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A ROUNDTABLE INTERVIEW WITH THE CAST AND CREW OF THE LORD OF THE
RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING
On Wednesday, Dec. 5th, Jeffrey Overstreet
joined several other privileged film critics, including Steven D.
Greydanus (Decent Films), Andrew Coffin (World), and Michael Elliott
(Movie Parables) to talk with members of the
cast and crew for the year's most ambitious, exhausting, and gloriously
realized film. Over the course of this week, Looking Closer will be
adding excerpts of those interviews here. Keep checking back!
Peter Jackson -
director
Press:
In the late 60s, Zeffereli introduced Shakespeare to a generation that
thought Shakespeare was difficult to handle. You have
done a similar thing for this generation with Tolkien.
Peter Jackson:
I know what you’re saying. I don’t normally think about the statistics:
I just believe that if you want to make a movie or there are reasons to
do something you should do it. New Line went out and conducted all sorts
of research at the beginning before we started as to what The Lord of
the Rings was today, and they came back and told us that, ‘Most
young kids today don’t know The Lord of the Rings—they haven’t
read it. It was read by generations in the 60s and into the 70s, and
that today… which was 1998 that this conversation would have happened…
no one knows it. So don’t assume that you’re making something that’s
based on a popular book because the main moviegoing audience doesn’t
have a clue about it, don’t know anything about it.’ That’s what we were
told by the studio when we went into the making of the film.‘
Of course what’s
happened now is that the book sales have gone through the roof since the
films started to come out. They’ve just exploded. The books are now way
back up on the bestseller list. Somebody said that The Lord of the
Rings sold more copies than the Harry Potter books did last
year. So it’s right up there again now. Clearly what’s happened is a
bunch of young kids have gone and picked it up and actually read it. I’m
very pleased with that. It’s fantastic. It’s not an easy book to read
when you’re young!
Jeffrey
Overstreet:
You’ve spent so much time in Tolkien’s mind. What do you find most
appealing about his view of the world, his view of morality and
spirituality? And what do you find most discomforting as well?
Jackson:
What I kind of admire about Tolkien, learning a bit about him from
the books—and I learned more about him
obviously from researching the scripts prior to that—he was just a guy
who was profoundly irritated by things and annoyed. And he vented
through this book that he created. And most of the things that he was
irritated about are very reasonable things to be angry about.
He hated the way that
the English countryside had been destroyed by the industrial revolution
in the mid 1850s. The Shire represents obviously the England that he
loved, the past rural farming community, simple life, simple people. And
then the factories arrived, the industrial age, and suddenly chimneys
were belching smoke. There was pollution. Forests were being cut down to
feed the steam-driven machines and townships were no longer like
Hobbiton… they were now terraced housing that were being built around
the factories. You were enslaved to the factories. All of the workers
were living there, and when the whistle sounded in the mornings, they
would just file into the factories and disappear until 6 o’clock at
night and then file back to their homes again. You were all enslaved to
the machinery of the factory, and the Ring is obviously a metaphor for
the machine. It enslaves you, it takes away your freewill.
And so he vented about
all this stuff. The Ents he created—he made the trees fight back. He
flooded all the industry at Isengard with the dams. Nature struck back.
He protected the Shire. He was a guy who put passion into this so-called
‘fantasy novel.’ I do admire him for that.
We actually tried to
honor all that stuff. We made a real decision at the beginning that we
weren’t going to introduce any new themes of our own into The Lord of
the Rings. We wanted to make a film that was based on what Tolkien
was passionate about.
Press:
What about the other part of that question? What did you find
disquieting about that vision?
Jackson:
There’s nothing disquieting about it particularly. Tolkien was quite
modern in that sense. He was quite caring about the environment long
before most other people were caring about the environment. He started
working on this book in 1938 and ‘39 and it was published in ‘53. So he
was ahead of his time in a lot of areas.
He was also a product
of the war that he fought in—World War One. Seeing all but one of his
school friends killed during the course of that war… coming out of it
and realizing that there are no winners in war… you only lose, really,
in war. I think that’s important for Lord of the Rings because,
in a sense, Frodo cannot win. Even though the war has been won, there is
no victory for Frodo, really. I think that’s what he felt coming back
from World War One and seeing all these young men destroyed by the war
and the sense of ‘What did it achieve? What was it for? Do you feel
better when you’ve been through a war?’ You’ve been damaged by it. You
know you will never be the same. That’s what he felt about Frodo. That’s
from his own experiences.
Jeffrey Overstreet:
Tolkien once wrote in a letter that he did not believe that human beings
were capable of resisting evil ultimately. But he said there is hope in
the fact that we are not the author of the story. Does that resonate
with anything you believe—the symbolism about the Secret Fire or the
power of the Valar?
Jackson:
I don’t know.
