lord of the rings really was lightning in a bottle. it shouldn’t have worked but by god it did. peter jackson, who had no filmmaking education and was mostly known for making low budget splatter movies, had no business going out and changing the movie industry like that but he did. return of the king showed up at the oscars and became one of the most awarded movies of all time. to this day it holds the record for the highest clean sweep. hollywood will keep trying to recreate that magic with bigger budgets and high profile actors and they will keep failing. i look at the state of these blockbusters where everything is smoothed over by soulless cgi and actors are acting opposite tennis balls and they will never hold a candle to the pure heart and soul and craft of the lord of the rings. every single person involved in that project loved being part of it and it fucking shows. i’m so thankful the stars aligned the way they did for these movies to happen like that.
Lord of the Rings worked precisely because everyone loved the story and the work and each other. The Hobbits are actually still besties in real life, so the love between them on screen is real. Viggo Mortensen bought and kept the horse that saves Aragorn's life. This man broke more than one finger insisting on doing real sword fights with real (unsharpened) swords.
The only kinda janky CGI in the entire movie is in there because Orlando Bloom broke a rib trying to actually jump onto a running horse and they ran out of time for him to heal and try again.
Andy Serkis scrambled around in a stream in New Zealand in winter. rather than do anything on a green screen. Christopher Lee was Ian McKellan's real life hero. The way Gandalf felt about Saruman until his betrayal. Ian McKellan loved the source material so much he walked around with a copy of the books on set and made script changes to quote it more often. Peter Jackson became a director because he wanted to make Lord of the Rings. This was his childhood dream.
And most importantly, the production executives gave him a buttload of money and shut the fuck up and let him do anything he wanted with it. Which is their job. The most successful thing about Lord of the Rings is that the execs kept their mouths shut and didn't get in the way of art.
Sooooooooo
Peter Jackson had already made Heavenly Creatures with Kate Winslet (her big break) and The Frighteners with Michael J. Fox (a major celeb at the time.) Not having a “filmmaking education" doesn’t mean much of anything but that you haven’t had your instincts filed down and homogenized according to industry standard. He learned by doing, like most filmmakers before the university boom.
They did have to do significant portions of their acting toward tennis balls - e.g. there’s a recent clip of Sir Ian McKellan in an interview roaring “YOU - SHALL NOT - BOUNCE” which is well worth seeing. The scale shots between hobbits/ dwarves and human/elf actors were almost never able to be done with direct eye contact and so they were acting toward empty air, and often not even on set at the same time, and many of those scenes are the most tender and emotional and meaningful in the films.
But the production bit is really what gets me here. These legendary films got made DESPITE the producers' best efforts to ruin it all. Peter and Fran and Phiippa - and the whole production team, the cast, the crew - fought for every inch of realism and ground, and the passion they all felt, and only because they were all so united in that, they managed - barely - to succeed, which feels meta on a level I can't even articulate.
Bob and Harvey Weinstein were executive producers from early on. Miramax wouldn't even TELL Jackson what their budget was so they could do any planning. Harvey in particular was CONSTANTLY harassing Jackson and the team trying to get them to make it in just two films, make it shorter, make it with less money, make it with different "less difficult" (COUGH COUGH COUGH) actresses, and I'm fairly persuaded the only reason that he wasn't constantly interfering in person is because Harvey couldn't be arsed to fly across the world to New Zealand when he could assault actresses at home.
HARVEY WEINSTEIN THREATENED TO REPLACE PETER JACKSON WITH QUENTIN TARANTINO if Jackson didn't strip all the character and story moments from the script, cut it to two movies on a COMBINED budget of $75 million pre-recession USD, and go from explosion to battle scene the whole time. My best half-remembered impression from interviews is that Peter ran interference on everything, presumably because if Harvey had been talking to Fran or Philippa he'd have been Harvey about it, and he was an egotistical shit the whole time with Jackson complaining to the studio he wasn't being respected like he deserved. Considering the careers he'd ruined before as such an influential money man, this was not an idle threat.
IT TOOK SOMEONE LEAKING THE DUMBED DOWN PROSPECTIVE DUOLOGY SCRIPTS FOR ENOUGH PUBLIC BACKLASH TO GET THE STUDIO TO FINALLY BACK DOWN AND LET THEM MAKE IT PROPERLY AS A TRILOGY. That's why New Line ended up with the picture in the end, and even then, it was barely funded.
Even then the ONLY reason we even got the Extended Editions was a massive online crowdfunding campaign, a total unheard-of novelty at the time that even my obsessive LotR-fan father thought might be fake/ a scam.
