There and Back Again (32 page)

Though separated by nearly five decades, Christopher and I developed an extraordinary rapport; he allowed me to enjoy a friendship with him that became almost as close as my friendship with Elijah. It happened pretty early on, in part because of my admiration not only for Christopher's acting, but his familiarity with Tolkien's writing. He knew the books cold, and in fact had a far deeper understanding than I did of Sam and his importance to the story. Not only that, but he made it clear that he appreciated and agreed with the choices Peter and I had made in my portrayal: namely, that Sam is a heroic character. Christopher understood this more than the other actors, or at least more than Ian McKellen or Ian Holm (who played Bilbo Baggins) did. These gentlemen—Christopher and the two Ians—were
legends
. You couldn't help but look to them and wonder if they grasped what you were doing, because if they did, that was validation.

Christopher and I would occasionally sit together in the dressing room, smoking cigars and talking about acting, art, politics—almost anything. Because of being raised by two actors, I've long felt a particular kinship with mature actors. I'm part of an acting tradition, and so I look at other actors and think,
We're fellow travelers along a common road.
I look to the generations that have come before me with a kind of respect that I think they've earned, and I feel like I'm ready to assume the mantle of that tradition with younger performers. I say this despite the gnawing feeling in my gut that, all else being equal, I'd rather be behind the camera directing than in front of it. It's weird, but that said, acting does give me a sense of belonging, and it's because of my parents, of course. I wasn't necessarily comfortable staying in the living room at their parties, conversing with the adult actors, but knowing they were there was comforting; it made me feel like I had a place in the world.

Christopher Lee tapped right into that. His reputation preceded him on the set. I'd never met Christopher, but I knew that Peter Jackson absolutely revered him for his work as Dracula, Rasputin, Fu Manchu, and other dastardly villains in the classic Hammer horror films of the 1960s. I had seen some images of him and had heard about him, so I had an idea of what he would be like. And he was pretty much as advertised, a rangy, almost regal man in his late seventies, with long thin fingers and a slow, steady, purposeful gait. This is a man who moves with stature, who moves, come to think of it, not unlike Treebeard. When Christopher Lee enters a room and turns around, it's a
choice
. He's a very dramatic, almost theatrical man.

We met for the first time in the wardrobe area. I introduced myself after watching him for a few moments, sizing him up and waiting for the appropriate time. And I remember thinking while shaking his hand,
Here's somebody who wants you to know that he's capable of determining that you're not worthy of extended interaction.
He had a commanding presence, which I found simultaneously appealing and intimidating. I knew he had read
The Lord of the Rings
trilogy every year, and that was the context of our first conversation. The subtext was,
I know you're a substantial performer deserving of respect.

Once I'd earned his trust and our friendship had begun to blossom, Christopher would occasionally indulge in a bit of griping in my presence. Actually, that may not be the best word. He wasn't griping so much as fretting. A healthy amount of commiserating went on among the actors, as happens on almost any production, although perhaps more so on
The Lord of the Rings
because of the sheer scope of the project and the demands it placed on cast and crew. For Christopher, a primary concern was the number of takes Peter routinely required to film a scene. Christopher was a “working” actor in the purest sense of the word. He'd made a career out of stacking one role on top of another, and always delivering exactly what was asked of him. The bulk of his filmography consisted of genre fare produced on tight budgets and squeezed through the smallest of windows. He was accustomed to filming scenes in a single, flawless take (and if it was flawed, so be it). On a couple of occasions he'd been asked to do three or four takes, but I got the impression that probably happened in the late 1940s on a lucky day when the cinematographer had an extra roll of film. Now, though, a different set of demands was being heaped upon Christopher, and he didn't like it. On the one hand, he was angry at Peter; on the other hand, he was experiencing self-doubt.

“Why, I've never had a director ask me to do it this many times in my life!” he exclaimed one day, after filming a scene that required some fifteen attempts. “This is ridiculous! I've done fewer takes in an entire movie!”

He was almost posturing, trying to project a sense of righteous indignation, but I could tell he was also looking for reassurance that everything would be all right, and that there was nothing inherently wrong with his performance.

