Ian Nathan - Anything You Can Imagine - Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2018

Copyright © Ian Nathan 2018

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018

Cover photograph © Paul Stuart/Camera Press London

Ian Nathan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008192471

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008192488

Version: 2018-09-21

For Kat, who can’t abide hobbits.

‘The artist-initiated epic is an obsessive testing of possibilities … It comes, too, from a conviction, or a hope, that if you give popular audiences the greatest you have in you they will respond.’

Pauline Kael

‘It would be easier to film The Odyssey. Much less happens in it.’

J.R.R. Tolkien

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword by Andy Serkis

Prologue: Journey's End

1: Sillification

2: An Unexpected Director

3: Many Meetings

4: Words and Pictures

5: Concerning Hobbits

6: Heavenly Creatures

7: Jamboree

8: Miramar’s Mecca of Merry Souls

9: Proof of Concept

10: The Monsters and the Critics

11: To the Edge of the World

12: Junkie

13: MASSIVE

14: Return to the Edge of the World

15: The Music of Middle-earth

16: King of a Golden Hall

17: Legacy of the Ring

18: There and Back Again

19: Augmented Reality

Afterword

Picture Section

Footnotes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

About the Author

Also by Ian Nathan

About the Publisher

It feels like there was life before and life after.

I can remember the first time I saw Gollum. A finished Gollum. It was the sequence by the Forbidden Pool where he turns around to see Frodo, and he knows that something’s going on. It’s almost like an animal instinct; he can sense it. It was absolutely extraordinary.

You don’t know, you could never know. Here, finally, was the first proof that a level of psychological and emotional detail could be conveyed through ones and noughts. That thought could be conveyed through the combination of my performance and what they were doing at Weta Digital. I could sense that thought. I could feel that was exactly as I played it. That was incredibly gratifying.

Then I remember seeing The Two Towers for the first time. It was in New York, I was with Miranda Otto, Bernard Hill and Karl Urban. It was mind blowing. I knew every single frame.

I sensed that my life was never going to be the same again.

I supposed that was true for everyone who shared in The Lord of the Rings . The actors, the crew, everyone. None of us really knew what we were letting ourselves in for. And we went through so much together. Filmmaking is life. Every day you’re making a film is as important as the end result, because it feeds into the fabric of that film. That counts tenfold for The Lord of the Rings . That’s what attracted me to go back and do so many projects with Peter, Fran and Philippa, and all those guys down there, because it is a way of life. You don’t go to work; you’re living and breathing it.

Nevertheless, it certainly wasn’t the journey I was expecting for a second. Not for a second. Adding together both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, I have celebrated seven different birthdays in New Zealand. The first one was literally only days after I arrived. We were up at Ruapehu, shooting Mount Doom. That was pretty cool. We were staying at the Powderhorn, which looked like an alpine chalet. It was lovely. They made me a cake. The most memorable one was when Pete gave me the Ring for my birthday and on the same day asked me to be in King Kong . That was on an Easter Sunday. Other ones came and went, in so many beautiful places.