Anything You Can Imagine

Expanding into three films, says Boyens, allowed them the luxury ‘to try and do scenes to the fullest of their capacity.’ Within the exigent drive of plot they could explore character and build mood, even stillness. The priceless moment of Bilbo and Gandalf, two very old friends, contentedly blowing smoke rings and galleons upon the doorstep of Bag End; the camera gazing in awe upon the pillared immensity of Dwarrowdelf as Howard Shore’s score swells up through the ancient columns. Such poise was totally contrary to the hyper-kinetic dogma of millennial blockbustermaking.

Obviously they also had room for plenty more Tolkien, and some painful excisions were immediately remedied. ‘It was such a relief to have Lothlórien back,’ says Boyens, and the Elven forest was the first thing she returned to its designated place.

The book was full of renewed possibility.

Says Jackson, ‘Unlike most movies where the pressure comes and you literally take twenty pages out, our scripts actually grew by thirty to forty pages, because we would keep finding stuff in the books. We were constantly thinking, “God, we really should be filming this, this is great, and we’d then write a page, show it to the actors, and they’d go “this is good” and I’d say, “You know, on Friday, I think we can squeeze this new scene in pretty simply.” It was very organic.’

The problem was it never ended. They couldn’t stop writing, editing, re-writing, trimming, extending, delving into the mines of the text, working with the actors, twisting and turning the mythology into cinema. This went on literally in tandem with the shoot. A honing of story in the same way a special effect can be bettered with care and attention. Such that there was never a definitive finished screenplay, not on page.

An early draft of the three-film version, dated 20 November 1998, reads like an alternative universe to an alternative universe, with many of these scenes shot and abandoned. Opening with Frodo and Sam surveying the limits of the Shire from a hilltop, Farmer Maggot clings on and the hobbit heroes encounter the first Ringwraith without Merry and Pippin. Rivendell, as we shall see, awaits a major overhaul. There is an Orc assault on the borders of Lothlórien, where Aragorn has a flashback to the days he spent there with Arwen and Frodo glimpses Gandalf in Galadriel’s mirror.

In this version, the second and third films radically depart from the book, with Arwen’s participation expanded even from the two-film draft. She follows the Fellowship to Lothlórien and then on to Edoras rescuing the refugee children from an Orc attack along the way. The love triangle is revived from the treatment, with a semi-comic rivalry established between Arwen and Éowyn. Arwen still battles at Helm’s Deep, still skinny-dips with Aragorn, still helps fight off a Ringwraith that swoops for Pippin, and still rides with the Rohirrim, but now alongside Éowyn disguised as a man (diluting the whole effect). Arwen will be left for dead by the Witch-king before Éowyn dispatches him. And Sauron still confronts Aragorn at the Black Gates.

They were constantly trying to insert the structural lessons gleaned from McKee to the glacial magnificence of Tolkien: climaxes, twists, foreshadowings, turning points and delayed reveals. Balanced with wilfully obscure references to his deep mythology. His archaic language could have enormous power when delivered by an Ian McKellen or Christopher Lee. But for clarity they would trim and edit from the book, moving passages around in the chronology or between speakers like a slider puzzle.

Boyens’ ancient prologue was still being reworked in post.

‘I first wrote it as Gandalf narrating,’ she says, running back through the manifold revisions in her head — there had been a Frodo-narrated version at one stage. ‘And then I wrote it in the voice of Galadriel. That was Fran’s idea, and it was a good one. Then when we were recording the ADR in London, I said to Fran, “Can we overlay it in Elvish?” You want that sense of strangeness of history.’

The trilogy’s overture carries the quality of a dream as Blanchett’s yearning voice pulls us across the frontier into Tolkien’s imagination.

*

The creative dynamic that evolved between Jackson, Walsh and Boyens would define the trilogy: the visualist devising heart-stopping scenes; the realist seeking emotional truths; and the Tolkien authority mindful of the Elvish provenance of Gandalf’s sword. As an unwritten rule, Jackson was responsible for what they categorized as the ‘Big Print’ set-piece stuff such as the battle with the Cave-troll (which elaborates on Tolkien to great effect). Something, Boyens soon noticed, he did with an extraordinary immediacy and originality. As if in response to that strangeness in Tolkien’s world no sequence was allowed to bear the formulaic imprint of a Hollywood blockbuster. Jackson, writing in those caps in which you can feel the camera’s hungry eye: ‘The dark WATER BOILS as the HIDEOUS BEAST lashes out at the FELLOWSHIP!’

