Ian Nathan - Anything You Can Imagine

Whatever ideas he came up with, Walsh and her watertight memory would shoot down: ‘No, no, no. You can’t do that — that’s just The Lord of the Rings .’

Jackson sighs. ‘You don’t want to be seen to be stealing stuff.’

His thought had been to do an original fantasy film, but at every proposal he made Walsh kept on repeating it like a mantra: ‘ The Lord of the Rings … The Lord of the Rings … The Lord of the Rings .’

‘It was getting frustrating.’

When he was a teen, no more than sixteen, already displaying a rapacious hunger for filmmaking, Jackson set out to make a Super-8 Sinbad film. There was to be a scene of him fighting a stop-motion skeleton in the surf. He shot himself hip deep in Pukerua Bay swinging a homemade sword, but he never got round to putting in the skeleton. Which was down to the fact that, with the tide heading out, Jackson had dived straight onto an exposed rock. Severe bruising led to a pilonidal cyst which led to surgery. He also hadn’t quite yet figured out how to do stop-motion.

During the Bad Taste era, he had considered shooting a Conan -type film on 16mm at the weekends. ‘I never got any further than swords and monster masks,’ he admits. ‘I had never actually sat down and written a script.’

Truth be told, there was no specific, original sword ‘n’ sorcery concept he’d been yearning to make. It was simply that the genre appealed to his sensibility and offered the chance for Weta to keep expanding. So, why not The Lord of the Rings ? Frodo’s enduring tale was the ne plus ultra of the genre. It was fantasy operating on an equivalent dramatic level to Heavenly Creatures .

According to prevailing Hollywood wisdom, fantasy, as a genre, was a joke. Jackson agrees. ‘I used to watch all the fantasy films. Things like Krull and Conan … Fantasy was one of those B-grade genres. No quality movies were ever made in the fantasy genre. Right from the outset The Lord of the Rings was always something different. You can’t think of Krull and The Lord of the Rings in the same sentence. While it was fantasy, in our minds it was always something quite different to that.’

And that was when they had put in the call to Kamins to find out who had the rights, and made their approach to Harvey. And even then things only grew more complicated.

The possibility of adapting Tolkien was soon to be one of three potential fantasy projects for Jackson.

For all of Harvey’s confidence in calling in a favour with Zaentz, it would take eight perilous months of negotiation for a deal to be struck. Zaentz had held the rights tight to his chest for three decades; whatever Harvey had done for him on The English Patient he wasn’t going to part with them lightly. Tribes of rival lawyers were making proposal and counterproposal, putting in calls, arranging meetings, filing memos, coming up with offers, rebuffing counteroffers, and charging by the hour. And Harvey showed zero inclination toward allowing Zaentz any active participation in his project.

Another problem was the weird, bifurcated rights situation surrounding The Hobbit . Harvey had endeavoured to go direct to MGM, which had purchased the crippled UA in the wake of Heaven’s Gate . Ironically, MGM was itself a studio in decline and in one of its many cycles of bankruptcy, reorganization and sale, nobody was about to give away one of its chief assets — even if they were only partial rights to The Hobbit .

‘The hell with it,’ cried Harvey, ‘let’s forget The Hobbit . The Lord of the Rings is a better-known title anyway. Let’s just go right to The Lord of the Rings . Two movies shot back-to-back.’

Still, with no sign of an agreement with Zaentz being reached, Jackson was growing increasingly nervous. The clock was ticking on his Weta project, even his career. It was becoming increasingly clear they were going to have to make something else in the meantime.

‘I will never forget it,’ recalls Kamins, and true to his word he can remember the exact day: ‘Monday, April first, nineteen ninety-six, I went to a premiere of Primal Fear at Paramount. I come home and there’s a message from Peter on my answering machine. This is like eleven p.m. at night. And he never calls me at home that late.’

Jackson’s recorded voice carried a seriousness Kamins had heard only rarely. ‘I need to know what my next movie is by the end of the week, otherwise all these great people that I put together to do the visual effects for The Frighteners are going to leave …’

As is standard practice, six weeks before the end of any movie the freelance visual effects team — and any other department employed on a film-by-film basis — is entitled to start looking for their next job. The buzz had gotten around about the visual effects work on The Frighteners , and the more established effects houses were reaching out to the Weta team, trying to entice them back to LA.

Meanwhile, Kamins was maintaining a constant vigil for any opportunities for his client, as he puts it, playing ‘backstop’ on Jackson’s career. Given the mercurial nature of the film business, any director would be foolhardy not to have more than one plate spinning at a time. He swiftly engaged a strategy to push forward on any one of the projects he and Jackson had in various stages of development.

Besides The Lord of the Rings , two other noticeably non-Miramax movies were to emerge. Confirming that this was a defining period in Jackson’s life and career, each would have a significant influence on his future. That first-look deal with Miramax notwithstanding, Jackson headed to LA to begin discussing the alternatives. He didn’t see himself as acting in bad faith. The Lord of the Rings had been his priority, but despite Kamins urgent pressing of Miramax it showed little sign of being resolved.

‘So we spoke to Universal about King Kong ,’ says Jackson, ‘and I did a lot of meetings with Fox about Planet of the Apes .’

A Planet of the Apes reboot had been jostling about in development for a number of years. Spreading its allegorical net to include the fear of atomic destruction and the civil rights movement, Franklin J. Schaffner’s biting, apocalyptic, 1968 Planet of the Apes, starring Charlton Heston, could fairly be considered a classic (if not its diminishing sequels). Jackson certainly thought so — he has some original John Chambers’ prosthetics in his collection and once designed his own set of ape masks for another of his novice ventures into filmmaking, The Valley , which paid homage to the first film’s devastating ending.

By the early 1990s, 20th Century Fox were keen to revive the idea of a future where the evolutionary order has been upended and apes have subjugated humanity. Some big directors had toyed with the hair-brained mythology, with all its juicy metaphorical potential, amongst them Oliver Stone, Sam Raimi, Chris Columbus, Roland Emmerich and Philip Noyce.

Jackson and Walsh had initially become involved as screenwriters in 1992, before Heavenly Creatures , only for their concept to fall out of favour with a regime change at Fox. But in 1996, following another bloody succession at the helm of the studio, the project was back on the table with Jackson potentially directing.

Ever the traditionalist, central to Jackson’s enchanting simian vision was the return of actor Roddy McDowell, who had played the pro-human chimp Cornelius in the original. He’d even gone to lunch with the actor and producer Harry J. Ufland to pitch his concept. McDowell had been resistant to doing another Apes film: decades might have passed but he could still remember itching beneath those prosthetics. Unbowed, Jackson pitched him Renaissance of the Planet of the Apes . It was to be a continuation of the first line of movies, and the apes have had a flowering of their artistic ability. ‘Like Florence or Venice, the Ape World has gained artistic beauty,’ he explains. McDowell would play an aged Cornelius-type character, sort of a primate Leonardo da Vinci. McDowell was enthralled. ‘Count me in,’ he told them.