Ian Nathan's Blog
September 8, 2019
The Good Life: A Collection of Thoughts on Once Upon A Time... in Hollywood
WITH SPOILERS...
Watching the ninth movie by Quentin Tarantino glide by many things occurred to me. Not least, what a pleasure it is to be in Tarantino's company once more. There are few nights out to compare. I'm of an age able to recall the press screening for Pulp Fiction, held in London on a hot summer night in 1994. We had heard all about Tarantino's second film from its P'alme d'Or winning jaunt to the Riviera, but we weren't ready. I've not been to another screening like it. Had the seats been wired to the mains in some crazy experiment? Critics were laughing, clapping, whooping in the effort to express the surge of shock and pleasure that ran through that cinema. As Travolta plunged that syringe, which looked long enough to impale a rhino, down toward poor, comatose Uma Thurman, her face smeared in heroin-snot, there were involuntary screams. We were captive to the sheer giddy rush of what movies might be able to do to us. We were high...
The first reaction to OUATIH (we'll be here forever if I write it out in full each time) is how easy it is to watch. The film is two and half breezy hours, often slow in that moony, talky, ruminating Tarantino way; often nuts, and at one particular juncture extremely bloody, in that scandalous, PC-baiting Tarantino way. There's not a dull note — you sit there marvelling how little you require the retina abuse of CG blizzards and hyperactive editing to stay in the room. You can just sit back and let it happen. There is no need to untangle the prior shenanigans of an extended universe. Plot, character, place and history are following their own rules. Tarantino calls it a "hang out movie" like Jackie Brown. The trajectories of each character and the film as a whole are ambling and easily side-tracked rather than predestined, the framework of the story is buried deep...
It is not a film that electrifies in the same way as Pulp Fiction, rigged to the snap of a punchline. A married, middle-aged, dare we say it, mature Tarantino is less showy (a relative distinction) than his youthful counterpart. He has a confidence to set aside (some of) the structural gamesmanship and let the story flow like a vodka cocktail scene to scene. An elegiac, chatty epic from an artist who claims to be drawing to a close...
This is a smooth ride through a City of Angels. And devils...
You'll know the OUATIH rubric by now, this fine Hollywood bromance set against the shifting sands of the times: downwardly mobile TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and compatriot Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) try to figure out what comes next. Meanwhile, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) comes to town, her life a contented stream of parties and possibilities. And meanwhile, Charles Manson and his derelict Family of dropouts are pacing the fringes of the good life, looking for an opportunity...
The LA of 1969 is virtually Oz compared to the strip malls and sidewalks of Tarantino's early films, which although contemporary leaned back into the beaten-up seventies that will follow OUATIH. So you can call it a prequel. Pulp Fact...
There is an aura of daydream about Tarantino's return home, a fairy tale by designation, with all the klutzy glamour of the movie business and that God given sunshine. How did Guillermo del Toro put it? This feels like the memory of something that never happened. A state of yearning. The kind of off-kilter, high-end gossip characters in other Tarantino movies like to talk about...
Given it is the movie capital of the world, there are surprisingly few movies that capture the otherness of Los Angeles, where reality blurs into fiction. Among its many poses, OUATIH stands alongside The Big Sleep, Sunset Blvd, much of Point Blank, Chinatown, Blade Runner, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Falling Down, Boyz N The Hood, Mulholland Dr., Pulp Fiction, LA Confidential, Magnolia, Heat and The Big Lebowski as the great LA movies. LA movies that get LA right — that sleepy dazzle, the outside-inside life, the hills that poke up restlessly within the city bounds, the bungalow mansions that cling to their flanks, with their glacier-blue swimming pools steaming in the midnight air...
Longtime QT-DOP, the Cliff to his Rick if you want, Robert Richardson has surpassed himself. Licked by that vanilla light (a brand of unblemished brightness that fashioned an identical climate for a zillion Westerns and soap operas), the film luxuriates in the joys of tailgating through neon-smeared streets thronging with people and hope, the current of celebrity...
I'm not sure there is a better film in existence on the pleasures of roving the rainbow streets of LA in a Cadillac to the sound of The Mamas and The Papas or Neil Diamonds's crooning Kentucky Woman. Tarantino takes such delight in the movement of automobiles as streamlined as fish, the pure, foolish, dick-swinging exuberance of being behind the wheel...
