Anything You Can Imagine. Ian Nathan
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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