Posted on 12/26/2002 7:51:32 AM PST by ksen
The Next Reel
By Nina Rehfeld
December 18, 2002 - 3:00 AM PST
Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens
For all the talk in the current cultural climate about how the wall between the highbrows and the lowbrows fell, or rather, was deconstructed decades ago, it's still a rare film that's as enthusiastically lauded, embraced or even just plain loved by critics and audiences alike as The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Sure, there are critics who cloud their praise with anti-populist grudges but even most of those cave in by their last sentences to the sheer movieness of it all. And there are Tolkien purists frustrated with the filmmakers' tinkering with the sacred text; they'll have even more to grumble about in the case of The Two Towers. But a book is a book and a movie is a movie and, after years of tackling a supposedly unfilmmable epic, few know the difference as well as Peter Jackson. In a way, he's been lucky. We can doubly appreciate what he's managed to pull off because, two years in a row now, his first two installments of the Lord of the Rings trilogy have been immediately preceded by exemplary lessons in how not to film a book. Where Chris Columbus has taken a straightforward narrative and, applying a stubborn sort of storyboard-by-numbers approach, bled two beloved Harry Potter tales of their magic, Peter Jackson has taken a gnarly, blustering and at times haughtily didactic doorstopper chock full of stilted dialogue and winding diversion and brought it to vibrant, thrilling life.
Last year, you told us that you wouldn't open this film with a summary of the first, and sure enough, you didn't. How hard was it push that through?
Peter Jackson: The studio wanted to do a prologuey thing. But I just find it a very TV kind of device. I think, you know, "The story of Lord of the Rings so far..." It's just like what you see on TV shows. I approached it from a common sense point of view, which may be right or wrong. I just figured that very, very few people, a tiny minority of the audience for The Two Towers will go in and see it without having seen The Fellowship of the Ring. It doesn't really matter whether or not you've seen Fellowship in the theaters. You've probably caught up with it on DVD now. And if you don't want to buy it, you've probably got a friend who's got it. So I didn't want the first five minutes of The Two Towers to be determined by a minority.
So my approach was: You've just seen The Fellowship and you've popped out to the lobby for a popcorn break -- it might have lasted a bit long, twelve months; that's quite a lot of popcorn -- but then we've gone back in and the projectionist has just put on the next reel. I wanted that kind of unity to the story.
The end of the book is much more of a cliffhanger. Structurally, it means that your second act has a sort of upbeat ending. How will that fit with the ending of the third film?
Philippa Boyens: I think that what we tried to do with Gollum is push it to a cliffhanger, but one of the things you had to do: This film has to deliver a satisfying experience. You can't go through three hours of something like that and not have felt like you were getting something, which is where we were going with Sam's speech. Each stage of this journey, particularly for Frodo and Sam, you feel that they've gone through something, that they've moved onto another point. So we needed to do that. I think it's very important for the audience to feel that. Otherwise, it really is episodic.
Peter Jackson: And Frodo and Sam and Gollum's story, we felt, was the psychological story of this film. Aragon and the whole Helm's Deep story and the saving of the people of Rohan story was like the action story. We didn't really want to have the action story, the Helm's Deep climax, at the same as having Frodo and Sam start their own action story by fighting a giant spider. We just felt that would be too much. So we wanted to keep them strictly as the psychological characters. That was the reasoning, really. And we've got a great spider scene for the third film.
Philippa Boyens: I think it's interesting that you ask, though, because we've had other people say, "How can you do that? How can you leave such a cliffhanger ending?" So I think different people receive things in different ways.
Could you talk a bit about the changes you made to the book's original story this time? In the first one, you were very true to the book...
Peter Jackson: Not really. It's an illusion! [laughs] No, no, you're right. I know what you mean.
In the book, for example, Faramir is very pure and very noble, but here in the film, he's got this evil touch. He's even tempted by the ring.
Peter Jackson: For a short time, yeah. We made that change, just to use that example -- and this is really where being a filmmaker differs from being a writer. You make decisions as a filmmaker and, rightly or wrongly, you change things if you think they need to be changed. We wanted the episode with Faramir in this particular film to have a certain degree of tension. Frodo and Sam were captured. Their journey had become more complicated by the fact that they are prisoners. Which they are in the book for a brief period of time. But then, very quickly in the book, Tolkien sort of backs away from there and, as you say, he reveals Faramir to be very pure. At one point, Faramir says, "Look, I wouldn't even touch the ring if I saw it lying on the side of the road."
