green_queen | An Evening with Peter Jackson

This is my VERY LONG (about 5000 words) and incredibly detailed account of 'An Evening with Peter Jackson,' March 12th 2005.

I took notes throughout the entire presentation. Unfortunately, I took them in the dark and often while laughing hysterically, so even I can’t read a lot of my notes. They look like they were written by a 5 year old. Also, my pen ran out of ink during the last blooper reel, so while I will do my best to remember I can’t guarantee anything.

David Stratton hosted the evening, and they started with the super-trailer of all three movies (during which

greedy_dancer and I squealed every time the word “lost” came up.) Then Peter came out. He has lost a LOT of weight, didn’t wear glasses and had long pants and shoes on. I felt like I’d walked into the Twilight Zone. Once we were all settled from clapping, the first question David asked Peter was about whether he went to the movies as a kid. PJ said he lived in a small town and his mother occasionally took him to the movies, and the first movies he remembers seeing were from TV shows, like Thunderbirds, in around 1965. He loved Harryhausen movies like Jason and the Argonaut. His uncle had bought a Super 8 camera and filmed family events on it, and PJ started putting together that he could film things and then watch them. One day his parents’ friend, who worked at Kodak, gave them a newer, smaller Super 8 camera she got for free and he started filming things. He was always fascinated by special effects and he did his first bits of stop-motion with plasticine dinosaurs he made after seeing King Kong on TV one night.

He saw Star Wars at 16, which David referred to as “the right age to see it,” and PJ said it blew everything before out of the water in terms of special effects and what they could do. He left school at 16 so that he could raise money to buy a camera and make films, because at that stage in New Zealand there really wasn’t any kind of further education in filmmaking. He won some sort of TV challenge for filmmaking at some stage (my notes skip this bit.) Then he started working at a paper as a photo engraver and began making a short film on Sundays, keeping the undeveloped stock in the fridge because he couldn’t afford to keep it in a lab all the time. He had to work overtime in order to fund the short film, which ended up being Bad Taste. His first cut was an hour long rather than being the 10 to 15 minutes of footage he thought it was, and so he figured if he had made that much already he might as well continued. He got some funding from the New Zealand Film Commission on his third try and said he’s had support from them ever since.

Then David asked a very Freudian and really rather irritating question about why in both Braindead and Heavenly Creatures there are these 50’s mothers who are bad guys – either in the eyes of their daughter or, you know, a zombie. PJ said he had a very sweet and supportive mum, and that Stephen Sinclair had to be blamed for Braindead, because it was his idea – he wrote it as a stage play (!) but they ended up making a movie first and a stage play second. PJ said the whole movie is a social satire on normality and suburbia, and putting up social fronts. Heavenly Creature, on the other hand, was an interest of Fran’s based on the true and very famous NZ murder case.

David said that brought them to The Frighteners, which PJ said was actually written because Robert Zemeckis had come to them asking if they could write a sort of feature-length Tales from the Crypt story for him to direct. Eventually Bob Z thought that The Frighteners deserved to be made on its own and he gave it back to PJ to direct. (PJ said it was quite odd being given a script to direct that you’d written for someone else to direct.)

Then David asked a very vague question about how Lord of the Rings got made, and PJ said there’s a short version and a long version, and he’d start talking and it would probably end up being the long version. He said there isn’t any real definitive start, you just “wobble from this place to that place and eventually things happen.” It basically started with WETA, which had been operating on 1 computer doing Heavenly Creatures and was up to 30 by The Frighteners. PJ was interested in the new special effects he could use and the places he could take them to, and was curious about doing a real fantasy movie with the new technology (going back to his Harryhausen-loving youth) instead of the sci-fi movies that have been around since. He and Fran were tossing around ideas, but it always kept coming back to LotR as sort of the ultimate fantasy that couldn’t be made. He mentioned that he’d only read the books once, on a train at the age of 18, and he thought it would be awesome as a film but he’d never seriously considered making it.

