘We decided to do Kong.’

First, though, he had to let Harvey know.

Making the connection across the thousands of miles that lay between New York and the South Island, Jackson got straight to the point. ‘Harvey, we are not going to wait any longer, we are doing Kong.’

Harvey went straight to force ten, the betrayed producer: ‘THIS IS NOT HAPPENING! I AM NOT HEARING THIS! YOU’RE NOT TELLING ME THIS! YOU ARE NOT TELLING ME THIS!’

It was Jackson’s first taste of the Miramax head’s notorious spleen. But he knew well enough the stories of screaming fits that had reduced both M. Night Shyamalan and Uma Thurman to public tears and narrowly missed causing a fistfight with Quentin Tarantino.

Shaken, Jackson managed to remain calm.

‘Well, I am telling you this, Harvey. We’ll do it. Get the rights and after Kong we’ll come back and do Rings.’

The phone went dead.

Kamins, aware they were gambling with an important relationship, admits that Harvey was in his rights to be angry. And, with Harvey, angry always meant apoplectic. ‘He had already agreed, in fairness to him, to suspend and extend the period of our first-look deal so that Peter could go and make The Frighteners. We didn’t have a movie in development with Harvey when The Frighteners was proposed. And Harvey understood it was an opportunity for Peter. So we sort of stopped the clock on the deal and then added whatever time he spent on The Frighteners to the end of the deal. Now we’re coming to Harvey and we’re putting him in a situation where he effectively has to bid for Peter’s services on his next film. The only thing we wanted to do was The Lord of the Rings. And Harvey didn’t yet have the rights.’

Feeling guilty that the first-look deal with Miramax was proving fruitless, and conscious The Lord of the Rings was still dependant on Harvey, it was Jackson who devised a solution that might placate the Miramax chieftain’s ego. It would be a plan that would turn out to benefit Miramax in another, unexpected fashion. Jackson was on the ferry back to Wellington, crossing the often-turbulent waters of Cook Strait, when it occurred to him to see if he could convince Universal to allow Miramax to co-finance King Kong. Indeed, Universal were interested in striking a deal.

Miramax would come on as a fifty per cent partner on King Kong and Universal would take a fifty per cent stake in The Lord of the Rings. That would surely keep Harvey calm, Jackson reasoned. But Harvey, wheeler-dealer extraordinaire, pouted that Universal was getting two films out of the deal while poor Miramax was getting only one. He had his eye on another treasure; there was a property he coveted that had been languishing at Universal. It was a script by Tom Stoppard called Shakespeare in Love.

Three years hence, Shakespeare in Love would be nominated for thirteen Oscars, winning seven, including stealing Best Picture from under the nose of the favourite, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (which would have a major influence on Jackson’s battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings).

Jackson shakes his head. ‘To balance this deal up, so it was two for two as it were, he got Universal to give him, without any investment or involvement, the film that would win all these Oscars.’

He lets the irony slip into his voice. ‘We were tangentially responsible for getting Shakespeare in Love made.’

*

In the foyer of Weta Workshop, still located where Park Road swerves decisively to the right and becomes Camperdown Road, sits a stunning bronze maquette of King Kong wrestling a T-Rex. The two creatures are so tightly entwined you have to get up close to trace where gigantic gorilla ends and struggling dinosaur begins. It sits there as both a monument to the talents of those who work within these bountiful halls, greatly expanded over years of profitable world building, and a salutary symbol of what it is to wrestle with Hollywood.

Through the latter half of 1996, as Jackson and Walsh got to grips with the script for King Kong, months of research and development went into the visual effects that were going to bring Skull Island to fetid and thrilling life. Yet more artists and technicians had been brought in from all around the world to this far-off island to bolster the ranks of the sister divisions of Weta Workshop and Weta Digital. They were over six months into manufacturing.

The Workshop’s famously loquacious head Richard Taylor takes up the tale. ‘We already had some animatronic creatures sculpted, and it started to get wobbly. We could feel this undertow of uncertainty.’ He suggested to Jackson he make a sculpture of Kong fighting a Tyrannosaur (and Jackson was not skimping on dinosaurs), which they could use as a presentation piece to Universal to try and ‘invest in them how exciting the moment could be’. Over the following two weeks he sculpted the very piece that now sits outside his office. Five weeks later it arrived at Universal.

‘They were excited by it, and, needless to say, they actually put it in their front foyer,’ he reports.

Four weeks after that the film fell apart.

Taylor doesn’t hide the amusement in his voice. ‘And Peter, in true Kiwi form, asked for it back. And we got it back.’ And there it sits, a warning to all-comers: you need to be resilient in this game.

Looking back from the vantage of having finally made his version of King Kong in the wake of The Lord of the Rings, the undoing of their first attempt is viewed by Jackson and Taylor as a lucky escape; the river of fate taking another turn. Beginning again from scratch in 2004, Jackson dusted down the 1996 script. He didn’t like what he read. It was the tone. It was too flippant, too jokey.

‘We were desperately trying to write an Indiana Jones type of film. It was lightweight, a silly kind of Hollywood script.’ The Lord of the Rings had taught him that fantasy must be treated as if it was reality not a movie.

‘I think ultimately we weren’t prepared to do justice to such an incredible story,’ concludes Taylor.

But it was impossible to be philosophical at the time. It was heartbreaking.

Things had started to fragment with the release of The Frighteners. Zemeckis’ instincts hadn’t served him well. The reviews were uncertain, and the film felt too autumnal and spooky to sit comfortably in a summer wiped out by Roland Emmerich’s defiantly inane mega-B-movie Independence Day. The fact their opening weekend coincided with the start of the Atlanta Olympic Games hardly helped.

Jackson and Walsh learned a great lesson not only about marketing campaigns but how crucial was a film’s release date. Thereafter, they would maintain an influence on a film right through to the promotional popcorn bucket.

The Frighteners flopped, eventually taking a little under $30 million worldwide. According to the ruthless cause-and-effect of Hollywood physics, you’re only ever as good as your last film, and Jackson’s lustre was instantly tarnished. Virtually overnight, the conversation changed once more. Who was this guy again?

Still devotedly banging the drum for The Frighteners, Jackson had flown non-stop to London in early 1997 to do some promotional interviews— the international release date had been delayed to regroup after the film’s failure in America, not that it did any good — from there he would fly to Rome and proceed on a European tour.

When he reached his hotel room the phone was already ringing. It was Kamins.

‘They’re pulling the plug on King Kong.’

Universal’s change of heart wasn’t only due to the failure of The Frighteners. Disney were putting out a (as it turns out ghastly) remake of Mighty Joe Young, the King Kong copycat from 1949, and now the all-conquering Emmerich had announced that for his next trick he was planning to remake Godzilla. ‘And Universal didn’t want to do another monster movie,’ laments Jackson.

How could he stay where he was, promoting a film for the very studio that put his next film so abruptly into turnaround? Moreover, he now had twenty or thirty staff working on King Kong and no salary to pay them. He had to figure out how the hell they were going to survive. Weta was back on a knife-edge.

He booked himself on literally the next plane home.

‘It is the only time in my life I have ever done that,’ he laughs ruefully; although, nothing about it at the time felt funny. ‘I did not sleep at all as I was dealing with all of this. So I went there and back.’ Again.

Before leaving he called Walsh. ‘Don’t tell the guys. I will tell them when I get off the plane.’

Touching down at Wellington, the sleepless Jackson drove straight to Weta Workshop. He gathered the staff together and told them the film was no more. As always with the death of King Kong, tears were shed.

Harvey, true to form, was spitting mad. Only this time it was on Jackson’s behalf. Universal hadn’t told him — he heard the news via Kamins — and he was supposed to have a fifty per cent stake in the film. He let it be known to Jackson that, in his humble opinion, The Frighteners deserved a better fate, and had Universal and Zemeckis stuck to the Halloween release date he was sure it would have done far better.

Then he got into fighting mode. ‘We are going to do Rings. We are going to do Rings,’ he bellowed. ‘And they are not going to be involved.’

The whole half-and-half deal between Universal and Miramax was split asunder with the end of King Kong, but, says Kamins, ‘Harvey was just excited now to have Peter all to himself.’

CHAPTER 3
Many Meetings

Of course, nothing is ever new to Hollywood. In 1928, the great Erich von Stroheim filmed The Wedding March back-to-back with its sequel, The Honeymoon. In 1966, Hammer Films shot Dracula: Prince of Darkness in concert with the unrelated Rasputin: The Mad Monk so they could make profitable use of the cast and crew, led by the redoubtable Christopher Lee. In 1973, The Three Musketeers simply carried on swashbuckling into The Four Musketeers. And, in 1978, from behind a veil of secrecy, Warner Bros. brought back Superman, knowing they already had Superman II ready for take-off. During the double-production, they even managed to dispense with director Richard Donner and replace him with Richard Lester.

While the rights to The Lord of the Rings were stagnating at UA, David Lean tried to get the studio to bail out his two-part, single-schedule version of The Bounty, which had got as far as building a three-mast replica merchant ship before backer Dino De Laurentiis swam for shore. Attempting to edit down great swathes of Cleopatra in 1963, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz recommended releasing a five-hour version in two halves, but 20th Century Fox vetoed the idea.

Perhaps the most publicized of all hybrid productions was Robert Zemeckis’ back-to-Back to the Futures, two intertwined sequels filmed in one gallop between 1989 and 1990, impressively spinning from a dystopian future to the Wild West.

Less celebrated by the chronicles of Hollywood was Peter Jackson’s avowed intention to make Bad Taste 2 and 3 in one go. This extension to his interplanetary saga of man-eating alien fast food operators, while considerably bigger in scope, was still scheduled to take considerably less than the four years it took to complete Bad Taste. The sequels have yet to come to pass, but here was proof that Jackson had already given serious consideration to the idea of juggling two films at once.

For all the risks involved — you would be doubling down (in gambling terminology, the doubling of an original bet in Blackjack; or, in more general terms, the doubling of one’s commitment to a risky strategy) on a sequel to a film that could stumble out of the gates — Jackson knew back-to-back filmmaking was the only conceivable way to do justice to The Lord of the Rings. To wait on the sequel would result in spiralling costs and a loss in the richness and flow of storytelling. Throughout his early discussions with Harvey Weinstein, he was clear they were telling one long, baroque story artfully sliced in twain.

And despite the best efforts of their lawyers to prevaricate until kingdom come, Harvey had called to say that he had finally struck a deal with Saul Zaentz. Miramax were officially making The Lord of the Rings. Or would be once they had agreed upon the script.

Throughout the endless legal quibbling, Jackson hadn’t even touched a copy of the book. The uncertainty had played on his superstitious nature. He was terrified of re-reading it, getting excited imagining the movie he could make, only for it all to fall apart.

In short, he was not in the business of tempting fate.

So it wasn’t until the spring of 1997, on the day they received the news, that Jackson and Fran Walsh took a momentous shopping trip into downtown Wellington to buy what would be his second copy of The Lord of the Rings. Until that time, as he admitted, it had ‘been a bit foggy’. Years later, interviewers would be staggered to find that Jackson had not spent his puberty pining over Middle-earth. Neither he nor Walsh had ever been Tolkien fanatics. It had been an abstract possibility. Which they now needed to make a reality.

Symbolically, the very copy they bought was the one Jackson would keep to hand throughout the entire production, the margins graffitied with notes. He still has it somewhere: three large paperbacks packaged in a box and adorned inside and on the covers with fifty beautiful watercolours by Alan Lee. The beauty of those pictures the deciding factor in the purchase.

What a pleasure, almost innocent, that moment must have been. Opening it up, flexing the cover back and letting the pages flow past, sensing the film that he might make. Only now realizing the full magnitude of what he was attempting. Only now gauging the thrilling possibility of what lay before him.

However, between the dying breath of King Kong and the dawning of The Lord of the Rings there had been a lull of six weeks where Jackson had been faced with his persistent Weta Digital problem. Their thirty-five Silicon Graphics machines were sitting idle and growing obsolete. Licence payments were due on the software packages, as well as the wages of the operators who were likely to up sticks for an increasingly bountiful digital revolution in Los Angeles. During development on King Kong they had doubled their staff. Mothballing Weta Digital until Middle-earth was ready wasn’t an option.

Again it was Zemeckis who arrived in the nick of time. He was in post-production on an expensive, hard-science fiction adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact and offered Weta Digital the opportunity to create the sequence of Jodie Foster plunging through a wormhole.

‘That was the first thing we ever did for an outside vendor,’ reports Jackson. While only a stopgap, this was enormously significant in industry terms. Here was the first, faint signal that Weta Digital would one day operate outside of Jackson’s projects and rival the likes of ILM and Digital Domain as a visual effects house for all-comers. For now, it was a matter of necessity. And Jackson was still serving as go-between with Zemeckis.

‘I supervised it a bit from my end,’ he laughs, amused by his credit as Additional Visual Effects. ‘He wanted me to help visualize it, and sort of supervise. So, I did act like a visual effects supervisor for that scene, you could say.’

While still wary of jinxing the deal by even touching a copy of The Lord of the Rings,¹ Jackson and Walsh had risked taking one step in the direction of a screenplay. They asked erstwhile collaborator Costa Botes to break the book down scene-by-scene into a working précis. Loading it up onto their computer they could then experiment with different road maps from Hobbiton to the Crack of Doom.

