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Date Posted: 05:04:03 04/25/04 Sun
Author: By Jeff Giles
Subject: Lure of the Rings

Lure of the Rings

How a little-known New Zealand director landed the most ambitious franchise in movie history
By Jeff Giles

Newsweek
Dec. 10, 2001 issue - The helicopter floats toward Kahurangi National Park, and New Zealand unrolls beneath you. You see farmlands almost fluorescent green. Mountains straight out of a model-train set. Craggy limestone plateaus. Giant ferns waving along beaches. And strange, tilting rock formations that look like primitive graveyards.

Before coming to the land of “The Lord of the Rings,” you’d heard two things over and over, the first of which concerned the landscape: as Liv Tyler put it, “It literally looks like somebody laid a velvet blanket down on New Zealand.” It’s hard not to feel moved as the helicopter flies between mountaintops filmed for the trilogy—even when you start throwing up in the back seat and the pilot has to make an emergency landing on a deserted beach. After you wash your face in the sea, you walk back toward the whirring helicopter and notice that everyone’s gesturing emphatically for you to stay down, stay down because they don’t want you to get decapitated. That’s the other thing you’d heard about New Zealand: everybody’s really nice.

In truth, you didn’t come to the Southern Hemisphere because of the landscape, but because a director named Peter Jackson has suddenly altered it. He’s brought to his native New Zealand, which has a tiny film industry, the most expensive and manifestly ambitious movie project in history: a trilogy of fantasy films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels shot simultaneously for a combined cost of at least $270 million. The first movie, “The Fellowship of the Ring,” will be released on Dec. 19 (Click here to see review), with sequels set for Christmas 2002 and 2003. By 2004 Jackson may be hailed as a visionary like George Lucas—already considered a done deal by many “LOTR” fans on the Internet—or he may want to throw himself into the fires of Mount Doom. All of which raises some questions, chief among them, who on earth is this guy? One day, in Wellington, the director drives you to one of his two special-effects companies, Weta Digital, parks and pads barefoot toward the door. Before he gets there he’s intercepted by some 10-year-old boys on bikes, one of whom calls out, a bit intensely, “Are you Peter Jackson?” Jackson, 40, is a shy person. He says, “Hmm?” He’s stalling.

”Are you Peter Jackson?”

“P’raps. Could be. Why?”

“Are you famous?”

“No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not.”

“Are you Michael Jackson’s brother?”

Jackson laughs. His belly ripples a little. “Ah,” he says, before making a quick getaway, “now you’re getting close.”

Jackson’s previous credits (a handful of gory splatter films and the indelible “Heavenly Creatures” among them) tell only part of the story of who he is. Some actors and friends, for instance, refer to the director as a hobbit. Fran Walsh—Jackson’s mordantly funny partner in life, parenting and moviemaking, who co-wrote “LOTR” with Jackson and Philippa Boyens—believes that that’s simply because the director resembles one. “You don’t wear shoes,” she tells him one day. “And you’re a lul’ bit round and a lul’ bit—” She says something that, in her New Zealand accent, sounds like “fairy,” but surely couldn’t be. You ask her to repeat it twice, and finally you get it: “Furry.”

But it’s not just Jackson’s looks that call hobbits to mind. In “The Fellowship of the Ring,” trembling, hairy-footed hobbit Frodo Baggins, who’s played by Elijah Wood, learns that he can save Middle-earth from the evil Sauron only by trekking into the heart of darkness, Mordor, and hurling the all-powerful ring into the flames in which it was forged. Filming “Lord of the Rings” was easier, but not by much. “LOTR” was an impassioned, but draining, all-consuming—and, at times, quite chaotic—shoot for everyone involved. (“Exhausted?!” says costume designer Ngila Dickson, laughing. “We were deranged.”) The cast and crew can’t remember ever working so hard, and no one even pretends to have worked as hard as Jackson. “Peter paid a huge price for this film,” says Walsh. “He lost his father in preproduction and his mother just a few weeks ago. He went in with parents, and he came out an orphan.”


Jackson grew up in Pukerua Bay, about 30 miles up the coast from Wellington. His mother was a housewife and community booster, his father a paymaster who drove around town in an armored car and paid city employees. “I am definitely the product of both my parents,” he says. “I feel it more acutely now that they’re gone—I guess that’s one of the ironies of life.” Dad was sweet, and preternaturally calm no matter the circumstances. Mum was utterly driven. “The one thing that I’m totally grateful for, beyond anything else, is that they never judged my hobbies,” says Jackson. “I loved monsters. I loved making movies with my movie camera. I loved making dinosaurs with Plasticine, and if I wanted more Plasticine, Dad would go out and buy it for me. They never had any judgment other than total support.”

By his early 20s, Jackson was deep in the thrall of the famous stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen (“The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”) and had had a transcendent, life-defining moment watching “King Kong.” While working as a photoengraver at a local paper, he launched a career shooting no-budget genre movies on Sundays, playing one or two roles himself if he had to. Jackson’s early films—the gross alien movie “Bad Taste,” the very gross puppet apocalypse “Meet the Feebles” and the really unbelievably gross zombie movie “Braindead”—are comic and strangely childlike, full of Monty Python-esque farce and an obvious passion for the goriest, squishiest special effects that next-to-no-money can buy. As Jackson fondly says of both himself and his longtime special-effects artists, Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger, “It’s like naughty children having a good, good time.” In four hours’ worth of interviews, the closest the director ever comes to bragging is when he reflects on “Braindead,” which was released in the United States as “Dead Alive”: “We made it in a local television studio, and we trashed the carpet. We had zombie extras trailing blood everywhere. They shoot game shows in the studio these days, and somebody told me that if you look up even now you can see blood splats from ‘Braindead’ on the studio roof.”