Eventually he and Fran decided to just ask around and see who had the rights to Lord of the Rings, and in November of 1995 they called their agent to ask about it. It turned out Saul Zaentz had the rights from when he had produced the Bakshi version. Saul had rebutted all previous inquiries, including George Lucas (!!), so they didn’t have much hope. Still, they went to Miramax with the idea, because they’d signed a First Look deal with them while making The Frighteners which meant that they had to run everything by them first – “like being part of the Miramax family, but you had to sign a bit of paper to say you were.” Harvey Weinstein, who was the head of Miramax, became very excited about the idea and it turned out to be one of those things that PJ said was “fate”, because at the time he had just saved Saul’s ass with The English Patient. Fox had pulled the plug on Saul, and Harvey had stepped in to cover the costs and get the film made with Miramax. PJ said Saul “owed Harvey big time” (and at this stage he did a Harvey Weinstein impersonation that was very funny.) While Saul and Harvey and their lawyers locked horns PJ and Fran started working on a King Kong remake. At this stage most of the talks were about making a film of The Hobbit because it was considered too risky to make three back-to-back films at once. However United Artists still owned half of The Hobbit, while Saul owned all of LotR, so it ended up being the latter instead.

At one stage Miramax and United were in talks to do Kong and LotR together but Saul axed the Kong idea after Godzilla and Meet Joe Young bombed at the box office. Unfortunately for him he had neglected to tell Harvey, who got pissed off and decided to let PJ go ahead with doing LotR at Miramax. This is when the idea of doing LotR as two films came in – the first film was basically a squashed version of Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, ending with the Battle at Helm’s Deep, and the second film was essentially Return of the King. PJ and Fran wrote two scripts and budgeted the film for $140 million. They went to Harvey with this but Miramax was owned by those bastards at Disney, who had imposed a $75 mil limit on Miramax in terms of budgets. By this stage there had been 18 months of work done on LotR - the design team (WETA, Richard Taylor, Alan Lee and John Howe) had been working on all sorts of sketches and miniatures, and some were even already complete.

Disney turned down Miramax’s request for more money, and it all turned into a “nasty and bitter” time during which a meeting between Harvey Weinstein and PJ and Fran took place (July 1997). Harvey’s brother Bob Weinstein was too angry even to go to the meeting. PJ and Fran didn’t want to be “the second people in history to do half of Lord of the Rings,” but they quickly discovered that Harvey actually wanted to make ONE film. PJ asked if it was going to be a “four-hour Lawrence of Arabia type film” and Harvey said no, one 2-hour film covering all of LotR. PJ and Fran said that was impossible, and then it turned out that Miramax had already done it. Harvey gave PJ a three-page outline and PJ said he wished he’d brought it because we were one audience who would really appreciate it. He said they’d taken out things like the Mines of Moria, with everyone coming out of the mines and saying “Well, that was an exciting experience!” and merged Rohan and Gondor into one nation, with Denethor and Theoden collapsed into one character. Harvey even said they had a writer and director (John Madden, who had done Shakespeare in Love) on call to do it. PJ said he actually felt ill, and asked for time to fly to New Zealand and think it over. Afterwards he and Fran went to their friend David’s office and PJ said he actually asked for a scotch “because of the movies”, because he was “trembling and gutted”, so David poured him his first ever scotch.

This was around the time of Fran’s birthday, so they flew off to some remote location in a helicopter and walked along the beach and discussed it all. They knew that this would disappoint absolutely everyone who had read the books, but they also thought of the damage to their careers - Kong had already fallen through and they would get a bad name if another of their projects fell through. In the end, of course, they made the call and told their agent to tell Harvey no. What they didn’t know is that their agent then phoned and told Harvey he had to give them a chance to take the project somewhere else, since they had brought it to him in the first place. Harvey set a bunch of absolutely ridiculous demands, such as that they only had 4 weeks to find another studio and the studio had to repay him the $10 mil that he had already invested at that stage within those 4 weeks – starting immediately. PJ said that they weren’t expecting it, and had already relieved themselves of it and then their agent came back with this information. They asked for a helicopter back in spite of a storm (“the worst helicopter ride of our lives”) and then they had a design team who were still working but not getting paid. So they decided to use them in the first week before their deadline and make a 35-minute documentary about the making of Lord of the Rings, which PJ referred to as “the most important bit of filmmaking [he’s] ever done in [his] life.” He said they were essentially interviewing themselves, shooting the miniatures with fancy lighting and making the film as appealing as possible.

Meanwhile their agent was sending their scripts to absolutely everyone, so that PJ and Fran expected that in the second week to be full of meetings. They got two. Every other studio turned them down without even meeting them. The first meeting was with Polygram, a British company who said they were very interested in getting involved but were being bought at the time, and it would be four or five months before they could begin. Of course, PJ and Fran had four weeks, so that wasn’t any good to them. They decided to keep putting off the New Line interview to make it seem like they were “so hot”, the hottest things in town. PJ said he knew Mark Ordesky from earlier, but I didn’t take down when. Eventually they had the meeting on the last day they were in LA, and PJ said he thought that he got the brush-off speech from Bob Shea immediately. They’d been ‘warned about him’ by Ordesky, who said that he was a very ethereal guy and they shouldn’t be surprised if he stood up and walked out during the film. At the start of the meeting Bob said that LotR may not go through but that PJ should come to New Line if he had any ideas in the future and that they’d love to work with him.

