The Making of the Making of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

How I wrote Anything You Can Imagine, a not so brief history of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien marvel

It appears I am drawn to fantasy fashioned with reality. A number of years ago I wrote a well-received book about the making of Alien, going by the hard to misinterpret title of ‘Alien Vault’, and to my eye, Ridley Scott’s dank, nightmarish future-gothic vision of the universe is as vérité as Peter Jackson’s expansive, feel-the-drizzle Middle-earth. Thinking about it, these two cinematic worlds are not so stylistically distant; unsurprisingly Jackson is a big fan of Alien and counts a genuine H.R. Giger model of the derelict among his diverse collection of movie memorabilia.

Back then, as I researched Alien, I found myself a little perplexed by the profusion and quality of what had already been written on the film as well as the slew of documentaries (a quick name check here for Charles de Lauzirika’s extraordinary work on the Alien Quadrilogy box set) that have accompanied its DVD afterlife. How could I hope to compete? What was there left to say? Where do you begin afresh with a beloved, 30 year-old chestbursting classic? Writers you will find are insecure creatures.

The only way out of the maze was to think of my book as a biography of a film, where I could attempt to find a different take on Alien, my take, which would hopefully mean a more personal approach. After all, how many biographies of Hitler or Churchill have there been? All great stories and all valid histories, whatever the subject, are finally about people (those who write them as much as those who appear in the text). That meant interviews and more interviews, and using the thirtysomething years since the film to my advantage. But it also meant imbuing all my books, consciously or otherwise, with the primary ingredient of myself. Guided by this ethos and pushing ever deeper into as many sources and first-hand accounts as I could possibly get my hands on, I realised there was a lot more to say, and, no doubt, there still is.

The Nazgûl in the flesh

Where were we? Oh, yes, Middle-earth. Like a drunkard drawn to the bottle, I found myself reading reviews of my less pithily (but rather fetchingly, I think) entitled Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth. I was struck how, for good and bad, some have deemed it a straight biography of Peter Jackson. To be fair, this is entirely how it was packaged by the publisher and categorised on Amazon (and in New Zealand bookshops, it turned out). And who am I to gainsay the commercial thinking of the book trade?

Woe betide any author who attempts to tackle the misgivings presented by a critic (which may be entirely fair), but I found myself coming back to the idea of my own definitions. Anything You Can Imagine, as I see it, is not a biography of Peter Jackson, at least not directly. As with Alien, but even more so in this case, my intent was to tell the story of an incredible filmmaking moment. One that represents a unique and surely unrepeatable period in Hollywood history. This is a book about the journey of The Lord of the Rings trilogy from inception to triumph via a multitude of tribulations, serendipitous turns and unforeseen victories. A path that could be defined as fate, if you are of that way of thinking. This is the biography of three films that serve as one. The biography too of a kind of endeavour only this medium can inspire, at once utterly insane, passionate, overreaching and, in every sense, extraordinary. The epic.

Ironically, one of my touchstones was Final Cut, Steven Bach’s beautifully written and compellingly detailed depiction of all that befell the making of Heaven’s Gate in the eighties — to this day the standard bearer of films unravelling in the face of calamitous ambition. It is the biography of how a film could break a studio. Bach was on the inside of that derelict in a way I could never emulate — he was the United Artists executive in charge of production during that tumultuous period and the tone he engenders carries the manifest doom of Shakespearean tragedy. I am not comparing myself with the late, great Bach, who was a supreme writer (if indifferent studio executive), and despite the many who sounded a death knell for New Line, my story takes flight in the opposite direction. Like Alien, it is the story of a towering success in the face of adversity.

For the record, this was never to be a book that fully encompassed the making of The Hobbit, and whatever pressures lay therein, beyond that divisive trilogy’s place as a legacy of the initial success of The Lord of the Rings. As such, it still gains a fascinating chapter.

Liv Tyler as valiant Arwen

Mine was also never to be a book about swords and elves, Hobbits and the disposal of magical rings, not directly. There were to be no runes or maps. Rather this was the tale of a gang of unruly Kiwis (and that unruliness I mean as a great quality) who outwitted Hollywood and Tolkien to adapt a book long dismissed as impossible. This was both a Hollywood and an anti-Hollywood story.

As much as anything, it is a book about something ineffable but vital in the New Zealand spirit that made the impossible merely a hurdle to be overcome. The same DNA that climbed Everest. They are such New Zealand films in flavour as well as location. Of course, that there are distinct parallels here with Tolkien’s tale of the little men who overcame a seemingly impossible task added to the whole scheme.

From my copious interviews, with time given so very generously by so many, I wanted to sew together a series of significant, parallel human stories that embodied the filmmaking journey (a fellowship within the Fellowship). Peter, of course, was bound to be the central figure — and in that sense there is an element of biography. Nevertheless, even at the end of the endeavour there remains something pleasingly enigmatic about him. Then this is also a biography of writers, producers, partners and saviours Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. My focus also fell upon Elijah Wood and Andy Serkis, the strange journey of Viggo Mortensen, behind the scenes master craftsmen like Richard Taylor and Joe Letteri, the influence of the artists Alan Lee and John Howe, producers and managers like Mark Ordesky and Ken Kamins, lesser sung heroes like first AD Carolynne ‘Caro’ Cunningham, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, miniatures genius Alex Funke, and MASSIVE maestro Stephen Regelous. This is only a taste of the individual endeavour involved in the Rings moment, and a soupçon of what the book covers, but you catch my drift. As I say within the text, Jackson was an auteur with an entire nation at his back.

The author – taller in real life.

One final, important thing to say is that I was wholly conscious of the host of DVD extras with which Jackson has provisioned the films. My approach was to spread the net wider, outside of a studio’s watchful eye, and, as with Alien, drill down further into the detail with the hindsight of the twenty years that have passed since these films were born. To get to the root, I hope, of the famous last ditch Mortensen casting story; the Sean Connery as Gandalf rumour; that epoch-defining New Line meeting where the films were finally (sort of) given the greenlight; the hilarious battle of the golds versus the silvers when they first tested the MASSIVE software; that glittering but bizarre night of Oscar glory: the manifold tales that have coalesced into myth around these still remarkable films. This is my contribution to the history of an unrepeatable filmmaking moment.

Anything You Can imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-earth is out now