Taylor would join forces with Jackson on his very next film, and begin his own journey toward The Lord of the Rings.
And this was when Jackson first met Fran Walsh. To be exact, he first saw Walsh on the set of the series Worzel Gummidge Down Under, the television offshoot about a talking scarecrow, for which he had been hired to do a few little special effects. She was one of the writers, but they hadn’t spoken. Then out of the blue Botes asked if he could show the unfinished Bad Taste to a couple of his screenwriter friends, he thought would appreciate it. They happened to be Walsh and her then boyfriend Stephen Sinclair. Walsh remembered being bowled over by how uninhibited the film was, and on zero budget.
She would volunteer her services to help complete the film, and would become not only the most important creative partner in Jackson’s life but the story of this book.
Completing Bad Taste, says Taylor, ‘Peter was bitten by the bug.’ Up until then he had thought he might get by in special effects. In New Zealand the thought that you could follow a career as a director was preposterous. But the response to Bad Taste was so powerful that it convinced Jackson this was his calling.
Jackson also committed himself to gore, and ruffling the strait-laced New Zealand film community. In 1989 came depraved puppet musical Meet The Feebles (shot in a rat-infested warehouse) followed in 1992, after a salutary false start, by Braindead, his blood-bolstered, period zomcom. The film that would take him to America — if only for a visit.
A career had been born in a deluge of sheep brains, farting hippos and a zombie baby named Selwyn. Middle-earth was another world.
‘When he finally made enough money to move into town,’ remembers Taylor, ‘it was into the tiniest house in Wellington. He bought the biggest television I have ever seen and we’d sit in his front room, dwarfed by this gigantic thing. When you stood up to make a cup of tea, there’d be half a dozen people out on the pavement, standing there watching the movie!’
*
There is one other adaption of The Lord of the Rings we have yet to mention. Indeed, it was the most comprehensive and meaningful adaption to date, one that is still held in the highest esteem by fans. It was also the only version of the book to provide any objective lessons — apart from what not to do — in how to successfully dramatize Tolkien, even though there was not a single frame to be seen.
This was, of course, the 1981 BBC radio serialization. Adapted by Brian Sibley and Michael Bakewell with a fine-edged scalpel, trimming great swathes of the book without any discernible loss of the central story (it still runs to a considerable eighteen hours). They also retained a good deal of Tolkien’s dialogue, while carefully negotiating the demands of radio dramatization. Events that are reported in the book are transformed into first-hand scenes (a trick Jackson and his writers would apply). Even the battle scenes, inevitably reduced by the medium, have a dense, breathy, clanging atmosphere. All of it eased onward through the addition of a narrator (Gerard Murphy).
Above all, the vocal performances set an enviable standard: Michael Horden swings appreciably between avuncular and steely as Gandalf; Robert Stephens’ smoky basso makes Aragorn seem older, wiser and immediately kingly. Jackson would seek a deliberate resonance between the serial and his own films in the casting of Ian Holm as his Bilbo; Holm having made an impassioned Frodo back in 1981.
Having made his mark in Bakshi’s adaptation, Peter Woodthorpe would again provide the disturbingly funny duality of his Gollum. Disembodied, that needling, pathetic, hissing voice carries a note of pure heartbreak.
The seminal serial was responsible for bringing another generation to the book. But Hollywood had lost interest or grown weary of its numerous challenges. And for fifteen years the Ring lay forgotten, until it was finally picked up by the most unlikely director imaginable.
The English Patient was dying. Saul Zaentz had pleaded with the studio that they were in the process of forging art. He had protested at their shortsightedness. And he had resorted to good old-fashioned brinkmanship. They were only weeks from shooting, but 20th Century Fox were not backing down. Fox had bought the English language rights to this expensive adaptation of Michael Ondaatje’s Booker prize-winning novel for a not inconsiderable $20 million (the full budget was $31 million, including $5 million of Zaentz’s own money) and were insisting it have a marquee female lead.
Accepting Ralph Fiennes as the hero — if such a straightforward term could be applied to the emotionally fraught and morally elusive weft of Ondaatje’s novel — already spoke of a due deference to artistic over commercial merit. This was, they knew, a prestige project. Fiennes was so very English — although his character turns out to be Hungarian.
The Second World War romantic epic came endowed with a tricky structure. It told a story within a story, gradually regaled to Juliet Binoche’s free-spirited nurse, and us, by a burn-ravaged Fiennes languishing within the gorgeous grounds of a Franciscan monastery somewhere in the Tuscany countryside. His tale will sweep us all back to a Sahara on the brink of war where spies and cartographers muster and a great love affair ensues, all simmering in a grand manner not seen since the imperial heyday of David Lean. The kind of film, everyone kept saying, no one made anymore.
When it came to Fiennes’ romantic opposite – the fragile, conflicted, swan-like Katharine Clifton – Fox were thinking of Demi Moore, in the spring of 1995 box office gold following Indecent Proposal and Disclosure. Zaentz and his so very English director, Anthony Minghella, whose determination to steer his own artistic choices mirrored that of Peter Jackson’s, had set their heart upon Kristin Scott Thomas — more traditionally beautiful, more icy and layered.
Bill Mechanic, who was then president of Fox, later promised on his life that the Moore rumours were untrue. Minghella maintained that ‘Demi’s name was always mentioned’.
Whatever the case, the fractious production had reached an impasse. Actually, that was no longer true.
Fox had pulled the plug.
Rallying round the desperate project, already encamped in the desert, two of Minghella’s closest allies, director Sydney Pollack and producer Scott Rudin, put in a call to Harvey Weinstein, the influential co-founder and co-chairman, with his brother Bob, of the independent film powerhouse Miramax.
‘Harvey just stepped in and financed it one hundred per cent,’ confirms Jackson, who has been recounting the story as a matter of significant background.
Cynical Hollywood commentators, of which there are many, suspected that Miramax was already well aware the project was faltering, with Harvey ready and waiting for it to collapse so he could swoop in and save the day.
Akin to Zaentz, this was exactly the kind of project that fitted Harvey’s view of himself as both Hollywood player and indie king, as well as the philosophy of Miramax as a film company: sophisticated, literary, but with mainstream potential, and Oscar-worthy, always Oscar-worthy. Spinning gold on behalf of the inevitable awards campaign for The English Patient, Miramax’s gifted publicists spread a tale of the White Knight who saved great art from studio defilement.
Nominated for twelve Oscars (including one for Kristin Scott Thomas), winner of nine, and making $231 million around the world, The English Patient cemented Harvey’s reputation. By the mid-1990s, he was the new Selznick, but operating from New York headquarters beyond the borders of Hollywood. He wasn’t the kind of studio boss who would demand Demi Moore. He understood the needs of filmmakers. He could manage big, important films outside of the studio system. He also understood the marketplace and how to reach an audience. He could finesse, and he could bully.