PJ said Bob sat through the entire documentary and then he told the famous “Aren’t there 3 books?” story that you already know if you’re a fan. Bob asked to keep a copy of the tape to show Michael Lynne, but said New Line were very interested and that they would get back to him by Monday. This was in August of 1997. New Line agreed to do three films, back-to-back, and PJ and Fran rewrote the two scripts as three and began another 18 months of pre-production at New Line, so that by the time the first day of shooting rolled around PJ was well and truly ready. David said this was a good time to show the first blooper reel, which PJ said was from his own DVD and not from the original film stock, so we had to forgive the quality (which was fine by the way.)

BLOOPERS!

The first and second bloopers overlap each other in my notes so that I can’t read the first one  But I DEFINITELY remember the second!

It was in Rohan, where Merry, Pippin and Gandalf were sleeping. Billy was sneaking past Dom and then he realised Dom had something under the covers that made it look like he had an enormous boner (seriously, about half the height of Billy) and goes “Phwoar!” Dom said he was having a “dream about [something]” (the audience was laughing too hard to hear), and then Billy snuck over and got into bed with him! Billy peeked up cheekily from the covers and then Dom pulled him back under.

Then there was Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli running up to Fangorn Forest and Viggo says “Fangorn Forest…what the fuck do they think they’re doing in there?”

Aragorn is patting Frodo, Merry and Pippin on the shoulders as they pass him but he’s saying “C’mon, you little bastards…get moving…”

A couple of Ian McKellen messing up his lines.

Billy walking into the camera at Gondor (probably on purpose) was followed by Ian with a hair in his mouth, but then there was another blooper of Billy where he walked past the camera and grinned at the doco camera and they brought up a puppet of PJ! It was *hilarious*, and somebody was doing the arms flailing around.

Sean Astin broke a rock, Elijah fell over in Shelob’s web, Sean fell over in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, Ian screwed up a line and Viggo stroked his face, Sean punched a blue screen figure with a little face drawn on, Viggo was in a serious scene and then drank coke and burped.

They were shooting the coronation, with Ian crowning Viggo, but then they pan up and Ian’s got on this giant blonde beehive wig with pink flowers in it and he says “Now come the days of the Queen.” Fucking genius.

A bunch of Liv screwing up her Elvish; Hugo and Liv having difficulty; Billy saying “This is Longbottom Leaf, the last of the old fuckin’ Toby."

Two moments of Viggo and Bernard looking out at the supposedly gathered horses at the camp:
Viggo: “I just had a moment.”
Bernard: “Keep it to yourself.”
And then Viggo saying “600 won’t…fuck,” and Bernard saying “6000 won’t fuck?! Why not?” and then them screwing up their lines shooting the same scene.

A cute scene of Ian yelling confusing directions at Billy as he runs away, then runs back in the opposite direction with his sword raised; Liv’s “fucking hair” getting in her face.

CUTE bit where Sean is holding Ali and saying “Can you just stay there?” and she says “No,” so then they call action and Sean and Sarah kiss, but Maisie is screaming and Ali hops out of Sean’s arms and he sort of shrugs helplessly at the camera :D

Billy’s sword getting caught in his cloak; Ian “can’t believe he has to say these lines” while practicing to the camera.

The best ‘blooper’ ever – during the originally planned fight between Aragorn and Sauron, Aragorn says “Right…that’s it” and pulls out a semi-automatic and starts shooting at Sauron going “This is for Frodo!” and they intercut it with earlier dramatic footage of Sauron falling to bits. Good stuff.