Though 1994’s “Heavenly Creatures” had its share of blood, it was a radical shift for Jackson, putting him on Hollywood’s radar screen and earning him and Walsh an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. The movie was a devastating, true-life portrait of two teenage girls named Juliet (Kate Winslet) and Pauline (Melanie Lynskey), who struck up an extraordinary friendship in New Zealand in the ’50s, freaked out their parents, lost hold of reality and, in a misguided attempt to stay together, beat Pauline’s mother to death with a brick following afternoon tea. Suddenly, Jackson had to direct not zombies but girls who’d never made a movie and who were overwhelmed by the emotions of the roles. “I always felt incredibly safe with Pete,” says Winslet. “He’d always come up very quietly, always put his arm around me. He’d say, ‘Do you feel OK about this scene, Kate?’ You can’t fail to love Pete. He can be quite quiet, but he’s an emotional man. Look, I’m telling you, when we wept, he wept.”

Jackson’s first movie for Hollywood, a ghostbusting comedy called “The Frighteners,” died at the box office. He had a champion in Robert Zemeckis, but the studios got nervous about him, and the director struggled and failed to remake two of his longtime obsessions, “King Kong” and “Planet of the Apes.” Fortunately, he had a third longtime obsession: the story of Frodo, Gandalf the wizard (Ian McKellen) and the rest of the fellowship. “I’ve always thought fantasy was the last frontier of cinema,” he says. “It’s the only genre that’s never really been mastered. The characters are always so cliched. I mean, I actually hate wizards in movies—they’re always terribly pompous, and they tend to fire blue lightning bolts from their fingertips.” (No, Jackson is not referring to “Harry Potter”; he says he enjoyed that movie, though all the other “LOTR” folks you talk to about “Potter” thought it was lame.)

Why did New Line Cinema trust the former Kiwi King of Splatter with “Lord of the Rings”? The studio has its reasons (Click here to see sidebar), and Jackson has a couple of theories of his own. For one thing, he says, he already co-owned two great special-effects shops: Weta Digital, which could make armies swarm ferociously and somehow get a towering, computer-generated Balrog to spout actual flame; and Weta Workshop, which could make museum-quality armor, sleek, evil miniatures of the Tower of Orthanc and about 48,000 other artifacts for the film. For another thing, Jackson lived in New Zealand, and could make the movies far cheaper than they could have been made in the States. As he puts it, “If an American director had the same amount of passion as me and a career that was similar to mine—if he did the same meetings that I did, and said the same things that I said—he still wouldn’t have been able to get his film made. Because he would have been in the wrong country.” But folks who have worked with Jackson say his modesty is misleading. “Peter only owns two shirts,” says McKellen. “They’re both pink. You can never be certain which one he’s got on. But there’s a lot of energy under there—and willpower and ambition.”

He needed every bit of it. At the height of the epic, 274-day “LOTR” shoot, Jackson had to command and choreograph an unheard-of seven camera crews working simultaneously to get the staggering number of shots required. His partner, Walsh, was deputized to film a moving scene between two hobbits toward the end of the first film, among other things. Producer Barrie Osborne (“The Matrix,” “Face/Off”) stepped up for some battle sequences, as well as a gorgeous helicopter shot of Frodo and his companions walking up a startlingly white glacier. And on and on. Jackson would sit in front of as many as seven monitors, directing by satellite feed and often bicycling back and forth between film crews.

There were real-life floods, landslides and snowstorms to contend with. Endless schedule changes. And, midway through the shoot, no more vacations. There were also ongoing script revisions for Liv Tyler’s character, the immortal elf Arwen. (Tolkien fans chastised the filmmakers on the Internet when it was rumored that Arwen was being reimagined as a sort of warrior princess. Jackson did shoot footage of Tyler at war—in a hilarious bloopers reel made for a party at the end of filming, the actress is seen fumbling adorably with a bow and arrow during the Battle of Helm’s Deep—but ultimately the director reverted to a less bloodthirsty, though still bold, vision of Arwen.) Everyone soldiered on. “There was one gigantic battle sequence that some of us worked on all night every night for three months straight, which is insane,” says Viggo Mortensen, who plays Aragorn. “It was dark and wet. That was a real tough one for the cast and crew, and it forged some strong friendships.” Jackson, it’s said, was astonishingly calm and focused all the while. Something he picked up from his dad.

Since this story began with a helicopter shot of the landscape, let’s end it with an interior. Before leaving New Zealand, you visit Jackson and Walsh’s home on Karaka Bay. They’re such a quirky, unlikely couple that it’s not even annoying that they’re crazy in love. (“Sometimes I’d be on set,” says Elijah Wood, “and Fran would call Peter on his cell phone for some information, and Pete—his voice would change and his whole body would change when he heard her voice.”) As Walsh walks to the kitchen for lunch, she passes a room crammed floor to ceiling with boxes. It’s Jackson’s sanctuary. He collects miniature soldiers. Models of World War I biplanes. And a million other things, from the looks of it. Walsh gestures to the room, and says, drolly but not unfondly, ”That is what the contents of Peter’s mind look like.” Sounds about right. Jackson is a director with a hundred boxes in his brain. There will be time to open every one.

© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.

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