Once they began to re-assimilate the book, the issue of structure became more serious. What of Tolkien’s vast story would they keep? What would they excise? What would they dare add to the precious story? How faithful would they be to the book? It was the biggest question of all. Could they radically alter Tolkien and still be authentic? Ironically, given what eventually transpired at Miramax, at this stage they briefly explored the idea of ‘one long, epic film’. Jackson also wondered whether it really ought to be three films, but Harvey swiftly disabused him of that notion.

Out of these first sessions emerged a ninety-two-page treatment, made up of 266 sequences: the embryo of an Oscar-winning trilogy.

Already mindful of how much interest the adaptation would engender, even in sleepy Wellington, Jackson codenamed the treatment Jamboree: The Life of Lord Baden Powell. You suspect more to amuse themselves, this also involved the adoption of grand but hardly uncrackable nom-de-plumes: Fran Walsh was Fredericka Wharburton; Peter Jackson became Percy J. Judkins.

Says ‘Judkins’, by way of explanation, ‘Jamboree was the codename for the 1933 film The Son of Kong, and we gave it the scouting theme on the cover.’ The caution to ‘be prepared’ would gain unwelcome prescience.

Not long afterwards came a stroke of phenomenally good fortune. Unable to gauge whether what they were writing was any good, Walsh decided they needed another voice in the mix. So they contacted Stephen Sinclair, a Kiwi playwright who had worked with them on Meet the Feebles and Braindead. Sinclair, who knew little of Tolkien, would in turn seek out the advice of his girlfriend, who knew her stuff. In this understated way, Philippa Boyens became pivotally involved in the project.

Parallel to wrestling the book’s great girth into two palatable films was an extraordinary period of quasi-scientific research into how the two sides of Weta were going to solve a problem like Middle-earth without sillification. Pint-sized hobbits, outsized creatures, epic battles, the magnificent variety of place and people that made the book so popular: Jackson needed to prove that not only filmmaking technology was ready for Tolkien, but Kiwi aptitude as well.

By August 1997, they were storyboarding and generating animatics (a rudimentary computer-based pre-visualization, or pre-viz, of key action). The influential artists Alan Lee and John Howe were installed in Wellington, already turning their intuition for Tolkien into reams of concept art. Locations were being scouted, logistics fathomed and the Gordian knot of scheduling loosened.

The journey of writing and visualizing the films will be tackled in the next chapter, but across Miramar the great beast of preproduction was stirring into motion: eighteen months of great hope and greater strife. Jackson and Walsh were slowly, respectfully and fretfully forming a relationship with a strait-laced Oxford don who had never suffered film people gladly. They were also developing a markedly different kind of relationship with Harvey Weinstein, a film person who didn’t suffer anyone gladly.

*

‘Fran remembers this stuff much better than I do,’ says Jackson stoically. ‘It’s like a car crash, I tend to sort of wipe out all the bad memories. Fran hangs on to every detail.’ However much he may wish to forget, their dealings with the brothers grim are sewn into the fabric of this story …

With their initial treatment completed, Jackson and Walsh flew to New York to begin their script meetings at Miramax, and get their first taste of the Weinstein way. There would be three script meetings in all, principally with the two executives Cary Granat (inevitably dubbed ‘Cary Grant’), the head of production at Dimension, and John Gordon, a Miramax production executive who had survived as Harvey’s assistant, who were managing the project. Harvey and Bob were, as Jackson ominously puts it, ‘floating around’. It had been decreed that this was to be the first Dimension-Miramax co-production and both brothers would make their presence felt.

Meetings at Miramax’s Tribeca office were conducted in a small, unventilated room walled in frosted glass, known among browbeaten indie filmmakers as the ‘sweatbox’. From the very first it was clear the Weinsteins were going to subject the project to the full glare of their nervous scrutiny. The honeymoon of getting the deal sealed was over; this was now about how their money was going to be spent. Jackson had a genuine feeling that it was only now that the brothers were truly rationalizing what was involved.

While Harvey had read the book in college, it became clear many of the executives, including Bob, had not. They were faced with the same frustration that confronted John Boorman and Ralph Bakshi — how could you drill down into the fine print of Tolkien’s world when everything you talked about was met with various degrees of bafflement?

Bob took almost malicious pride in playing the incredulous audience member who had never heard of Mr. J.R.R. Whoever. Any script was going to have to pass the Bob test. Indeed, having submitted an early draft, Jackson remembers Bob slamming his hand down on the table in triumph.

‘I know what this is!’ he declared. ‘The Fellowship of the Ring, these nine characters, are all expert saboteurs. They all have their specialties. It’s the fucking Guns of Navarone!’

‘Really? The Lord of the Rings?’ laughs Jackson, recalling his own incredulous reaction — and he couldn’t be a bigger fan of the fucking Guns of Navarone. ‘He had figured it all out. He now had a filter by which he could understand this thing.’

Harvey would generally give good notes, nothing too crazy. Bob was big on the fact they had to kill a hobbit. ‘Pick one,’ he kept telling them. All they could do was keep deflecting this stuff: ‘Well, we will certainly think about that …’ It soon became a slog. They were rewriting and rewriting, then flying to New York to play Tolkien tennis with the Weinsteins. Jackson started to suspect that the brothers might be stalling.

The budget, Harvey insisted, was not to exceed $75 million, which based on the $26 million The Frighteners had cost with all its CGI, Jackson naively thought was achievable. Then the whole process was like a whirlpool of elusive possibility in which they were increasingly likely to drown.

Amusingly, if only in hindsight, the Weinsteins revealed a good Harvey-bad Bob routine. Whenever Bob was out of the room, Harvey would tell them to ignore his brother, who was just crazy. Stick with his ideas.

‘But you know that is not really the truth,’ sighs Jackson. ‘You’re lulled into thinking Harvey is the one you can talk honestly with. But the real truth is he is really tight with Bob. It’s an illusion.’

On occasion this Abbott and Costello routine would explode into full theatrics. For instance, after another of Bob’s ill-informed ideas, it was Harvey who slammed his meaty fist onto the table before storming out of the sweatbox. They watched his silhouette retreat down the corridor while Bob carried on regardless. Within moments Harvey’s silhouette, as unmistakable as Hitchcock, came back down the corridor clutching an Oscar. The one his half of Miramax had received for The English Patient. He burst back into the room and thrust it in front of Bob.

‘I’ve got one of these; you haven’t got one of these. So who the hell do you think is the smarter one? Shut up, Bob!’

Looking back with a less jaundiced eye, Jackson likens Harvey’s tricks to Tony Soprano or what it must have been like to work for one of the old, bullying Hollywood moguls, a Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn or Harry Kohn, who would rage or weep to get their way. Everything had shifted into a different register, one of emotional extremes utterly alien to a New Zealand temperament. It was all so bipolar: tantrums followed by largesse.

During the darkest hours, as relationships fragmented, Harvey had called Ken Kamins and began to rant down the cell phone. Eventually Kamins got a word in edgewise, ‘Harvey, I just don’t want to hear this. I am with my wife giving birth.’

The next day a huge gift basket arrives care of Miramax.

Beneath all of Harvey’s volatility was a stealthy manipulation. As the mists began to clear on a workable structure for the two films, it became starkly apparent that $75 million was vastly short of what was required. Experienced Australian producer Tim Sanders, who had worked on The Frighteners, had come on board at Jackson’s behest expressly to draw up a budget. Realistically, he estimated the two films would cost $130 to $135 million. The news didn’t go down well with Harvey, who had already invested in the region of $12 million toward serious development costs. A fact, Jackson says, ‘that was driving him nuts’.

What Harvey wasn’t telling Jackson was that he couldn’t get Disney to let him greenlight anything beyond $75 million. He later claimed he had tried to entice them onboard as partners, but they turned him down flat.

Kamins isn’t so sure that Disney had been so dismissive. ‘I have since talked to [then Disney CEO] Michael Eisner and he tells me that he wanted to engage, but Harvey wouldn’t show him anything. Wouldn’t show him scripts. Wouldn’t show him artwork. Wouldn’t let him talk to Peter. I don’t know if this is history being rewritten by the different participants, but he claims that he had asked Harvey for the ability to talk to Peter and the answer was no. And so when the answer was no, it was kind of like well, “Okay, no to you too.”’

Harvey had even ventured to other studios in an attempt to offset the swelling costs. Whether it was the uncertainty of getting into the Miramax business, the pervasive scepticism over the viability of the project, or good old-fashioned schadenfreude, no one was buying.

In desperation, Harvey dispatched the ‘executive from hell’ to New Zealand charged with rationalizing Sanders’ estimates back to $75 million. Jackson had looked up Russ Markovitz’s credits and ‘it was all a bit bloody dodgy’. With loose ties to Dimension through risible straight-to-video horror sequels for The Prophecy and From Dusk Till Dawn, Markovitz aggravated one and all by showing scant interest in the movie but a great obsession with Jackson having a medical in order to be properly insured. His increasingly paranoid imagination concocting nefarious plots to bump off the director for the insurance money, Jackson kept coming up with excuses to get out of it, before flatly refusing. ‘It was a screwy time,’ he admits. After two months, the mysterious Markovitz returned to from whence he came and was never heard from again.

With better judgment, Harvey then sent down Marty Katz, a more genial, square-jawed old-Hollywood type fresh from trouble shooting on Titanic, who expended a lot of energy trying to get his Porsche shipped over from Los Angeles. Katz, who was an old friend of Zemeckis, got along well with Jackson. He was impressed by what they were achieving in Wellington and reported back to Miramax both his enthusiasm and the confirmation that, ‘If you’ve only got seventy-five million you can only do one film.’

In the end, his Porsche would never get to Wellington. Jackson, Walsh and Katz were summoned to the looming Orthancs of New York for a crisis meeting

‘That is when it all sort of went pear-shaped,’ says Jackson.

They were sat in the sweatbox. But there were no theatrics, no double-act. In fact, there was no Bob. Which was a very bad sign. Harvey was about to give them the benefit of his feelings and this time the fury wasn’t an act. Jackson had betrayed them. He had broken their agreement. He had wasted $12 million of their money. Wasted his time, squandered his good will. Now the director had to do what was right and make a single film of The Lord of the Rings of no more than two hours in length for $75 million otherwise he was going to get John Madden to direct it.

Courtly and intelligent, a similar man in some respects to John Boorman, Madden was the very English director currently finishing up Shakespeare In Love to Harvey’s satisfaction. The featherlight period rom-com concerning the famous playwright’s romantic distractions would soon give Harvey another Oscar with which to berate his brother.

Kamins recalls a more radical threat. ‘Harvey was like, “You’re either doing this or you’re not. You’re out. And I got Quentin ready to direct it.”’

Mad as that sounded, there was no way to know if it was a bluff. At the time he took it as gospel: Quentin Tarantino’s fucking Middle-earth.

Harvey had already sent Jackson’s two-film draft to British screenwriter Hossein Amini, another talent in good standing at Miramax having adapted Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove. Amini remembers being baffled by the peculiar cover: ‘Jamboree, The Life of Lord Baden Powell.’ Turning the page, it evidently had little to do with the Scout Movement.

Amini was a huge Tolkien fan and had been following the rumours about an adaptation. Now, here in his hands, was the secret script for The Lord of the Rings. He knew nothing of Harvey’s ultimatum to Jackson that either Madden or Tarantino was waiting in the wings. ‘They mentioned it might need some work, but I couldn’t really see why. I read it and loved it,’ he recalls.

When Miramax suggested converting it into one film, Amini’s mind shot back to Bakshi’s animated effort. A single film version would do nothing but alienate the massive fan base. ‘I believe at the time budget was the biggest stumbling block,’ he says, remaining convinced he was a bluff to get Jackson to rethink his approach toward the single film option.

In the sweatbox, with New York indifferently getting on with life somewhere outside, Jackson had reached the same conclusion. His face taking on a Gollum-like pallor, his hands trembling, he refused to crack. He just couldn’t see how you could make a single film and still do justice to the book.

Harvey engaged the full orchestra of his fury, threatening lawsuits to get his money back once he had kicked them off the project and back to New Zealand.²

Says Kamins, ‘Harvey really didn’t want to let go. He didn’t want to be embarrassed. And I think Peter was putting him in an awkward place. There was a mix of a lot of different feelings.’ Indeed, it remains a tricky situation to parse. Jackson had agreed to a $75 million budget, and his plans had vastly outstripped that. Channels of communication had broken down. But he was on a road that would lead to over three billion dollars and Oscars galore. While no one could have quite predicted that, Miramax’s voluble supremo had neither the foresight nor the means to back Jackson’s vision, and in his frustration was pursuing something inevitably inferior. Did he really believe in the single film option?

To Jackson here was irony as bitter as burnt coffee (and he is assuredly a tea man). When they had first come to Miramax, Harvey had actually screened the Bakshi debacle proudly announcing, ‘This is something we are never going to do.’

Jackson had been forewarned. Katz had got wind of the single-film scenario, although Jackson had thought he meant a first part with a potential sequel to follow. Even this thin hope was shredded, however, when a memo arrived at his hotel emblazoned ‘ultra-confidential’. It turned out to be a litany of suggestions on how to crush Tolkien’s novel into a tidy two hours, written without Jackson’s knowledge.