“That's Peter's style,” I said. “It's not about you. It's just the way he works.”

While I was trying to comfort Christopher, I also meant exactly what I said. Peter had so much on his mind, and he was juggling so many different things at once—the story, the technology, the finances. Whatever frustrations I may have experienced, they are mitigated by the realization, crystallized in hindsight, that simply by completing this project, Peter accomplished one of the great miracles in the history of cinema. That his creation is artful and entertaining and accessible is a wonder almost beyond comprehension. (Think about it: in
The Return of the King
there is a swashbuckling scene in which Orlando Bloom's Legolas surfs gallantly down the trunk of an oliphant, a smile on his face, bow at the ready, as Howard Shore's musical score reaches a crescendo. How many movies could get away with a scene like that and still be deemed serious enough to merit eleven Academy Award nominations?) Although I know he tried, Peter hadn't the time to dwell on the myriad insecurities of actors. I think Christopher sometimes felt that the production was not making enough accommodations for the fact that he was elderly, resulting in a game of tug-of-war. Peter expected Christopher to be able to do more than he wanted to do, but not more than he actually could do. Maybe it came down to this: Peter didn't want Christopher to pull a star trip on him. I know firsthand from my mother that actors can and do use their infirmities to get attention. (Sorry, Mom. Please don't kill me!) Perhaps Christopher hadn't had the benefit of watching
Meet the Feebles;
he was used to being the grand pooh-bah on pictures. He enjoyed that status, he had fun with it, and you know what? To a certain extent, he had earned it. On
The Lord of the Rings,
however, the story was the star; there wasn't time or space for coddling.

*   *   *

Another aspect of the process troubled Christopher (and almost everyone else at one time or another), and that was the constant changing and rewriting of lines. It wasn't at all unusual to be presented with a ream of new dialogue just minutes before a take, with the understanding that instant memorization and clarity of purpose weren't possible, and so it was okay to work through the bad stuff for a while, over the course of maybe a dozen or more takes, on the path to capturing something worthwhile on film. Most of the actors, especially those of us who'd been on location for a while, understood that. But each time a new actor arrived, he or she was subjected to baptism by fire. Many of the more familiar names in the films, such as Liv Tyler, Ian McKellen, Ian Holm, and Cate Blanchett, spent much smaller blocks of time in New Zealand than did the Fellowship. Some handled the demands better than others. Christopher's work in
The Lord of the Rings
is stellar, but it was not achieved without some pain. This was a production that required nimbleness, elasticity. Most of us accepted that we'd look dreadful while churning through the disposable takes, but Christopher didn't like looking bad. He wasn't used to it. And I felt for him during those moments.

I also felt for Peter, who loved Christopher's work and wanted him—
needed
him—to shine in the role of Saruman, and who also wanted to be respectful of Christopher's age and experience and stature. And yet, Peter had to contend with the much more practical, pressing matter of filming a $270 million trilogy. He had been weaned on the Hammer films and had been mesmerized by the repeatedly and consistently creepy work of Christopher Lee; but now he was dealing with a sometimes cantankerous old bastard who didn't want to do more than three takes, but Peter wasn't going to leave until they got it right.

The writing process made this challenging. Christopher is from the old school. If he had a speech to deliver in a scene, he wanted to see the pages well in advance—at the very least, the night before filming—so that he could commit the words to memory. He wasn't as quick to embrace the notion that on this production the smart survival strategy for an actor was to learn it, be willing to totally forget it, and know that if they write you a new scene ten minutes before you're scheduled to perform it, somehow it will all work out. If you screwed up on the first ten or fifteen takes, that was all right. Peter would give you thirty. And by the thirtieth take, you'd have learned the lines. This was not just a one-way street, incidentally. To his immense credit, Peter understood the demands he placed on his cast, and he was willing to reciprocate. If you wanted another take, Peter was, within reason, willing to give you another one. To a large degree, he trusted the actor to be the ambassador of his character, and he expected him to communicate what was working and what was not working—above and beyond what he could sense.

