There and Back Again (23 page)

Walking through Weta Workshop, I saw ironsmiths working on swords and shields, and hundreds, if not thousands, of orc masks. We toured the digital workshop, where so much of the films' groundbreaking computer-generated imagery would be produced, as well as an editing facility and the aptly named 3Foot6 Limited studio, where the hobbit holes had been assembled. There was an oversized hobbit hole, and right next to it, a miniature one, so that when Gandalf walked into the miniature hobbit hole, he would look and feel like a giant. I was struck by the array of techniques being applied to bring Tolkien's world to life: some of it was clearly on the technological forefront, but some of it was decidedly low-tech. I would learn over the course of the production that anything was worth trying. No good idea would be dismissed as unreasonable.

That the production design seemed to be driven by Alan Lee's artwork was also readily apparent. I'd been impressed by his drawings, but here I was in awe of his imagination. The man behind the art is more subdued, but no less impressive, than the work he creates. We met on that first day in Alan's office, a spare, nondescript little room made distinctive only by the drawings he had tacked to the wall. Standing there, soaking up the atmosphere, I had a sense of understanding and clarity that I hadn't experienced before. There weren't a lot of drawings in the edition of
The Lord of the Rings
I had purchased, so this was the first time I felt a strong visual sense of Middle-earth. I'd read the scripts on the plane and found them exciting—all the fighting and the spiders and the trolls and everything—but this was something else.

I wondered how we'd actualize this other world I was discovering. Sure, I knew about blue or green screens, but from the smell of fresh-cut wood from the sets, to the paint and the hum of activity of hundreds of crew folks all around us, it was clear that Middle-earth was under construction. And frankly I wasn't sure how it would look. Now contemporary actors have a lot of history and information to draw on. Our collective consciousness is pretty strong for us in the area of special-effects pictures. We've all seen various “making of” videos. I'd seen Sam Neill running away and looking over his shoulder at a tennis ball that would later be replaced by a digital T. rex in
Jurassic Park
. I knew what sort of environment I was entering, and I thought I could do that sort of work pretty well, because I have a good imagination. But here, surrounded by Alan's illustrations, it suddenly felt
real
.

A few of John Howe's paintings were there, too, but somehow I wasn't as drawn to them. In fact, I worried that if they used Howe's color pallet for the set design, it wouldn't be the kind of movie I wanted to see; it would just be a real cool fantasy movie. I didn't know Peter Jackson's work well enough to know which direction he would choose.
The Frighteners
had been visually arresting, but I'd had problems with it. I enjoyed the special effects, but I didn't really like the campiness of some of it, and the third act disappointed me. (Of course, I hadn't yet watched the extended version, which I'm sure is more satisfying.) What came through in the early pages of
The Lord of the Rings
was excellence: storytelling in service of important ideas. Not the world, not the characters, not even the story, but rather the richness of the language and the quality of the ideas as they were being presented. It struck me on an intellectual level, rather than an emotional level, and the challenge, in my mind, was to make sure that my artistry would be able to survive in concert with literary work of that caliber. Ridiculous as it may seem now, I was concerned, maybe even a little worried, that Peter wouldn't understand that aspect of the book.

I was wrong, of course. I underestimated Peter, or at least didn't know him well enough then to understand his cleverness and level of commitment. There's an old saying by Thomas Edison: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” That's Peter. Man, he perspires like no one I've ever seen. And I mean that in the best possible way. He
works
at it. Sometimes I think people fail to recognize that trait in artists. They think it's all about talent or luck or some mystical creative spark. I've experienced it myself; I've found my own creativity muted by other people's genius occasionally, because I look at what they accomplish and I think, “I would never have thought of that. How could they be so smart? How could they be so inspired?” Well, inspiration takes work. I've heard Peter talk repeatedly about using the art of Alan Lee and John Howe to gain inspiration. But what does that really mean? It's more than just saying, “Wow, that artwork is incredible!” It's deeper. It's saying, “I'm going to communicate with that artist, and I'm going to convince him to work with me.” That's what Peter did. He figured out what really inspired him.

