by Paul Fischer
by
Paul Fischer
Peter Jackson has been compared to
Tolkien's own Hobbits, which may be why he is 
appropriately
dressed to meet the press for the film's first major junket. Wearing his trademark
khaki shorts, purple T-shirt and no footwear, it's this relaxed disposition that
suggests a director simply interested in being himself and not worrying about
the rest of the world - least of all Hollywood. This is why he makes it a point
to shoot all of his work in his native New Zealand. That's the way it's been and
the way it will be. But the Hollywood establishment had enough faith in the idiosyncratic
filmmaker to allow him not only to bring Tolkien's classic fable to the screen,
but to shoot all three films simultaneously. "We always wanted to make more
than one film", Jackson explains. "For starters, we made a decision
at the very beginning that you could never do The Lord of the Rings as
one film, which a lot of people have tried to do. I think that's one of the reasons
why it hasn't been made for 50 years, because there have been scripts written
and there have been filmmakers who have sort of dabbled with the project over
the years that have tried to put it into one script and have failed, so we thought,
we're definitely not gonna make one. Originally, we were gonna make two, and Miramax
was developing the project with us for 18 months as two films. Ultimately, when
New Line came on board it was New Line's idea to make three. That was perfect
for us, because, obviously, it's like the three books." Jackson hopes that
by having shot all three films simultaneously, "that we're actually asking
audiences to become part of an event that they've never been asked to do before.
I don't think anyone's ever said to a film audience: You know what, this story's
too big for one movie, so we're gonna make three, and you're not gonna see the
end of the film, until you see all three movies."
Jackson is not the kind of director who is obsessive. He wants to make it clear
that "I've not had a lifelong ambition to make The Lord of the Rings, which
is what a lot of people are sort of 
assuming
that I've had. I've had a lifelong passion to make a fantasy adventure film, because
when I was younger I loved Ray Harryhausen's movies, as well as stuff like
Jason and the Argonauts, and the original King Kong. I've always
had a desire to make one of those fantasy adventure type films. They don't do
those movies much any more because fantasy is a strange genre that has always
been treated with huge suspicion and contempt by Hollywood. Certainly they lack
confidence with fantasy, and because they lack confidence they tend to make them
a little campy or a little over the top, or they get over-designed and it all
becomes about production design and not about the story, and the characters are
usually very clichéd." With The Lord of the Rings, Jackson
approached the novels "by making a conscious decision at the very beginning
of our project, [to] set ourselves the job of making more of an historical than
a fantasy film, because I just thought that would be interesting, to treat fantasy
as if it had a degree of reality to it. So everything we did in the movie we tried
to make feel real and just tried to avoid an over-designed sort of film and tried
to make it more earthy and organic."
One of the many challenges that Jackson and his team faces, is that he hopes audiences will accept the fact that there is no real ending to The Fellowship of the Ring. It's quite a leap of faith, but the director is unconcerned. "I certainly hope that audiences are going into the The Fellowship of the Ring realizing that it's the first of a trilogy; I don't want people going into it thinking that this is one movie, because I certainly don't want to surprise people in that way, but we've tried to make the ending of the The Fellowship of the Ring emotionally climactic. We couldn't end the story, because obviously Frodo doesn't get to Mount Doom with the ring in the Fellowship, so we've done everything we possibly can to try to create a satisfying ending; so that it feels that Frodo's completed an emotional journey and, hopefully, leaves people looking forward to what's going to happen next."
We may live in cynical times, but Jackson believes that the themes to Tolkien's
trilogy are as relevant to 
contemporary
as they were half a century ago. After all, so much of contemporary folklore,
such as Harry Potter, would not exist without The Lord of the Rings.
"What that proves is that Tolkien's themes are timeless in the genuine sense
of being timeless, because he wrote The Lord of the Rings pretty much during
the years of World War II, having himself had horrific experiences in World War
I as a lieutenant in the British Army. He went into World War I with a huge amount
of school friends and at the end of the war only two of his friends were alive.
He saw everybody die. And you know, that would affect somebody, and his themes
of courage and friendship without strings attached and self-sacrifice resonate
from his life experiences. He also felt that he was born 100 years too late, that
he would have loved to have lived in the English countryside before the Industrial
Age, because he really hated the spread of factories and chimneys belching smoke,
and he hated, that the internal combustion engine was the greatest evil ever visited
on the world. It's interesting that America adopted Lord of the Rings as did the
hippie generation of the '60's who were reading all sorts of messages with the
Vietnam War and the atomic bomb. I mean, the young American reading the book today
isn't certainly thinking about Vietnam, yet it still has a message, so I just
think his themes are universal and timeless, so you can obviously take from the
book or the movie whatever you choose to take."
And Jackson is confident that his screen version will reach an audience beyond the die-had fans of the book, of which there are millions. "I've made a film, where I felt my primary responsibility was as a filmmaker hopefully making a good movie. I didn't want to be a totally slavish Tolkien interpreter and I didn't feel that was my primary job. I mean there was a lot of money at stake, and I wanted very much to make a film that you could walk in off the street having never read the Lord of the Rings, and still enjoy the film. The book is regarded as being very, you know, it's famous for being incredibly dense and detailed and rich, which is why it has such a huge fan following. I've tried to catch the feeling of Tolkien for the people that like the book but simplify it to the extent that you don't have to have read the book to enjoy the film. It's a fine line. You cannot please everyone, and I'm sure that we haven't but, ultimately, I could only make the best film that I could."
December, 2001 All images ©2001 New Line Productions. Used by permission.
