What she had resolutely not done was watch Ralph Bakshi’s half-grown adaptation. On this she was adamant, no one could possibly do justice to the book on film.
In early 1997, Stephen Sinclair was helping Jackson and Walsh fathom how to do just that. While a fine dramatist, who had read the books as a kid, Sinclair was no expert and had no intention of changing that fact. He took what Jackson called a ‘cavalier’ attitude toward the text. However, Sinclair‘s girlfriend, a playwright, teacher, editor and director of the New Zealand Writer’s Guild, definitely knew a thing or two about Tolkien.
Boyens can remember the night Jackson and Fran Walsh first called, wondering if he might join their new project. She was in the kitchen when Sinclair got off the phone.
‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘You’ll never guess what Fran and Pete are working on next.’
‘I have no idea.’
‘It’s The Lord of the Rings.’
Boyens was incensed. ‘Well, they can’t. That’s crazy. No one can make that film.’
With her deep red, disobedient locks, often shored-up beneath a hat, Boyens cultivates a bohemian air much like her close friend Walsh. The two women who work so closely with Jackson have an aura of the otherworldly about them, as if they already had one foot in Middle-earth. Cloaked in her softly Gothic selection of floor-length dresses and shawls, you might suspect Boyens of being a modern-day sorceress. That is until you get a taste of her earthy Kiwi humour and logical mind. Like her partners, she has little time for the platitudes of Hollywood. There is an undercurrent of conviction to her mellifluous, Kiwi accent that is ironclad.
When Sinclair showed Boyens the treatment, she came back with notes. ‘Just ideas about the story,’ she vows. Initially, all Jackson and Walsh knew of Sinclair’s bookish partner who would alter the course of their creative lives were the incisive despatches that arrived from Auckland via Sinclair (Boyens also unofficially assisted Sinclair in writing some ‘romantic’ elements while he was still involved in The Lord of the Rings), until, intrigued, they invited her down to Wellington. After ten minutes of effusive icebreaking over how impressed she had been by their treatment, she got on to its shortcomings. Which turned out to be the interesting part. If there were things she felt they had done wrong — and there were more than a few — she had a solution for each one.
Boyens emphasized that it was critical to still recognize this as The Lord of the Rings within the landscape of the film. It had been an almost counterintuitive experience, assessing the book as a film, prompting an internal debate with her old self. Knowing in her heart that you can’t do The Lord of the Rings without Tom Bombadil and the Old Forest, but in her head understanding that you have to. Boyens found that she was able to think ruthlessly in film terms.
Impressed, Jackson and Walsh pushed for her active involvement. Meanwhile Sinclair’s interest had begun to wane as he itched to return to his plays and novels. The enormity of the project was too much of a commitment. ‘He looked at one draft,’ confirms Jackson. ‘But he was involved for literally a few weeks.’ Sinclair was recognized with a credit on The Two Towers, where his contribution was most manifest.
Thus it was Boyens who became the third voice in a screenwriting fellowship. She admits to feeling ‘terrified’ at first. This was her precious The Lord of the Rings; it still felt crazy to be even thinking of turning it into a film. But this was an offer to be at the heart of the craziness. To live and breathe Tolkien in a completely new way. How could she say no?
Before she met them, Boyens had been avidly following Jackson and Walsh’s blossoming career. She thought Braindead was genius. She was in the audience at the New Zealand Awards when Heavenly Creatures won everything only to be denied Best Film. ‘I felt like, God, New Zealand film needs to grow up. It felt so small and insular, and Fran and Pete have always looked outwards.’
That sense of adventure was infectious.
‘The biggest issue was always how do you get into this story?’ Boyens had written plays and dealt with screenwriters, but never attempted a screenplay herself. She was hired first as a script editor on the two-film draft, which was still in need of a prologue. So she volunteered to try and write one. The very first thing she officially set to paper was the opening line, ‘The world has changed …’ Over the arduous months that became years of interminable rewrites and restructuring of ultimately three-intertwined, award-strewn scripts, that line never changed.
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‘The most difficult thing on this project has been the script. The script has been a total nightmare.’ Jackson was speaking in Cannes in 2001, where he had unveiled twenty-six minutes of footage to raptures from the world’s press. The question of how one successfully adapts Tolkien had come up frequently. Something he had been doing his level best to answer for six years.
He mused that it was about getting the balance right. To have the characters represent both Tolkien’s intentions and be accessible for a modern cinema audience who didn’t have a clue about hobbits or Elves. ‘It’s about trying to please as many people as possible,’ he explained, which he knew sounded horribly general. ‘But to reach people,’ he insisted, ‘you have to start by pleasing yourself. And that is what I did. I thought simply of the film I dreamed of seeing.’
Costa Botes has a memory of seeing the script for Bad Taste. Or the lack of it — it was little more than lines scribbled on increasingly crumpled pieces of paper in biro. Jackson had had no idea how to write a formal script. Walsh at least had some experience writing for television. ‘But both of them got religion when Robert McKee made a rare excursion to Wellington and they attended his seminar.’
McKee was the Detroit-born playwright and screenwriter turned hugely influential creative screenwriting guru touring the world with his famous Story Seminar. He preached a gospel that it was narrative structure that made a story compelling rather than any of its component pieces: plot, dialogue, characters, etc. You must tell a story.
Enlightened, Jackson and Walsh changed their entire approach to screenwriting. Out of which came Meet the Feebles, Braindead — which for all its gore is elegantly structured — and, in time, their Planet of the Apes and Freddy Krueger scripts. Says Botes, ‘I remember Pete showing me the third draft of Heavenly Creatures. It’s a masterpiece. That’s an unbelievable development in a very short space of time.’
Deep-rooted into Jackson’s philosophy of filmmaking was the certainty that he, alongside Walsh, would always generate the screenplay. Writing and shooting were stages on the same journey. This is one of the reasons he could hold three films in his head at one time — the scripts were ingrained.
From the moment he reread The Lord of the Rings, however, it was clear McKee’s principles would be put to a severe test. Tolkien had taken seventeen years to write the damn thing. It was dauntingly complex. Jackson and Walsh had to go back over and over things — ‘assembling it in their heads’ — seeing how it all connected, figuring out what made this book they had fought doggedly to adapt so adored? More to the point, what, if anything, made it cinematic?
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The Book: The debate over the relative literary merits of Tolkien’s great opus has raged since its publication. There is no arguing that a vast readership is devoted to the point of religious fervour. Indeed, this intense popularity is partly what inflames the literati. Why can’t it just be forgotten? They would surely miss it if it were to pass out of fashion. They make such sport out of mocking the book. The aforementioned Edmund Wilson surmised that ‘certain people — especially, perhaps, in Britain — have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash’. The general tenor of literary disgust aggregates around its supposed childishness and lack of moral depth, irony, theme or allusion.
When it was crowned ‘the greatest book of the century’ by a public poll in 1997 the journalist Susan Jeffreys led a chorus of snobby intellectuals in