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Can't break
this hobbit : Will Frodo destroy the ring ? Will Aragorn wear the
crown ? An exclusive first look at director Peter Jackson's
exhilarating Lord of the Rings finale, The Return of
the King - and at the battles the cast waged on-screen and
off.
Peter Jackson's
The Return of the King begins with a flashback to what
seems like the beginning of time-young Deagol is fishing with
his creepy brother Smeagol when suddenly a fish on his line
pulls him out of the boat and underwater, where he spots a gold
ring half-submerged in the riverbed - so let's begin with a
flashback of our own. IT'S AUTUMN of 2001, at WETA Workshop, in
Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson is about to release The
Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment of his
adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and
some costumes and props made for the movies are laid out in a
massive, high-ceilinged hangar. There's a miniature of the elven
retreat of Rivendell, mossy and genteel. The ominous black tower
of Orthanc, about a dozen feet high. There's the hobbit blade
Sting and, right next to it, two versions of the kingly sword
known as Anduril, one shattered, one whole. There are racks of
armor, both regal and savage. Everything is so meticulous and
ambitious that it's clear the filmmakers are brilliant - or
nuts. New Line Studios' Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne have devoted
$300 million, and counting, to the trilogy. And they've allowed
Jackson - a New Zealander known, if at all, for a handful of
tiny zombie films and the brilliant real-life drama Heavenly
Creatures-to shoot all three movies at once, arguably the
biggest gamble in history. Still, there are believers. By the
door, somebody has tacked up an advance picture of the ferocious
Uruk-hai warrior Lurtz from Fellowship, along with
comments about it from the Web site aint-it-cool-news. “Since
nobody has mentioned it, Lord of the Rings will kick Star
Wars' ass,” reads one of the postings. “I'm sorry, but
someone had to say it.”
Today, two
years later, Jackson is poised to release The Return of the
King, in which the hobbit Frodo (Elijah Wood) continues his
torturous trek to Mount Doom, in hopes of destroying the evil
ring, and Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) wages war, in hopes of
distracting the enemy from the hobbit's quest, as well as
ascending the throne of Gondor and marrying Arwen (Liv Tyler),
the elven princess of his dreams. The Return of the King
is the third and final chapter in what's likely to be a nearly
$3 billion franchise that should, according to sources familiar
with Jackson’s deal, net the director at least $150 million.
Judging from a recent NEWSWEEK screening in New Zealand, The
Return of the King is a sure contender for best picture.
More than that, it could be the first franchise ever that didn't,
at the end of the day, let audiences down—either because of
laziness, pretension, greed or other phantom menaces. This is an
especially poignant possibility at a time when we can all still
smell the smoke from the wreckage of The Matrix.
New Line will
likely position The Return of the King, which opens Dec.
17, as a sort of “actors' movie,” in an effort to make an
end run around the Academy's well-documented antipathy toward
fantasy. Whatever works. In truth, Return of the King has
nothing to apologize for. It's an epic. It tells a passionate,
elemental story. It takes the principal filmmaking currency of
our times, special effects, and makes them matter. Is it a
fantasy ? It's a lot of people's fantasy, yes.
Jackson stands
in a light rain on a set in Wellington. It's May 2003, and he's
directing scattered scenes for Return of the King. He is
bearded, scraggly-haired, Santa-bellied and, ordinarily, a bit
shy and internal. He has thick, powerful-looking arms and legs.
He wears shorts almost constantly - he was once tossed out of
the bar at the Dorchester Hotel, in London, for this very crime
- and shoes virtually never. Meanwhile, his principal
collaborators, Philippa Boyens and co-writer and producer Fran
Walsh, meet in an office on the set and talk about him behind
his back. “It was hysterical seeing Pete at the last British
premiere,” says Boyens. “There
were these young girls screaming for Orlando [Bloom] and Elijah
- and then they started screaming for Pete, too ! Which is
pretty hysterical.” Walsh looks up; she has two children with
Jackson and has been his partner for many years. “Why is that
hysterical ?” she says, dryly. “Can you elaborate ?”
Boyens turns to Walsh. “You're right, darling,” she says.
“He's a total stud.”
This week
Jackson is shooting footage to insert into the epic battle of
Pelennor Fields, among other things. He guides Eowyn (Miranda
Otto) and the Witch King (Lawrence Makoare) through some
climactic hand-to-hand combat involving swords and a mace, the
latter of which will be added digitally (” Whammo ,” he
says. “Yep. Whammo. Whooosh. Bang. Bang. And another one.