Dated 17 June 1998 and written by Miramax development head Jack Lechner, it began, ‘We’ve been thinking long and hard …’ Despite Jackson’s yeomen’s efforts, the two-film structure was too dense — code for too expensive — and they had a more radical, streamlined approach utilizing ‘key elements’ but still dispensing with many. Among its manifest sins, Helm’s Deep was cut, Théoden and Denethor combined (QED: so were Rohan and Gondor) and Éowyn replaced Faramir to be Boromir’s sister, while the memo vacillated over whether the problematic Saruman should be cut or present at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. The great, subterranean drama of Moria was to be ‘drastically’ shortened: Balin’s Tomb, Orc attack, Balrog and out.

‘It was literally guaranteed to disappoint every single person that has read that book,’ concludes Jackson, still smarting.

Scribbled on the copy of the memo now archived in Miramar, was a note from Jackson to distribute it to all the department heads, ‘so they can see why the project is coming to a sticky end.’

Harvey had cornered him. He understood the producer was doing what he felt was best for Miramax, that was his job, but Jackson and Walsh were shattered. They couldn’t even think straight.

‘We just said to Harvey, “We can’t give you an answer. Please will you just give us time to fly back to New Zealand to think about it?”’

That was when Harvey’s mood got worse.

The filmmakers left Miramax’s office as if escaping Mount Doom, dashing across Tribeca to find a haven with their friend David Linde, the executive who had first gone to New Zealand to see Heavenly Creatures and since left Miramax to start his own production company, Good Machine. Linde could tell at a glance they were in a bad way. He retrieved a bottle of Scotch from a cabinet, stored for such an emergency.

Jackson smiles. ‘It was the first time in my life I had ever drunk scotch.’

Catching the next flight home, Jackson and Walsh headed down the coast for a few days with the intention of celebrating Walsh’s birthday. But on 8 July 1998, the trip was more about decompression; a chance to breathe blessed New Zealand air after all that American humidity.

Reflecting on their situation, it must have felt like they were cursed. They had spent nine arduous months on their remake of King Kong with Universal only for it to come to nothing. Now their even longer quest to bring The Lord of the Rings to the screen was heading the same way, or arguably somewhere worse. Being forced to make a hugely compromised version of the book they knew in their bones, no matter how hard they worked, would only be met with the scorn of fans; who would place the blame squarely upon Jackson’s shoulders. This was no longer about making the best version of the book under the circumstance. This threatened their credibility as filmmakers.

Walking along the beach, you like to think with the sun setting, they accepted that there were forces you could not conquer. Skull Island or Mordor had nothing on Hollywood.

‘I’d been hit too many times,’ says Jackson.

He called Kamins. ‘Just tell Harvey we can’t do it. We’d rather have our lives and do our films and not deal with all this crap anymore. Tell Harvey to go ahead and make his film and good luck.’

Kamins being Kamins, he didn’t actually do that.

Undaunted, resolute, the voice of reason: Kamins allowed fevers to cool down then went back to Harvey with a request. ‘At the end of the day, what was the worst that was going to happen?’ he laughs. If Weinstein still said no, the disappointment would remain the same.

These guys have killed themselves for you, he insisted. They have a vision that they had all signed up for. Would he give them an opportunity to make the movie the way they envisioned it somewhere else? You’re not obligated, but I’m asking.

Harvey agreed, but his terms were draconian.

The most aggressive studio turnaround period, in which a filmmaker can attempt to find a new home for their project, might be six months. Traditionally, it’s a year.

‘You have four weeks,’ Harvey told Kamins. ‘If you set it up someplace else, I get all my money back immediately on signature. Not on the first day of photography. I get it all on signature. And I get five per cent of first dollar gross across the board.’

‘Okay,’ said Kamins, icy calm, ‘let me give it a shot.’

*

So the phone would ring again, the shrill, insistent call of fate. Hope was back on the agenda. A fool’s hope maybe — Kamins had been frank: relocating a project in four weeks was unheard of — but for now they were back in the Tolkien business. And that was enough.

‘Exactly four weeks as the clock ticks,’ echoes Jackson ruefully. Twenty-eight days later, if no deal had been struck, Harvey would take back control and offer it to Madden or Tarantino or whoever. You sense Weinstein really didn’t believe it would happen, not under his impossible conditions. That ultimately he was hoping Jackson would learn the error of his ambitions and agree to make one film with Miramax.

Miramax had done a fine job distributing Heavenly Creatures, raising the New Zealand director’s status immeasurably as a commercial filmmaker. They had invested in Jackson and wanted a return on that investment.

‘Harvey didn’t want to give up the movie,’ says Kamins. ‘Harvey had really wanted these films and he wanted them with Peter. But I think Bob didn’t. They weren’t on the same page. Bob was second-guessing the economic investment and was worried that they could really be putting themselves on a bad financial footing.’

Right now, what Jackson needed was a presentation. One that, as Kamins explains, quickly answered the questions, ‘Why these movies? Why now? And why us?’

Of course, they were sitting on a hoard of concept art, test footage, storyboards, animatics, and even props and prosthetics. Richard Taylor admits that even as the mood had worsened with Miramax he and his team had refused to stop working. Frankly, they were in denial. The thought of abandoning the project was too painful to recognize. ‘We were like addicts,’ he says. ‘We couldn’t stop ourselves.’ They went on designing, sculpting maquettes, and forging weapons and armour for a hypothetical Middle-earth. Lee and Howe, at least, would return to England and Switzerland respectively, their brief, wonderful sojourn in the moving picture business over with.

This was far too much material to play show-and-tell with the limited patience of a prospective studio. They would be out of the room before they’d finished setting up their slide show. There was also scant chance of encouraging anyone down to New Zealand to see their nascent operation. Half of Hollywood still couldn’t find it on a map. Jackson’s solution was to shoot a short film, a presentation piece that told their story. Kamins dubs it ‘the making of the making of’.

Jackson still considers it the most important film he has ever made.

Cutting short Walsh’s chaotic birthday trip, they were a good three-hour drive from their Wellington base. And so a story, already fraught, once again gathers the patina of movie melodrama as a storm bowled in off the Cook Strait and two filmmakers thinking of nothing else but the ticking clock persuaded a helicopter pilot to brave the tempest.

Jackson sounds rueful. A bad flier, he was known to turn his knuckles transparent gripping the armrests as 747s drooped into LAX. ‘We had the worst helicopter ride in the world around the coast,’ he remembers. To a Weinsteinian chorus of thunder, pummelled by winds, lashed with rain and plunging between pockets of air it felt as if King Kong had plucked them out of the sky. When they touched down in Wellington, Jackson’s legs almost gave out, but it never occurred to either of them they were now risking their lives for the sake of these films.

So while Kamins began a preliminary round of the studios, armed only with the scripts and a basic animatic of the story, Jackson enlisted Allun ‘Bolie’ Bollinger, cinematographer on Heavenly Creatures, and roused his team to help create a forceful ‘documentary’.

What immediately impresses is how confidently the thirty-five-minute pitch answered Kamins’ questions. It demonstrates an affinity with the material and the certainty that technology had not only caught up with Tolkien’s imagination but this New Zealand operation was more than capable of wielding those advances. With a youthful Jackson in the starring role (bearing no ill effects from his recent dalliance with death), the film makes explicit how this vast world would be brought to life.

Talking heads extoll the need for realism. A mythical reality that is ‘lived in, sweated in’ says Howe. Using the power of the Lee-Howe artwork and behind-the-scenes footage from Weta Workshop, they describe how hobbit stature would be achieved using forced perspective, motion-controlled cameras and body doubles with digital face replacement. There are beautifully lit maquettes by the sculptural magician Jamie Beswarick: powerful, redolent versions of Orcs, Ringwraiths and the Balrog exactly as they would appear in the finished film.

At Weta Digital they talk up the Cave-troll as their test case for digital biology, modelled on a real human skeleton and musculature then distorted into a troll’s frame. Motion capture is discussed but not yet in relation to, at this stage, a more alien-looking Gollum. Software magician Stephen Regelous reveals prototype footage of the MASSIVE software program that would allow them to mount battles with thousands of computer-generated ‘thinking’ soldiers.

There is also a slender tally of things later abandoned or used limitedly: large puppets to scale up humans alongside hobbits, demonic horses for the Ringwraiths and the idea of giving all the Orcs digitally enlarged eyes like Gollum.

Local actors including the steadfast Jed Brophy (whose involvement with Jackson goes back to Braindead), Craig Parker (who would play the elf Haldir, as Frodo) and Peter Vere Jones (from Bad Taste, as a touching Gandalf), perform choice segments from an animatic of the entire film — something else that had displeased Miramax. Familiar passages from The Council of Elrond, Moria and Mount Doom relayed over cycling storyboards. The scores of Braveheart and The Last of the Mohicans are used throughout.

The footage is so thorough and ardently mounted it became the prototype for Jackson’s vaults of DVD extras. This wasn’t a desperate plea it was a fully strategized battle plan.

To complement the video, Taylor’s team provided a set of their finest maquettes to accompany Jackson. Something meaningfully tactile that would hopefully serve a better purpose than the sculpture of King Kong sent and then retrieved from Universal.

The idea was that when they got to LA there would be a slew of meetings with their dog-and-pony show raring to go. However, they landed to the news only two meetings had actually been confirmed.

On the other side of the Pacific, Kamins had been burning a hole in his contact book trying to get Jackson through the door. To give the studios a taste of how serious a proposition this was, how good. But he was drawing blank after blank; it was terrifying.

Notoriously, Decca turned down the Beatles, nearly every publisher in London passed on Harry Potter and Western Union spurned the chance to spend $100,000 on the patent for an ‘interesting novelty’ called a telephone. History is littered with bad calls. But in Hollywood commercial misjudgements are an inevitable side effect of the business where every movie is a swing at a curving ball; you can only hope to hit more often than you miss. In Hollywood, as screenwriter William Goldman immortally pronounced, ‘Nobody knows anything.’ However popular the book might be, The Lord of the Rings held no guarantees. It was too long, too tricky and — cue: siren — too expensive. Add in Harvey’s prohibitive conditions and Kamins knew he had a hard sell on his hands.

But he hadn’t counted on the politics. The obvious objections weren’t even raised. That Jackson didn’t have the track record to support this kind of venture. That fantasy struggled at the box office. That this sounded like Willow or Labyrinth. ‘It wasn’t any of those things,’ says Kamins. This was an industry-wide jeremiad against the viability of Tolkien.

Paramount was developing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the bestselling children’s fantasy by Tolkien’s friend and peer C.S. Lewis. They felt they were tonally too close (a nonsense). Lewis’ book would eventually be adapted by Walton Media and released by Disney to capitalize on Jackson’s triumph.

Disney was already in the middle of things with Harvey and had spurned, or been denied, the chance to be involved.

‘Regency was interested.’ Kamins is referring to independent production house Regency Enterprises, run by the billionaire and former Israeli spy Arnon Milchan — another colourful character in the echelons of Hollywood. With distribution deals at Warner and 20th Century Fox, they can boast hits as varied as JFK, Pretty Woman, and LA Confidential. Milchan had gotten as far as approaching his partners at Fox to say he was keen.

‘What’s Saul Zaentz’s involvement?’ Fox had shot back.

‘Well, he gets a fee,’ Milchan responded carefully. ‘He doesn’t get a credit, but he gets a fee and a participation on the back end.’ Wherever they went the basic terms of Zaentz’s deal with Miramax would still stand.

Kamins shakes his head philosophically. Where once The English Patient had opened doors, now it was slamming them shut.

‘Fox had fumed, “If he gets one nickel, we’re out.”’

The year Fox walked away from The English Patient, Zaentz had given the keynote address at the American Film Market. Even though the film had been revived with Miramax, this turned into a twenty-minute denunciation of the evil empire, Fox. How they hated movies, hated filmmakers and were anti-artists.

‘It was a rant,’ says Kamins, ‘a very public rant.’

So Fox was out. And Regency.

Amy Pascal, the head of Sony, openly told Kamins she didn’t care for the scripts. ‘I don’t know if there was more to it, but that’s what we were told.’

After The Frighteners and King Kong, there was baggage with Universal. They were better to hedge their bets by going back through their old friend Zemeckis. He could surely relate: every studio in town had turned down his pitch about a teenager who accidentally travels back to the 1950s, before Universal agreed to make Back to the Future. Sadly, they weren’t buying now. Recent history couldn’t be rewritten.

Kamins goes on. They tried Roland Emmerich, who had used his newfound clout to set up a production company called Centropolis, but he claimed not to like the scripts either.

‘So that left us with New Line, because Peter had a longstanding friendship with Mark Ordesky, who worked for Fine Line, their arthouse division.’ It was tenuous, but they were desperate. ‘And we went to PolyGram and Working Title.’

Both agreed to listen to Jackson’s pitch.

They flew to Los Angeles troubled less by turbulence than a growing sense of dread, and landed to the news that a baggage handler at LAX had dropped one of their flight boxes and a precious maquette of Treebeard had smashed on the tarmac.

‘We just felt like fate was against us,’ recalls Taylor.

First came PolyGram (who had distributed Braindead in the UK) represented by their British production arm, Working Title. ‘I believe it was Eric Fellner and Liza Chasin from Working Title,’ says Kamins. Stewart Till, the CEO of PolyGram, the man with the power to greenlight the films, wasn’t at the meeting but had read the screenplays. Kamins had them delivered to his hotel room and Till had given his corporate blessing to Working Title to pursue the project if they were as keen as him.

