The Director: Peter Jackson

In a rare interview just weeks before the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring, the man who turned the dream of making The Lord of the Rings into a trilogy of movies, Peter Jackson, talks to Pavement about the pitfalls and pinnacles of five years of toil to ring one of the modern classics to the screen, not once but thrice.

Interview Bernard D McDonald
Peter Jackson photographed by John McDermott

PAVEMENT. Whatever induced you to take on such an enormous project, Peter?

PETER JACKSON: Urn, well, it's a good question. If someone says, 'If you'd known how difficult it was and how long it would take at the beginning, would you actually have gone there?', that would be a very hard question to answer, knowing what I know now, because it has been far and away the most phenomenally difficult thing I've ever done in my life. And a lot of other people that have worked on it feel the same way. But I think we are very happy with what we have done and we know that what we are involved in is something that is quite extraordinary. So from that point of view, it's a once in a lifetime thing. And that, in a way, makes it worthwhile because YOU may as well do a once in a lifetime job once in your lifetime [laughs].

P: Why did you choose to make The Lord of the Rings, which for most people was probably the last thing they expected a New Zealand filmmaker to do here in New Zealand?

PJ: The film really stems from the films that inspired me when I was young because I grew up loving Ray Harryhausen films. Voyage of Sinbad was a favourite and Jason and the Argonauts. The original King Kong totally inspired me to make movies when I was 12, so I had this love of that type of film. Essentially, LOTR falls into that category of fantastical story with creatures and monsters and heroes. It has all those elements about it of the movies I loved as a kid. My career path when I tried to break into films was obviously more through splatter and horror, which for low budget filmmaking is the perfect vehicle to try and get into films and make an impact without much money. You can do them on a shoestring and still make quite an impact, as long as you've got enough blood and enough of a sense of humour to get yourself seen. For young filmmakers, it's a great genre to work in. And we eventually got to a point where Heavenly Creatures had been made and Fran Walsh and I had really enjoyed that film. The Frighteners was really good fun too, in a completely different kind of way. And in 1995, during post-production of The Frighteners we wondered what to do next. By that stage, we'd built up quite a large computer effects facility at Weta, which, back then, was about 30 or 40 work stations, all geared up for The Frighteners. So we were thinking about what we could do with Weta too. And the idea of doing a fantasy film came into my mind and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to do a Harryhausen film but do it with computers instead of stop motion?' Finally, having been a big fan of these films and having animated clay monsters with stop motion since I was a kid, I finally had the tools available to me to take it into a new sort of realm. So the thinking at that time was that we'd have to create an original fantasy film. But we kept referring to the fact it would be LOTR-like. I wasn't at the place where I had a life-long ambition to make a film of LOTR. I'd read the book once and really liked it. But I felt it would be out of my reach. It wouldn't be a possibility making LOTR when you're a filmmaker down here in New Zealand. It's just not something that I'd deemed to be a possibility. I thought the rights would be tied up with some huge conglomerate like Disney or Dreamworks. You just naturally assume that it's an impossibility. But we did pick up the phone at that stage -- it was still '95 -- and called our agent in LA and said, 'Can you just do a bit of quiet snooping around for us and find out about LOTR film rights.' And he found that they were with a producer called Saul Zaentz who'd had them for 25 years. He said that Saul wasn't really that enthusiastic about doing anything with them, so you could give him a call if you want but you'll probably just get a polite rebuff. We were working with Harvey Weinstein at the time and he had a first look deal with us, so it was duty bound for us that anything we wanted to look at we had to let Harvey know first to give him first option. So we made the call to Harvey at Miramax and he just happened to be working with Saul at that time, having just rescued The English Patient from oblivion. Harvey nearly fell off his seat and said, 'Well, I know Saul very well. He owes me a big favour. Let me talk to him straight away.' And then it became clear to us that talking to Saul was just the beginning of a very long and complex legal negotiation. The legalities of Harvey being given approval to make the film by Saul took about 18 months, during which time we were going to be doing a remake of King Kong. That ultimately fell over but it all came together perfectly because about the time King Kong fell over, Harvey finally cleared the rights with Saul, so jumped from one to the next.