Whoosh “). Tyler floats around the set dispensing hugs, extras
dressed as soldiers take a break from lying dead and one orc,
with a typically crazed, mangy rubber head, flirts with a
publicist. The next day Jackson gives his 8-year-old son’s
class a tour. He asks the kids questions and videotapes them as
he walks backward through a field of fake dead horses. The
children worship the Aragorn character, and they had hoped to
meet Mortensen. Later, when Jackson is asked if they got their
wish, he nods giddily. “Oh, yep-yep-yep,” he says. “Viggo's
great with kids. He showed them his sword, and then one of the
boys very excitedly pointed to his dagger and said, ‘That's
the dagger he stabbed Lurtz with in Fellowship of the Ring
!’ So then Viggo whipped out his dagger.” Jackson is
giggling now. “Afterwards, one of the kids said to his
friends, ‘Do you think Aragorn would baby-sit children ?’
”
Fellowship
and The Two Towers made a combined $650 million in the
United States alone, but the cast's devotion to the trilogy
clearly has more to do with their love for the story in general
and Jackson in particular than with money. As it happens, New
Line hired most of them for a song - many of the cast, including
Bloom, were unknowns at the time - and has asked them to return
to New Zealand every year for reshoots, and to commit to
never-ending press and premieres. “When they offered me the
part, I had to sit down and think about whether I was willing to
work on this for a year and a half,” says Tyler. “But
actually it's been four and a half years.” There's no
bitterness in her voice, but the truth is that this past year
has been a volatile one for relations between the cast and the
studio. Some observers predict that, in the grand Hollywood
tradition of creative accounting, New Line may try to prove that
it did not make a profit on The Lord of the Rings. News-week
has learned that early this year, the studio offered some cast
members an initial round of Two Towers bonuses. Though
the movie had been an even bigger hit than Fellowship,
the bonuses were smaller and left far more cast members out in
the cold. The actors wanted assurances that there would be a
more equitable offering in the future. When the studio declined
to make promises, 18 actors are said to have banded together and
composed a letter to Time Warner chairman Richard Parsons
pleading their case. You want a fellowship ? You got it.
The actors were
ultimately convinced that going over New Line's head to Parsons
would only initiate mutually assured destruction between the
cast and the studio. They did not send the letter. Instead, they
made what New Line executive vice president Mark Ordesky
diplomatically calls “a vigorous appeal” to the studio's
leadership, telling them that it was difficult to imagine
spending the final quarter of 2003 attending press junkets and
premieres when some of them, particularly those with smaller
roles, really did need to get other jobs to make a living. (The
actors approached for this article would not confirm any of
this; Jackson, who's said to be a merciless negotiator when he
believes the occasion warrants it, would say only that whatever
did happen happened between the cast and the studio.) New Line
agreed to create a new bonus pool. Crunching numbers with one of
the actors everyone trusted - without any agents at all, and
with a lawyer only to type up the agreement - the studio struck
an egalitarian deal for both The Two Towers and The
Return of the King, paying cast members above and beyond
their profit-participation deals, and even rewarding the many
actors with no deal in place at all.
The bonuses
restored good will. For the most part. Sources tell NEWSWEEK
that the cast is now auditing the studio. And Jackson and
Miramax, which launched The Lord of the Rings years ago
but ultimately couldn't afford to make it, have teamed up for an
audit of their own. New Line's Ordesky, an old friend of Jackson's
from the days when the director needed a couch to sleep on in
L.A., insists that the studio does not consider the audits
confrontational. The irony is that, in the midst of all this,
Jackson is delighted with New Line's financial commitment to the
making of Return of the King. “On the first two
films,” he says, “we always had to do a dog-and-pony show in
order to get more money to do [special] effects shots. They
wouldn't approve the money until we showed them the movie in
whatever state it was in, and we had to have big story meetings
with them to justify everything. I think that's perfectly fine.
That's what you expect to do. But this time around, they're
basically saying, ‘Listen, whatever you want to do, we're
going to support you.’ I mean, it's possible that at the
moment, I'm experiencing - the greatest freedom I'm ever going
to have.” As a reporter leaves Wellington in May, he shakes
Jackson's hand between takes of a scene, and asks if the studio
will let him make Return of the King as long as it needs
to be. Jackson's eyes get wide, and he grins : “I'll make them
let me.”