‘Philippa and I were very invested in the emotional content of the story,’ Walsh explained in a rare interview. ‘It’s easy for those things to be obscured by spectacle and the sheer sort of exhaustion of that final ascent to Mount Doom. But we wanted to touch the audience in a meaningful way. Maybe that’s an easier thing for us to do because we are women.’

Boyens did the bulk of the physical typing sitting up in bed with her laptop or at her desk. ‘We got into this rhythm. I was the faster typist and better speller. Fran’s great because she can see the scene in her head. When I write, the words don’t come unless I actually physically type them.’

They were known to spend a whole day in their pyjamas, writing, writing, writing. ‘Then Fran would have time with the kids,’ recalls Boyens. Jackson and Walsh’s children, Billy and Katie, were still only infants. ‘So it was nuts,’ she laughs. But nothing could beat that moment of breakthrough. When, as Boyens puts it, ‘the landscape held’.

Walsh was the driving force. Jackson’s partner would be the first to admit she wouldn’t naturally have chosen to adapt The Lord of the Rings. She had been seduced by Jackson’s passion for the possibility of something epic. As much as she was caught in the slipstreams off the Misty Mountains, addicted to Middle-earth, she could remain more academic about the material: how does it work as entertainment?

‘I learned how to write from her and from Pete, but mostly from Fran,’ says Boyens. ‘There’s so many holes and missteps with a film. There are so many different ways you can go and so many things that you have to break. I’m someone who would paper over the cracks. She couldn’t. The other thing that I learned from her is that it’s the ideas which are informing the story that are important. Why would anyone care? And understanding how you take what is interior, especially for a character such as Frodo, and translate it to film. She was masterful at the Gollum-Sméagol dynamic.’

Kamins can see that they were a unique producing-directing-writing unit. ‘You understood that they were close. They were willing to argue with each other to make something better. To push each other to prove why their point was right.’

And the clear distinction of roles could be deceptive. Walsh and Boyens could be good on the Big Print action scenes and Jackson excellent on the fine print of Tolkien.

Still, freed up by the obsessive dedication of his co-writers, Jackson utilized his energies across preproduction, finding the visual texture with which to clothe the bones of the words. As shooting bore down on him like a mûmak, the director took more of an ‘overarching eye’, says Boyens. Generally, after a team discussion, she and Walsh would do a draft of a scene and then Jackson would do his pass.

‘I was literally almost doing a shot list,’ recalls Jackson. ‘A lot of screenwriters say don’t tell the director what to do, but I guess as I’m the director I don’t mind. It helps when I am sitting there reading the script a year later and knowing that I had a thought to do a close-up.’

The original three 150-page scripts presented to each actor were always available for consultation, but they were only blueprints. Rhys-Davies laughed about the dreaded brown envelope that would be slipped under their door each morning with that day’s revisions.

Sean Astin describes the scripts as ‘fluid’. But if an actor wanted to adjust a line on set, try it in a different way, they would be met with resistance. Jackson would joke that he dare not cross the ‘script Nazis’. Given what Boyens and Walsh were going through, he may have been genuinely fearful. They were constructing a monumental house of cards where one minor adjustment could bring the whole edifice crashing down.

Yet the cast did contribute. Both in preproduction and production they would meet with Walsh and Boyens to talk through upcoming scenes. Viggo Mortensen, who always had the books about his person, was relentless when it came to his character. Astin likes to think of it as keeping the filmmakers’ ‘feet to the fire’. And that drive brought Aragorn to life.

Astin remembers coming up with the idea that Sam had been secretly spying on the Council of Elrond throughout. How else would he be aware of what had been decided? ‘Sam belonged there,’ he had argued to a sceptical Walsh. It was, he insists, ‘a legitimate desire to act as an audience surrogate’.

A compromise was reached where Sam is seen hiding in the shrubbery. Astin wasn’t wholly mollified, but nothing was as emblematic of the brinkmanship of writing — and indeed shooting — as mounting the Council of Elrond. ‘Just don’t make me go back to Rivendell,’ Boyens would remonstrate whenever things got complicated.