Nevertheless, OUATIH is a thriller. It has a lot of plot, and plots lurking within the plot, all shaped with elegant purpose. But there is no requirement to get ahead of events. Not being able to figure out where we're going (especially as on one level we think we know exactly where) is an almost vertiginous thrill in these days of movies written by predictive text. The Manson Family, the Spahn Ranch, the Tate murder, the crash landing of the sixties: history shimmies around Tarantino's vibrant, flowing camera...
He may not be shuffling time and story like a poker deck, but Tarantino still plays some lovely, subtle sleight-of-hand between fact and fiction. Not only with the bigger historical picture, but in the way we sample long, involving scenes of the episodic television Rick Dalton stalks as a heavy before the camera pulls back to reveal the cameras on set, and all the tawdry behind the scenes routines where he tries to maintain face. We have Rick digitally slotted into Tarantino's childhood favourites like The FBI and The Untouchables. And scenes concocted from his made up ones, like Bounty Law, former mainstay of Rick's career, now cancelled, but we get enough to gauge its clunky appeal...
In a hopscotch of faked clips, trailers, flashbacks, cheesy ads, dumb promotional interviews and shows blaring out of nearby TV sets, Tarantino builds up a fictional inner-Daltonverse of brassy small screen pleasures and big screen B-pictures...
There will few incidental pleasures this year as delightful as Rick's daydream of having beaten McQueen to The Great Escape or Al Pacino as smoothly vociferous agent Marvin Shwarz (make sure you get that right) enunciating the name "Sergio Corbucci" — second best director of Spaghetti Westerns, a potential outlet for Rick's devolving caché...
Indeed the shimmering ironies of Spaghetti Westerns remain the connective tissue that binds Tarantino's galaxy together. The title is not just for show. We get plenty of Western action from Rick's catalogue. More to the point, there are traces of the plot of Once Upon A Time in the West: two guys and a girl, the outside threat, the coming of a new era...
It is also a film about the fabric of stardom, both swish and tattered. Which was why it was so important to cast bona fide stars. We join a poolside party at the Playboy Mansion, nirvana's hub, where Sharon Tate boogies without a care and Damien Lewis tries out Steve McQueen's sour growl as he recounts the peculiar cohabitation situation at the Polanski's house (Emile Hirsch appears as live-in ex Jay Sebring). We taste the high life, and its hangover in the fading decor of Rick's place, not coincidentally right nextdoor on Cielo Drive...
And yet like all Tarantino movies, OUATIH still moves in time to the New Hollywood groove of the seventies. Which is another irony. This is film set on the cusp of that transitional phase when the old Hollywood, the Once Upon A Time... Hollywood, drained of purpose by the cheap hooks of television, gave way to a flurry of artistic brio of the early seventies. That was part of the motivation for 1969 and Manson, it marked the end of an era — the literal and figurative death of innocence...
Cliff, compared to Rick, is trailer trash. A real fringe player to the party scene. He's installed his mobile shit-hole in the shadow of Van Nuys Drive-In, stalked by the movies even in his sleep, eating mac and cheese from the pan and feeding his red-brown pit bull Brandy a can or two of Wolf's Teeth dog food — raccoon, bird, rat, or lizard flavours — a new edition to Tarantino's stock of made-up brands. Pay attention: this will all prove relevant...
The detail is impeccable. Tarantino's knowingness knows no bounds. There is a delectable in-joke wherein Sharon Tate visits a book store off the drag to buy a first edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles for her husband (Polanski will get around to adapting it in ten years time — and caption it in memory of is wife, who had dreamed of playing Tess). This literary joint is the spitting image of the book store from noir classic The Big Sleep. In case you were missing the point, there is a replica Maltese Falcon by the till (or maybe it's the real thing, who is to say?) from that other Bogart noir beauty. Said book store is also staffed by a relic played by the relic Clu Gulager, featured player in cult Daltonesque western shows of the sixties like Wanted Dead or Alive and Laramie...
Anyway, Rick...
