This is one of a collection of articles appearing in the New Zealand screen production industry magazine Onfilm from February 2000 onwards. The articles all relate to The Lord of the Rings trilogy and/or its director Peter Jackson.

Directing the three Ring circus Onfilm December 2001 Onfilm spoke to Peter Jackson three weeks after he'd delivered the first film in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, to New Line Cinema. "It's completely out of my hands now - it's gone out into the big wide world," he told PHILIP WAKEFIELD. Peter Jackson: We're continuing the work on the second film now. We've been cutting for a long time and now the work's focusing on the effects shots. We've got another 500 or so and have turned over 75% of those to Weta. Most of my energies over the next several months will be focused on just getting the effects done. And I'm sure there will be pick-ups to shoot as well. One of the things with any filmmaking is, as you cut the film together you start to think about what you've got and whether you can improve that, whether the story's as clear as you need it to be... So we shot a bunch of extra scenes for the first film, and I'm sure we'll probably do the same again for the second one and the third film as well. We shot about three weeks' [footage] for the first film; I think we budgeted about three or four weeks [for each film]. We'll do film two next year and film three the following year. Is that standard for films of this scale? Yeah, I would imagine it is. It's a good way to work. I know that with the Star Wars films George Lucas has got his actors booked to come back for several weeks of shooting after he's done six months of cutting. People call it re-shoots, which is not an accurate description because you're never re-shooting anything. You're always shooting new stuff you didn't do the first time around that you feel you need. How long is The Fellowship of the Ring? Including credits, it's two hours, 58 minutes... The others are in a state of flux but they're all going to clock in between two-and-a-half and three hours I would say... Everybody has a rule that, when you write a script, it's a minute of screen time per page of script. But I've never seen that work in real life. I think our screenplays were generally between 120 and 130 pages long but obviously there are visual sequences of battles and chases and various action scenes that take a lot longer than a minute per page. The final cut of the film [is three hours]. But I'm sure there will be DVD editions with deleted scenes as well, so ultimately on DVD we'll probably end up with something that's 10 or 11 hours long in its entirety. Is it your cut, Peter? Yep, yep. Was it a subject of much debate or discussion with New Line? No, it wasn't. I have in my contract that I had to deliver a two-hour film. I well and truly broke my contract but nobody ever mentioned it once. We went through a process where you basically cut the movie together, you screen it for the studio, and at that point you're also seeing it yourself for the first time. I mean, when we screened a cut of The Fellowship in the studio a long time ago that was the first time we'd seen it in its entirety. When you come out of that screening the studio has notes and you have notes, and you sit down and you discuss it... The whole thing was a very collaborative, smooth process... There are very few disputes. If they come up with ideas you don't like, you just tell them you don't like that idea, explain why and they're fine. The studio has been very respectful. I think part of that is possibly because The Lord of the Rings is such a complicated story - they aren't as familiar with the characters and the nuances of the story as we are, so they always tend to defer to us for the final decision about what should be in and what shouldn't. Was cutting it down to two hours 58 hard? We'd screened versions of the films to ourselves that had various times - one was three-and-a-half hours long, another was three hours 18... You know when something feels long and why it feels long. It's an organic thing that's hard to describe. We want The Fellowship of the Ring to have a certain emotional punch as well - it's not just a story with monsters and hobbits, we actually want people to have an emotional response. We were finding out that, if the film was simply too long, people's emotions were somewhat numbed by the fact that they had been sitting down for so long. We found as we made the film shorter that people's tears would start to flow a bit more freely at certain times. Where they wouldn't cry at 3:18 they would cry at 2:58. The scenes were the same - it's just that the film itself was a little shorter. There's a certain tolerance beyond which you don't want to go if you want people to be emotionally engaged. It was an interesting process of arriving at the ideal length. Did New Line have a comprehensive list of do's and don'ts re the depiction of violence, so the film could have as wide an audience as possible? The intention was always to do a PG-13. PG would have been broader but The Lord of the Rings has a certain darkness, and it has fight scenes with swords. We