P: How did you start putting the production together at that point?

PJ: We wanted to develop the film in a way that wasn't just the normal development process, which would've been us locking ourselves away writing scripts and eventually, when the scripts were in good shape, we'd put ourselves into preproduction and start to go forward. Because LOTR is so well known and the characters and places are so well known, it's different to an original screenplay. We set up a situation where Fran and myself were writing the screenplay, we got Weta working, we had conceptual designers involved and we had our production designer Grant Major involved at a very early stage so we were able to develop models and miniatures of what the creatures might look like. We were designing sets and sending people around New Zealand to take photos of possible locations and that was happening concurrently with the writing of the screenplay. It ultimately served us very well because we came to a crucial crossroads in about 1998, where Miramax decided they couldn't afford to make two films back-to-back, which was the original idea. They only wanted to make one. They wanted us to cram the entire LOTR trilogy into one two-hour film, which we didn't want to do, so we essentially walked away from the project at that stage and Miramax were going to hire someone else to do it. But they did give us a four-week window to try and find another company to take it off them who would pay them everything they had spent on it, plus be prepared to make more than one film. So during a very tense four-week period, where we had to shop the project around all the Hollywood studios, we made a little videotape to show them all the work we had done so far. That was very valuable. Rather than go into a situation where you had to explain your take on it, we were able to show them this 25-minute tape of what Weta had done. And we'd taken over some of the models we'd made, so it gave us very good ammunition for this presentation that ultimately got the film positioned at New Line Cinema. That became its new home and that's where the concept of doing three films was born.

P: There have been a lot of major action blockbusters in recent years. Do you think it's time for a return to epic adventures that explore me es pivotal to our humanity?

PJ: I don't particularly know if, from a genre point of view, it's a good time for LOTR, However, I do think, as a moviegoer, there's sort of an homogenisation of films taking place, where films often seem to be made for a demographic, a perceived audience. There just doesn't seem to be real love or heart or soul being put into these films. There just doesn't seem to be the care. People don't seem to be making films because they passionately want to be making these films. They're being hired and it's a quick pay cheque. And a studio wants a big blockbuster film for summer, so it hires a team of people and puts them together and tries to get this thing made. That's not really the way our project has come together. Ours has been done with everybody involved having a real, burning desire to be working on it. And as I said at the beginning, everyone involved realises they'll never get to work on something like this again for the rest of their lives. That really has infused our project and I think you can see that when you see the movie.

P: Is that true for you too? Do you feel you'll never get the chance to make a film like this, on this scale, again in your lifetime?

PJ: For me, it's the first time in films I've made where I'm connecting myself back to what I loved when I was a kid. I've done my zombie films and that was fun and good but LOTR is it for me. This is me doing what really inspired me to get into films in the first place. It has a really special significance for me.

P: Would you liken LOTR to a sort of medieval Star Wars trilogy?

PJ: Everyone compares us to Star Wars, on one hand, or Harry Potter, on the other. But having seen the four Star Wars films that have been made so far and having seen The Fellowship of the Ring, it doesn't remind you of Star Wars at all. It's actually completely and utterly different in every aspect. The approach that we've taken is almost the opposite. We've taken a very strong point of view that we're not making a fantasy film, we're making an historical film. Tolkien didn't write Middle-earth as another place on another planet. Middle-earth, in Tolkien's mind, is our own planet about 6000 or 7000 years ago. He was creating a mythic prehistory; basically saying, in a mythological sense, that this is what happened to us at a time that records have forgotten. From that point of view, LOTR immediately becomes that much more interesting. It portrays a time when our planet was populated by other creatures: dwarves, hobbits, elves and orks. And LOTR chronicles a period of time in which the fate of the planet is in the balance and it could go to evil, to the orks. But for this unlikely group of different races that have to band together to try to prevent that, there's real uncertainty about which of the races is really worthy of inheriting the rule of the planet. And, ultimately, the rule of the planet through Aragorn becomes one in which mankind takes over. So I look at LOTR as a piece of our history that chronicles when mankind actually took dominance of the earth itself And that philosophy has really driven everything. Ngila Dickson designed her costumes to reflect that reality and that period of time. None of the design was geared towards a Hercules or Xena look. It was geared much more towards Braveheart. But if you're doing a film like Braveheart, you're obviously doing research into what Scottish people wore in the 1300s and you do whatever research you can into that period. But in our case, we had to say, 'Well, what would an elf wear? Or a dwarf?' But we wanted it to be not just an elf or a dwarf from a Star Wars-y fantasy look, we wanted it to feel like it was believable. But the great thing about Tolkien is that his book is so rich and The Silmarillion is another volume that expands on the history of the different races, so you were able to research it like you were researching an historical event. It's just as easy to research the battle of HeIm's Deep as it is to research the Battle of Trafalgar [laughs]. You've got the same books to look at, the same eyewitness accounts, the same descriptions. So we were able to launch ourselves into it as if we were researching a real historical piece and base all of our artistic design concepts on what our research uncovered as part of that process.

