Lord of the Cinematic RINGS Part Two

By: SCOTT COLLURA
Date: Tuesday, January 08, 2002

Now that director Peter Jackson's THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING is a bona fide success, fans have already begun buzzing about the next film in the LORD OF THE RINGS series, THE TWO TOWERS. But as the New Zealand-born filmmaker explained in the first part of CINESCAPE's profile of him, bringing the classic J.R.R. Tolkien series of fantasy novels to the big screen was as hard as one might imagineif not harder. Today, in the second part of our interview with Jackson, the director discusses the development process of the project and exactly how he dealt with the ravenous fan anticipation of the films.

As tough as it is to mount a successful big-budget epic nowadays, it's even more difficult to create a genre film of that scale while legions of fans around the world anxiously anticipate the film, discuss every minute detail of the production and gossip and spread Internet rumors about the picture. Jackson was faced with a doubly tough job in this respect when taking on LORD OF THE RINGS, seeing as how the property already had a built-inand highly opinionatedfan base watching and waiting.

"I made

[a] conscious decision not to even imagine that I was making the film for millions of fans because I think that would be a mistake," says Jackson. "You can't please everyone and once you try to please everyone, you end up with something that's very bland and homogenized. I really made the conscious attempt to make the film that I would like to see because, I mean, I read the book. I was a fan. I certainly would [have] loved to have gone and seen The Fellowship of the Ring myself with someone else having made it, and I'd have a certain expectation of what I want that film to be. So, I was really making the film for myself, and I really, deliberately did that because I didn't want to get influenced by what one fan thought, because who is to say that that one fan is right when there are millions of others who all have different opinions?"

Of course, Jackson and his team had other matters to worry about beyond what John Q. Hobbit had to say about their developing project. As with any film, the LOTR series went through a gestation period that actually saw it undergo a variety of changes. As Jackson explains, the property originally began at Miramax, where he worked on it for some 18 months.

"They developed the film with us as two movies," says the filmmaker. "They ultimately felt that they couldn't get the budget together to make the two films, and they wanted us to reduce it to one film. Not just the first part, but [to] actually compress the entire story into one film, which we felt very strongly against."

Eventually the project would move on to its final destination at New Line. But before that could happen, there came a point where it looked as though Jackson might be dropped from the film altogether.

"[Miramax chief]

Harvey Weinstein gave us four weeks to set the film up somewhere else as two movies," continues Jackson. "Just trying to find someone else to back it as two films. And the deal was that at the end of four weeks if we hadn't found anyone, then Harvey would take the project [and] we would go away and be finished with it and he would hire some other filmmaker to make his single film version. [I] did think, at that point, that the film was probably not going to happen because the chances of finding someone were not great and most studios in town passed. We had a lot of meetings and luckily New Line came on."

Ultimately, the move to New Line was a blessing in disguise, for whereas Miramax only wanted to make one or two films, New Line asked Jackson to produce Tolkien's entire trilogy of novels. Aside from the chance this afforded the director to give each book its own film, it also meant an increase in budget for the entire project. In fact, the overall price tag of the LOTR series wound up doubling to some $300 million.

"When we arrived at New Line, we had the budget in there for two films because it was the Miramax plan," explains Jackson. "That had a budget of like $130 or $140 million for the two films, and then once New Line came onboard and wanted three movies, obviously that was a substantial increase in budget."

$300 million might sound like a lot of money, but it's actually quite modest considering the scope of the three films that Jackson was expected to put together. As the filmmaker points out, he couldn't have pulled it off if he had attempted to shoot the films anywhere but where he ultimately wound upin his native (and cost-efficient) New Zealand.

"I don't

think that this film would have been made anywhere else because of the budget," says Jackson. "Each of our movies is costing about $90 or $92 million each, and we're living in a world today where a film like Pearl Harbor cost $150 million... and comparing Pearl Harbor to Fellowship, just in terms of logistical filmmaking, we had more locations which are expensive, we have a bigger cast than Pearl Harbor which is expensive, we had more CG shots. So, I would guess that Fellowship in the Pearl Harbor environment would cost about $180 million. I think that it would be reasonably accurate to say that we made these films in New Zealand for half the price for what they would have been made for in the States and, of course, if you accept that then you realize that no studio is going to greenlight a $180 million film. That would never be greenlit, let along three of them. So, I do think that the fact that we made these films in New Zealand is the only reason that they actually exist."

By the time Jackson completes the third and final film in the LORD OF THE RINGS series, THE RETURN OF THE KING, in 2003, almost a decade will have passed since he first began work on the trilogy. One would think that after such an intense and arduous experience, the filmmaker would be ready for something... simpler. And one would be right.

"I sort of know, in my heart, I've made the biggest thing that I'm ever going to do in my life," he laughs. "I mean, I'm never going to do anything as big as The Lord of the Rings again!"