The disputes over creative interference were so acrimonious that, per Elijah Wood, one of the orcs was designed to look like Harvey. That's technically unconfirmed/ apocryphal, but this ain't - at the and of the Return of the King we get all these lovely illustrations over the principal credits…
And then one of these things is not like the others -
YOU WILL NEVER CONVINCE ME THAT WAS NOT COMMENTARY. Twin giant, blinkered trolls driving a machine and their handler?
NO.
Give the filmmakers, cast, crew, extras the full credit they deserve - they fought uphill and en masse for these films; conditions were not nearly so good as the above implies in that they were often having to summon their performances from theatre of the mind, they were shooting scenes or reshoots or pickups years apart from prior events or without their counterparts on set because that was the only way to stay in budget and on time when the script was having to be retooled in part under financial threats, they were reacting to placeholder objects to keep eyelines, there was ENORMOUS UNANIMOUS COLLECTIVE effort to ward off the cheapening the producers were always calling for. And the pay for the principal cast was poor, even the huge, established celebs - so you can imagine what it probably was for all the crew, production, the hordes of people necessary to make it all work. It was a labor of great love and it was frankly underfunded many times over for what it was, for the amount of both brilliant innovation and brute force work that some of the most skilled specialists, technicians, artisans on the planet put into it. It was not - could not be thanks to those producers being bizarrely praised (?!?) above - fairly paid and conditions often really were miserable - freezing, injury-prone, obscene hours (imagine working only nights, outdoors, in artificial rain, for over a month, just to get the Hornberg siege.) SO many injuries on those sets, not just from Viggo's madcap method acting. Everything at a breakneck, whirlwind pace. Everything built so lovingly, even when they knew it would all be dismantled within weeks.
SOOO.
Don't let all that be erased in some happy retcon about The Good Old Days. There was never a time that film wasn't a ruthless industry. Yes, the conditions on The Hobbit films were far worse despite more money (and the costs to New Zealand film production labor law were obscene.) Enshittification is a production line that has only gotten more efficient over time and the erosion of worker protections. That doesn't mean things were GOOD before.
GIVE THE REAL CREATIVES THE CREDIT THEY DESERVE. What they did was an irreplaceable, unworldly passionate gift to film and fiction and fantasy, at enormous sacrifice of bodily wellbeing, let alone career costs/ finance. They believed in their collective vision and each other, and so they ensured it became a reality, but not one bit of that road was paved for them - they cut and trod the path for each other.
(And may Harvey Weinstein's crotch and eyes rot for all his many crimes against humanity and art both.)
Also, belatedly, although we all feel love and gratitude to Sir Ian McKellan for his excellent portrayal of Gandalf, he hadn't even read the books when he accepted the role on the strength of the script. To this day, when he talks about it, although he considered it an excellent theatrical production of which he was very proud and remembers fondly, he clearly has very generationally-typical British views of fantasy (that is, even at its best, it's all a little bit silly) of the very type that left Professor Tolkien himself, despite impassioned and formal defense of myth and monsters as literature in the academic field for decades, sort of embarrassed and shy of his great oeuvre. He certainly sees it as valuable storytelling, but he always frames that back in reference to real life and real people - a valid opinion and way to hold the story, but not the sort of excited student demeanor/ affection for the source material mentioned above.
All the actors were expected to become experts in their characters and speak to what those characters would do, and McKellan did the same, carrying his copy of the books with him on set and participating in that collaborative storytelling. He mostly argued for Gandalf, specifically, to have the sorts of long speeches he tends to in the book (I suspect in part this was essentially asking for harder material; he was in his sixties and the prime of his career, he wanted a challenge, and this was delightful new-to-him stuff to work with. As a footnote, I also think not only was he surprised to learn this odd material full of wizards and "hobbits" was greatly beloved by not just a preexisting audience - exciting for any actor - but what he rightly identified as an underserved audience longing to see men who love men who saw at least dimensions of their lives reflected in Sam & Frodo's dynamic.)
Otoh, Christopher Lee reread the books every year & had an encyclopedic knowledge of the work. He'd met Tolkien, and his respect for him was reverential. He absolutely made notes and comments on Saruman's role and many other minor details besides. McKellan said of Lee after his passing that he'd been aware of his career as a fellow actor for many years but felt intimidated when he realized the profundity of his expertise, but that Lee was a perfect gentleman & never deliberately made him feel lesser.
It's worth going and digging up the interviews (there are so many) or just grabbing the extended editions from your library and watching the commentaries (somehow I'd never even watched the cast commentary until this year! Only the other three from the writers and production teams.) Understanding just how many people had to profoundly care for it to come to pass - and, yes, the odds and opposition and naked evil they faced - makes it even more miraculous that it happened.
Humanity is that, though. The fact that it began in one mind, and then all the rest labored so tirelessly to realize it? There's a lot of hope in that, for much more than the great good of great art.
