During the summer of 1998, Samwise Gamgee was conducting Hollywood business from behind the wheel of his air-conditioned BMW. In this town it was advisable to squeeze in a meeting between meetings, and somewhere along an overheated Burbank Boulevard, Sean Astin’s phone had jarred him out of autopilot. It was his agent, whose calls were becoming rare enough to collect. She went by the name of Nikki Mirisch, and like most of her kind Mirisch possessed a crippling allergy to general pleasantries, small talk and complete sentences.
‘Listen … Peter Jackson is doing The Lord of the Rings trilogy for New Line. You’ll need a flawless British accent by Thursday.’
All that shot through Astin’s brain were the words ‘Peter Jackson’, ‘New Line’ and ‘trilogy’. Which was enough to make him pull over.
‘You know … Tolkien,’ Mirisch reiterated as if explaining to a senior aunt. You wonder if this was an approach she often found necessary with her clients. ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ she stressed again.
Astin remonstrated that there was no way he could be ready by Thursday. It was already Tuesday. Come on, could she push it back a couple of days? He would be so much better prepared.
He was met with a barbed silence.
‘Nikki?’
‘Thursday, Sean. Be ready.’
You have to admire Astin’s honesty. He completes the tale with a chastening visit to a nearby Barnes & Noble where he walked up to the counter and asked if they had anything by J.R. Tolkien?
‘Yes sir,’ the assistant replied from behind his impregnable Californian sangfroid. ‘It’s J.R.R. Tolkien.’
Faced with the cacophony of editions occupying an entire wing of the fantasy section, deep in Astin’s brain synapses began to flare like beacons on distant mountaintops. This was something far more than a big, plump fantasy trilogy or fleshed out comic book. This was literature.
Purely on aesthetics he opted for an Alan Lee version.
A year earlier, Harry Knowles, the Austin-based internet pioneer and zealous Jackson advocate at the helm of Ain’t It Cool News, dropped by the set of Robert Rodriguez’s alien-parasite-loose-in-a-high-school B-movie pastiche The Faculty. Wherein Frodo Baggins was playing the school newspaper’s klutzy photographer Casey Connor. On a break, Knowles wandered over to Elijah Wood.
He and Wood had become fast friends. On the actor’s days off he often headed over to Knowles’ house to eat barbecue and geek out over movies.
‘I just heard that Peter Jackson’s going to make The Lord of the Rings into a feature film,’ announced Knowles, whose own allergy was to not giving the world the benefit of his opinion. ‘You should play Frodo.’
Knowles emailed Jackson shortly afterwards to tell him so as well.
Wood had seen Braindead, Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners. He’d loved the boundless energy and raucous sense of humour, but there was drama too. Having read The Hobbit as a kid, he was tangentially aware of what The Lord of the Rings was about and the idea of Jackson directing an adaption made perfect sense to him. With its showcase of human drama with fantasy, Heavenly Creatures was a perfect template for what Tolkien required, albeit on a much lower budget. Jackson, he could see, liked to play in that sandbox. The notion of him being attached himself to such a famous series of books was exciting.
Beyond that he had no sense of who Frodo might be or why he was so right to portray him. At that stage, he admits, ‘It was an abstract thought.’ One he paid no more heed to until almost twelve months later when he read that Jackson was travelling to London, New York and Los Angeles in search of hobbits, and it turned out that seed Knowles had planted in his head had taken root.
Wood’s agent made the appropriate introductions for him and he met with the casting director, Victoria Burrows, who was running the Los Angeles end of the operation. He read an early draft of The Fellowship of the Ring (which was not to leave the room). Burrows suggested he come back in a day or two to put something on tape.
But the idea of Frodo was now too important to chance on some identikit audition against the featureless wall of a casting office. ‘I wanted to do something that would showcase my enthusiasm and passion, something that would push me in a different direction and be more visible. Something I would have more control over.’
Wood had never been bold enough to shoot his own audition tape before — not an unheard-of tactic for zealous actors — but that is what he was going to do, using the three audition scenes he had been given for Frodo. One was a prototype scene between Gandalf and Frodo that never made it to the movie and two were scenes from film three where Frodo has to varying degrees succumbed to the Ring’s psychic tentacles. The idea was to show the actor’s range across the gamut of Frodo’s decline. As two of the scenes were exteriors he headed out the pine-strewn slopes of Griffith Park for a quasi-Tolkien backdrop.
But not before heading to the bookstore and grabbing a pile of illustrated editions of Tolkien’s thick tome, Alan Lee’s among them. Equipped with a general idea of what constituted hobbit attire, he hired a waistcoat, knee high pants, braces, that kind of thing. Then with his friends George Huang, who had directed Swimming with Sharks, behind the camera and Mike Lutz reading the parts of Gandalf and Sam out of shot, he filmed the first ever live-action scenes of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Edited into shape, the tape was Fed-exed to Jackson, who was in London becoming increasingly despondent that he may never find his ideal Frodo and Sam.
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Martin Scorsese once said that ninety per cent of any film is casting. And who are we to doubt the master? He is one of Jackson’s chief inspirations as a director. But Scorsese has never been burdened with finding a hobbit. One of the keenest pleasures in contemplating a live-action adaption of The Lord of the Rings was that game of mentally casting the Fellowship and the host of other named parts.1 Who was best for Frodo or Sam or Gandalf or Ted Sandyman? In practice, locating the perfect Fellowship and beyond became a quest littered with false starts, frequent despair and pure fluke.
In his prologue (paraphrased by Bilbo in the extended edition of The Fellowship of the Ring) Tolkien alludes to hobbits’ ‘love of peace and quiet’ and ‘good tilled earth’. They were clearly a romanticized version of the country folk the writer had known from his rural childhood. The twist of course being they grew ‘not taller’ than four feet and had extremely large feet ‘clad in thick and curly hair’.
In the pitch documentary, Jackson is determined his hobbits were to be, as Tolkien said, ‘little people’. They were not children, or any of the grotesque garden gnomes fancied by less faithful artists. Bakshi had fallen headfirst into that trap. Jackson wanted his audience to relate to them, and be equally as unsettled by big folk.
The director also explained in his pitch how the problematic issue of scale would be achieved via a variety of cunning visual tricks: forced perspective, slaved cameras, crosscutting between differently scaled sets, digital face replacement, distinctively tall and small stand-ins and the (in the end limited) use of giant puppets.
Ian Holm noted the ‘great satisfaction’ Jackson derived from mastering what the actor called this ‘Brobdingnagian event’.
Once shooting, Jackson became increasingly willing to trust the audience to assume the distinction naturally. They could shoot a hobbit actor from over a human’s shoulder and we would unconsciously rescale the scene. The sequence where Boromir tries to claim the Ring from Frodo features no trickery at all (excepting the Ring’s). Jackson uses the slope of the hill to fool our eyes.
Each