Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-Earth by Ian Nathan

Author:Ian Nathan [Nathan, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B0716L6FJD
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

To the Edge of the World

On 14 June 2002, banking through the cloud cover and taking some roughhousing from the local airstream — out of the window the wingtips pitch and yaw like a troubled boat — I touched down at Wellington International Airport for the first time. Taxiing to the terminal, all that could be seen of New Zealand’s capital city were the quaint clapboard houses clinging to the hillsides. The airport is slotted onto a neck of flatland that joins the alluvial terraces of the Miramar Peninsula to the sandstone mountains that fortify Wellington itself. This made a natural funnel for the north-westerly that skims off the Cook Strait, ensuring a bumpy welcome for travellers.

The short distance to Stone Street Studios, literally over the hill, offered equal parts convenience and exasperation. Famously, during filming, a plane spotter was positioned on the ridge with a walkie-talkie to warn of imminent take-offs and landings, so the business of Middle-earth could avoid the anachronistic boom of jet engines.

A year after Cannes, I had been invited to New Zealand, to Middle-earth, the gold seam of Jackson’s great project. I was there as a prospector, a journalist seeking a sense of how the impossible had been achieved. What was this mysterious Kiwi spirit that everyone spoke about? And where was that fabled, magical light?

Outside the terminal it was beginning to drizzle.

Despite having theoretically wrapped on 22 December 2000, cast and crew had returned to Stone Street for six-week blocks of what had been classified as supplementary shooting, or ‘pick-ups’, on each film. In June 2001, they returned to supplement The Fellowship of the Ring. And now it was the turn of The Two Towers.

What made this occasion different to the many months they spent here in the past was a sense of accomplishment, laced with a little relief as well. Not only had they come back in the full knowledge the first film of the trilogy has been a huge box office success, The Fellowship of the Ring had been strewn with Oscar-nominations — Hollywood’s golden validation. And everyone knew it had been a close-run thing for Best Picture.

Their first film had slipped the moorings of its genre. The naysayers had been made to swallow their bile. There was a new frame of reference, a new language being used — critics were talking about art, ravishing and elemental. Jackson was now at the helm of a phenomenon, which inevitably meant the beady eye of Hollywood had grown only more intense.

Now the misanthropes, galled at having been proved wrong, were asking a new question. Could he sustain it?

Such debates were not to be heard at The Green Parrot or The Spruce Goose or The Prancing Pony, or any other Wellington spot frequented by filmmaking folk. They were definitely not to be heard on set.

‘No one was thinking, “Ah, now we are under this pressure,”’ recalls Ordesky. ‘Peter did not wear stress poorly, which I think is a testament to him and a testament to the New Zealand culture.

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