Back to the interview with Peter. David asked him how many people were in the battle scenes an PJ said they were limited by the number of costumes (100 Uruks, 200 Rohans, 100 Gondorians and 150 Orcs) but they could fill in the rest mostly with CG, you don’t need the huge epic crowds anymore. Then David asked what would have happened had LotR been a flop and PJ said that “New Line probably wouldn’t exist” because of the AOL/Time Warner merger, New Line could’ve been swallowed up to become part of Warner Bros., and he said he would probably “be making more Bad Taste on Sundays. David asked whether it was true that there was pressure on them not to call the second film The Two Towers because of 9/11, but PJ shot that rumour down, saying it was made up by the press. It did remind him of a different story – originally New Line didn’t want a prologue on FotR, and then they wanted it cut down to 2 minutes, and he said Mark Ordesky was terrified of going to the studio and saying they had this 7-minute prologue. PJ said that it happens from time to time, “you butt heads and then go along doing what you want.” Then of course New Line wanted a prologue again for TTT but PJ said no – if the audience were silly enough not to have seen FotR they could figure it out as they went along.

David said he liked the way PJ started the third film with the unusual Deagol/Smeagol sequence, and PJ talked about how it was initially meant for the Dead Marshes scene in TTT where Frodo talks to Gollum about his sad life, but he said it slowed the pace. Everyone assumed it would go on the extended but he thought about it and they didn’t have an interesting beginning for RotK (I think he said it started at Rohan with them sleeping) so they decided to move it to the start of RotK.

I don’t remember the David question next but PJ said that initial shooting was actually about 15 or 16 months, and that they did 3 lots of shooting in 2001, bringing back the actors each time they thought of new scenes to make the movie work better. He said they could generally talk New Line into doing it because there was such immense pressure for the film to work. He went on to talk about the 18-minute “Cannes Reel,” which he said was a very audacious move – it could have worked or it could have backfired. He said they worked longer on the Cannes Reel than the first film, and then David said that it was the best footage they got to see of FotR, which I thought was a bit much.

I can’t be sure, but I *think* this is when the second blooper reel came up.

BLOOPERS

Christopher Lee lying dead on the wheel that kills Saruman, then opening his eyes and saying “There’s something vaguely familiar about all this.” Something about seeing Peter Cushing in his Dracula days and Peter Jackson today.

Dom and Billy dancing on the tables at Rohan and Billy singing “But the only brew for the brave and true, comes comes comes comes comes comes comes from the Green Dragon!” before drinking. Dom cracks up, then Billy, who says “I came too much!”

Ian telling Faramir “I’m sorry, your brother’s dead as this is the third film”; Dom and someone big (Tall Paul I’d wager) riding a horse and Eowyn’s helmet and wig falling off.

A VERY funny scene at the coronation of Faramir and Eowyn and “the look” where Daisy looks to the camera and mouths “This is bullshit” before smiling at Miranda again, who has no idea.

Viggo patting Dom on the back while Dom’s on his knees, and Dom falls flat on his face; Bernard messing up some lines; Orlando having serious troubles shooting arrows at Helm’s Deep, including not being able to get the arrow onto the bow, putting it on the wrong way around, and shooting it so that it doesn’t even make it off the bow; Bernard at the doors to Helm’s Deep saying “Hold them back! They’re Jehovah’s Witnesses!”, Bernard skipping off to war; a scene with the PJ puppet giving Ian a script from his mouth and then kissing Ian.

There were two scenes of PJ on the anniversary of shooting on location where it’s snowing and he says it’s a treat for the anniversary, a “new snow machine”, very fancy, covers quite a lot of ground. Then he says they should turn it off and get back to filming. After a couple of bloopers of Brett falling over and JRD forgetting his “fucking line” (These are no ordinary orcs, they’re Uru-quhai…no they’re not. They’re uRUK-hai…no wait), they return to PJ in the snow saying that the button on the snow machine is jammed and the police are coming, and he delegates Brian (I think this was the gaffer, but I can’t be sure) to go fix it.

Then they showed an extended sequence of the bloopers shown at another convention, where Dom and Billy are in the trailer with their pants down saying “Yours is a bit longer, but mine’s fatter…yours looks infected…” Then they pull their pants up and hide a sex doll in the bed and say they were rehearsing for a scene where “Pippin’s thing gets infected, and there are no doctors.” Billy asks for water and says they can just cut that stuff and start there. Very cute.

Then that blooper reel finished and David quote PJ as saying he “hated magic.” PJ said he didn’t like all the wand-waving, lightning bolts out of fingers as a cheap story-telling device or a cheap solution to a problem. He said those sorts of films have given fantasy a bad rep, bad films were made by overendowing themselves with that kind of magic.

