by Jerry Roberts
photos by Doane Gregory

J.R.R. Tolkien's literary fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, began with the publishing in 1954 of The Fellowship of the Ring and was completed by the sequel novels, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Jackson's onscreen interpretation began with the holiday release of the hugely scaled and totally New Zealand–lensed The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The sequels, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, are in the can, having been made in succession with the original through a grueling 15-month shoot. They will be released this year and 2003.

"This is something that I will never do again in my life," Jackson said, cognizant that the three-epic gamble, which used 4.5 million feet of film, may be something no filmmaker will ever again attempt using today's technology and costs. The film takes television's miniseries concept to the more expensive world of features.

"It has been a lot of fun, but also it's been a long, hard, tough haul," Jackson said. "We'll be in post-production a long time with the second and third films, and we'll be doing some reshoots. But I tell myself, 'You've just done the hardest thing that you will ever do in your lifetime.' The filmmaking was tough and demanding, logistically and in every other way imaginable. But filmmaking always is. A lot of the pressures were of a different sort. Everything is relying on the success of the first film. There are very clear reasons why people don't attempt to do projects such as this."

And how did Jackson get to call the shots on one of the biggest filmmaking projects of all time? His claim to fame was the internationally well received Heavenly Creatures (1994), which he based on an actual murder in the 1950s in Christchurch, New Zealand. The film gave Kate Winslet a step to stardom. Between then and now, Jackson made The Frighteners (1996), starring Michael J. Fox and executive-produced by Robert Zemeckis.

The Lord of the Rings route was a boulder-strewn road of screenwriting, dealmaking and execution that might be likened to the journey collaboration, trust and judgment taken by the story's hero, Frodo Baggins, a young Hobbit who's entrusted with skirting powerful, dark forces through Middle Earth, protecting the coveted "One Ring" in The Fellowship of the Ring.

		Director Peter Jackson (center) with crew on set of The Fellowship of the Ring. Click picture for larger view.

"We had a first-look deal with Miramax at the time. We asked Harvey Weinstein if he would like to do The Lord of the Rings. Saul at the time was producing The English Patient, which was to be released through Miramax, and Harvey had a very close relationship with Saul. It took about a year for Harvey to get the rights. Then, three of us — Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh and myself — began writing the script. Initially, we planned on making two movies. It was a huge job. The three of us sat around on sofas in a living room, drinking lots of tea, with someone taking notes on a computer."

Jackson said that a balk on Miramax's part to finance the two big spectacles forced them to try to see the trilogy as one film.

"To squeeze it all into one film came with a degree of compromise that I just wasn't willing to do," he said. "These are among the most popular books in the world. You can't be disappointing your audience. The project went into turnaround for three weeks. Since I'd never made a commercially successful film, all the major studios passed on the project. Fortunately, New Line Cinema intervened. Then Bob Shaye suggested we make three movies."

Robert Shaye, the co-chairman and co-chief executive officer of New Line with Michael Lynne, guided New Line through 34 years of such popular hits as the Austin Powers movies and Dumb and Dumber as well as Shine, The Sweet Hereafter, Se7en, Boogie Nights and I Am Sam.

"New Line wanted the three original books shot back-to-back-to-back which was a dream come true," Jackson said.

"We had planned to spend 18 months on the original two-movie plan. We then restructured for three films, and spent another 18 months writing. We ultimately arrived at a plan to complete principal photography on all three in 15 months. A lot of revision to the scripts continued through the shoot. The bad thing was that introduced a lot of surprises. We would rewrite scenes, lose scenes, change scenes throughout the 15 months. It was very complicated. Yet, it's creatively exciting, a strength and perhaps weakness to roll with the punches and get input from all of the actors. Once they took over their characters, they would make suggestions and that would lead to other opportunities to improve the script. The script process was truly organic."

Many in the cast came on board with the proviso that they live in New Zealand for better than a year. It included Elijah Wood as Frodo, Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey, Liv Tyler as Arwen Undomiel, Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn, Sean Astin as Samwise Gamgee, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Hugo Weaving as Elrond, Ian Holm as Bilbo Baggins, Sean Bean as Boromir, Brad Dourif as Grima Wormtongue, Christopher Lee as Saruman the White and Bruce Spence as Mouth of Sauron.