In August 2003,
while producer Barrie Osborne supervises special effects, sound
mixing and last-minute filming back in Wellington, Jackson flies
to London to work on the score with composer Howard Shore. One
day, at Abbey Road Studios, they spend a lunch break watching
footage and free-associating about musical passages still to be
written. Shore has been recording his extraordinary score in
Studio One - the Beatles used it for, among other things, the
apocalyptic symphony that bisects “A Day in the Life” - and
personally conducting the London Philharmonic. (Shore's
commitment to the trilogy is such that he's not only writing
music for scenes that will surely be cut when Return of the
King is edited down, but will write new music for entirely
different scenes when they’re added for the DVD.) At the
moment, Jackson, who's unconsciously conducting with one hand,
narrates the scenes for Shore, while a microphone records
everything for reference.
A brief scene,
in which the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) advises Aragorn to
ride to battle by a secret route, passes by on the monitor :
“It's a bit creepy,” Jackson says. “We don't know why it's
creepy, but the music tells us it is. Spooky... spooky...
spooky... and then the moment just sort of fades away.” A
scene of swarming orcs attacking a ruined city by boat :
“Tension... tension... tension still building. It doesn't
really explode until there . It's not fight music anymore. It's
defeat music. It shouldn't be heroic. It should be a nightmare.
Maybe one way you can build tension is where the boats are
splashing into the water. Each splash can build.” Soon Jackson's
children arrive, and his young son quietly enters the room, sits
on the couch, wedges himself into the crook of his father's arm
and gazes at the monitor. “Are you tired ?” Jackson asks.
The boy shakes his head vigorously. Jackson smiles. “Ah, yes,
you are. You're tired.” He gestures to the monitor. “You're
not allowed to tell anything at school. You're going to get a
sneak peek.”
Speaking of
which. The Return of the King is the most ambitious
installment of the trilogy. While Fellowship and The
Two Towers had bravura action and effects sequences that you'd
have thought were impossible to top, Jackson and the folks at
WETA Digital continue to astonish. After Smeagol kills his
brother for the ring at the bottom of the river—the sequence
was originally intended for The Two Towers - Return of
the King cuts to the present to find that Smeagol has
undergone the most extreme makeover of all time : he's turned
into Gollum. The creature, long ago driven mad by the ring, is
guiding Frodo and Sam (Sean Astin) toward Mount Doom so they can
toss it into the fires before the evil Sauron - well, not
exactly gets his hands on it, because he's only an all-powerful,
disembodied eye now, but you get the idea. Gollum longs to kill
the hobbits and reclaim his “precious,” and the threesome
make for a traveling party constantly careering among rage,
suspicion, loathing, pity and love. In a sequence long awaited
by fans, Gollum lures Frodo into a tunnel inhabited by an
enormous spider named Shelob. As it pounds behind Frodo in the
darkness, the spider - partly because Jackson himself just hates
the damn things - looks almost photo-real and moves with a
terrifying stealth.
The Return
of the King also delivers spectacular battle sequences -
which probably goes without saying, given Jackson's lifelong
fascination with warfare. (Tell him you've seen an early
screening of Master and Commander, and he'll nod
excitedly and ask, “How are the battles ?” Tell him you've
seen The Last Samurai, and he'll nod excitedly and ask,
“How are the battles ?”) In Return of the King, the
enormous cast of good guys helps wage what WETA Digital's Jim
Rygiel refers to as “World War Zero” against Sauron's orcs
and trolls. The Battle of Pelennor Fields outdoes even the
Helm’s Deep section of The Two Towers in scale, and it
resonates far more because the characters have become richer and
because the story is now filled with stark, Shakespearean
familial dramas. Families are always more interesting than Good
and Evil.
Yes, there are
visually arresting moments : The elephantine creatures called
Mumakil charging like tanks. The evil orcs overrunning the
bone-white citadel of Minas Tirith. Aragorn and an army of
ghosts on the offensive. But this time, there are just as many
emotionally arresting moments : Faramir (David Wenham) leading a
suicide mission just to prove his worth to his father, Denethor
(John Noble), who's deranged with grief after the death of a
more beloved son. Eowyn, disguised as a soldier and trying to
protect her wounded uncle King Theoden (Bernard Hill) from the
monstrous Witch King : “I will kill you if you touch him !”
The Return
of the King will not get an entirely free ride from critics.