For us, as filmmakers, that sort of thing creates a bit of a problem because we've spent a lot of time in the last film and in this one to establish this ring as incredibly powerful. Then to suddenly come to a character that says, "Oh, I'm not interested in that," to suddenly go against everything that we've established ourselves is sort of going against our own rules. We certainly acknowledge that Faramir should not do what Boromir did and that he ultimately has the strength to say, "No, you go on your way and I understand." We wanted to make it slightly harder, to have a little more tension than there was in the book. But that's where that sort of decision comes from.
The reality is that The Two Towers is the slightest of the books, I think. We kind of have all the memorable moments of the book in the film and what we've done is to actually enhance and add bits of story that weren't in the book. For instance, we have Frodo and Sam arguing with each other at one point in the movie so that you can see that the tension of what they're doing is getting to them. And that wasn't in the book, but we wanted to develop these characters a bit.
Philippa Boyens: It's the book most people stumble on. A number of people have hit The Two Towers and actually abandoned the trilogy. I think Tolkien went off a little bit on a tangent. There's a lot of his great love of epic storytelling and the warrior code and there are huge passages dealing with that whole thing. Which is his utter privilege, as the owner of the story, to do, but it'd just die on film. Especially in the Aragon story, I think.
"The film is beginning to take on an identity of its own."
Did the success of the first one allow you more freedom to take these liberties?
Philippa Boyens: I think that the film is beginning to take on an identity of its own. Peter always said that this is not the book. This is The Lord of the Rings as a film. You can't just film that book verbatim. It'd never work. People are beginning to accept that, and what's been interesting for us to see is people's investment in it. Great cinema comes to be owned by the audience. You really feel that now. I felt this investment when we met the fans who came to the movie in New York, for example. They have this huge investment, so even though they'll take you to task about something, they're now not only fans of the book, they're also fans of the movie. They're interested in why you're making changes not because "you can't do that," but because they're part of this thing, this whole storytelling process.
Do you see this movie as political in any way?
Peter Jackson: Political. Well, I don't quite know in what context politics comes into it. There are certainly themes Tolkien felt were important. We made a promise to ourselves at the beginning of the process that we weren't going to put any of our own politics, our own messages or our own themes into these movies. What we were trying to do was to analyze what was important to Tolkien and to try to honor that. In a way, we were trying to make these films for him, not for ourselves.
Anything that's in there is in there because we interpreted it as something that he felt strongly about. He wrote these books between 1937 and 1949, over a twelve year period, a decade of obviously incredible turmoil in the world. His themes are many and varied, really. As a professor, he was kind of interested in all sorts of things and vented about all sorts of things in the book. The hatred of factories swallowing up the countryside. And there's a lot about freedom and enslavement. Tolkien was very, very passionate about people's right to live their lives as they wanted to and their right to live as free peoples.
A lot of his themes, even the factory theme -- it's not just about the destruction of the countryside, it's not just a green message. It's as much about the fact that the factory enslaves you, the fact that it takes away your free will. The existence of the factory enslaves you to the machine. You show up at eight o'clock in the morning and you have no freedom until the whistle blows at six o'clock at night. Such a huge proportion of your life, you're enslaved to the machine.
The ring is about a loss of free will. The threat and the danger of the ring is that if you possess it and own it, it will slowly take away your ability to think for yourself. Frodo does what he does, he goes on this journey because he's terrified by the idea of his beloved homeland, the Shire, being enslaved. Whether you'd call those things political or not, I'm not sure, but they're certainly themes that Tolkien addressed.
Philippa Boyens: He would have hated it as a label, I believe. He was a humanist. And I think one of the great lessons of Lord of the Rings is that you can look at any era of human history and find great evil. What he's saying is that this is a universality that encompasses us all. The whole world is under threat. The whole of Middle Earth is under threat. Which is why it's: Unite or you will fall. That's what he was speaking to.
Peter Jackson: He also had a great pessimism, or rather, a melancholy about him and a lack of confidence in mankind. Which is really part of what he was venting about. He was aware of and frustrated with how flawed we are. He created the Elvish race as his perfect ideal beings. They were wise, they were artistic, they were noble, they were sensible, basically. They were full of common sense, if you want to describe the Elves in the other direction. [laughs] They embody basic common sense. The world was ok as long as the Elves were in charge, but of course, The Lord of the Rings is about the time when the Elves were departing.