My read on
The Frighteners
was that the studio wasn't interested in the dark, psychological stuff; they just wanted the really scary set pieces. So they turned the sound way up and assaulted the audience. I missed a sense of universality or an optimism in
The Frighteners
. It seemed designed for people interested in cool effects, and in death and dying. It wasn't a movie for me. Even so, I liked it because my dad was in it and because I could appreciate the artistry. I liked Michael J. Fox, the star, although I was disappointed that he didn't look quite right. Only much later did I learn that around that time Michael was just starting to suffer from Parkinson's disease. I admired that both Peter and Fran seemed to care more about Michael the human being than their movie, despite the stakes being so high. That, too, gave me faith.

Equally impressive was my first meeting with Richard Taylor, whose special-effects work on
The Lord of the Rings
would be honored with multiple Academy Awards. Richard brought me in to see the “bigatures,” the not-so-miniature miniature sets the crew had painstakingly constructed, and they were so beautiful, so perfect, so real, that I wanted to cry. I had loved miniatures when I was a kid. Not that I was smart enough to figure out how to fashion them or create them. My mother had an assistant, Elaine, who was one of the most artistic people I've ever met, and when as a kid I had a brief fetish for Smurfs, she made miniatures for me out of cardboard, the most wonderful, elaborate Smurf houses and Smurf garages you could imagine. She made a train station to go with my train set, a lovingly detailed building based, she said, on the station she often visited near her home in Connecticut. Elaine spent hundreds of hours making these things for me and my little brother, and we'd play with them for days on end. Sometimes I'd film them with my Super 8 camera. Elaine wasn't just a model maker; she was like a design engineer. And yet she was working as an assistant for my mother, which I found perplexing. Why, I later wondered, hadn't anyone figured out how to make her a rocket scientist?

Then
Star Wars
came along, and I loved that, too, especially when I saw how George Lucas had created some of the special effects using miniatures. When I worked on
Memphis Belle
, I felt like I really understood the process and appreciated it. Miniatures were used to re-create World War II. There were assembly lines of B-17 miniatures, all destined to be blown up in one fashion or another. And they all looked so real.

So now, walking into this room, meeting Richard Taylor and seeing his miniatures, which were obviously the crème de la crème, I was nearly overcome with emotion. Imagine a kid who likes building models and hanging them over his bed. Imagine saying to that kid, “Where do you build your models?” and hearing him say, “I use the dining room table.” Now imagine taking that kid, who loves making model trains or rockets—a kid with an extraordinary attention to detail, for whom building models represents a method of artistic and personal expression—and saying to him, “I'm going to give you a big factory and all the tools and all the time and money you need to build the greatest model ever.”

That kid was Richard Taylor.

I tried to build a replica of the USS
Nimitz
when I was a boy, but I failed miserably. I tried to make a glider and failed. I wanted to be good at making models and miniatures, but I wasn't. I did like remote-controlled cars and got fairly adept at making them, but that's about it. Here I was, though, looking at Richard Taylor and a staff of about twenty-five guys who were spectacularly good at it. They'd been hired by Peter and given seemingly unlimited resources. This paint factory was vast, and the miniatures housed within were almost beyond comprehension. I wasn't sure what I was looking at, but I knew it was a representation of a city. I saw orc mines, surrounded by a wall twenty feet high and a couple of hundred feet wide. There was an unbelievable level of detail in these miniatures: like a visitor admiring Renaissance paintings at the Louvre, you could stand and stare at them for hours and not grow tired of the experience. So striking was the level of detail that the cinematographer could take a 35-millimeter camera, put it right next to the miniature, and film it, and the human eye would have no idea it wasn't full-scale.

The experience was nothing short of stunning, and it took my breath away.

Wow! Peter Jackson gets it. He really, really gets it.