Led by the charming, savvy producer Fellner, they couldn’t have been more enthusiastic; but he had no idea they were one of only two last-ditch possibilities. ‘Really? We got no sense of that,’ he says, remembering a very impressive pitch. Being able to handle those beautiful maquettes left a real impression. ‘God, if we’d only done it,’ he laughs. ‘But we were never going to be able to. At the time, it was two films, and I think Jackson wanted $180 million. We just weren’t in a place to do that. PolyGram just didn’t have $180 million dollars to put into a project.’

In fact, PolyGram was in the process of being sold (it finally folded in 1999) and couldn’t make any commitments until the sale was done, let alone one of this magnitude. Realistically, it was going to be two to three months before they could properly talk.

‘We have seven days,’ replied Jackson.

The yo-yoing of hopes kindled then dashed was taking its toll. Dread was sliding into despair. Why keep subjecting themselves to such disappointment?

‘New Line was the only other meeting we had,’ he says. ‘At that point I really was like, “Let’s just do our New Line meeting tomorrow and go home.”’

*

In 1986, Mark Ordesky was in the direct-to-video business, sourcing lucrative shockers for B-movie distributor Republic Pictures: ghoulish Z-grade stuff like Witchboard and Scared Stiff. But even they thought he was nuts for suggesting Bad Taste. Ordesky had been gobsmacked after the New Zealand Film Commission had sent him a copy of Jackson’s splatter-happy debut and, undaunted, took the tape with him when he moved to New Line.

‘I became this kind of Peter Jackson partisan,’ he enthuses. ‘Whatever was happening, that was my solution to it.’

Slight, with tightly cropped hair and an unwavering gaze, Ordesky is a likably upbeat soul who doesn’t see the worth in hiding his insecurities. He is like a recovering Hollywood addict. He openly frets and fusses, always the butt of his own stories, but nothing can disguise his quick, deprecating wit and, especially, his passion. You could bottle the stuff. He would deny it, always crediting Jackson, but that passion truly counted when it came to adapting The Lord of the Rings, a book he revered. When Jackson was introduced to Ordesky’s mother, she told him about the Alan Lee posters her son had on his wall.

Sure enough, Ordesky had been a Dungeons and Dragons addict as a kid and his dungeon master, who he held in great esteem, had presented him with a box of required reading: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and a ‘bunch’ of Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard, C.S. Lewis and Jack Vance. He ended up reading The Lord of The Rings before The Hobbit. And it took hold of him deeply.

‘The idea of a small person, which I was and remain, taking on this great journey appealed to me in a very profound manner.’

Ordesky got into the film business by fittingly circuitous means. As a student, he had written a novella called Lines that had been picked up by TriStar. Not, he insists, for any great literary merit but because of its double-act of a grizzled old hack teaming up with a callow student journalist to solve the murder of the campus drug dealer. They had Gene Hackman and Matthew Broderick in mind. It never got made, but it did get Ordesky a job as a script reader at TriStar, which convinced him writing was not his calling.

‘My true skill was recognizing great talent in others and being able to articulate and advocate,’ he says. That, and the balls to stroll into New Line, past the receptionist and ask round for a job. To get him back out of the building he was offered the chance to provide notes on a script called The Hidden. Fortunately, he liked the alien invasion movie as much as CEO Bob Shaye and was hired. This was before his brief spell at Republic, and he would return to New Line, his tape of Bad Taste to hand, as a story editor and began to frantically push this guy named Jackson.

In light of his inability to get Bad Taste on the map, Ordesky had actually written Jackson a fan letter. Something along the lines of, ‘Hello, you don’t know me, but I have failed you. I loved your film, although I failed to convince my bosses. But someday I’m going to be a big player in the film business and I will not fail you then.’

The director may have been blissfully unaware, but at New Line Ordesky was championing him for Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 and pushing Braindead 2 (Jackson’s zombie comedy had eventually been released via Trimark in America under the braindead title Dead Alive). Finally, when they were looking for a suitably bloodthirsty talent to revive the flagging Nightmare On Elm Street franchise, Jackson was commissioned to write a script with his Meet The Feebles co-screenwriter Danny Mulheron.

‘They were friends more than anything else,’ observes Kamins. Jackson would stay on Ordesky’s ‘ratty-arsed sofa’ on his earliest visits to LA, and they would sit up all night playing Risk. Even if it eventually landed in turnaround purgatory, Ordesky still adores Jackson’s ‘meta’ take on Freddy Krueger.

‘The film was set several years in the future,’ he explains eagerly, launching into a description of A Nightmare On Elm Street 6: The Dream Lover, the Freddy movie that never was. When the film begins, no one takes Freddy seriously anymore, therefore he’s no threat. Springfield teens now go to sleep on purpose, mainlining sleeping pills to enter the dream world and beat up on him ‘Clockwork Orange-style’. The heart of the movie was a cop who gets put in a coma in an accident and must contend with a resurgent serial killer.

‘What was really great was that the whole movie took place in Freddy’s world,’ says Ordesky. In other words, it would entail the creation of an elaborate fantasy universe … New Line were impressed enough with the Jackson-Mulheron script to subsequently ask Jackson if he would be interested in working on their Freddy Versus Jason concept, but he declined.

When it came to his Tolkien pitch, Jackson didn’t need to dance around Ordesky. He gave to him straight. ‘We’ve got a four-week window before The Lord of the Rings goes ahead without us,’ he informed his friend by phone. Could Ordesky lay the foundation at New Line before they rolled into town with their presentation? Could he get them a meeting?

Ordesky could hardly breathe when he replaced the receiver. ‘Literally when the call came, I knew what pure faith was. I felt that with my love of Peter and my love of The Lord of the Rings that this is why you get into things.’

Not that Ordesky’s enthusiasm prevented Kamins from cooking up some Hollywood gamesmanship. He kept delaying the meeting, implying Jackson was busy meeting other studios. In reality, with little to do, he and Walsh would head off to the movies, catching The Mask of Zorro and Saving Private Ryan. The process was becoming surreal, they were so primed, so aware of how little time they had, only now they were drinking Big Gulps in Santa Monica matinees as if they hadn’t a care in the world.

Not for the first or last time, their New Zealand pragmatism marvelled at the strangeness of Hollywood. So much of it depended on the pretence of something. It was a fantasy world.

After what Kamins considered a suitable lapse of time to fool their prospective producers, the meeting was scheduled.

‘So it was Peter, Fran and me, and it was Marty Katz, who was still the producer of record at the time,’ reports Kamins, listing the attendees of their fateful meeting. ‘And then it was going to be Mark Ordesky and Bob Shaye from New Line.’ Despite Ordesky’s fervour and Kamins’ games, they still weren’t being taken too seriously. New Line’s influential Head of Production, Michael De Luca, was in London visiting the set of Lost in Space, a clunky attempt by New Line to warm up a science-fiction franchise.

Finally, it was Shaye, sleek and coiffured like an ageing prince, upon whom their tattered hopes were hanging. Co-chairman of New Line (with Michael Lynne, who was based in New York), only he remained with the power to greenlight their two-film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.

In many, less conspicuous ways, New Line was a more influential and versatile indie than Miramax. They courted audience approval not headlines. They had found cash in kudos, bringing foreign masters to American audiences, such as Robert Bresson’s Au Hassard Balthazar and Eric Rohmer’s The Marquise of O. But it was the company’s pioneering line in low-budget horror that set it apart, and made it so successful. Shaye and Lynne were behind such seminal gore as Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street. They were known as the ‘house that Freddy built’. In more recent times, they had lined the coffers by diversifying into action, comedy and action-comedy hits like The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, Rush Hour and the Austin Powers trilogy. Upholding their kudos with Oscar nominations for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights and critical appreciation of David Fincher’s serial killer hit Seven.

Charismatic and prickly, mercurial and driven, in his late fifties Shaye was a complex soul. Unlike Harvey, there was no subterfuge, no games; he told it like he saw it, wearing his heart on his sleeve. He could be moved to public tears. But he wasn’t predictable or tame. This former New York hipster and art collector was a filmmaker at heart who once shared a prize with Martin Scorsese from the Society of Cinematologists for a surreal 1964 short entitled Image. Started in 1967 with $300 of his own money, working out of his New York apartment with a piece of plinth for a desk, there was something homemade about New Line.

Says Ordesky, ‘He had a true artistic streak.’ But it could be a double-edged sword. He was quite prepared to slay dreams if he felt they had no reality.

To his chosen ‘sons’, like De Luca and Ordesky, the paternal Shaye preached a gospel of experimentation and escaping claustrophobic studio thinking. Or as he put it, with his knack for a telling aphorism, ‘Not smoking from the Hollywood crack pipe.’ In fostering talent, could they ‘spot someone one or two stops before the station’?

‘In my own small way with Peter Jackson, I did,’ claims Ordesky. Indeed, the Kiwi had barely found his seat on the train.

Picture the conference room of New Line’s headquarters at 116 N. Robertson Blvd, since vacated when they were subsumed into parent company Time Warner. Well appointed but unremarkable by Hollywood norms: boardroom table, designer chairs, state-of-the-art VCR, television, water and coffee. Did they offer tea?

‘The first thing that happens is Bob Shaye is not there,’ recounts Jackson.

Ordesky came into the room, his face ashen, to announce that, ‘Bob would like a private word with Peter first, then he’ll come look at the video.’

Putting on his game face, Jackson got up to go, a lead bar in his stomach. Ordesky could feel everyone looking at him for some kind of response. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Had the bad news arrived before they had even started?

‘Mark had warned us Bob Shaye was a plainspoken guy,’ notes Kamins. ‘We could be six minutes into this thing and he might just say, “Stop the tape, we’re done. It’s over.”’

All they could do was wait for Jackson to return.

Jackson remembers feeling sick as he entered Shaye’s office. He knew New Line’s kingpin a little from his Freddy Krueger days, but hardly well enough to second-guess his motives.

Shaye looked at him kindly. ‘Listen, I’m happy to spend an hour with you looking at this film that you’ve got for us,’ he said, ‘but you’ve got to realize that it’s probably something that we’re not going to want to do.’

Jackson had no idea how to respond.

Walsh only had to look her partner in the eye to know what had happened. The jig was finally up. All Jackson could do was go through the motions. Like an out of body experience, he watched this version of himself calmly return to his seat and his artwork and his maquettes, only pride and forward momentum keeping him afloat.

It was Ordesky who loaded the tape and pressed play.

He knew this was only more pretending. Yet even now, as those thirty-five minutes of endeavour unspooled, Jackson couldn’t yet jettison all hope. He too was an addict of the Ring, lost in denial, and every now and then he would glance at Shaye, just to see. ‘But there was no expression, no comment, nothing …’

He remained as inscrutable as a cat.

Well aware the odds were stacked against The Lord of the Rings, Kamins had not been idle. He knew they needed a backup. While struggling to hawk their Tolkien opus around town, he had actively been looking into other projects for Jackson. Projects that could keep the Weta dream alive.

While balancing on his Lord of the Rings high wire, Jackson had taken other calls. ‘There was a lot of enthusiasm for me directing the next Bond movie,’ he grins, a lifelong Bond enthusiast contemplating 007’s alternative universe. Kamins tells the story of an early initiation watching Thunderball while his new client talked him through nuances of SPECTRE set decoration. ‘It was the Pierce Brosnan one,’ recalls Jackson, ‘The World Is Not Enough.’ Barbara Broccoli had loved Heavenly Creatures and asked to see The Frighteners.

He sent over a tape and never heard from her again.

Joel Silver, the ebullient producer behind the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon films, pitched him Lobo, a comic-book series about an intergalactic bounty hunter. Closer to his tastes, Tom Rothman at 20th Century Fox, who he knew from their Planet of the Apes discussions, tempted him with Twenty One, the tale of a First World War hotshot who shot down twenty-one enemy planes in twenty-one days. Jackson was keen enough to show Rothman the biplane tests he had done for King Kong.

Jackson jokes that he could have been David Fincher before David Fincher. He was sent Fight Club first. He had read The Curious Case of Benjamin Button before Fincher got his hands on it. ‘If someone is going to pick up my rejects I am very glad it was him.’

He met with Kathleen Kennedy to talk about The BFG, the Roald Dahl adaptation full of big folk rather than little, since fulfilled by his friend and collaborator Steven Spielberg. He was certainly interested, but he had to be honest. Within three or four weeks he might be doing this other film. ‘We just don’t know yet.’

Kamins suspected that if The Lord of the Rings didn’t work out, especially after King Kong, Jackson and Walsh would have likely ‘taken their ball and gone home’ to New Zealand to pick up on that smaller, local career. Maybe Jackson would have revived those back-to-back Bad Taste sequels featuring Derek in space.

The video ended with a deafening click, and silence congealed around them. Ordesky was visibly squirming; if Shaye said no he’d already planned to chase after him to try and talk him round, risking his own standing at New Line. ‘I probably contributed to the sense of drama,’ he confesses. But Shaye didn’t get up. Instead he turned to Jackson and looked him in the eye. There is a sense of events switching into slow motion as a series of checks and balances are determined invisibly in the air — a recalibration of destiny.

‘Why would anyone want movie-goers to pay eighteen dollars when they might pay twenty-seven dollars?’ he finally asked, his face still betraying nothing.

Everyone tried to process what he was saying. Why were they talking about ticket prices? Had they started their own game of riddles?

‘So I don’t get this at all,’ Shaye continued, ‘why would you make two films when there are three books?’

Jackson was only becoming more perplexed. Did he mean they should only be doing one film? Were they back at the gates of Harvey’s ultimatum? ‘I’m like, what does this mean?’