I love that it is never entirely clear whether Rick has any real talent. He reminded me of the Coens's Llewyn Davis, good enough to know he's a failure (he's Salieri too, but lacking a Mozart in his eye line, fixates on himself). It's always a tricky business, an actor playing an actor. But get this: DiCaprio has the unenviable task of creating a loveable reality for this blowhard neurotic, addled on booze, smokes and the last embers of celebrity, marginally heightened to a Tarantino movie-movie tenor, and then portray Rick portraying his dumb characters with conviction, but also stiff enough at the edges to remind us he is no great shakes. In other words, he's good bad in the scenes within the scenes. And at time, as he scuffs lines, he gets down to good bad bad. It's a madcap challenge to which the star rises: all these different contours, hope, vanity, terror, comic effect, a sense of a decent professional losing his mind under the strain. Not least among the visions of madness is acting itself...
One thing is certain, Tarantino would be the first to cast Rick Dalton in his autumn years, igniting a brief revival as journalists clambered over each other to write about his overlooked greatness...
Tarantino is one of the few directors who openly admits to not only reading but embracing film criticism. Mark Harris's Scenes from the Revolution — which compares and contrasts the five Best Picture nominees of 1968 — is a key text in understanding the backdrop to OUATIH. Tarantino has written extensively in the field himself — there's a rumour that once he's done with the 10th film by Quentin Tarantino, he'll publish the collected works. Before then, we can look to his films as living works of criticism (Inglourious Basterds, of course, included a critic in its number: Michael Fassbender's Lt. Archie Cox, author of Art Of The Eyes, The Heart, and The Mind: A Study of German Cinema in the Twenties, and Rick and Cliff have plenty of opinions to share on contemporary culture). OUATIH not only ponders Hollywood past, but queries Hollywood present. What do movies even do anymore...
Can we see a flicker of Tarantino's own night sweats? It's in the film's genes, a consideration of where he now stands in a modern multiverse so untethered from the past and all he holds dear. Tarantino, the firebrand of the early nineties, has been around long enough to have weathered into history. For the first time you feel him genuinely probing his own place in the world like a loose tooth. Is he still relevant? He could easily be Rick, rattling with distress...
We are challenged to compare Rick to Sharon Tate, brimming with life's pleasures, light as a dove, skipping in to see herself on the big screen, and grin with goofy delight (just as we had upon first seeing Pulp Fiction) as the scattered audience light up at her antics in Matt Helm screwballer The Wrecking Crew. With nonchalant postmodernism, Tarantino plays the real Dean Martin flick on the screen, with the real Sharon Tate, and it fits. Things in movies are different to life...
Robbie's Tate is deliberately angelic, an almost abstract innocence that floats across the film barely rubbing shoulders with the plot. There have been complaints from the justice police over Tarantino's neglect of the character. You can certainly mount an argument that his structure and intention are not really very woke — Robbie's part is inferior in range and dialogue to what is offered to DiCaprio and Pitt. Tarantino could have written a different film, told a different, more Tate-centric story. But within OUATIH the depiction of Tate makes absolute sense, and the serenity and sweetness given to her by Robbie are something we rarely get to savour in a Tarantino joint...
Indeed, in a recent, illuminating on-stage Q&A with director bud Paul Thomas Anderson (essential OUATIH background to be found here: https://thefilmstage.com/news/listen-...) made the case that Sharon Tate was not one his characters. "Rick’s a Quentin Tarantino character," he explained. "Cliff’s a Quentin Tarantino character. Even McQueen is a bit of Quentin Tarantino character. In a way, I didn’t want Sharon to be a character. I wanted her to be the person that she is." So we're just watching her real life — as reimagined by Tarantino., having read the biographies, talked to her sister, getting as close as he could to what she may have been like. In more ways than one this is an act of resurrection...
It occurs to me now, twice upon a time... in Hollywood, that it is at heart a film about vanity as much as anything. Set in the most vain town of all, among the most vain of its citizens, striving in an industry run on vanity. Can we view Robbie's Sharon Tate, pointing herself out to the box office clerk and getting a picture with the cinema manager, as both charming and, when it comes to it, vain? Was she really like that? Watching for envious eyes on her back? Rick is being consumed by his own vanity — it's virtually an affliction. Cliff, so laidback and sure of himself, vainly puts a vainglorious Bruce Lee in his place (we'll come to this). And in Tarantino's view, the Manson Family, who have supposedly shed the plumage of the times for the unwashed truth, do nothing but rattle on about their own transcendent place in the universe. Manson, when it comes down to it, was an attention seeker...