I don’t know whether
evil exists. You see stuff happening around the world and you believe it
probably does. I think that human beings are not capable… I think that
evil exists within people. I don’t know whether it exists as a force
outside of humanity.
One of the things
that’s in Tolkien’s book too is this feeling that the elves are this
perfect race. They’re intelligent, they’re sophisticated… they’re
spiritual. If you have the elves in charge of the world, there will be
no wars, there will be no hatred. And the whole thing with The Lord
of the Rings is that that age is now past and men are going to
inherit this world. Tolkien was writing it as a pre-history. So the
story that he was writing in the sense that he had the orcs which
represented the enslavement of people being defeated by men in a time
that elves were leaving. He knew that Aragorn inheriting the world and
mankind taking over was only going to lead to World War One eventually,
because he imagined this book as happening six thousand years ago. He
certainly wasn’t writing with a degree of triumph that mankind is now in
charge. He felt that we are flawed and they we don’t deserve to be in
charge of the world.
Press:
Tolkien also felt that The Lord of the Rings was a fundamentally
religious and Catholic work, ‘unconsciously so at first but consciously
so in the end.’ [Do you feel the same way about the film?]
Jackson:
I think his Catholicism… I’m not a Catholic, so I didn’t put any of
that personally into the film on my behalf, but I am certainly aware of
certain things that Tolkien was thinking about. The passing of Frodo
into the Gray Havens is clearly Tolkien’s dramatization of the journey
into an afterlife, into a spiritual afterlife. Frodo essentially dies at
the end of the film. The way we filmed it, it isn’t a moment of death,
but there is a moment of passing, which for Tolkien represents
the same thing.
Steven D. Greydanus:
One of the major themes is that in the very last stage, Frodo fails. He
is spared the fate of Gollum and Isildur only by… chance, fate,
Providence, whatever you want to call it. Do you think that for us,
watching the film, as we struggle with our own inner demons, that this
has any resonance? I’m thinking particularly in regard to some of the
ideas in some of the addiction-recovery programs of the acknowledgement
of a Higher Power. Do you think there is anything we can take away [to
that effect] from the films?
Jackson:
It’s a good question. I’m not sure. We modified the film a little
bit from the book. We tried to have our cake and eat it too. This is not
really answering your question, but… We did want to honor the sense that
it was the pity of Bilbo that was ultimately going to lead to the
destruction of the Ring.
Bilbo not killing
Gollum, and Frodo not killing Gollum at various stages of the story—many
people would have regarded that as the sensible thing to do. Frodo
showing pity to Gollum was a factor that led to the destruction of the
Ring directly. Tolkien made that connection very simple in the book. In
the book he had Frodo injured with his finger being bitten off and then
Gollum dance for joy on the edge of the Crack of Doom, and then he slips
and falls into the lava. Tolkien just did it the most simple way that he
could for what he was trying to achieve.
In the movie, we felt
that there was a problem with that. We felt that audiences—a lot of
people haven’t read the book, of course—would feel very let down and
would actually judge Frodo badly for just sitting there watching as the
ring got accidentally destroyed, and they’d feel that Frodo would have
failed essentially in his quest, and it was an accident that stepped in.
We had to be careful in the movie to keep Frodo from looking bad because
of that.
So I said to Elijah,
“We’ve obviously modified it. So when Gollum dances on the Crack of
Doom, we want you going back for the Ring. Now, you know, it’s really
got to be ambiguous as to whether you’re going back to take the Ring and
destroy it and complete your mission or whether you want to take the
Ring for yourself [in a way] that’s got nothing to do with destroying
it.” And Elijah said, “Oh, I think I want it!” [chuckles] So I said,
“Just play it in a very ambiguous way.” So Frodo went for Gollum—Elijah
went for the Ring. The two of them fought: Andy Serkis was there, and
Elijah, and the two of them fell in.
So we still tried to
preserve what was important to Tolkien—the sense that it was the pity
that [resolved the conflict.] There’s nothing that takes away from that.
If Gollum hadn’t been there, if he had been killed earlier, then Frodo
would have just kept it. We still had the presence of Gollum being the
catalyst that led to its destruction.
[Regarding the added
scene of Sam rescuing Frodo from the cliff.]
We didn’t want to make
Frodo heroic. We wanted to make Frodo feel that he had failed. At that
point, he’s free of the burden—the Ring is destroyed and it’s no longer
having that power over him. There’s a sense that Frodo feels like he
wants to let go, he feels that he has failed, and Sam says, ‘No, don’t
do that.’
Press:
Why do you feel these epic stories needed to be told right now, in these
last few years?
Jackson:
It’s sort of interesting because there’s been so much written about
the September 11th events and the movies. And in my mind
there was never a connection between them because we started working on
this in ’95. We shot the movie in ’99 and 2000. It was filmed and what
you saw in the movie was four years old. But it is strange, because we
made these movies when the climate in the world was much different than
it is now.