Shaye still wasn’t finished. ‘Tolkien has done your job for you, Tolkien wrote three books,’ he pressed. ‘If you’re going to do it justice, it should be three movies.’

You could have heard a Mithril pin drop.

Ordesky can still picture Jackson’s face, seeing the wheels begin to turn. An incredible, unforeseen recalculation was underway. The director’s voice came out hesitantly, still not quite daring to believe, ‘Yes … It could be three films.’

*

While it’s a pleasure to remain here, basking in the glow of a dream-come-true now enshrined in Hollywood folklore, there was of course much more to it than that. Most immediately, the films certainly hadn’t been greenlit yet. According to Jackson, such are the thorny tracts of Hollywood business that it was hardly unusual that the fully ratified, ink-on-paper go-ahead wasn’t actually signed until about two weeks out from shooting. Elijah Wood was already trying his feet on.

Back then Shaye did at least switch onto a business footing. His voice a perfected blend of beneficence and caution, he began inching a trilogy forward. ‘This is very impressive, something that I wasn’t expecting it to be. I can see this. I want to show it to Michael [Lynne]. Can we keep the tape?’

They hadn’t wanted to leave the tape anywhere, but how could they say no?

‘I don’t know where you are in the process; I don’t care,’ Shaye went on, ‘but I can’t do anything until my partner sees it.’

It is strange to report that there was not a trace of euphoria as they filed out of the room. Jackson was too gun-shy for any kind of celebration. ‘You don’t emotionally invest in anything until you know it was a hundred per cent certain,’ he admits. ‘So it wasn’t euphoric, it was more like really?’

As excited as Shaye was by the pitch, there was more to his interest in The Lord of the Rings than the thoroughness of Jackson’s proposition. The meeting couldn’t have been more perfectly timed. New Line was deep into a dry spell. Vacillating talent and spiralling costs had combined to scuttle sequels to their big franchises: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Dumb and Dumber and The Mask. They were hungry for a branded property with built-in sequels.

Indeed, Shaye’s energies had been focussed on an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books. But in a not unfamiliar turn of events he had come to loggerheads with the rights holders. After a year and a half of development a lot of money had, as Kamins says, ‘walked out of the door’. Frustrated, Shaye had let the option lapse. This was no more than a month before Jackson walked in the door.

New Line’s chief had a more measured take on the meeting. He knew the proposed budget. He knew the financial structure of the company could handle it. Yes, they needed sequels. And here was an opportunity to have three years of ‘potential security and good business’.

Twenty-four hours later, Kamins’ phone rang. It was Shaye — Lynne had seen the tape. ‘We’re ready to start negotiating,’ he said and that was that.

The prosaic reality of Hollywood spoils the poetry of the occasion. Deal-making at its most mechanical would continue for months. Yet there is no doubt that it still took a mad flutter from a maverick studio like a PolyGram or a Miramax or a New Line to back the films. Shaye wasn’t a corporate soul. He viewed himself in a romantic, old Hollywood mould: David O Selznick stoking the flames of Gone with the Wind. Says Kamins, ‘Bob Shaye would look for ways to buck the system.’

Shaye felt his calling in Hollywood was to find a balance between art and commerce, cash and kudos. He was a frustrated film director trapped running the company. Whereas Lynne, with his well-tended beard, shining pate and tailored suits, began as New Line’s general counsel before becoming COO in 1990 and CEO in 2001. He was the sense to Shaye’s sensibility. He shored up the bottom line, steadying the boat if Shaye’s more mercurial style ever set it rocking.

If Bob was ‘dad’, the gag went; then Michael was ‘mom’.

‘Bob is an artist and intensely creative,’ says Ordesky. ‘The reason why he and Michael made such great partners is that Michael is incredibly sharp and business-like. They had known each other from college days. They could see through situations to the heart of an opportunity and find a way to structure that opportunity in a really compelling way. But Bob, even though he had a thoughtful process, was also a gut player.’

Like Miramax, New Line was an indie minnow swallowed by a bigger fish. Shaye and Lynne had offloaded ownership of the company to media mogul (and then husband of Jane Fonda) Ted Turner, who was subsequently swallowed by a whale. Time Warner, the media conglomerate that also operated Warner Bros., merged with Turner, sending a shiver down the New Line spine. Yet within the corporate hierarchy that emerged, Shaye and Lynne were granted far more autonomy than the Weinsteins. They could, within reason, steer New Line’s destiny.

Whatever the ultimate driving force behind Shaye’s great gamble on Jackson and Frodo, you suspect that an element of it was an opportunity to show up Miramax. Proof that he was operating on a studio scale.

In response, Hollywood thought that Bob Shaye was going to sink the company. New Line was risking north of $200 million on three films made back-to-back by the guy who had directed The Frighteners. If the first film flopped, you were left with, as Jackson put it, ‘the two most expensive straight-to-DVD films in history’.

Behind his natural Hollywood sangfroid, Kamins’ voice becomes intense: ‘If you watched Peter and Fran go through the entire process; if you looked at those maquettes; if you looked at the designs and the artwork; if you looked at this documentary. There was a level of seriousness and purpose of responsible filmmakers honouring the investment being made. But also that risk married perfectly with the cultural DNA of New Zealand, which is: we’re going to show the world that we can do what they can do.’

It was a sensibility that tallied with New Line’s underdog persona. The enterprise was so big and so daring that the risk involved almost felt hopeful. It said something about what was possible in this business. ‘I think we all sort of lived in that for the first couple of years,’ says Kamins.

Ordesky was more than aware that this was his company, his family, his job security, betting the farm on a mad venture. Yet not for a single second did he harbour a doubt that they had made the right choice.

‘I had known Peter as a human being for a long time. I had a conviction about him on a human level, about his stamina, about his brilliance. Not just his creative brilliance, his strategic and intellectual capacities to manage something so huge and with so many parts. And that gave me a certainty.’

CHAPTER 4
Words and Pictures

When Philippa Boyens was twelve years old her mother presented her with a copy of the book that would change her life. She was partial to a vein of old-school, romantic fantasy, inspired by her time spent at school in England. Between terms, her family would tour the country locating the fabled seats of Arthurian history. Myths and legends fired her imagination.

Nevertheless, moons would wax and wane while The Lord of the Rings stared at her from the shelf, untouched. She had enjoyed The Hobbit, but she was wary of the sheer volume of its grown-up brother. Venture within those pages and she might never come out. Which, you could say, is exactly what happened.

‘I’ve got this memory of my sister having swimming lessons,’ she says, ‘and me sitting in the car and deciding, ‘“Okay, I’m going to start reading this thing.”’

It was like taking a deep breath then diving in.

‘Then I read it every year. I’m not joking, every year. It was my rainy day book.’ There were many wet afternoons in the New Zealand she returned to as a teen.

Boyens had loved C.S. Lewis’ Narnia novels, fleet and quixotic, with evacuees finding snow-dusted enchantment at the back of a wardrobe. But Lewis wasn’t an obsessive like Tolkien. That is what moved her so deeply. How you could keep delving and there would always be another layer beneath. She lapped up the genealogy, the languages, how every person or place or antique artefact was reinforced in the appendices, and this great legendarium linked together like history.¹ Only Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea novels came close.

She might refute the label of Tolkien expert that is regularly foisted upon her — often by a director swerving a tricky question. ‘I’m not an expert. I’ve met Tolkien experts. I can’t speak Elvish.’ Even so, while a teen, Boyens read Humphrey Carpenter’s eloquent biography of Tolkien, high-minded appreciation by David Day and Tom Shippey and the low-minded parody of The Harvard Lampoon’s 1969 Bored of the Rings, featuring Frito Bugger and Gimlet son of Groin. She would bring to the films an invaluable depth of knowledge and near-photographic recall of the professor’s sub-creation. She also had a real thing for the art of Alan Lee.

Her mother, that singular influence, had given her a copy of Lee’s seminal collection Faeries, a gift she passed on to Jackson. There was an illustration of a ‘Gandalf-like character’ that, she says, ‘really lit Pete’s radar’.

What she had resolutely not done was watch Ralph Bakshi’s half-grown adaptation. On this she was adamant, no one could possibly do justice to the book on film.

In early 1997, Stephen Sinclair was helping Jackson and Walsh fathom how to do just that. While a fine dramatist, who had read the books as a kid, Sinclair was no expert and had no intention of changing that fact. He took what Jackson called a ‘cavalier’ attitude toward the text. However, Sinclair‘s girlfriend, a playwright, teacher, editor and director of the New Zealand Writer’s Guild, definitely knew a thing or two about Tolkien.

Boyens can remember the night Jackson and Fran Walsh first called, wondering if he might join their new project. She was in the kitchen when Sinclair got off the phone.

‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘You’ll never guess what Fran and Pete are working on next.’

‘I have no idea.’

‘It’s The Lord of the Rings.’

Boyens was incensed. ‘Well, they can’t. That’s crazy. No one can make that film.’

With her deep red, disobedient locks, often shored-up beneath a hat, Boyens cultivates a bohemian air much like her close friend Walsh. The two women who work so closely with Jackson have an aura of the otherworldly about them, as if they already had one foot in Middle-earth. Cloaked in her softly Gothic selection of floor-length dresses and shawls, you might suspect Boyens of being a modern-day sorceress. That is until you get a taste of her earthy Kiwi humour and logical mind. Like her partners, she has little time for the platitudes of Hollywood. There is an undercurrent of conviction to her mellifluous, Kiwi accent that is ironclad.

When Sinclair showed Boyens the treatment, she came back with notes. ‘Just ideas about the story,’ she vows. Initially, all Jackson and Walsh knew of Sinclair’s bookish partner who would alter the course of their creative lives were the incisive despatches that arrived from Auckland via Sinclair (Boyens also unofficially assisted Sinclair in writing some ‘romantic’ elements while he was still involved in The Lord of the Rings), until, intrigued, they invited her down to Wellington. After ten minutes of effusive icebreaking over how impressed she had been by their treatment, she got on to its shortcomings. Which turned out to be the interesting part. If there were things she felt they had done wrong — and there were more than a few — she had a solution for each one.

Boyens emphasized that it was critical to still recognize this as The Lord of the Rings within the landscape of the film. It had been an almost counterintuitive experience, assessing the book as a film, prompting an internal debate with her old self. Knowing in her heart that you can’t do The Lord of the Rings without Tom Bombadil and the Old Forest, but in her head understanding that you have to. Boyens found that she was able to think ruthlessly in film terms.

Impressed, Jackson and Walsh pushed for her active involvement. Meanwhile Sinclair’s interest had begun to wane as he itched to return to his plays and novels. The enormity of the project was too much of a commitment. ‘He looked at one draft,’ confirms Jackson. ‘But he was involved for literally a few weeks.’ Sinclair was recognized with a credit on The Two Towers, where his contribution was most manifest.

Thus it was Boyens who became the third voice in a screenwriting fellowship. She admits to feeling ‘terrified’ at first. This was her precious The Lord of the Rings; it still felt crazy to be even thinking of turning it into a film. But this was an offer to be at the heart of the craziness. To live and breathe Tolkien in a completely new way. How could she say no?

Before she met them, Boyens had been avidly following Jackson and Walsh’s blossoming career. She thought Braindead was genius. She was in the audience at the New Zealand Awards when Heavenly Creatures won everything only to be denied Best Film. ‘I felt like, God, New Zealand film needs to grow up. It felt so small and insular, and Fran and Pete have always looked outwards.’

That sense of adventure was infectious.

‘The biggest issue was always how do you get into this story?’ Boyens had written plays and dealt with screenwriters, but never attempted a screenplay herself. She was hired first as a script editor on the two-film draft, which was still in need of a prologue. So she volunteered to try and write one. The very first thing she officially set to paper was the opening line, ‘The world has changed …’ Over the arduous months that became years of interminable rewrites and restructuring of ultimately three-intertwined, award-strewn scripts, that line never changed.

*

‘The most difficult thing on this project has been the script. The script has been a total nightmare.’ Jackson was speaking in Cannes in 2001, where he had unveiled twenty-six minutes of footage to raptures from the world’s press. The question of how one successfully adapts Tolkien had come up frequently. Something he had been doing his level best to answer for six years.

He mused that it was about getting the balance right. To have the characters represent both Tolkien’s intentions and be accessible for a modern cinema audience who didn’t have a clue about hobbits or Elves. ‘It’s about trying to please as many people as possible,’ he explained, which he knew sounded horribly general. ‘But to reach people,’ he insisted, ‘you have to start by pleasing yourself. And that is what I did. I thought simply of the film I dreamed of seeing.’

Costa Botes has a memory of seeing the script for Bad Taste. Or the lack of it — it was little more than lines scribbled on increasingly crumpled pieces of paper in biro. Jackson had had no idea how to write a formal script. Walsh at least had some experience writing for television. ‘But both of them got religion when Robert McKee made a rare excursion to Wellington and they attended his seminar.’

McKee was the Detroit-born playwright and screenwriter turned hugely influential creative screenwriting guru touring the world with his famous Story Seminar. He preached a gospel that it was narrative structure that made a story compelling rather than any of its component pieces: plot, dialogue, characters, etc. You must tell a story.

Enlightened, Jackson and Walsh changed their entire approach to screenwriting. Out of which came Meet the Feebles, Braindead — which for all its gore is elegantly structured — and, in time, their Planet of the Apes and Freddy Krueger scripts. Says Botes, ‘I remember Pete showing me the third draft of Heavenly Creatures. It’s a masterpiece. That’s an unbelievable development in a very short space of time.’