P: Is that one of the reasons Phillipa Boyens was drafted in as a co-writer, since she had never written a feature script before but was a devout fan of LOTR?

PJ: When you want someone to read your script, you've got to pick them really carefully because unless they have some knowledge of scriptwriting, you're not going to get the feedback you need. Phillipa was someone we'd known through another friend and she is a huge Tolkien fan who had read the books every year since she was a kid, so she has this incredibly detailed knowledge of the world of LOTR. Also, she had been part of the New Zealand Writers Guild, so she knew scripts and knew the sensibilities involved. She had lots of comments and lots of helpful criticism. And we liked what she had to say so much we thought we'd invite her on as part of the team.

P: You also work with your partner Fran Walsh, who is writer and co-producer of LOTR That must make the process of doing this film much easier for you to endure.

PJ: Yeah, I'm very fortunate because I have someone like Fran who is my partner and who can write incredibly well. I mean, I can write a little bit but I could never write a screenplay on my own. I'm just in a very lucky position as a filmmaker because with Fran, we can generate our own projects. So often other directors don't write and I think if you're a director who doesn't write or doesn't generate your own scripts, then you're at a disadvantage because you're literally in a position of waiting for a script to come through the mailbox and for somebody to offer you a job. I've never read anybody else's scripts. People have offered me lots of scripts in the past but I've just had no interest because Fran and I have so many ideas for what we want to do. And that's much more fun. The writing and the developing of the script is a really fun time because there's no pressure There aren't 150 people waiting to know what to do. There are no studios breathing down your neck. It's just a really enjoyable part of the process. I come at the films from a slightly different place because we've developed a script and had a lot of fun before any of that starts to happen.

P: It must be great to give so many talented New Zealanders the chance to work on such a huge project and further develop their skills. Plus, from your point of view, to be able to work with these people yourself.

PJ: Yeah. I mean, it is very much a New Zealand-made film. I think with something this big, it's not really a case of keeping it all New Zealand or a case of importing an American Filin crew to shoot your movie. It's a case of using everything that's great about New Zealand filmmaking, crews, skills and expertise and just supplementing it in a very strategic way with really good expertise from overseas and picking your people very well. We met the American producer, Barrie Osborne, before we asked him to join the team. And the thing was, he had a very Kiwi sensibility and was very laidback and relaxed and had worked here before and knew the crews. We knew he would fit in really well. So it's always important to get the right people involved.

P: I guess that's partly about removing hurdles before they even exist.

PJ: It's one of the things that could've gone wrong with this production that fortunately didit. It's not like a film where you put a bunch of people together for three or four months and it's done. From the point of view of shooting the movie, we were all together for 15-16 months. But some people are on the film for three, four or five years. So when you're working for that long, you have to work with people you totally trust, get along with and develop a sort of second nature with.

P: Would you have made LOTR if you had been required to shoot it overseas?