A great gulp of exposition that often defeats casual readers of the book, here we are introduced to the members of the Fellowship and get a lesson in the complexities of the ‘big picture’ via a succession of stories within the story, told at exorbitant length by individual characters. Moreover, Jackson has an allergy to any form of reportage. Show-don’t-tell is the heartbeat of cinema. You have to picture things, not have actors describe them — even actors as persuasive as McKellen. But this would necessitate a frenzy of flashbacks.

In the book, the Council is where Gandalf finally tells the tale of his capture by Saruman. As early as the two-film draft the writers had decided cleverly to cut away from the hobbits’ journey through the Shire to portray Gandalf’s excursion to Isengard in real time. This both exploited the potential of two ancient wizards duelling with shockwaves of magic and teased the possibility that the Bombadil episode could have occurred in the meantime. ‘We chose to leave some things untold, rather than left out,’ is Boyens’ escape clause. Only Gandalf’s eagle-spirited getaway is suspensefully withheld until Rivendell.

To avoid the scourge of reportage the script syncopates a variety of flashbacks and reveries throughout the story without stalling momentum. A feat doubly impressive given Tolkien’s epic mode didn’t provide much inner life for his characters — Gollum expresses his internal narrative aloud.

‘Backstory was incredibly difficult to do,’ confesses Boyens. It had to be character driven, or action driven. Nevertheless, as written, the Council scenes were yawning to a stifling forty minutes while everyone sat in a circle talking politics. There was no way they could effectively put the story on hold for so long. Figuring out the scale issues and eyelines alone was headache inducing.

Ordesky remembers joining Walsh and Boyens at the shoot’s hotel HQ while on location in Queenstown as the dreaded Council loomed in the next block of filming. They were in one of the most beautiful places in New Zealand unable to leave the hotel as they wrestled the scene into submission. ‘It was such an education,’ he says, ‘seeing their process of laying tracks in front of the moving train, as Fran liked to say.’

Says Boyens, ‘One of the things that I learned in particular and, I think, Fran and Pete did too — and actually the studio did too — is that you didn’t have to explain the history of Dwarves. You just needed John Rhys-Davies to turn up and be a Dwarf.’

They needed to trust the actors.

As Boromir, Sean Bean immortalizes the finished scene with his portentous, half-whispered line reading: ‘One does not simply walk into Mordor …’ A passage of dialogue scribbled on a piece of paper and literally balanced on his knee (you can spot him subtly glancing down).

‘He was so good,’ says Boyens, savouring the victory. ‘That tension between him and Viggo … Man, it was great casting: those two opposite each other … And I’m very proud of my Pippin line: “Where are we going?” You kind of needed it.’

The humour in the scripts often goes uncelebrated. Enriched by the fine cast, the comic elements help puncture any drift toward pomposity. Merry and Pippin’s chittering banter, Gandalf’s crabby exasperation, Gimli (surely Jackson’s avatar in the films) and his rivalry with Legolas, Sam and Gollum, the slowpoke Ents and the quarrelsome Orcs all contribute a flavour that is consciously Jacksonesque.

‘It’s taking the piss,’ says a delighted Boyens. ‘And that is Pete’s sense of humour definitely. He always says that you don’t earn the pathos if you don’t make people laugh.’

Away from the wellspring of Harryhausen and Kong, Jackson adored the sublimely engineered slapstick and anguish of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and the gonzo follies of Monty Python. Comedic forces welcome amid the serious business of saving the world.

*

In early 1997, Michael Palin was in Wellington for a one-man show, and Jackson wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to go backstage and meet a hero. They shared the usual pleasantries. Jackson telling the erstwhile Python how much he appreciated his work. Palin enquiring after what the director was currently working on. They got talking about The Lord of the Rings. Then it occurred to Jackson to ask a pertinent question.

‘Do you know where Alan Lee lives?’

Jackson was desperately trying to get hold of the seemingly reclusive artist’s expertise, but so far in vain. It had occurred to him that Palin had worked with Lee on an illustrated children’s book called The Mirrorstone — he may have even got hold of a copy — about a boy travelling to a wizardly realm via his bathroom mirror.