Everything was fluid, especially the writing. There is no such thing as hyperbole or overstatement when talking about the constant nature of the rewrite process on
The Lord of the Rings
. Let me be clear about this, because Peter and Fran would doubtless be hurt, or feel their reputation was being impugned, if I were to suggest that there wasn't a sense of professionalism about delivering pages on time. There were very real-world, budgetary consequences to having pages rewritten beyond a certain point, and Peter was always aware of such things. In fact, another area of expertise he demonstrated was knowing what needed to be written (and shown to the studio) in order for certain budgets to be drafted, for sets to be constructed, illustrations of the sets to be commissioned, and so on. But he also knew how to time everything so the writers could apply the best part of their creativity to the reworking of language at the right moments. Peter was deeply respectful of the screenwriters and the screenwriting process (and not simply because he is a credited writer on the screenplay and a coauthor of the original draft). He respected their autonomy, and was deferential to what they had done—unless, of course, push came to shove and he had to change something. Generally speaking, it's fair to say that the standard response to suggestions made by the actors regarding dialogue was, “Oh, we can't change that—the script girls will come in.” Peter jokingly referred to Fran and Philippa as the “script Nazis.” They were fiercely protective of their work. Understandable, really, since they bled for each and every word.

I recall feeling for them as we were prepared to shoot the Council of Elrond sequence, which was arguably the hardest scene in the book for Peter to film, because it involved so many main characters in one place at one time. With the exception of the closing scene of the final film, such crowded scenes were avoided. Like the characters in the movie, in fact, we were all scattered about New Zealand and Middle-earth. Just as Sam and Frodo, while marching to Mordor, have no way of knowing what is happening to Pippin and Merry, Elijah and I spent great stretches of time isolated from the other actors. The Council of Elrond, however, is a break from that style of storytelling, a pivotal moment in the first film that presents to the viewer the formation of the Fellowship. It's an enormously complicated scene, one requiring significant exposition in the face of monumental technical challenges. I'm not sure the writers ever got it quite right, although God knows they tried. Tolkien devotes some seventy pages to the Council of Elrond meeting and its implications, and yet the scene as filmed lasts only a few minutes.

That only magnifies the challenge, for this is a scene that sets the tone not just for the remainder of the movie, but for the entire franchise. The story repeatedly refers back to the idea that it's Frodo's
mission
to carry the ring. That is the fundamental quest at the core of the trilogy, and the reasons for Frodo being assigned and accepting this burden, as well as the motivation of the other members of the Fellowship, are all established at the Council of Elrond.

Talk about a plot point!

In addition to the formidable task of communicating the information necessary to understanding the story, Peter was also dealing with the expectations and skills and egos of a score of world-class actors, all sort of jostling for space and screen time; at the same time, he was wrestling with the scale issues endemic to a production in which some of the characters are three and a half feet tall, and others are twice that height. It's challenging enough to put Gandalf and Bilbo in a room together, and make it believable when the actors who portray them are roughly the same size. But when you put everyone in one place at one time—elves, dwarves, men, hobbits, and wizards—and ask the camera to sweep across the screen, scale issues become a point of great concern.

Many of the artful ways Peter devised to introduce various characters—like Boromir arriving in slow motion at Rivendell—hadn't been completely determined at that point. The script called for ways of introducing characters and handling exposition, but changes were often made at the last second. This, of course, was one of the ways they struck terror into the hearts of studio executives: that $270 million had been committed, and the director wasn't going to shoot the script. Well, he was shooting the script. And he was shooting so much more than the script. The script was a very real, living and breathing document, but Peter wasn't a slave to it. While he was respectful of the script, he knew intuitively that when we'd get to a particular sequence and shoot all day long, the process would evolve organically. Each page of a script typically results in one minute of footage. On average. Well, Peter would shoot so much footage that each page could have filled fifteen minutes on screen. But he did it without going over budget, and he did it largely without incurring the wrath of his cast and crew, which speaks volumes about his managerial style and wisdom, as well as everyone's faith in him.