And who's going to inherit this thing? Well, it's going to be men, and men, well, they squabble, they kill each other, they're territorial, they're petty, they're full of greed. The book is sort of a sad reflection on the fact that what was once great and pure and noble is now going to fall into the hands of these people called "man" or "mankind." And sure, I think Tolkien's right. I think everything we do today, yesterday and tomorrow is proving Tolkien to be completely right. The Elves should make their way back here. And take control again! Then the world would be a better place.
It seems that fantasy is replacing science fiction in the realm of imaginary cinema. Do you think that science fiction has been exhausted?
I know what you're saying and I think it's true. There seems to be a slight feeling of turning away from science fiction, of people preferring fantasy. Of course, science fiction is a form of fantasy. It's just a technological form of fantasy. But it seems people are preferring stories more based in the real world. You know, still with the magic and still with a little bit of fantasy but not quite so artificial. I've always thought of science fiction being relatively artificial. I've never quite liked science fiction, to tell you the truth. I've always preferred fantasy. Because fantasy feels more historical to me.
But Star Trek does that as well, with the social elements --
But still with the production design of a very futuristic world, which is hard to relate to. I think one of the problems with science fiction is that it's often quite difficult to put yourself in that world because it is so art directed and so over designed and so separate from what we can experience today. It's easier for us to project backwards to an older age and put ourselves back rather than put ourselves forward, at least in terms of positioning yourself within the world of the movie.
Why does Fran Walsh never do these interviews?
Well, she does that of her own choice. She's my partner and when we try to take our kids to the movies, she sees the difficult time that I have going to the movies in New Zealand where I get stopped all the time. People want to talk to me and have autographs, which is nice but Fran has determined that she never wants to become a familiar face or a celebrity in that way.
She actually isn't here, she's back in New Zealand staying with our kids. We've got two young kids and the kids are always put second to the film, for obvious reasons. The film kind of demands that it be done. But we just, rather than saying to our kids, "Mommy and Daddy are going to be away for two weeks," we just thought that this time we'd put the kids ahead of the movie. So I'm here and Fran's with the kids.
How old are they?
Six and seven.
Are they proud of you? Do they know what you've achieved?
[laughs] They're very grounded children. They're very down-to-earth kids. They're great. We showed them The Two Towers before anybody else saw it. Really, they were, like, the first people that ever saw it. The second it was finished, we ran it for our kids. I said to Billy at the end, "What'd you think?" And he said, "Yeah, Dad, that's pretty good. It was better than Spider-Man." And Spider-Man is his favorite film! He's got Spider-Man stuff all over his bedroom and everything, so really, the biggest compliment he could think of to give me was to say that it was better than Spider-Man. It was incredibly touching.
The movie wasn't a bit much? I mean, seven years old?
Nah, not for our kids. Our kids were on the set. They cuddled the Orcs with their rubber masks and they know the names of the stunt guys that are wearing those masks, so they can see through all that. They know exactly what they're seeing.
Could you talk a bit about the extended version of the DVD, the importance to you of that?
Well, there's not a lot to say other than the fact we cut the film to the length that we thought was right for the theatrical version. We felt the pacing was right. We would have felt very nervous with a three-and-a-half hour film last year. We just didn't want to do that. But of course, in doing so, you're losing a lot of really nice scenes. The DVD marketplace now allows the filmmaker these opportunities -- if they choose; a lot of filmmakers would never want to do it -- but I'm not feeling that pressure. I just thought that these are a lot of really great scenes and it would give the film a little more sense of character, a little more back story, and so, I was really enthusiastic about the idea of trying to create a slightly fuller version of the movie for DVD.
By no means does that have all the scenes that we shot. You're still trying to put into the film what you think is going to help the film and enhance it and you leave other stuff out. But somebody said to me, "Ok, so you've got the theatrical version and you've got your extended cut, so what's your definitive version of the film?" And I just couldn't really answer. I sort of can. I'm not a sort of auteur in the sense of, you know, "This is my vision" or "This is my masterpiece" or this is anything, it's just that that's a slightly longer version. That's all it is! Leave it up to people to make up their own minds, which they prefer to do, really.
All that, and sick too? Man, everytime I look, Aragorn's got it tougher and tougher. ;^)
I thought that meant that he was having problems with his Mac OS. :P
This is how I got in, too.
You are getting into FR through an old LOTR thread? How's that work?
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