PJ: No. But that was never really a possibility. It developed in a way that was different to that. I think because we originated the idea, it gave us an ability to control things. There's a thing in Hollywood where you're either the person who originates the idea or you're the hired hand that comes on board to execute somebody else's idea. And even though we obviously don't own the rights to LOTR and we didn't write the book, we were the people who made the original phone calls and we're New Zealand filmmakers and obviously we were looking for projects we could make here, which is what we always do. There was never any question that we wouldn't be shooting it here.

P: You've got an impressive cast at your disposal in this film. How did you choose them?

PJ: We were in a very good place because, again, the studio had been fantastic to deal with. They never really imposed any casting on us. Like, they never said, 'We need one huge star and you can pick some lesser known actors but this is a choice of five big names that we need you to pick from.' And that often happens on films. Sometimes films are purely star-driven and until you sign up an actor of status, your film won't get off the ground. Fortunately, because we had LOTR, which is arguably the most popular book in the world, everybody felt there was no need to dress it up with well-known actors, other than people who were just good for the roles. So we had amazing fun and freedom in our casting because we were fans of the book. We were able to fantasise about who we should have for these roles. Some of them were easy. Others, we just had no idea. We had no idea who Frodo should be, who Legolas should be... So we were able to do a very extensive casting process. We travelled all around the world and did extensive auditions in New Zealand, Australia, England and America and looked for a lot of these characters to be played by young, unknown actors.

P: Liv Tyler is an inspired choice to play a beautiful elfin maiden.

PJ: We looked at a lot of Liv's films, like Plunkett & Macleane and Stealing Beauty. We thought she'd be really good in the role. I was down in Queenstown on a location reccie and she was in the States, so we spoke on the phone. She hadn't read LOTR, so I had to explain what elves were and how she wouldn't be human, she'd be elfin [laughs]. But she liked it enough and had a look at the script and agreed to be in it.

P: Some of the themes in LOTR, particularly the struggle between good and evil, seem relevant to what is going on in the world today, with Osama bin Laden, and Saddarn Hussein before him, being demonised as evil personified. Do you think people will pick up on those themes?

PJ: It's interesting because of what's happening today. But I think, in a way, it's slightly more simple than that because what Tolkien writes about is a timeless conflict of good versus evil. And that's relevant today, as it was also relevant in 1937 when he was writing the book. I think it's such a timeless book, with timeless themes. Unless you can imagine a world where no evil exists, there's always going to be an evil and it's always going to be in conflict with good. One of Tolkien's strong themes was that if you don't fully destroy evil, if you allow it to exist in some form, it will slowly fester away and rebuild its strength and you will suffer for it because it will come back again. You could say Tolkien was writing about Germany because at that time Germany was rearming and he was very worried about that. A cloud was starting to form over Europe again due to complacency because people just sat back and allowed evil to grow and build and flourish. But there are certainly comparisons with what's happening today. I'm also very much aware that what happened in New York is such a huge tragedy that it turns a film into a fairly frivolous thing. It's just a movie and you can't compare that to what happened in New York. I feel uncomfortable scrambling around trying to make the film justifiable and important in terms of these recent events. I think it just shows that evil will always be with us and good will attempt to defeat it.

P: How are you coping with the incredible stress and pressure you must be under?

PJ: Well, you cope good on some days and bad on other days. But it's just physically exhausting now. The whole thing is a slowly moving train and once you're on it, you can't jump off. You're not allowed to jump off, it's impossible. You've committed to it professionally, so you've got to see it through to the end. So you tend to reach these moments where your mental being is aimed at certain milestones. When I did Heavenly Creatures, that was a 12-week shoot. And at the end of that, I was totally exhausted. I slept for days. I was a wreck. And then The Frighteners was six months and at the end of that, I was a total wreck. And then with this one, it was a 15-month shoot. But I wasn't any more tired on the 15-month shoot than I was on the 12-week shoot. But you just get through it and then at the end of the time, your body says it's time to pack up. And I'm at that time now because we're about two weeks away from giving New Line the totally finished, 100 per cent, no more work to do film. Now my body's starting to crap out again because I'm starting to feel I'm so close to just getting past this milestone. Post-production's been pretty intense and hard work, so I'm just going to take a bit of a rest and get into part two [laughs].