didn't want to undermine the action with humour, and make it very campy like Hercules and Xena - we wanted to steer ours more towards Braveheart - so we were always walking on a tightrope. Everyone wanted to deliver a PG-13 film, including me, because obviously the minute you deliver an R-rated film you're going to [cut] your potential audience way down, and this film should be one that parents can take their nine- and 11-year-olds to. It should be accessible to families. So we shot our fights with that in mind and we pushed things as much as we could. We got our PG-13 reasonably easily... We gave it to the MPAA and said we'd like to get a PG-13: "Can you tell us what would cause a problem?" They identified some stuff and we trimmed it back and we got the PG-13 on our second attempt, so it was actually fairly smooth. Is there much gore in it? There's no gore per se. There's very little blood. And in the case of the Orcs it's black blood, anyway. Was that in line with the books or was it done for censorship reasons? I can't remember. If you're asking me whether Tolkien describes black blood, I'm not entirely sure. He might do. I can't remember - it's too long ago since that would have been discussed... We asked my agent in Los Angeles to find out who had the rights to The Lord of the Rings back in November 1995. It's a long story but it went through permutations and things. It will be Christmas 2003 by the time I'm finished. How intense has shooting the three films back-to-back been - easier than you anticipated or worse? It's been okay. I'm kind of like an ox. I can plod on and keep going for a long time. What was interesting to me was how much your mind actually plays a part in exhaustion and stress. I remember Heavenly Creatures... We shot for 12 weeks and on the last day of shooting you're so exhausted that you feel you couldn't possibly go for one more day and all you want to do is sleep. Because your mind is telling you, "This is the end of the 12 weeks, you're almost there, keep on going, you're going to get it done"... The Frighteners was a six-month shoot and it was the same thing. After six months I was in that same kind of state... And The Lord of the Rings was the best part of a 15-month shoot. I plodded on and was pretty tired and exhausted after 15 months, but by the end of 12 weeks I wasn't tired like I was at the end of Heavenly Creatures. Somehow your mind helps your body to pace itself. And we also had a really good cast and crew. I found the shoot of The Lord of the Rings to be one of the easiest shoots I'd ever done. That's a credit to Barrie Osborne, who produced it - it was a phenomenally logistically complicated thing to have to run each day. When you're making a low-budget movie, the stresses of production always end up on the director to some degree. You badly want this number of extras or you badly want this crane but you've only budgeted three days for the crane so which three days of the shoot do you want the crane on? So a lot of the production issues end up falling on the shoulders of the director... But on this film we had a lot of money so were able to have the things we wanted. Also, I didn't have to worry because Barrie was so good at doing what he did... I'd just turn up on the set, the actors were in the costumes I was expecting to see them in, the number of extras I was expecting were where they needed to be, the paint on the set was dry... I just turned up each day and worked with the crew and the actors, and we shot the film. So in some respects I found it the easiest film I've ever made on that level and it was difficult in just the sheer length of the shoot, the stamina of getting through it. Was there any stage of the shoot when you felt you had taken on more than you could pull off? Yeah, there were the dark moments brought on by standing in the pouring rain and freezing cold waiting for the rain to stop, and you're in the middle of the South Island up to your knees in mud and thinking you'd rather be lying in a warm bed in front of the TV... There are moments of depression but any time I was thinking those sorts of thoughts I would ask myself a couple of questions. I'd say, "Well, do you want to direct films?" And I'd say, "Yes I do want to direct films." "Is there any movie you'd rather be doing rather than The Lord of the Rings?" And I'd say, "No there's not." The shooting of a movie's always the hardest part. Pre-production's usually a lot of fun and post-production's quite a lot of fun. But with the shooting of a film you do get into gruelling long hours, exhaustion, creeping cold, bad weather...You get into that cycle, it's pretty tough. Was it tough in another sense because you weren't in charge of the whole process? I felt like I was reasonably in charge of it. I had experiences I hadn't had before. I had 2nd units working... Geoff Murphy was shooting 2nd unit stuff, John Mahaffie was directing 2nd unit for the entire duration of the 15 months... That was fine because I enjoyed working with them and they shot good stuff. If the 2nd unit had been shooting stuff I didn't like, it would have been a nightmare but that wasn't the case... The key thing on a