We made these films
because it is such a great book and because of the themes in the book.
The themes in Tolkien’s work… are timeless, and I think that is what is
genuinely special about them. I think the only reason that a book can be
popular for 50 years and stand the test of time … is because it is
genuinely timeless. It is not dated. It is not fixed to a particular
moment in time, whether it’s post-September-11th or
pre-September-11th or World War Two or World War One or any
of these cataclysmic times in our age. They’re not related to current
events, they’re just timeless themes.
Jeremy Landes:
Your films really give me hope—hope for the world, hope that the world
can improve. Were there certain themes [that you had mind to that
effect]?
Jackson:
We didn’t try to put our own baggage on these films. I agree that
hope is there. At least, I hope hope is there! It must be about
hope. I don’t think the alternative is particularly attractive. There
has to be some degree of hope.
Bob
Smithouser:
Going into the Lord of the Rings, you weren’t exactly a household name.
And now you’ve put out three extraordinary pictures. You adapted a
classic book and your next project is to remake a classic film. What is
the feeling that you as an artist have coming out of The Lord of the
Rings different than when you went in?
Steven D. Greydanus:
And when are you going to do The Hobbit?
[laughter around the table]
Jackson:
Everyone asks me about The Hobbit! I’ll
answer that in a bit.
It’s interesting. I’ve
never really felt different to how I was when I was seven years old
making movies with a Super 8 camera. I’m just a kid. I feel like I’m
still a kid. I feel like I’m making movies because I love making movies.
I’m making King Kong because I saw that movie when I was nine
years old. It cemented in me a desire to want to make films for the rest
of my life. I’d been making films on Super 8 and then I saw that film
and I thought “I just want to do this so badly.” That’s why I’m making
King Kong… I just love that movie so much.
There’s a generation of
kids now who don’t watch black and white films anymore… they don’t watch
classic movies anymore. The generation at my age did, and the next
generation now doesn’t. They don’t care for looking at black and white
stuff. Even our kids—as soon as something black and white shows up on
TV, they just don’t want to see it. So I think King Kong is a
story that can legitimately be re-introduced to a new generation.
Press:
I was thinking more about you as an artist, having the qualifications
to…
Jackson:
I think those kinds of questions are much easier for you guys to
talk about and debate amongst yourselves. I have no real self-awareness.
I feel like I’m a bit more experienced now. I used to be terrified of
studios. When I was making The Frighteners it was the first time
I’d ever worked with a studio… I was terrified of meeting the studio
people. I’d only made New Zealand films. I was a bit insecure. I feel
less insecure which is good. I feel a bit more confident, which is a
good feeling.
But I don’t feel that
different and I don’t know what expectations are on me. Expectations for
myself are just that I make a good movie, and that what I hope to do,
whether it’s a zombie movie like I used to do or The Lord of the
Rings or King Kong or whatever it is. You just go into it
wanting it to succeed on its own terms and to be an entertaining piece
of cinema.
Fortunately with
Lord of the Rings we had very strong themes which Tolkien created…
but I don’t think generally I make movies for messages. I make movies
for entertainment. Hitchcock’s quote is my favorite quote: ‘Some
people’s films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake.’ But
fortunately with Lord of the Rings we had a slice of Tolkien’s
life in there which we were able to use to strengthen the movie.
The Hobbit has
never been discussed. That’s actually the truth. It may seem strange,
because everybody asks me about it, so they have assumptions. New Line
has never ever had a conversation with me about The Hobbit. I do
know that the rights are complicated because United Artists has for some
reason—I don’t actually know why—has some distribution rights to The
Hobbit. In other words, if anybody makes The Hobbit, United
Artists has to distribute it, which New Line wouldn’t want because
obviously they have a distribution division of their own that they’d
want to use. Lawyers would have to talk to each other. New Line and UA
would have to talk… and they wouldn’t talk to me until they had all the
legal stuff cleared. I haven’t heard that they’ve even had a
conversation about it.
Press:
Peter, I appreciate what you said about 9/11. The collapse of the towers
at the end bears an eerie striking physical resemblance to the collapse
of the World Trade Center. I’m curious about the timing. Is that just
wildly coincidental?
Jackson:
Well, the collapse of the tower is obviously a very important part of
the book. The collapse of the tower is really a metaphor for Sauron’s
physicality because he’s just a flaming eye, he’s a force of evil. The
tower is really his body.
I know what you’re
saying about the similarity. I don’t know how you can have the collapse
of a tower and not have it be similar. We tried to stay away from
it actually. We deliberately tried to make it feel different. We
actually had versions of the collapse where they put a lot of dust into
the collapse, and I said, ‘No, this does look much too much like
the World Trade Center, so let’s make it dry without dust.’ So we made
it look more like black ice that is collapsing, like a sort of ice tower
that was cracking up and falling in shards. We tried to give it a
different quality because we were very aware of the problems with that.
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