		Director Peter Jackson (center) with crew on set of The Fellowship of the Ring. Click picture for larger view.

"No casting was forced upon us. We didn't see a necessity to have a box-office star. We relied on the book itself and the style we were going to use on the picture. During the casting process, we had seen 200 young actors who were trying for Frodo, and I still didn't think we had found the right one. Then a video from Elijah Wood showed up in the mail."

Wood has had success as a juvenile player in such films as Avalon, Oliver Twist and The Ice Storm. "He had been working with a dialogue coach on his accent," Jackson said. "He used dialogue taken from the book and really perfected it. When I saw the tape, I saw Frodo."

The director had no such problems in choosing the locations for the trilogy. New Zealand proved ideal from his first imaginings of the script. A relatively unpopulated nation/ archipelago, New Zealand runs the gamut of rugged locales to match Tolkien's otherworldly descriptions of Middle-Earth. New Zealand's wild landscapes include jungles, temperate forests, high mountains, beautiful wide beaches, big rivers and open savannahs.

Jackson knows this country very well. He was born there in 1961 and at an early age began making Super 8 movies. He left school at age 17 to work in the nation's film industry, first as a photoengraving apprentice. Eventually, he bought a 16mm camera and made Bad Taste, a 75-minute feature that grew from an intended short. The New Zealand Film Commission gave him the money to complete the picture, and its cult-hit status led Jackson to make the features Just the Feebles, Braindead and Heavenly Creatures.

"It's the chicken and egg thing," Jackson said of shooting in his homeland. "I am a New Zealander, and I'm based here. Obviously, we knew we could make The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand. I'm also co-owner of a special effects company [WETA Digital]. So, this project was perfect for us to make, and perfect for us to make here. There were never any discussions about shooting anywhere else. And even if another filmmaker were shooting The Lord of the Rings, my guess would be that New Zealand would show up on the top of the list of locations. The variety of the scenery here gave us everything we needed."

The principal actors arrived in New Zealand six weeks prior to principal photography and began discussing their characters with Jackson. "I like to rehearse as much as possible, but I always prefer to formally rehearse on the day we shoot, with all of the props and all of the costumes," Jackson said. "I want to save most of the moment-by-moment reality for the day of the shoot. I'll talk to them a little about what their particular character is like beforehand. With Ian McKellen, we talked about what a 600-year-old wizard would be like. Some of our cast had to learn to sword fight, how to get in and out of boats and canoes, how to use them. A few of the cast had never been on horseback before."

		Director Peter Jackson with actor Christopher Lee Click picture for larger view.

"You ultimately choose your cinematography because you like the work that they do," Jackson said. "I wanted The Lord of the Rings to have the stylized look of natural light on location, and one of the most wonderful uses of natural light was on the Babe films, which had been shot in Australia. Babe had one of the nicest uses of sunlight I've ever seen — nicely stylized without going over the top.

"My other thought was that I would be together with this guy for three movies, so I decided to go after an Australian or a New Zealander as my DP. In fact, with most of the crew, it would be advisable to use the same people to achieve continuity, to keep the same specific look to all of the films. We hired mostly 'kiwis,'" he said, referring to the nickname for New Zealanders, which is the name of a flightless bird with vestigial wings and a slender bill that is indigenous to the island nation.

The director selected his directing team based on the same thinking. He hired Carolynne Cunningham, an Australian, as the first assistant director and David Norris as one of the principal second ADs. "The coordination duties multiplied significantly on the films," Jackson said. "There were some days when we had three or four units shooting in a day on different films, counting second units. Barrie Osborne, the producer, ran the entire film. For something this big, it was the smoothest, most organized, shoot I've ever seen. Barrie enabled me to turn up on the set and be free to get the best footage that I could on every day. It was an enormous, mammoth task to run the day-to-day operations, and Barrie managed it all with absolute smoothness. I don't know how he did it."