shoot this size is it's more important than ever that the director is in control, because you need this big machine to have a common vision. So I was very careful to make sure everybody on board knew they were making the same film. Whether you've got a crew of 200 or 2000, those people have questions that need answering and the director's usually the one to answer the questions. How many units did you have shooting at once? There was a period of time in the middle of last year when my unit was shooting, which was 1A, and we had a unit called 1B, which I usually directed - it was close to where I was but shooting a different scene. I'd walk between the two. Then we had the two 2nd units, and a scenic unit that was doing helicopter footage and various scenic shots with sunrises and sunsets and misty South Island valleys... We then had three miniature units going at the same time... This was only for a period of a few weeks. But we always had at least three units going. Would you consider yourself a collaborative director? I think so, to the extent that you can be. What I consider my job to be - and this is just my description of my job, I think all directors probably have a different view of what they want to do and to achieve - is the final filter for a lot of people's ideas. So I'm collaborative in the sense that I regard the way that I work as having ideas, because I've got to be able to say that this is what I think it should look like or how this scene should go... Then I hope that other people in the room - whether it's an art department meeting or a wardrobe meeting or a meeting with the actors or the cameramen - will come up with ideas that are better than mine... I've always tried to encourage people to bring me ideas. But on the other hand you can't make a film by committee. So what I always try to do is block the ideas that I don't like and gratefully run with the ideas that I do like. It's all geared towards the fairly selfish goal that the film we finally make is one I'd really like to watch. And that's ultimately what I based my decisions on. It's not an ego thing or who's right or who's wrong - it's just, "What would be the film I'd really enjoy?" What prompted Barrie Osborne to issue "the elephant memo"? (See box story above right - Ed) You always try for the very best and never stop trying. You always push until you can push no more. It's a philosophy I feel very strongly about... I never like to settle for anything and then just say, "Okay, this is as good as it can be." Because I think everything can always be improved, everything can be better. It just comes down to a question of... you run out of time to make things better, so you buy what you've got. It's always important to keep striving until someone like Barrie says, "We have to move things on." What was the background to the trilogy's expanding budget? The money thing was based on a budget figure of US$130 million going around in the Miramax days when we had two scripts. When New Line took over, it expanded from two movies into three movies, and we wrote three different scripts and put in a lot of sequences that weren't part of the first two... There was a big budget increase at that point, which a lot of people have accused us of blowing out. But it was just sort of inflation [as a result of turning] what Miramax was going to make into three movies. The budget hovered around US$270 million from the beginning of the shoot all the way through. We ended up with more effects shots than we thought, so we spent a little more money in the last few months farming some shots out. I don't know how much that was because I lost touch with the budget after a while and just focused on directing the film. What impact do you think Rings will have on foreign shoots here? Will it open up NZ as a location for other shoots? That's a very good question. I don't know. It's the sort of thing you need a crystal ball for... The answer's going to become fairly evident when the film gets released. It's the sort of thing that's either going to make an impression that will become obvious and everyone's phones will start ringing about bringing films down to New Zealand or it won't. I honestly can't predict which it's going to be. But I'm sure we'll find out in the first month or two of next year. A lot of people in Hollywood, a lot of studio executives are going to see The Lord of the Rings, and even though they've read about the fact that it was filmed in New Zealand, I think actually viewing the movie will make the impression on them. And I'm not sure which way that will go. Would The Lord of the Rings have been shot here if New Line hadn't been able to exploit the tax break loophole that's since been closed? No, it wouldn't have... If they couldn't get the tax break here, there was some talk it would shift into a Canadian-based production and I would have been going up there with it. But I don't know if that would have happened... None of those budgetary figures were actually run at the time, so I'm not sure. Does that make you think New Zealand should be more concerned about offering tax incentives to filmmakers? It does. I am worried about that. I'm not a