That country, root and branch, mountain and valley, is the soul of the films.
Moreover, I also can’t express how honest and open the people are. How much they made us part of their community and gave us such a good time. I made so many great friends.
So many people migrated there to take up jobs on The Lord of the Rings, it created a film industry there.
In the end, though, all roads lead back to Pete. And Fran and Philippa, of course. Pete is the most fearless director I’ve ever met. He has shared so much with me, taught me so much. I have said it often, but there is something truly maverick about him, an indie filmmaker working on the biggest scale possible. That’s what it always felt like. We were shooting these personal little indie films. These extraordinary films are an expression of who a person is. Pete is also such a visionary, just breaking barriers all the time with this marriage of technology and artistry.
I remember the glint in his eye when I first met him, so many years ago, in London. I could sense, even then, his vision for Gollum; neither of us really knew what we were letting ourselves in for but it was definitely going to be an unexpected journey. After principal photography on The Lord of the Rings ended, Pete signed a poster for me, which said “Many thanks for all the fun … and the fun to come.” It was then, and for the next decade, and hopefully always will be just that …
Andy Serkis
Monday, 1 December, 2003 was a typical summer’s day in Wellington. The sun was doing its level best, but the eternal, maddening winds were already scuffling over the bay and muscling their way inshore to ruffle pennants and hairdos but never spirits. Not on this day.
The red carpet was less familiar but not unexpected. Over 500 feet of imitation velvet swerved up Courtenay Place to the doors of the Embassy Cinema, recently refurbished at a cost of $5 million to a fetching cream and caramel Art Deco scheme. One of the myriad cinematic gifts Peter Jackson had bestowed upon his hometown. Fittingly, fifteen years earlier, his debut film, Bad Taste, had premiered at the Embassy, albeit with less salubrious décor and a smaller turnout.
Less in keeping with the old movie-palace aesthetic was the cowled Nazgûl astride a fell beast that had landed on top of the cinema virtually overnight to take up silent watch over the day’s festivities.
That full-size model, or maquette, with its great-scooped neck and outspread wings, sculpted by the imperious talents of Weta Workshop, still exists. Like so many Middle-earthian relics, it has been squirrelled away for posterity in one of Jackson’s dusty warehouses, the Mines of Moria of the Upper Hutt Valley.
Jackson might have to still undertake the mandatory global press tour on behalf of his new film, with its procession of glad-handing and crowd waving, but he had been adamant that the official world premiere for The Return of the King was to be in Wellington, the city at the heart of the production. This was the victory lap for a filmmaking triumph that, even in his innermost fantasies, he could never have imagined, and he wanted to share the moment with the people who had contributed so much.
Naturally, it was to be a party of special magnificence.
The good folk of Wellington were beginning to line the streets, bringing picnics and an unusual air of excitement for such an imperturbable race. Some had even camped out overnight. It felt like a public holiday, or a homecoming parade. And in some senses that is exactly what it was. By the afternoon, over 125,000 locals were crammed ten rows deep on either side of the streets — quite something for a city with a population of 164,000 — their ranks swelled by out-of-towners (decreed honorary Wellingtonians for such an occasion), many wearing homespun wizard hats and Elf-ears, who had crammed themselves onto long-haul flights from every corner of the world just to be here on this day. You could hear the noise halfway to Wanganui.
Soon enough the stars and filmmakers would glide through the city, setting off from Parliament House on Lambton Quay in a fleet of Ford Mustang convertibles, soaking up the adoration of the crowd with a royal wave, flanked by Gondorian cavalry, enshrouded Nazgûl on stoic horses, pug-ugly Orcs hefting Weta-made swords, beefcake Uruk-hai, supermodel Elves, and dancing hobbits trying not to trip over their outsized feet. At their head, in deference to the country that had become Middle-earth, was an outlier of Māori warriors with florid tā moko tattoos and waggling tongues. They might as well have been another extraordinary tribe dreamed up in leafy Oxford, a million miles away, in the mind of a pipe-smoking don.
When Orlando Bloom wafted past accompanied by Liv Tyler, there was screaming of a kind that was once the preserve of Beatlemania. There exists a framed photo of the four young actors who played the heroic hobbits — Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan — that they had made for Jackson’s birthday. They are in their hobbit wigs, Shire garments and prosthetic feet, but playing instruments and posed exactly like John, Paul, George and Ringo. ‘The Hobbits’ is emblazoned on the bass drum. The Beatles are Jackson’s favourite band, and had themselves once pondered making their own version of Tolkien’s epic as a musical extravaganza.
New Line had reputedly spent millions on the last official world premiere of the film trilogy they had staked their future on. What an inspired decision that seemed now. Had any film in history received a welcome like this? Bob Shaye, the tall, graceful, slightly bohemian CEO of New Line, would sit alongside Jackson in the lead car, the man who had taken the chance on this young director. It hadn’t been the easiest relationship. Hollywood’s risk-averse mentality was not an ideal mix with the natural Kiwi courage to take on the odds. There would be further tensions to come. For now, Shaye and his partner Michael Lynne’s gamble on the impossible book, which had seemed so foolhardy if not outright suicidal to their peers, had that shimmer of Hollywood history about it. That sense of divine obsession on which the movie industry was built, where for every Gone with the Wind there was a Heaven’s Gate.
Figurative tickertape was raining down on Wellington; it was the stuff of dreams with the city’s favourite son capturing it all on his video camera. He knew he would never remember it all, it would pass in a blur.
They had made it to the Moon and back again in filmmaking terms. The Return of the King, a fantasy epic, that laughably unsophisticated genre, would soon pick up eleven Oscar nominations. This was the culminating chapter in a staggering, and staggeringly successful, adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, considered for so long as impossible to capture on film.
Helen Clark, New Zealand’s prime minister, the day’s host, would give her thanks for all the films had brought to this country. Not only Hollywood dollars and employment — when the accounting was done the films would have utilised the talents of 23,000 Kiwis — but the tourism boom his trilogy of marvels had launched. With the help of a different world Jackson had put New Zealand onto the map.
How proud his country was of him, she said. How much she hoped his success would continue on into the future.
Jackson too would address the crowd, giving his thanks and saying how humble he felt that so many of them would turn out. He wasn’t even an All Black.
Everyone would give speeches. Each roared on by the crowd. It was like a wedding or a coronation, with 2,500 specially invited guests. Only this time Viggo Mortensen wasn’t expected to sing.
*
Earlier that day, amid the bustle of party business, with various planners and executives clamouring into walky-talkies and lumpen Nokias, Jackson had dutifully arrived on time at his allotted meeting point. Then, he hadn’t had to travel far. His home in Seatoun was barely ten minutes away, twenty if you caught Wellington at rush hour when the tailbacks can stretch to as many as ten cars long.
Seatoun lies on the seaward side of the quiet Wellington suburb of the Miramar Peninsula that plays home to Jackson’s filmmaking empire — studio,