David asked PJ what he thinks he can bring to a project as a director and PJ sounded quite bashful at this point saying he didn’t know. Then he said he supposed any director brings an ability to see and imagine the final, finished film. As he’s writing the script he can see it in his mind’s eyes, with camera angles and cutting and sometimes even the style of music he wants for the scene. He said he has a strong image of what the film could be without denying the organic changing nature of a movie. He said he gets all sorts of ideas from others, including the design team (who he said was brilliant and he found working with them “inspiring”.) He used the story about the stairs in the Mines of Moria drawn by (I think) Alan Lee as an example. He also talked about how they could use previz in lieu of storyboarding these days, and they animated the whole sequence.
Then he said the Lord of the Rings films are “so defined by the cast,” that he had a wonderful cast. He talked about how it was strange because instead of asking the cast to commit to just one film for a few months this was three back-to-back films over 18 months in New Zealand, so he had to pick special people, and no big names so that the story of Lord of the Rings could be the star of the movie. He said he was particularly proud of the way the relatively anonymous casting succeeded and we could see the spirit of them in the bloopers.

Then he said it was the same with Kong, which prompted David to ask how Kong was going. PJ said it was going well, but that films were tough to make and shooting is the least enjoyable part of making a movie. He said you’re in a dreamland while writing it and again while editing because you’re seeing your film come to life, but while shooting you have to deal with hard, practical realities. They’re almost at the end of shooting, with 3 weeks of principal left to go, mostly between Naomi and Kong on green screen, before post-production, when they’ll do most of the work on Kong himself. After a 112-day shoot PJ can’t believe he ever did 3 films back-to-back and can’t imagine ever doing it again.

THEY HAVE NOT FINALISED THE DESIGN FOR KONG!! They’re still in the early stages of developing him, with muscle tone and face definition. He said he’s seen the early designs and he’s happy with them, and apparently they’ve built Andy some kind of robotic suit to wear to work in, which he’s been experimenting with. Andy in human form played a cook on the boat. PJ said he’s excited about Kong, and he’s looking forward to post-production.

The release date is December 14th, just like with LotR. David asked if PJ was nervous about having a release date and PJ just said he was used to it after the three LotR films, and that it wasn’t daunting but good to work to goals. He said that a film creates itself and the director is the final filter, making it all function as a singular film. He said he’s always thought schedules and budgets were good; he likened it to being incredibly creative but in the constraints of a straight jacket. Then David said speaking of deadlines, there was no time left, so they decided to show the last blooper reel. PJ said it was a good place to end because it had Christopher Lee saying the Australian Lords Prayer as the last one (in a good Aussie accent, very funny.)

I LOST THESE BLOOPERS! I will record what I remember of them, but it’s not much I’m afraid. My pen ran out of ink!

The first blooper was of Viggo and Bernard in the Golden Hall. Bernard is looking very serious saying “A great host you say?” and Viggo responds with “They will lock you in a dark room and scan your head…A host of them! Children will play with them, tear your head off over and over again…” Then they did it again, and Viggo exclaimed “A great host! Little plastic men! Shall I give permission my lord?” and Bernard agreeing, all the while maintaining a very serious face.

Other tidbits: The hobbits popping champagne at the coronation and then hugging; Dom and Billy giving CPR to a decapitated orc head; Ian lifting his robes and strutting towards the camera with his undies showing; four Uruk-hai singing “You make me feel like a natural woman”; Elijah drifting backwards on a horse, putting on sunglasses, crossing his eyes at the camera; a couple of Dom and Elijah goofing around during Sam and Rosie’s wedding scene; some more line goofs and general mayhem.

Afterwards

greedy_dancer and I walked out all excited and went around the corner to go see a movie. We were INCREDIBLY lucky, coming to the side exit just as Peter was leaving. I immediately dumped my stuff on poor

greedy_dancer, grabbed her notebook and mine and gently forced my way through to the front of the group of people crowded around. I kept getting overlooked and realised I didn’t have anything LotR related to sign, so I grabbed my ticket stub from my bag and held it up and said “Hi.” He took it and said “Hi, how are you?” At this point my brain shut down and went into automatic mode and instead of saying something clever or heartfelt I said “Fine thanks, how are you?” in my chirpiest phone-voice. He chuckled and looked a little surprised and said “I’m good thanks,” smiled at me and handed me back the autograph. I managed a “thankyou” before running off to let the others through.

It was SO GREAT! PJ was very open, and he kept his audience in mind the whole time, which was really nice. I’m so glad I took notes, because I never would’ve remembered a damn thing otherwise.

Green Queen

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Date: 2005-03-13 11:38 am (UTC)

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