‘Ah, he’s a funny chap, isn’t he?’ Palin recalled. ‘I’ll find out for you.’

A few weeks later an email arrived bearing Lee’s Devon address. ‘It’s true,’ laughs Jackson. ‘Michael Palin came to the rescue. No one could figure out how to contact him.’

While re-reading The Lord of the Rings, Jackson found himself eagerly anticipating the next of Lee’s wonderful illustrations. He was struck by how utterly removed the pictures were from that juvenile vogue for muscle-bound Conan-clones draped in a buxom wench that adorned heavy metal albums and Dungeons & Dragons boxes. ‘They were sort of pastoral, with these elegant pastels. Sort of historical, I suppose,’ he says. ‘We fell in love with those pictures.’

As he surveyed Middle-earth with his internal camera it was Lee’s version of the world he would likely see. So he began to gather together as many of the artist’s calendars, book covers, posters and compendiums of Tolkien artwork as he could lay his hands on. This was pre-internet, pre-eBay, so it was a matter of trawling second-hand bookshops, collectors’ fairs, jumble sales and nagging friends to scour their attics.

‘I was tracking down calendars going back to the seventies, trying to see who the other artists were. That was how we saw John Howe’s work — in calendars.’ Howe had contrasting strengths. Lee was good at the gentle whimsical, hobbit stuff — it was very beautiful. The more dynamic Howe, in Jackson’s opinion, ‘did really great Nazgûl’. His paintings were ‘like freeze frames of a movie’.

Jackson wallpapered an entire room with the two visions of Middle-earth, hoping to absorb the poetry and drama of the images. Then it occurred to him that osmosis was unnecessary. Why not put your inspirations on the payroll? And the decision to involve Lee and Howe as guiding lights was another piece of applied Kiwi logic that bled into the visionary. In a stroke, the films became a continuum of what for many was the definitive Tolkien aesthetic.

However, despite the best efforts of Miramax, Lee had proved elusive. All they could ascertain was that he lived in the middle of Dartmoor — the insinuation being he was some kind of mad hermit. They were also rather suspicious he was a minion of the Tolkien Estate.

Fusing Bruegel with Arthur Rackham, Lee is arguably the greatest of the Tolkien school. Howe is exalted too, and the likes of Pauline Baynes, Ted Nasmith, Ian Miller and Michael Foreman. But Lee, certainly in recent years, is largely responsible for shaping our perception of what Middle-earth looks like.

‘I get that, I get people saying my work is exactly as they imagined it,’ he says. ‘But it’s interesting because often it is not exactly as I imagined it when I read the book. But that is the way it turned out through the process of drawing. I would say it is in the right ballpark.’

In conversation Lee speaks in hushed, careful tones as if you’ve surprised him in a library. Silver-haired and bearded with an intense, indecipherable gaze, he is well cast in a silent cameo as one of the nine kings (second from the right) in the prologue. The immediate impression is someone both reassuringly adult and somewhat mysterious.

Lee had moved into illustrating paperbacks from art school in the late 1960s, gravitating toward anything ‘slightly weird or ancient’. He was responsible for the first fourteen covers of that young reader’s rite-of-passage The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories. Through renowned publisher Ian Ballantine3 he contributed pictures to two best-selling anthologies: Faeries and Castles. Lee had first read The Lord of the Rings when he was seventeen and working in a graveyard, but it wasn’t until Castles he first attempted Tolkien with versions of Barad-dûr, Cirith Ungol, and Minas Tirith. These drew the approval of the Tolkien Estate who agreed to his being commissioned to paint fifty watercolours for the 1992 centenary edition of The Lord of the Rings. In 1996, he was asked to illustrate The Hobbit.

Like a portent, in 1997 a producer from Granada television approached him about providing concept art for a proposed twelve-part television adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. ‘The script actually read quite well,’ he remembers. ‘But in the end he couldn’t get the approval for it.’

Then one morning a package arrived by courier all the way from New Zealand containing two videos, two scripts, and a letter of introduction from a fellow named Peter Jackson. He helpfully included a number to call. The videos were Heavenly Creatures and Forgotten Silver. ‘He had neglected to put in Bad Taste,’ notes Lee. He watched the brilliant Heavenly Creatures first. Then he read the letter, in which Jackson explained that the scripts were for another potential adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and would Lee like to be involved?