Quite why Tate reveals grubby souls resting on the seat in front is another mystery of Tarantino's peccadillo for lady feet (of which we get enough close ups to count as a motif). Or it might simply be recognition of how filthy cinema floors got in the sixties. Or maybe she is supposed to chime, softly, with the grubby state of the hippie-chicks of the Family, where innocence has soured...
There's a passing gag about snoring beauties. This is still a fairy-tale...
It is telling that the potpourri of pop cultural ephemera has transferred from the flurries of dialogue into the background: in cinema fronts, restaurant signs, studio billboards and the mythic clutter of sound stages and backlots. Following on from The Hateful Eight (a better film than its current rep as low-wattage Tarantino maintains), the director has gone big on world building. Think Johnny Rockerfellas as a design ethos...
So overall, in a positive way, the film is far less quotable than any Tarantino before it. The script relocates somewhere closer to the rhythms of life. Not that it's devoid of verbose riffs on Italian directors or acting technique, just this is... Hollywood. People tend to talk about themselves...
Newcomer points go to the memorable turns provided by Margaret Qualley as skinny Manson misfit Pussycat, trying her luck on Cliff, and Julia Butters as a precocious child star named Trudi who stirs Rick from his doldrums. That former precocious child star Dakota Fanning crops up, unwashed and chillingly defiant as real-life Manson acolyte Squeaky Fromme, adds another dark irony to the mix...
The corruption of innocence is clearly on Tarantino's mind...
What of Brad Pitt as Cliff, erstwhile stuntman, Dalton gofer, best friend on the payroll and suntanned fix-it guy? Well, you could say, it's his movie. He's the hero. A good soul in a sold out town. But he's got his issues...
Cliff's got a troubled past, which means no one in the stunt game (including Randy, played by big grinning Kurt Russell, a relative perchance to Stuntman Mike in Death Proof?) has got any time for him, as much as Rick begs on his behalf. Cliff's dead-end career brings us back to Tarantino. As much as he's Rick, he's also Cliff — a man whose hopes have been derailed by a former misjudgment. After the whole Uma thing, connected tangentially with the whole Harvey thing, there was talk of Tarantino being cast out of Babylon, metaphorically left to fix aerials and reminisce about bettering Bruce Lee in a fight. Cliff's redemption, if that's what it is, is Quentin's daydream...
That Bruce Lee scene is debatable in theory, but in practice very funny, not least because Korean actor Mike Moh gives such a winningly absurd performance as the fabled fighter. The point, to me, is that this is a fantasy Bruce Lee, in costume and channelling Kato in The Green Hornet (he could be made up in Rick's head). But you're entitled to be offended if you want. We're in Tarantinoland...
Anyway, Cliff...
The film's best sequence takes Cliff, by chance (and momentarily following his pecker), to the Spahn Ranch on the wild hinterlands of LA, recreated in authentic detail for the occasion (what you might call ranch dressing). Cliff knows it from his stunting days on Rick's Bounty Law. It's now the scuzzy domain of the Manson Family, a cackle of unlovely hippies, whose reception is far from welcoming (NB: Manson like Polanski is merely a passing shadow in the story)...
Like a Southern Californian Midsommer, the gear shift into dread is seamless. A chill wind wafts through the glossy Hollywood posturing like the death rattle of the sixties. There is a whisper of Vietnam on the cold breeze, flower power wilting into dementia, murder most foul. Fame's ugly opposite — notoriety...
In a sharp little cameo, Bruce Dern emerges from beneath crumpled sheets like a mole. He's assaying another interloper from the real world — the Ranch's blind old owner George Spahn, caught up in the thrall of the Family's sexual dominion and the cause of Cliff's immediate concern. Dern is fine, but it was a part readymade for Burt Reynolds...
The Spahn Ranch sequence is almost a Sliding Doors invitation. Another film suggests itself, a horror movie pitched at icy realism. That is not Tarantino's bag, but it would have been something to have him truly confront the despair of Manson's stain...
Anyway, the actual non-actual ending...
As it is, exactly how OUATIH unravels is knot of life and art is very funny. But you'll check yourself for laughing. The screams were back at the screening I was in — at the outrageousness of it all; Tarantino's ability to entwine ultraviolence and deranged wit. It' been a while since we've sample such gurgling bad taste.