Deep-rooted into Jackson’s philosophy of filmmaking was the certainty that he, alongside Walsh, would always generate the screenplay. Writing and shooting were stages on the same journey. This is one of the reasons he could hold three films in his head at one time — the scripts were ingrained.

From the moment he reread The Lord of the Rings, however, it was clear McKee’s principles would be put to a severe test. Tolkien had taken seventeen years to write the damn thing. It was dauntingly complex. Jackson and Walsh had to go back over and over things — ‘assembling it in their heads’ — seeing how it all connected, figuring out what made this book they had fought doggedly to adapt so adored? More to the point, what, if anything, made it cinematic?

*

The Book: The debate over the relative literary merits of Tolkien’s great opus has raged since its publication. There is no arguing that a vast readership is devoted to the point of religious fervour. Indeed, this intense popularity is partly what inflames the literati. Why can’t it just be forgotten? They would surely miss it if it were to pass out of fashion. They make such sport out of mocking the book. The aforementioned Edmund Wilson surmised that ‘certain people — especially, perhaps, in Britain — have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash’. The general tenor of literary disgust aggregates around its supposed childishness and lack of moral depth, irony, theme or allusion.

When it was crowned ‘the greatest book of the century’ by a public poll in 1997 the journalist Susan Jeffreys led a chorus of snobby intellectuals in a familiar song. Writing in The Sunday Times, she feared she might actually catch something from the book. ‘I won’t keep the thing in the house,’ she insisted. For the article, she had borrowed a copy and complained about its ‘stale, bedsittish aroma’. Ultimately, she found it depressing to find so many readers ‘burrowing an escape into a non-existent world’ and its popularity proved ‘the folly of teaching people to read’.

There is no doubt of Tolkien’s appeal to readers of a certain age. This might in part be about escapism. Neil Gaiman, the celebrated fantasy author, recalled that at fourteen all he wanted to do was write The Lord of the Rings. Not the equivalent high fantasy, but the actual book. Which was awkward, he admitted, as Tolkien had already done so.

But Jeffrey’s ‘non-existent’ feels underpowered. Tolkien is far from divorced from the real world.

Yes, the story does transport people. The wonderful, unquenchable invention that sheers off every page is intoxicating. ‘It is a really exceptional and remarkable creation, an entire cosmology in itself,’ enthused actor John Rhys-Davies, who had long considered the book beneath him. This has led to obsession, if not addiction. Jackson and Walsh were keenly aware that they needed to escape the closed feedback loop of Tolkien fixation. In this, their relative ambivalence toward the text to begin with was an advantage.

Nevertheless, re-reading The Lord of the Rings through a cinematic lens revealed a store of promise for the filmmakers.

In 1938, Tolkien gave a lecture at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, in which he highlighted the necessary components of ‘the office of fantasy’. A fantasy world, he insisted, while ‘internally consistent’ must possess ‘strangeness and wonder’. It must have a freedom from observed fact. The laws of physics while largely upheld can be a tiresome constraint on mythical storytelling. Quite how Sauron has uploaded a crucial portion of his malign life force into a golden ring is not worth deliberating. Above all, he declared, the secondary world must be credible, ‘commanding belief’.

Tolkien was not shy about the fact he had fashioned Middle-earth from the forges of history. This wasn’t an alternative universe but our own. Richard Taylor fixates with great pleasure on the estimation that the story can be located to an interglacial lull in the Pleistocene. Are we to consider the mûmakil relations of mammoths? Are the fell beasts a species of Pterodactyl?

It is a perspective somewhat undone by the Edwardian trappings of Hobbiton, although Jackson describes it as ‘a fully developed society and environment the records have since forgotten.’

Within the fabric of the world and the weft of the storytelling came Tolkien’s firm instruction to Jackson — command belief.

And contrary to critical opinion, the book possesses a rich seam of theme and allusion. This was something the arrival of Boyens really brought home. She educated her partners in what lay behind the book that Jackson admits they ‘really hadn’t grappled with’. A depth, she felt, that would elevate their films above the gaudy clichés of the barbarian hordes.

Says Jackson, ‘We hadn’t understood that he cared passionately about the loss of the natural countryside, for example. He was very much this nineteenth century, pre-Industrial Revolution guy against the factories and the enslavement of the workers in factories. Which is what Saruman is all about.’

Tolkien’s experiences on the Somme pierce the book. It was something to which Jackson, the First World War scholar, really responded. The Dead Marshes, depicting an ancient battleground swallowed up by the earth, are a striking vision of bodies lurking beneath the characters’ feet like no man’s land. The book is transfixed by death. While in counterpoint it portrays loyalty and comradeship in extremis. The Fellowship isn’t only a mission; it is the philosophy that might save them. And in Frodo and Sam the idea of comradeship crosses boundaries of class much as Tolkien had witnessed in the Great War.

The critic Philip French found it telling that Tolkien ‘made the object of Frodo’s journey not a search for power but its abnegation’. Ironically, for all its Elves, Dwarves and hobbits, the book’s humanity makes it timeless — applicable to any age, any war. It remains relevant.

Tolkien’s writing can be archaic (he was creating a mythology; you can take or leave the songs) but he had an intuitive grasp of a set piece modern studios would die for: the Ringwraiths attacking Weathertop; Gandalf confronting the Balrog; the Ents demolishing Isengard; Shelob’s Lair. It was a menu of choice, cinematic dishes.

Jackson appreciated how Tolkien’s writing so vividly describes things: ‘You can imagine a movie: the camera angles and the cutting, you see it playing itself out.’

Ordesky admired how the story expands in a natural way. From the Shire, the world unfolds, getting larger and larger.

And at heart it was a relatively linear story. The unlikeliest of heroes, knee-high to a wizard, must sneak into the enemy’s camp and destroy their most powerful weapon right beneath their nose (or Eye). Keeping the focus on Frodo’s quest, aided and abetted by a disparate group of individuals, would give the films forward momentum. Through a very distorted lens, here was Bob Weinstein’s fucking Guns of Navarone.

So it didn’t take long to conclude that Tom Bombadil was surplus to requirements. Tolkien had started writing his sequel to The Hobbit without a clear sense of direction. The first few chapters charting the hobbits’ flight from The Shire don’t really cohere until they get to Bree and Strider. Preserving Bombadil, an ambiguous eco-bumpkin-cum-forest spirit immune to the Ring, would only waylay the drama and diminish the authenticity of the world at a critically early stage, no matter how many fans clamoured for Robin Williams to supply the babbling brook of his rustic banter.

‘He was never in the script at any point,’ asserts Jackson.

The question of Bombadil, so easily answered, signalled that key debate: how faithful they were going to be. Something they would begin to fathom with a treatment.²

*

The Treatment: As their initial canary in the cage sent into the Mines of Moria, Botes’ scene-by-scene breakdown provided the basis for a ninety-two-page treatment for the two-film screenplay, clarifying Tolkien’s 1,000-page edifice into 266 sequences. A document that reveals how the backbone of the eventual trilogy was established very quickly, and where there was still considerable uncertainty.

While the detail is inevitably sketchy, the shape and tone of book are clearly intact. This was not the lightheaded remix embarked upon by John Boorman. The first film would end shortly after Helm’s Deep with the death of Saruman (eventually postponed all the way to the extended edition of The Return of the King), the second picking up immediately in the wake of battle. Many of the scenes are already determined, especially for what were eventually the first and third films. There are fewer major omissions than you might imagine: Lothlórien is the biggest absentee, while Edoras gets only a fleeting visit.

What impresses is how much of Jackson’s vision already emerges so quickly. The opening scene is a ‘breathtaking vista of battle’ with 150,000 Orcs, Men and Elves on screen. He is already inventing signature shots. With Radagast eliminated (until The Hobbit) the great eagle Gwaihir is sent to rescue Gandalf from Orthanc by the intercession of a moth. An idea which just ‘popped’ into Jackson’s head simultaneously with the image of the camera plummeting over the edge of the tower, down its vertiginous flank and into the quasi-industrial pits of Isengard.

Here is both the train of events and the visual language with which he would depict Middle-earth, giving the camera a panoptic viewpoint, swooping and plunging across the landscape indeed like an eagle. For instance, from the moment he re-read the book the siege of Minas Tirith clanged within his eager imagination: ‘Thousands of FLAMING TORCHES light the snarling, slathering ORCS. DRUMMERS are beating the DRUMS OF WAR …’

*

The Two-film Version (with Miramax): For all his many gifts, Tolkien presented pitfalls for a future screenwriter. The sheer multitudinousness of his sub-creation would always have to be tamed — a landslide of material artfully removed while remaining tangibly Tolkien — but the story is also awkwardly episodic and repetitious. ‘You kind of don’t notice it when you fall into the world of the books,’ groans Boyens. ‘But boy, you notice it when you have to bring it to screen.’

There are dramatic cadences that would have McKee wielding his red pen in fury. As Jackson bewails, the good guys ‘need to lose’ the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Tolkien has to rustle up a further clash at the Black Gates to maintain tension. And his female characters are memorable but marginal.

To counter the problem, Arwen is sent in from the sidelines as, Boyens admits, more of a ‘Hollywood stereotype’ at the heart of the action. She arrives to fight at Helm’s Deep and joins the Rohirrim’s charge on the Pelennor Fields. Purists might wince, but this isn’t as entirely unsuccessful as the filmmakers later claimed — on page she hacks at the Orcs with gusto and flashes of ironic humour. Whereas the romance with Aragorn is that bit too broad — the second film opens with Arwen and Aragorn frolicking naked in a pool in the Glittering Caves (which recollects John Boorman’s erotic leanings).

Ordesky, for whom Jackson’s vision was almost sacrosanct, admits to being uncertain of the tone of the scene revealed in the animatic on the pitch video. ‘My life is with you,’ Arwen gushes, having danced over stepping stones to surprise her beloved, ‘or I have no life!’

‘I never had any doubt, but that is the only place where I thought, “Huh, that is probably not what it is ultimately going to be”.’

With no Lothlórien, Galadriel’s moment is threaded into Rivendell as a dream sequence. As Frodo gazes into her mirror (to still see a burning Shire) the scene descends to an almost David Lynchian intensity of dreams within dreams.

Written between 1997 and 1998, the two Miramax scripts entitled ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ and ‘The War of the Ring’ (the name Tolkien had preferred for The Return of the King) would, as Marty Katz once claimed, still have made for exciting if shallower films. Here is the urgency of a Hollywood thriller — and the bluntness of Hollywood logic. Motivation is spelled out explicitly: ‘Those who resist Sauron are doomed …’ announces a scheming Saruman, ‘but for those that aid him there will be rich rewards.’

The biggest challenge Tolkien presented was the absence of a physical villain. ‘If you were doing an original screenplay, having your chief bad guy as a big eyeball would be a no-no,’ laughs Jackson. ‘You also wouldn’t have Saruman never leave his tower.’

His and Walsh’s first answer to the problem was to stir up some monster-movie action: poor Barliman Butterbur is skewered by a Ringwraith, and Sauron’s agents provide a constant airborne terror, attacking Gandalf on the battlements of Helm’s Deep where Gimli cleaves one with a battle axe. Sauron returns from the prologue in his super-sized, humanoid manifestation to duel with Aragorn: ‘… he stands at least 14 FEET TALL … is CLAD in sinister BLACK ARMOUR!’. A concept that would persist long enough to be filmed.

Ultimately, says Jackson, the issue of villainy would be addressed by making the Ring a character. ‘It speaks, it sings, and fills the frame — we were deliberately trying to give it presence.’

Evil is already in their midst, preying on weaker minds.

The two-film version cuts corners and concertinas events. Not illogically, Théoden mismanages his kingdom straight from Helm’s Deep, while Gandalf scours Middle-earth on the back of a giant eagle, Aragorn takes the Paths of Dead as a short cut, and to keep the clock ticking Arwen, mortally wounded by the Witch King, will perish if Sauron is not defeated.

Some details have already been filleted out of the treatment: Glorfindel rescuing Frodo on the flight to the ford; Sam looking into Galadriel’s mirror; Saruman’s dying redemption; the arrival of Elrond’s sons, Elladin and Elrohir; and the Ringwraiths trying to intercept Frodo at the Cracks of Doom.

There is, however, still a conscious attempt to keep tabs with the book: there is a Farmer Maggot, a Fatty Bolger, Bilbo attending the Council of Elrond and characters as obscure as Prince Imrahil and Forlong the Fat make cameo appearances.

Aside from a feisty Arwen, Gandalf is more frail and emotional, less in control; Gimli swears like a stevedore; and Faramir is described as a ‘fresh-faced seventeen-year-old’, making sense of why Orlando Bloom first auditioned for that part.

Ordesky wonders if he might be the only person at New Line to ever have read the original 280-page two-film script. He admired the coherent grasp of the material and the lovely, piquant details that would remain to elevate the films three years hence: a blazing Denethor casting himself off the rocky prow above Minas Tirith like a falling star; Sam’s impassioned speech on the slopes of Mount Doom, ‘I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you …’ Ordesky also knew that three films could offer so much more.

*

The Three-film Version (with New Line): ‘I will go to my grave saying that the crafting of those three screenplays was one of the most underappreciated screenwriting efforts ever undertaken,’ declares Ken Kamins proudly. ‘You are writing what is essentially a single ten-hour script, which you have to divide into three movies. You have to set up things in movie one that may not play out till movie three. And you’re burdened with having to explain the world to the neophyte.’