particularly political person and I don't really know what the right answers are. I'm not an expert on this... But it seems to me that we're one of the few English-speaking countries that doesn't offer tax incentives. I know Australia does to some degree, the Canadians obviously do in a major way, the English government does... It seems that on the eve of us doing something exciting, by having this huge production based here that did take advantage of a tax break that existed at the time, the law suddenly changed and they shut it down... If I was being cynical, I would say it was something that New Zealanders seem to do very well - it's like running to victory and at the point you're about to cross the finishing line, you take out a gun and shoot off your toes. Which seems to be a little bit of a [national] trait. Forgotten Silver was entirely about that, a parody on our ability to be visionary and innovative and our lack of the killer instinct to then follow it through and to exploit it. Which Colin McKenzie never had the ability to do... I've got to say that shutting down all tax incentives for film right at the point The Lord of the Rings gets made is another example of that. Have you a new project lined up? There's nothing actually happening. Obviously I'm with The Lord of the Rings for the next two years. But I do have a strong interest in looking for a true New Zealand story to do again. I'd love to do a much more Kiwi-orientated film, something a lot smaller. And I love the idea of true stories. Heavenly Creatures was a wonderful experience... Doing all the research and things. I've got an itch to do something like that again. And I'd love to do a zombie film again. What's your cameo in The Fellowship of the Ring? You'll have to wait to find out. I am a little bit of a blink-and-you-miss-it type of thing, I'm afraid, so you'll have to concentrate to see it. Is it true that Miramax's Weinstein brothers are depicted as two of the ugliest orcs you'd ever not want to meet? Not particularly, although there are a couple of orcs that bear a resemblence to them and other people I shall not name. Anybody local? No. I understand the cast got matching tattoos to mark the part The Lord of the Rings played in their lives. Did you get a tattoo as well? No. They didn't ask me. It was an actor's thing. The tattoo they got was a Celtic symbol for number nine. And there were nine members of The Fellowship. And nine actors got the tattoo. So I would have been number 10 and would have completely blown their lovely little special thing. Was Liv Tyler's role severely cut in the second and third films? No, it's the reverse actually. The problem with Liv Tyler's character is she only appears in the first book. She doesn't appear in the second book at all and makes only a very small appearance in the third book. So we had to develop more story for her. And we're probably going to develop some more as well. I think when we do the pick-ups next year we'll probably expand her role because she's extremely good in the first film and her character's very strong. We've put her in the second and third films in a way she doesn't appear in the books. Has this experience whetted your appetite to work in Hollywood? No, not really. I think a lot of what made The Lord of the Rings so enjoyable was the fact it was shot here. We had a largely Kiwi crew and it was just fun making it with a bunch of people that I knew. I think The Lord of the Rings would have been a very different experience if I'd made it in the States. Nothing about the experience of shooting it here would make me want to leave the country. It's actually almost the reverse. I mean, the fact that we have a big-budget film in New Zealand and managed to attract all those actors down here for 15 months... And the art department has done such a great job. And wardrobe... You know, the fact all these Kiwis have proven they can do all these things makes me more determined to stay here. Did the making of The Lord of the Rings become a much bigger phenomenon than you'd ever imagined? It has inspired the country in a way that went beyond whatever I'd imagined. Which is great. I was probably expecting that degree of fervour on the internet. But the way that New Zealanders have embraced the film, and the way that everybody gave us support as we moved around the country, it went beyond being a film and became something that the entire country rallied behind. It was great. How do you feel about the release of The Fellowship of the Ring? I'm in a fairly karmic state. I feel okay, I feel very happy with the film I've made. I'm looking forward to it becoming a movie. It needs to be allowed to be a movie. I've had three years of this kind of anticipated event. The Lord of the Rings has been around so long on the internet, and everyone's been speculating about this and about that... But one day very soon it's going to be a film at your local theatre... In a way I'm looking forward to it being reduced from this special effects thing to just a movie that's out there with a bunch of others that you can choose to see. PHILIP WAKEFIELD © Copyright Onfilm magazine, December 2001, www.onfilm.co.nz