In hindsight, that sounds like such an ungracious, stupid thing to say, but everyone has their level of skepticism about how things can or should be done. What got me down to New Zealand was the possibility, not the certainty, that
The Lord of the Rings
would absolutely be done right. It's one thing to look at pictures, one thing to know there's a franchise, one thing to understand the potential of a director. It's another thing entirely to look and feel and smell and hear the results. The armory, the weapons, the leather, the level of detail in every inch of the production was exactly what I would have wanted it to be. The actors were just arriving, and already Peter had accomplished so much. He had assembled a legion of artisans and craftspeople so devoted and committed that you'd get a little wave of anxiety just watching them at their stations:
God, I hope when it comes time for me to do the thing I'm here to do, I can produce a fraction of the integrity, talent, and emotion that all these other people bring to their work.

There was so much to see and soak up. Richard was talking nonstop; Peter was chiming in whenever the mood struck him. At every stop on the tour, someone would interact with us intensely and briefly, just long enough to provoke a sense of wonder and confidence, to give us the feeling that we were all going in the right direction and that it was going to be an unforgettable ride. So much was thrown at us at once, so many bewildering tidbits of information—“Weta has ordered more foam rubber than any other company on the face of the earth!”—that the effect was almost disorienting. Each person we met seemed to have some specific, almost arcane area of expertise, and each was utterly and completely thrilled to be on this production. They were devotees of the literature, experts in their field, and they were totally committed to the dream of actualizing this movie.

Some people on the production had only the slimmest of connections to the film business, yet they possessed particular talents that merited inclusion. Others used
The Lord of the Rings
as an opportunity to break out of a box, to demonstrate themselves worthy of a landmark project. Consider the case of Ngila Dixon, who would win an Academy Award for her costume work on
The Lord of the Rings
. Ngila had been working on
Xena: Warrior Princess
and
Hercules,
a pair of campy, good-looking television shows, but representative of a specific type of entertainment. I wouldn't necessarily expect the wardrobe people to take their jobs too seriously on those programs, but you know what? They do. They absolutely do, and you realize after watching them work that the people who do
Hercules
can also do
The Lord of the Rings
, provided there's the right leadership and resources. All in all, extraordinarily talented people were working at every level of the production, but often the lines just got blurred. It became nearly impossible for me to tell who was responsible for something or who deserved credit, because it was such a gigantic, cooperative venture.

“Authenticity” was a buzzword. Peter wanted everything to be based on a kind of history, even if that history existed only in the mind of J. R. R. Tolkien. That's one reason why Alan Lee's illustrations provided more guidance than did those of John Howe. Similarly, the armor worn during battle scenes was not simply the product of a designer's imagination, but was based on real armor. The amount of intelligence and sophistication applied during the research phase of the project, coupled with the money that was invested, allowed everyone to do their jobs at a level I had never seen on a movie set. Still, there was always a sense that cash was being burned. And while $270 million may seem like a ton of money, it goes fast. So fast, in fact, that at each level people felt they didn't have quite enough money to do their jobs. Even so, they were doing more with what they had than anyone else would have been able to do. Why? Because they cared. They knew they were part of something extraordinary.

It was almost impossible not to feel that way. I remember during Peter's guided tour, stopping at a glass case filled with costumes and masks, including those worn by my father as the decrepit judge in
The Frighteners.

“Look, Alexandra,” I said, pulling my daughter close. “There's Granddad.”

She didn't respond, just scrunched up her nose disapprovingly, as if to say,
What? That mangy old character?

It's funny, when you're in the movie business, you cycle through stages: awe, then disillusionment, and then hopefully, a new appreciation for it. And then you get lost in it all over again. You go through waves of how you experience reality and fiction.
The Lord of the Rings
, for me, was a psychological cyclone, an emotional, analytical torture chamber out of which grew something magical: a sense of wonder that I hadn't experienced in a very long time. And I am so very grateful for it.