SO SPOILER ALERT! Okay, ready? Here we go... In a madcap reversal of fortune, Sharon Tate lives on. Just as Tarantino rid us of Hitler a little earlier than recorded history, he adjusts the horrors of Cielo Drive, sending Manson's crazed hippy outliers nextdoor to Rick's diminishing luxury, where they confront Cliff, tripping... And, going right back through True Romance, 12 Monkeys, Snatch, Inglourious Basterds, Brad Pitt can trip the light fantastic. In fact, he is way more fun with craziness bubbling away beneath the grin. Anyway, Cliff, tackles the intruders with in giggle of LSD induced mania. Brandy helps. As does a well aimed can of Wolf's Tooth. And Rick, eventually...
There is an adjustment of tone too. The whole film starts tripping (can we conceive it as a drug-induced fever dream?). The violence is reckless and extreme. You'll wince. Turn away. And the fact that most of it is meted out against women diverts us down a complicated ethical branch line: to beat one woman to death, then cook another with a flamethrower (the single male villain gets Brandy's teeth attached to his unholy of unholies), in order to save another pregnant woman and reconfigure history. You might argue the Manson Family was dominated by women, they really did commit the awful deed, and this is Tarantino's rampage of revenge. We should also mention the late and welcome arrival of Maya Hawke, daughter of Uma Thurman, that voice unmistakable like the ghost of movies past...
I'm not sure I found it as cathartic as others have, but I laughed. And I worried at my laughter. Which feels like an honest and fitting reaction. That willingness to bowl headlong into the pins of propriety — especially in this patrolled era — is a welcome rush of caffeine to our complacent cinema. Stories must challenge us...
Here is a whisper of something deeper — a pondering of the purposes of fiction. Can we really use stories to mend sorry reality? What might be the world be like with Sharon Tate? Maybe the sixties would never have died, as Manson shrunk from view. Maybe the seventies would never have happened. At the end of this new timeline, would we even get Quentin Tarantino, jiving his love for exploitation thrillers and Godard among the aisles of Video Archives, readying himself to reinvent the movies...
OUATIH really is a gorgeous, crackpot, really very moving hymn to cinema. Not film, cinema, in the get out there, off your ass and back into a movie house kind of way. Television is a cheap trick, a sideshow, an old hustle, don't go falling for its mountebank wares. Only in the high church of the movie theatre can the world be mended...
By Ian Nathan 8/9/2019
Quentin Tarantino: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work is out October 1 from White Lion Publishing
Watching the ninth movie by Quentin Tarantino glide by many things occurred to me. Not least, what a pleasure it is to be in Tarantino's company once more. There are few nights out to compare. I'm of an age able to recall the press screening for Pulp Fiction, held in London on a hot summer night in 1994. We had heard all about Tarantino's second film from its P'alme d'Or winning jaunt to the Riviera, but we weren't ready. I've not been to another screening like it. Had the seats been wired to the mains in some crazy experiment? Critics were laughing, clapping, whooping in the effort to express the surge of shock and pleasure that ran through that cinema. As Travolta plunged that syringe, which looked long enough to impale a rhino, down toward poor, comatose Uma Thurman, her face smeared in heroin-snot, there were involuntary screams. We were captive to the sheer giddy rush of what movies might be able to do to us. We were high...
The first reaction to OUATIH (we'll be here forever if I write it out in full each time) is how easy it is to watch. The film is two and half breezy hours, often slow in that moony, talky, ruminating Tarantino way; often nuts, and at one particular juncture extremely bloody, in that scandalous, PC-baiting Tarantino way. There's not a dull note — you sit there marvelling how little you require the retina abuse of CG blizzards and hyperactive editing to stay in the room. You can just sit back and let it happen. There is no need to untangle the prior shenanigans of an extended universe. Plot, character, place and history are following their own rules. Tarantino calls it a "hang out movie" like Jackie Brown. The trajectories of each character and the film as a whole are ambling and easily side-tracked rather than predestined, the framework of the story is buried deep...
It is not a film that electrifies in the same way as Pulp Fiction, rigged to the snap of a punchline. A married, middle-aged, dare we say it, mature Tarantino is less showy (a relative distinction) than his youthful counterpart. He has a confidence to set aside (some of) the structural gamesmanship and let the story flow like a vodka cocktail scene to scene. An elegiac, chatty epic from an artist who claims to be drawing to a close...
This is a smooth ride through a City of Angels. And devils...