In Jackson's movies, as in Tolkien's novels, the love stories
tend to be undernourished. And even with three hours and 12
minutes to work with, he has had to make cuts that will
initially cause gasping among some fans. Recently, on the Web, a
revolt began percolating when Christopher Lee, who plays the
turncloak wizard Saruman, went public with his indignation at
having been cut from the new movie. But by now, heretical as it
may sound, many audience members are as hungry for Jackson's
vision as they are for Tolkien's. “I was staying with some
friends in England, and it was New Year's,” says Liv Tyler by
e-mail. “My husband, Roy, and I were sleeping, and I woke to
the sound of our friends' two little boys. They were going
around the bedrooms opening the doors and looking in. When they
got to our door, one little boy went to open it and the other
said, ‘No ! Don't open that door. The princess is sleeping in
there.’ It made my heart leap out of my chest. I think that
was the first time I really realized the impact these films had
on people.”
Asking the cast
and crew how it feels now that the journey's over will get you
nowhere. Or next to nowhere. The loss hasn't hit many of them
yet. Mortensen, for instance, has been in South America doing
radio, TV, newspapers, everything. “It's been pretty
intensive,” he says. “And I know that we have the same ahead
of us in New Zealand, the same in L.A., Berlin, Copenhagen,
Oslo, London, Japan. I mean, there's a long way to go yet, and
it all involves remembering and explaining and offering points
of view and all that. So I have no feeling that it's over at
all.” But Orlando Bloom, who plays the elf Legolas, has no
trouble summoning up his last day in costume. “I was
definitely welled up, man,” he says. “I was choked. I was
suddenly reminded of how lucky I was to be a part of this
process and how much it changed me - Viggo being a real mentor
to me, and Peter being this incredibly amazing, visionary
director. They cut together a little gag reel. It was, like,
four minutes of all these different Leggy moments from the whole
shoot and outtakes and stuff. It was hilarious ! It had all this
'80s music. You know that song ‘Hungry Eyes’ ? ‘One look
at you and I touch the sky’ ? They had this homoerotic thing
where they had a shot of Viggo pulling out his sword and looking
at me, and me looking at him and drawing my bow. It was
brilliant , man.”
As for Jackson,
he's already hurtling into his next project, King Kong,
which will be set in the '30s; it stars Naomi Watts and begins
filming early next year. One afternoon in early November, in
Wellington, Jackson sits on a sofa in his office in the mammoth
post-production facility he's been building, and shows a visitor
early artists' renderings of Skull Island : lush, retro-looking
computer paintings of Kong battling prehistoric monsters by a
waterfall in an impenetrable jungle. He tried to make Kong
for Universal years ago - seeing the original as a kid changed
his life, if not his very DNA - but the studio got nervous about
the impending Mighty Joe Young, and broke his heart.
Recently, though, Universal's new leadership made a Kong
deal so rich that it rattled Hollywood, offering Jackson, Walsh
and Boyens $20 million against 20 percent of the box-office
gross to write, direct and produce the movie. A top executive at
another studio says of Universal, “They're out of their minds.
Everybody else will tell you the same thing.” But giving away
20 percent of the box office on a blockbuster is hardly unheard
of. “I'm not a wild cowboy, and I haven't lost one second of
sleep,” says Universal's chairwoman Stacey Snider. “Peter's
responsible for the budget, and he and his team are providing
almost every service except acting. A lot of the bellyachers [at
other studios] - and none of them have spoken to me directly -
are right now sitting on movies that are much more dangerous.”
What would
really be dangerous would be giving King Kong to anybody
else. Jackson's co-screenwriter and friend Philippa Boyens likes
to say that Jackson is consumed with the desire to make jaws
drop, to which we’d add only : including his own . On Nov. 5 -
in the midst of the rush to get Return of the King
finished - the director, his friends and his family celebrate
Guy Fawkes Day by setting off fireworks at his house on Karaka
Bay. He has laid in a great stash of explosives for the
occasion. It's dark and chilly, and everybody's wearing a coat
except him. He scampers around barefoot, in shorts and a
short-sleeved shirt, handing out Roman candles and saying,
“First you must read the label, where it says, caution : do
not hold in your hand. OK, now - hold it in your hand.” Every
time more fireworks go up, there's a tiny slice of silence and
then the sound of Jackson, and only Jackson, shouting,
“Woo-hoo-hoo- hoo !” Boyens, who lives next door, looks on
fondly. “Pete's a pyromaniac,” she says. “A complete
nutter.” For half an hour, Jackson's fireworks are the only
show in sight. Then some family a quarter of a mile down the bay
sends up a giant flourish that seems maybe a little bit better.
Jackson grimaces playfully at the competition. “Can't have
that,” he says - and runs back to his stash. They have no idea
who they’re dealing with.
By Jeff Giles
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