Jackson said he admires "directors who use the camera as another character in the story such as Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese." For Rings he storyboarded the entire trilogy, "but not to the point where it restricts me," he said. "It's an interesting tool. And it's valuable to have a plan in your back pocket just in case something comes up, which is what storyboarding gives me. If I turn up on the set and I have nothing else, then the storyboards are valuable to fall back on. They're the most valuable for special effects sequences. I have reasonable confidence in doing visual effects, so that I can easily turn away from the storyboard and redesign a scene on the day we shoot. I often prefer to adapt and think on my feet.

		Jackson sets up a shot for the Hobbiton Festival scene in The Fellowship of the Ring. Click picture for larger view.

The Fellowship of the Ring and the sequels provided many opportunities for stunts. "Some of the actors were keen to do their own stunts, especially Viggo Mortensen. But New Zealanders aren't particularly experienced with medieval sword fighting. In New Zealand, they're used to doing explosions and car gags. So, we brought in Bob Anderson from America. He used to stunt-double Errol Flynn in sword fights and double Flynn's sword fight opponents in American films. He would give actors and stunt doubles lessons. He's very safety conscious as well. We used an actor as much as we could in the sword fighting, then used the stunt double in tough situations. All of us were very safety conscious and under control. We also had very good horse masters on these films. We had huge battle scenes, and quite a bit of horse stuff. With all of this going on, you have to be safety conscious."

		Director Peter Jackson (center) with crew on set of The Fellowship of the Ring. Click picture for larger view.

Jackson prefers to think of the three pictures as one story, The Lord of the Rings. But because it would be initially carved into three movies, he employed three different editors. "John Gilbert, who I worked with before on The Frighteners, is cutting the first movie. He's extremely good, and we involved him early on. We started cutting right away, concentrating on the first film but simultaneously cutting the others too. Because of the amount of shooting and multiple-unit shooting, we had to cut as we went. Over the span of three movies, we shot 4.5 million feet of film. The editing was a huge undertaking in itself."

To score the picture, Jackson secured his "first choice," Howard Shore, whose distinguished work as a composer who amplifies dark-themed imagery includes the music for most of the David Cronenberg canon, Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, Tim Burton's Ed Wood and David Fincher's Se7en. "We wanted somebody who would take a risk, but wouldn't risk the world of J.R.R. Tolkien," Jackson said. "We needed a composer with the ability to do the dark, majestic beauty inherent in the story. I've long admired Howard.

"Howard Shore began work on the project over a year ago, spending time on the set with us in New Zealand, and thereafter returning home to New York to totally immerse himself in the books. Much of his music is inspired by the book, and he has made use of many beautiful, ancient sounds to transport us back 7,000 years into pre-history, into the Third Age of Middle Earth. He has also drawn upon the languages of Tolkien's world: Elvish, Dwarvish and Black Speech, to deepen and enrich the musical content of the film."

Jackson was active in marketing decisions for the movies, and was conscious during the making of them that he was shooting for a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. "This was always intended as a PG-13 film," he said. "The book is not a children's book. We didn't want restrictions on the creativity, but we also knew that The Lord of the Rings deserves to be seen by the widest possible audience. So, to a certain extent, I'm involved all the way through marketing, on down to the poster and trailers. We wanted to somehow depict that this was J.R.R. Tolkien's story, and enforce that notion at the studio level. We wanted the creativity in the advertising to feel like it belongs to the world of Tolkien. We regard ourselves as responsible for protecting The Lord of the Rings. That's why we were as faithful to the books as we were. Just to leave your responsibility as a creator to somebody else to sell is an abdication of your role as a director, especially on something as personal as this."

Action films and advertising have overworked the adage: "This time, it's personal." To Peter Jackson, there is nothing near a cliche in that phrase when it comes to The Lord of the Rings.

		Elements come together to create a battle sequence for The Fellowship of the Ring.

"This has been a unique and personal experience for me and for everyone who worked on these films," Jackson said. "When you signed on an actor, they knew this wasn't a two- or three-month gig. It's a 15-month commitment. It's a lifestyle decision rather than a job. You're all so close. There was a great experience of trusting and dedication going on among the cast and crew. This is unlike anything I've known before. It was grueling as well. But the principal advantage is that, one day, all three movies can be watched back-to-back-to-back and you'll see that it is one story. I always saw it as one story, and that's how we shot it. This is not a movie and two sequels. It's one, unified story."

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