You'll know the OUATIH rubric by now, this fine Hollywood bromance set against the shifting sands of the times: downwardly mobile TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and compatriot Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) try to figure out what comes next. Meanwhile, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) comes to town, her life a contented stream of parties and possibilities. And meanwhile, Charles Manson and his derelict Family of dropouts are pacing the fringes of the good life, looking for an opportunity...
The LA of 1969 is virtually Oz compared to the strip malls and sidewalks of Tarantino's early films, which although contemporary leaned back into the beaten-up seventies that will follow OUATIH. So you can call it a prequel. Pulp Fact...
There is an aura of daydream about Tarantino's return home, a fairy tale by designation, with all the klutzy glamour of the movie business and that God given sunshine. How did Guillermo del Toro put it? This feels like the memory of something that never happened. A state of yearning. The kind of off-kilter, high-end gossip characters in other Tarantino movies like to talk about...
Given it is the movie capital of the world, there are surprisingly few movies that capture the otherness of Los Angeles, where reality blurs into fiction. Among its many poses, OUATIH stands alongside The Big Sleep, Sunset Blvd, much of Point Blank, Chinatown, Blade Runner, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Falling Down, Boyz N The Hood, Mulholland Dr., Pulp Fiction, LA Confidential, Magnolia, Heat and The Big Lebowski as the great LA movies. LA movies that get LA right — that sleepy dazzle, the outside-inside life, the hills that poke up restlessly within the city bounds, the bungalow mansions that cling to their flanks, with their glacier-blue swimming pools steaming in the midnight air...
Longtime QT-DOP, the Cliff to his Rick if you want, Robert Richardson has surpassed himself. Licked by that vanilla light (a brand of unblemished brightness that fashioned an identical climate for a zillion Westerns and soap operas), the film luxuriates in the joys of tailgating through neon-smeared streets thronging with people and hope, the current of celebrity...
I'm not sure there is a better film in existence on the pleasures of roving the rainbow streets of LA in a Cadillac to the sound of The Mamas and The Papas or Neil Diamonds's crooning Kentucky Woman. Tarantino takes such delight in the movement of automobiles as streamlined as fish, the pure, foolish, dick-swinging exuberance of being behind the wheel...
Nevertheless, OUATIH is a thriller. It has a lot of plot, and plots lurking within the plot, all shaped with elegant purpose. But there is no requirement to get ahead of events. Not being able to figure out where we're going (especially as on one level we think we know exactly where) is an almost vertiginous thrill in these days of movies written by predictive text. The Manson Family, the Spahn Ranch, the Tate murder, the crash landing of the sixties: history shimmies around Tarantino's vibrant, flowing camera...
He may not be shuffling time and story like a poker deck, but Tarantino still plays some lovely, subtle sleight-of-hand between fact and fiction. Not only with the bigger historical picture, but in the way we sample long, involving scenes of the episodic television Rick Dalton stalks as a heavy before the camera pulls back to reveal the cameras on set, and all the tawdry behind the scenes routines where he tries to maintain face. We have Rick digitally slotted into Tarantino's childhood favourites like The FBI and The Untouchables. And scenes concocted from his made up ones, like Bounty Law, former mainstay of Rick's career, now cancelled, but we get enough to gauge its clunky appeal...
In a hopscotch of faked clips, trailers, flashbacks, cheesy ads, dumb promotional interviews and shows blaring out of nearby TV sets, Tarantino builds up a fictional inner-Daltonverse of brassy small screen pleasures and big screen B-pictures...
There will few incidental pleasures this year as delightful as Rick's daydream of having beaten McQueen to The Great Escape or Al Pacino as smoothly vociferous agent Marvin Shwarz (make sure you get that right) enunciating the name "Sergio Corbucci" — second best director of Spaghetti Westerns, a potential outlet for Rick's devolving caché...
Indeed the shimmering ironies of Spaghetti Westerns remain the connective tissue that binds Tarantino's galaxy together. The title is not just for show. We get plenty of Western action from Rick's catalogue. More to the point, there are traces of the plot of Once Upon A Time in the West: two guys and a girl, the outside threat, the coming of a new era...