Jackson, meanwhile, had been following the package via his courier and knew it had been delivered, satisfying himself that he wouldn’t hear back for weeks. Hours later his fateful phone rang. It was Lee’s quiet, gracious tones announcing that he would love to be involved. As luck would have it, he was finishing up a project. With no pressing family ties, he was ‘kind of free’.

The artist laughs at the memory. ‘I went down to New Zealand for six months. I ended up staying for six years.’

Howe had heard the odd rumour about a potential adaptation of the book, but knew little else. Born in Vancouver, Canada, he had since settled among the chocolate box lakes and mountains of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, no less removed from Hollywood than deepest Devon. Growing up in a rural outpost he had known ‘ever since he could remember’ that he wanted to live off his artistic talents, but never dreamed it was possible. He should finish high school — get himself a normal job.

His life changed when Tolkien-themed calendars started appearing in the town bookstore in the mid-1970s. It wasn’t that he was an avid fan. He read The Lord of the Rings during high school, having visited The Hobbit as a child. ‘They didn’t really strike me as anything,’ he admits, enjoying the irony. An opinion that might have been shaped by the fact he read the trilogy in the wrong order. Someone had always beaten him to The Fellowship of the Ring in the local library. So he ended up reading The Two Towers and Return of the King before the first part. ‘I was a bit confused,’ he laughs.

The calendars showed that it was possible to have a career painting pictures based on fantasy novels. Suddenly Middle-earth came alive as a world of infinite possibility; he still remembers his first attempt: ‘It was from the Pelennor Fields and had a Frank Frazetta-like touch — a reptilian creature and Nazgûl rising up to tackle Éowyn.’ Howe would pick up the latest calendar and each month do his version of the picture.

Over the years, as he established himself as an illustrator, Howe diligently sent samples into HarperCollins for their Tolkien calendars. Until, in 1987, he finally had three pieces published.

Rather than a package, Howe received a phone call in the middle of the night. Jackson had tracked down the artist’s number with relative ease but in his excitement had forgotten about the time differences. Ten days later Howe was on a plane to New Zealand.

‘The commitment was extremely light at that stage. The project had yet to be confirmed, and if things didn’t work out, you have your ticket home.’ While his wife and son would follow him, Howe never relocated with any permanence to Wellington. Conscious of his son’s education he would exit the project when production finally got underway in 1999. ‘We were back home once sets were being built.’

Howe shares the same meditative delivery of his colleague but is more eccentric. Where Lee is almost serenely composed, Howe has an undercurrent of energy that can’t be stilled. With his thin frame, flowing brown hair and beard he cultivates a little wizardliness, that or a mad professor. He too is one of the nine kings (second from the left), but harder to recognize beneath his wig and frown.

Jackson laughs. ‘We did Alan first and then we did John. Then we figured out that they had never met each other, and I thought, “God, I hope there’s no rivalry here.” They literally met each other on the aeroplane.’

They knew of one another’s work, of course, and had vaguely corresponded. But it was on the middle leg of their journey from Singapore into New Zealand in 1997 that they became acquainted. Howe had been sitting downstairs when one of the stewards approached him.

‘A Mister Lee wants to meet you.’

‘I didn’t even make the connection,’ he says. So it was midway over the Indian Ocean the two artists were introduced, and found they got on very well. Which was a relief.

Although, while changing planes at Auckland, Lee — and the airport ground staff — was startled to discover Howe had packed a suit of armour. As a serious medieval re-enactor he was keen to bestow his historical expertise in forging suits of amour on Weta Workshop, sceptical they were up to the task.

Howe still has a ‘laser-sharp image’ of arriving into Wellington for the first time, following the coastline as it snaked along the southern hem of the North Island. ‘It was an extraordinary feeling.’

From the airport they were driven straight to Jackson’s house at Karaka Bay and over the kitchen table, adrenaline keeping overwound body clocks ticking, began to understand how the director saw them working with the production. They would, Jackson informed them, design everything, with the division of labour laid out as per his appreciation of their respective gifts: Lee the light side, Howe the dark. Naturally, lines were blurred. Howe would design the vestibule of Bag End and Lee created Orthanc. Still, it was a place to start and this way they could cover more ground.