As soon as New Line came on board, they became impatient for Jackson, Walsh and Boyens to turn the two scripts into workable drafts of three. Jackson says this meant starting again with a page-one rewrite (essentially beginning afresh), but it is closer to what Boyens describes as a serious ‘rethinking’. Each draft would still be codenamed Jamboree, still ‘an affectionate coming-of-age drama set in the New Zealand Boy Scout Movement’. Only now it wasn’t simply the work of Fredericka Wharburton and Percy J. Judkins, but also Faye Crutchley (Philippa Boyens) and, for his contribution, Kennedy Landenburger (Stephen Sinclair).

Whole passages of dialogue and the structure and rhythm of specific scenes would be retained from the two-film draft, but restructuring to three films brought about a re-evaluation of what these films could be. Renewed emphasis was placed on what was emotionally satisfying. Posing the fundamental question: what were they fighting for? Action scenes needed to be earned on an emotional level. Characters needed to make sense. Legolas may be as nimble as Fred Astaire as he releases unerring arrows at blighted Orcs but this wasn’t a superhero film.

‘The script I’m most proud of is The Two Towers, because it was so frickin’ hard,’ says Boyens. ‘It was like, how do you break the story into three and then follow these different threads? And make people care. Also you’ve got no end — how do you create an end?’

Points of transition became a real issue with New Line. Concluding the first film especially would be a real bone of contention during post-production. Shaye was a huge fan of the books, but he was also a canny businessman in search of profit. He understood the screenplays would have to be representative of Tolkien’s work as a trilogy, but insisted that they also had to work as individual films.

If you missed the first movie, The Two Towers had to be a compelling piece of cinema. And if you missed the first two and still decided to see The Return of the King, it would have to work all by itself. Once The Fellowship of the Ring was a big hit, the editing of the ‘sequels’ re-orientated back toward a single saga.

Expanding into three films, says Boyens, allowed them the luxury ‘to try and do scenes to the fullest of their capacity.’ Within the exigent drive of plot they could explore character and build mood, even stillness. The priceless moment of Bilbo and Gandalf, two very old friends, contentedly blowing smoke rings and galleons upon the doorstep of Bag End; the camera gazing in awe upon the pillared immensity of Dwarrowdelf as Howard Shore’s score swells up through the ancient columns. Such poise was totally contrary to the hyper-kinetic dogma of millennial blockbustermaking.

Obviously they also had room for plenty more Tolkien, and some painful excisions were immediately remedied. ‘It was such a relief to have Lothlórien back,’ says Boyens, and the Elven forest was the first thing she returned to its designated place.

The book was full of renewed possibility.

Says Jackson, ‘Unlike most movies where the pressure comes and you literally take twenty pages out, our scripts actually grew by thirty to forty pages, because we would keep finding stuff in the books. We were constantly thinking, “God, we really should be filming this, this is great, and we’d then write a page, show it to the actors, and they’d go “this is good” and I’d say, “You know, on Friday, I think we can squeeze this new scene in pretty simply.” It was very organic.’

The problem was it never ended. They couldn’t stop writing, editing, re-writing, trimming, extending, delving into the mines of the text, working with the actors, twisting and turning the mythology into cinema. This went on literally in tandem with the shoot. A honing of story in the same way a special effect can be bettered with care and attention. Such that there was never a definitive finished screenplay, not on page.

An early draft of the three-film version, dated 20 November 1998, reads like an alternative universe to an alternative universe, with many of these scenes shot and abandoned. Opening with Frodo and Sam surveying the limits of the Shire from a hilltop, Farmer Maggot clings on and the hobbit heroes encounter the first Ringwraith without Merry and Pippin. Rivendell, as we shall see, awaits a major overhaul. There is an Orc assault on the borders of Lothlórien, where Aragorn has a flashback to the days he spent there with Arwen and Frodo glimpses Gandalf in Galadriel’s mirror.

In this version, the second and third films radically depart from the book, with Arwen’s participation expanded even from the two-film draft. She follows the Fellowship to Lothlórien and then on to Edoras rescuing the refugee children from an Orc attack along the way. The love triangle is revived from the treatment, with a semi-comic rivalry established between Arwen and Éowyn. Arwen still battles at Helm’s Deep, still skinny-dips with Aragorn, still helps fight off a Ringwraith that swoops for Pippin, and still rides with the Rohirrim, but now alongside Éowyn disguised as a man (diluting the whole effect). Arwen will be left for dead by the Witch-king before Éowyn dispatches him. And Sauron still confronts Aragorn at the Black Gates.

They were constantly trying to insert the structural lessons gleaned from McKee to the glacial magnificence of Tolkien: climaxes, twists, foreshadowings, turning points and delayed reveals. Balanced with wilfully obscure references to his deep mythology. His archaic language could have enormous power when delivered by an Ian McKellen or Christopher Lee. But for clarity they would trim and edit from the book, moving passages around in the chronology or between speakers like a slider puzzle.

Boyens’ ancient prologue was still being reworked in post.

‘I first wrote it as Gandalf narrating,’ she says, running back through the manifold revisions in her head — there had been a Frodo-narrated version at one stage. ‘And then I wrote it in the voice of Galadriel. That was Fran’s idea, and it was a good one. Then when we were recording the ADR in London, I said to Fran, “Can we overlay it in Elvish?” You want that sense of strangeness of history.’

The trilogy’s overture carries the quality of a dream as Blanchett’s yearning voice pulls us across the frontier into Tolkien’s imagination.

*

The creative dynamic that evolved between Jackson, Walsh and Boyens would define the trilogy: the visualist devising heart-stopping scenes; the realist seeking emotional truths; and the Tolkien authority mindful of the Elvish provenance of Gandalf’s sword. As an unwritten rule, Jackson was responsible for what they categorized as the ‘Big Print’ set-piece stuff such as the battle with the Cave-troll (which elaborates on Tolkien to great effect). Something, Boyens soon noticed, he did with an extraordinary immediacy and originality. As if in response to that strangeness in Tolkien’s world no sequence was allowed to bear the formulaic imprint of a Hollywood blockbuster. Jackson, writing in those caps in which you can feel the camera’s hungry eye: ‘The dark WATER BOILS as the HIDEOUS BEAST lashes out at the FELLOWSHIP!’

‘Philippa and I were very invested in the emotional content of the story,’ Walsh explained in a rare interview. ‘It’s easy for those things to be obscured by spectacle and the sheer sort of exhaustion of that final ascent to Mount Doom. But we wanted to touch the audience in a meaningful way. Maybe that’s an easier thing for us to do because we are women.’

Boyens did the bulk of the physical typing sitting up in bed with her laptop or at her desk. ‘We got into this rhythm. I was the faster typist and better speller. Fran’s great because she can see the scene in her head. When I write, the words don’t come unless I actually physically type them.’

They were known to spend a whole day in their pyjamas, writing, writing, writing. ‘Then Fran would have time with the kids,’ recalls Boyens. Jackson and Walsh’s children, Billy and Katie, were still only infants. ‘So it was nuts,’ she laughs. But nothing could beat that moment of breakthrough. When, as Boyens puts it, ‘the landscape held’.

Walsh was the driving force. Jackson’s partner would be the first to admit she wouldn’t naturally have chosen to adapt The Lord of the Rings. She had been seduced by Jackson’s passion for the possibility of something epic. As much as she was caught in the slipstreams off the Misty Mountains, addicted to Middle-earth, she could remain more academic about the material: how does it work as entertainment?

‘I learned how to write from her and from Pete, but mostly from Fran,’ says Boyens. ‘There’s so many holes and missteps with a film. There are so many different ways you can go and so many things that you have to break. I’m someone who would paper over the cracks. She couldn’t. The other thing that I learned from her is that it’s the ideas which are informing the story that are important. Why would anyone care? And understanding how you take what is interior, especially for a character such as Frodo, and translate it to film. She was masterful at the Gollum-Sméagol dynamic.’

Kamins can see that they were a unique producing-directing-writing unit. ‘You understood that they were close. They were willing to argue with each other to make something better. To push each other to prove why their point was right.’

And the clear distinction of roles could be deceptive. Walsh and Boyens could be good on the Big Print action scenes and Jackson excellent on the fine print of Tolkien.

Still, freed up by the obsessive dedication of his co-writers, Jackson utilized his energies across preproduction, finding the visual texture with which to clothe the bones of the words. As shooting bore down on him like a mûmak, the director took more of an ‘overarching eye’, says Boyens. Generally, after a team discussion, she and Walsh would do a draft of a scene and then Jackson would do his pass.

‘I was literally almost doing a shot list,’ recalls Jackson. ‘A lot of screenwriters say don’t tell the director what to do, but I guess as I’m the director I don’t mind. It helps when I am sitting there reading the script a year later and knowing that I had a thought to do a close-up.’

The original three 150-page scripts presented to each actor were always available for consultation, but they were only blueprints. Rhys-Davies laughed about the dreaded brown envelope that would be slipped under their door each morning with that day’s revisions.

Sean Astin describes the scripts as ‘fluid’. But if an actor wanted to adjust a line on set, try it in a different way, they would be met with resistance. Jackson would joke that he dare not cross the ‘script Nazis’. Given what Boyens and Walsh were going through, he may have been genuinely fearful. They were constructing a monumental house of cards where one minor adjustment could bring the whole edifice crashing down.

Yet the cast did contribute. Both in preproduction and production they would meet with Walsh and Boyens to talk through upcoming scenes. Viggo Mortensen, who always had the books about his person, was relentless when it came to his character. Astin likes to think of it as keeping the filmmakers’ ‘feet to the fire’. And that drive brought Aragorn to life.

Astin remembers coming up with the idea that Sam had been secretly spying on the Council of Elrond throughout. How else would he be aware of what had been decided? ‘Sam belonged there,’ he had argued to a sceptical Walsh. It was, he insists, ‘a legitimate desire to act as an audience surrogate’.

A compromise was reached where Sam is seen hiding in the shrubbery. Astin wasn’t wholly mollified, but nothing was as emblematic of the brinkmanship of writing — and indeed shooting — as mounting the Council of Elrond. ‘Just don’t make me go back to Rivendell,’ Boyens would remonstrate whenever things got complicated.

A great gulp of exposition that often defeats casual readers of the book, here we are introduced to the members of the Fellowship and get a lesson in the complexities of the ‘big picture’ via a succession of stories within the story, told at exorbitant length by individual characters. Moreover, Jackson has an allergy to any form of reportage. Show-don’t-tell is the heartbeat of cinema. You have to picture things, not have actors describe them — even actors as persuasive as McKellen. But this would necessitate a frenzy of flashbacks.

In the book, the Council is where Gandalf finally tells the tale of his capture by Saruman. As early as the two-film draft the writers had decided cleverly to cut away from the hobbits’ journey through the Shire to portray Gandalf’s excursion to Isengard in real time. This both exploited the potential of two ancient wizards duelling with shockwaves of magic and teased the possibility that the Bombadil episode could have occurred in the meantime. ‘We chose to leave some things untold, rather than left out,’ is Boyens’ escape clause. Only Gandalf’s eagle-spirited getaway is suspensefully withheld until Rivendell.

To avoid the scourge of reportage the script syncopates a variety of flashbacks and reveries throughout the story without stalling momentum. A feat doubly impressive given Tolkien’s epic mode didn’t provide much inner life for his characters — Gollum expresses his internal narrative aloud.

‘Backstory was incredibly difficult to do,’ confesses Boyens. It had to be character driven, or action driven. Nevertheless, as written, the Council scenes were yawning to a stifling forty minutes while everyone sat in a circle talking politics. There was no way they could effectively put the story on hold for so long. Figuring out the scale issues and eyelines alone was headache inducing.

Ordesky remembers joining Walsh and Boyens at the shoot’s hotel HQ while on location in Queenstown as the dreaded Council loomed in the next block of filming. They were in one of the most beautiful places in New Zealand unable to leave the hotel as they wrestled the scene into submission. ‘It was such an education,’ he says, ‘seeing their process of laying tracks in front of the moving train, as Fran liked to say.’

Says Boyens, ‘One of the things that I learned in particular and, I think, Fran and Pete did too — and actually the studio did too — is that you didn’t have to explain the history of Dwarves. You just needed John Rhys-Davies to turn up and be a Dwarf.’

They needed to trust the actors.

As Boromir, Sean Bean immortalizes the finished scene with his portentous, half-whispered line reading: ‘One does not simply walk into Mordor …’ A passage of dialogue scribbled on a piece of paper and literally balanced on his knee (you can spot him subtly glancing down).

‘He was so good,’ says Boyens, savouring the victory. ‘That tension between him and Viggo … Man, it was great casting: those two opposite each other … And I’m very proud of my Pippin line: “Where are we going?” You kind of needed it.’

The humour in the scripts often goes uncelebrated. Enriched by the fine cast, the comic elements help puncture any drift toward pomposity. Merry and Pippin’s chittering banter, Gandalf’s crabby exasperation, Gimli (surely Jackson’s avatar in the films) and his rivalry with Legolas, Sam and Gollum, the slowpoke Ents and the quarrelsome Orcs all contribute a flavour that is consciously Jacksonesque.

‘It’s taking the piss,’ says a delighted Boyens. ‘And that is Pete’s sense of humour definitely. He always says that you don’t earn the pathos if you don’t make people laugh.’

Away from the wellspring of Harryhausen and Kong, Jackson adored the sublimely engineered slapstick and anguish of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and the gonzo follies of Monty Python. Comedic forces welcome amid the serious business of saving the world.

*

In early 1997, Michael Palin was in Wellington for a one-man show, and Jackson wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to go backstage and meet a hero. They shared the usual pleasantries. Jackson telling the erstwhile Python how much he appreciated his work. Palin enquiring after what the director was currently working on. They got talking about The Lord of the Rings. Then it occurred to Jackson to ask a pertinent question.

‘Do you know where Alan Lee lives?’

Jackson was desperately trying to get hold of the seemingly reclusive artist’s expertise, but so far in vain. It had occurred to him that Palin had worked with Lee on an illustrated children’s book called The Mirrorstone — he may have even got hold of a copy — about a boy travelling to a wizardly realm via his bathroom mirror.

‘Ah, he’s a funny chap, isn’t he?’ Palin recalled. ‘I’ll find out for you.’

A few weeks later an email arrived bearing Lee’s Devon address. ‘It’s true,’ laughs Jackson. ‘Michael Palin came to the rescue. No one could figure out how to contact him.’

While re-reading The Lord of the Rings, Jackson found himself eagerly anticipating the next of Lee’s wonderful illustrations. He was struck by how utterly removed the pictures were from that juvenile vogue for muscle-bound Conan-clones draped in a buxom wench that adorned heavy metal albums and Dungeons & Dragons boxes. ‘They were sort of pastoral, with these elegant pastels. Sort of historical, I suppose,’ he says. ‘We fell in love with those pictures.’

As he surveyed Middle-earth with his internal camera it was Lee’s version of the world he would likely see. So he began to gather together as many of the artist’s calendars, book covers, posters and compendiums of Tolkien artwork as he could lay his hands on. This was pre-internet, pre-eBay, so it was a matter of trawling second-hand bookshops, collectors’ fairs, jumble sales and nagging friends to scour their attics.

‘I was tracking down calendars going back to the seventies, trying to see who the other artists were. That was how we saw John Howe’s work — in calendars.’ Howe had contrasting strengths. Lee was good at the gentle whimsical, hobbit stuff — it was very beautiful. The more dynamic Howe, in Jackson’s opinion, ‘did really great Nazgûl’. His paintings were ‘like freeze frames of a movie’.

Jackson wallpapered an entire room with the two visions of Middle-earth, hoping to absorb the poetry and drama of the images. Then it occurred to him that osmosis was unnecessary. Why not put your inspirations on the payroll? And the decision to involve Lee and Howe as guiding lights was another piece of applied Kiwi logic that bled into the visionary. In a stroke, the films became a continuum of what for many was the definitive Tolkien aesthetic.

However, despite the best efforts of Miramax, Lee had proved elusive. All they could ascertain was that he lived in the middle of Dartmoor — the insinuation being he was some kind of mad hermit. They were also rather suspicious he was a minion of the Tolkien Estate.

Fusing Bruegel with Arthur Rackham, Lee is arguably the greatest of the Tolkien school. Howe is exalted too, and the likes of Pauline Baynes, Ted Nasmith, Ian Miller and Michael Foreman. But Lee, certainly in recent years, is largely responsible for shaping our perception of what Middle-earth looks like.

‘I get that, I get people saying my work is exactly as they imagined it,’ he says. ‘But it’s interesting because often it is not exactly as I imagined it when I read the book. But that is the way it turned out through the process of drawing. I would say it is in the right ballpark.’

In conversation Lee speaks in hushed, careful tones as if you’ve surprised him in a library. Silver-haired and bearded with an intense, indecipherable gaze, he is well cast in a silent cameo as one of the nine kings (second from the right) in the prologue. The immediate impression is someone both reassuringly adult and somewhat mysterious.

Lee had moved into illustrating paperbacks from art school in the late 1960s, gravitating toward anything ‘slightly weird or ancient’. He was responsible for the first fourteen covers of that young reader’s rite-of-passage The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. Through renowned publisher Ian Ballantine³ he contributed pictures to two best-selling anthologies: Faeries and Castles. Lee had first read The Lord of the Rings when he was seventeen and working in a graveyard, but it wasn’t until Castles he first attempted Tolkien with versions of Barad-dûr, Cirith Ungol, and Minas Tirith. These drew the approval of the Tolkien Estate who agreed to his being commissioned to paint fifty watercolours for the 1992 centenary edition of The Lord of the Rings. In 1996, he was asked to illustrate The Hobbit.

Like a portent, in 1997 a producer from Granada television approached him about providing concept art for a proposed twelve-part television adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. ‘The script actually read quite well,’ he remembers. ‘But in the end he couldn’t get the approval for it.’

Then one morning a package arrived by courier all the way from New Zealand containing two videos, two scripts, and a letter of introduction from a fellow named Peter Jackson. He helpfully included a number to call. The videos were Heavenly Creatures and Forgotten Silver. ‘He had neglected to put in Bad Taste,’ notes Lee. He watched the brilliant Heavenly Creatures first. Then he read the letter, in which Jackson explained that the scripts were for another potential adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and would Lee like to be involved?

Jackson, meanwhile, had been following the package via his courier and knew it had been delivered, satisfying himself that he wouldn’t hear back for weeks. Hours later his fateful phone rang. It was Lee’s quiet, gracious tones announcing that he would love to be involved. As luck would have it, he was finishing up a project. With no pressing family ties, he was ‘kind of free’.

The artist laughs at the memory. ‘I went down to New Zealand for six months. I ended up staying for six years.’

Howe had heard the odd rumour about a potential adaptation of the book, but knew little else. Born in Vancouver, Canada, he had since settled among the chocolate box lakes and mountains of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, no less removed from Hollywood than deepest Devon. Growing up in a rural outpost he had known ‘ever since he could remember’ that he wanted to live off his artistic talents, but never dreamed it was possible. He should finish high school — get himself a normal job.

His life changed when Tolkien-themed calendars started appearing in the town bookstore in the mid-1970s. It wasn’t that he was an avid fan. He read The Lord of the Rings during high school, having visited The Hobbit as a child. ‘They didn’t really strike me as anything,’ he admits, enjoying the irony. An opinion that might have been shaped by the fact he read the trilogy in the wrong order. Someone had always beaten him to The Fellowship of the Ring in the local library. So he ended up reading The Two Towers and Return of the King before the first part. ‘I was a bit confused,’ he laughs.

The calendars showed that it was possible to have a career painting pictures based on fantasy novels. Suddenly Middle-earth came alive as a world of infinite possibility; he still remembers his first attempt: ‘It was from the Pelennor Fields and had a Frank Frazetta-like touch — a reptilian creature and Nazgûl rising up to tackle Éowyn.’ Howe would pick up the latest calendar and each month do his version of the picture.

Over the years, as he established himself as an illustrator, Howe diligently sent samples into HarperCollins for their Tolkien calendars. Until, in 1987, he finally had three pieces published.

Rather than a package, Howe received a phone call in the middle of the night. Jackson had tracked down the artist’s number with relative ease but in his excitement had forgotten about the time differences. Ten days later Howe was on a plane to New Zealand.

‘The commitment was extremely light at that stage. The project had yet to be confirmed, and if things didn’t work out, you have your ticket home.’ While his wife and son would follow him, Howe never relocated with any permanence to Wellington. Conscious of his son’s education he would exit the project when production finally got underway in 1999. ‘We were back home once sets were being built.’

Howe shares the same meditative delivery of his colleague but is more eccentric. Where Lee is almost serenely composed, Howe has an undercurrent of energy that can’t be stilled. With his thin frame, flowing brown hair and beard he cultivates a little wizardliness, that or a mad professor. He too is one of the nine kings (second from the left), but harder to recognize beneath his wig and frown.

Jackson laughs. ‘We did Alan first and then we did John. Then we figured out that they had never met each other, and I thought, “God, I hope there’s no rivalry here.” They literally met each other on the aeroplane.’

They knew of one another’s work, of course, and had vaguely corresponded. But it was on the middle leg of their journey from Singapore into New Zealand in 1997 that they became acquainted. Howe had been sitting downstairs when one of the stewards approached him.

‘A Mister Lee wants to meet you.’

‘I didn’t even make the connection,’ he says. So it was midway over the Indian Ocean the two artists were introduced, and found they got on very well. Which was a relief.

Although, while changing planes at Auckland, Lee — and the airport ground staff — was startled to discover Howe had packed a suit of armour. As a serious medieval re-enactor he was keen to bestow his historical expertise in forging suits of amour on Weta Workshop, sceptical they were up to the task.

Howe still has a ‘laser-sharp image’ of arriving into Wellington for the first time, following the coastline as it snaked along the southern hem of the North Island. ‘It was an extraordinary feeling.’

From the airport they were driven straight to Jackson’s house at Karaka Bay and over the kitchen table, adrenaline keeping overwound body clocks ticking, began to understand how the director saw them working with the production. They would, Jackson informed them, design everything, with the division of labour laid out as per his appreciation of their respective gifts: Lee the light side, Howe the dark. Naturally, lines were blurred. Howe would design the vestibule of Bag End and Lee created Orthanc. Still, it was a place to start and this way they could cover more ground.

‘It was also pretty clear Pete wanted to get going on the bigger environments,’ notes Lee, who spent his first two weeks in Helm’s Deep.

For Howe it was all entirely new, Lee at least had some experience creating concept art for another Python, Terry Jones’ Erik the Viking, and Ridley Scott’s Legend. There was only one strict instruction: don’t curb your instincts in any way for a film. ‘They told us quite quickly that if you can draw it we can make it,’ says Howe.

Everything from Minas Tirith to door hinges fell into their remit. There would be no hand-me-downs from old epics. Stationed amid the inspiring bustle of the Workshop, they were going to design this ancient world inch by inch. Recalls Howe, ‘We weren’t working on computers at that time. That sort of kicked in later. All you needed was enough good paper and enough pencils.’

On a workaday level nearly all of their design work was pencil, colour was too time consuming and too prescribed. They soon understood they were cogs in a giant mechanism that would have to churn out Middle-earth on an industrial scale.

Says Jackson, ‘Usually in design meetings you’d been talking about some location: “Maybe there is a bridge here and a building here.” Then everyone would go off and come up with stuff. But Alan or John would have their pads and as I was talking they would sketch up something. By the time I had finished describing it they could show me a sketch. It was like instantaneous design.’

‘Peter’s also somebody who likes looking at artwork,’ appreciates Howe. ‘He enjoys artwork. He’s art literate in that sense.’

The one exception to the no-colour rule was when Howe, whose work would be more legibly dynamic to a studio, was asked to paint a dozen ‘great moments’ for the pitch meetings in Los Angeles. Lee added large pencil drawings and sketchbook material. They mounted them into a slideshow using Photoshop, something they were only beginning to figure out. ‘It was all a bit naff really at that stage,’ admits Lee.

It was a strange time. As Miramax wound things up in Wellington, Lee and Howe simply went home. That was that. But they had barely had time to unpack their HBs and plate armour when news came that the presentation had worked, a deal had provisionally been struck with New Line and the artists were back on a plane to New Zealand. ‘Peter’s no slouch,’ notes Howe, approvingly. ‘He’s a clever man and managed to pull it out of the fire.’

*

Why, when, where and with whose money Jackson was going to direct the films was decided. The question now confronting him was how was he, personally, going to direct so much story? What would his Lord of the Rings look and feel like? What would it sound like? What style would he bring to Middle-earth?

While Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners had shown there was more to the director’s repertoire than splatter satires, The Lord of the Rings was a leap of faith. Would he have to curtail his natural excesses to be epic? Was there a nascent Cecil B. DeMille or John Ford or David Lean beneath the crash zooms and wacky angles?

Perhaps the better question to ask is what was there in the flare and versatility of Jackson that so befitted The Lord of the Rings? As the pitch documentary proclaimed, he couldn’t have been more thorough in his development of the films. The labour of screenwriting was providing him a narrative roadmap — quite literally in terms of location — as well as inspiring camera moves. But Jackson’s instincts split between groundwork and natural daring. He was a thrilling stylist who had seen as many slasher movies as Lawrence of Arabias. He was a technically brilliant storyteller guided by an inner Einstein with no space or time for formulaic thinking.

Nevertheless, his governing principle possessed a Kiwi-like directness: ‘I was trying to make it feel real. It wasn’t so much thinking about what can I do differently, rather than what can I do for the story? We really approached it like it was real; this is authentic, it is not fantasy, it is a piece of the past.’

Jackson is the artist who once cooked special effects in his mum’s oven. Who made ‘realistic’ alien vomit out of yogurt, pea green food colouring and baked beans. When he found the consistency too runny he added handfuls of soil before his Bad Taste actors dug in. Back in those early days he even made puke by hand. He loves the tactile — the texture of the world. Braindead is an orgy of sensation. The sheer blood-drenched chaos pours off the screen until you feel sticky just watching it. Inches out of shot you sense the gleeful filmmaker caked in his own stage blood laughing till his lungs burst. When he watched Harryhausen it was as if he could reach out and touch those strange creatures.

‘That’s what I loved about Pete’s approach,’ says Boyens, ‘and made me feel this was the right person. This guy who did Braindead and Meet the Feebles — no matter what he did he wanted it to feel real and earthy, and there’s a lot of earthiness in Tolkien’s work.’

It was Lee and Howe who revealed the dizzying scale of Middle-earth, and warned him not to giggle.

‘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 The Return 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.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.