It is also a film about the fabric of stardom, both swish and tattered. Which was why it was so important to cast bona fide stars. We join a poolside party at the Playboy Mansion, nirvana's hub, where Sharon Tate boogies without a care and Damien Lewis tries out Steve McQueen's sour growl as he recounts the peculiar cohabitation situation at the Polanski's house (Emile Hirsch appears as live-in ex Jay Sebring). We taste the high life, and its hangover in the fading decor of Rick's place, not coincidentally right nextdoor on Cielo Drive...
And yet like all Tarantino movies, OUATIH still moves in time to the New Hollywood groove of the seventies. Which is another irony. This is film set on the cusp of that transitional phase when the old Hollywood, the Once Upon A Time... Hollywood, drained of purpose by the cheap hooks of television, gave way to a flurry of artistic brio of the early seventies. That was part of the motivation for 1969 and Manson, it marked the end of an era — the literal and figurative death of innocence...
Cliff, compared to Rick, is trailer trash. A real fringe player to the party scene. He's installed his mobile shit-hole in the shadow of Van Nuys Drive-In, stalked by the movies even in his sleep, eating mac and cheese from the pan and feeding his red-brown pit bull Brandy a can or two of Wolf's Teeth dog food — raccoon, bird, rat, or lizard flavours — a new edition to Tarantino's stock of made-up brands. Pay attention: this will all prove relevant...
The detail is impeccable. Tarantino's knowingness knows no bounds. There is a delectable in-joke wherein Sharon Tate visits a book store off the drag to buy a first edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles for her husband (Polanski will get around to adapting it in ten years time — and caption it in memory of is wife, who had dreamed of playing Tess). This literary joint is the spitting image of the book store from noir classic The Big Sleep. In case you were missing the point, there is a replica Maltese Falcon by the till (or maybe it's the real thing, who is to say?) from that other Bogart noir beauty. Said book store is also staffed by a relic played by the relic Clu Gulager, featured player in cult Daltonesque western shows of the sixties like Wanted Dead or Alive and Laramie...
Anyway, Rick...
I love that it is never entirely clear whether Rick has any real talent. He reminded me of the Coens's Llewyn Davis, good enough to know he's a failure (he's Salieri too, but lacking a Mozart in his eye line, fixates on himself). It's always a tricky business, an actor playing an actor. But get this: DiCaprio has the unenviable task of creating a loveable reality for this blowhard neurotic, addled on booze, smokes and the last embers of celebrity, marginally heightened to a Tarantino movie-movie tenor, and then portray Rick portraying his dumb characters with conviction, but also stiff enough at the edges to remind us he is no great shakes. In other words, he's good bad in the scenes within the scenes. And at time, as he scuffs lines, he gets down to good bad bad. It's a madcap challenge to which the star rises: all these different contours, hope, vanity, terror, comic effect, a sense of a decent professional losing his mind under the strain. Not least among the visions of madness is acting itself...
One thing is certain, Tarantino would be the first to cast Rick Dalton in his autumn years, igniting a brief revival as journalists clambered over each other to write about his overlooked greatness...
Tarantino is one of the few directors who openly admits to not only reading but embracing film criticism. Mark Harris's Scenes from the Revolution — which compares and contrasts the five Best Picture nominees of 1968 — is a key text in understanding the backdrop to OUATIH. Tarantino has written extensively in the field himself — there's a rumour that once he's done with the 10th film by Quentin Tarantino, he'll publish the collected works. Before then, we can look to his films as living works of criticism (Inglourious Basterds, of course, included a critic in its number: Michael Fassbender's Lt. Archie Cox, author of Art Of The Eyes, The Heart, and The Mind: A Study of German Cinema in the Twenties, and Rick and Cliff have plenty of opinions to share on contemporary culture). OUATIH not only ponders Hollywood past, but queries Hollywood present. What do movies even do anymore...
Can we see a flicker of Tarantino's own night sweats? It's in the film's genes, a consideration of where he now stands in a modern multiverse so untethered from the past and all he holds dear. Tarantino, the firebrand of the early nineties, has been around long enough to have weathered into history. For the first time you feel him genuinely probing his own place in the world like a loose tooth. Is he still relevant? He could easily be Rick, rattling with distress...
We are challenged to compare Rick to Sharon Tate, brimming with life's pleasures, light as a dove, skipping in to see herself on the big screen, and grin with goofy delight (just as we had upon first seeing Pulp Fiction) as the scattered audience light up at her antics in Matt Helm screwballer The Wrecking Crew. With nonchalant postmodernism, Tarantino plays the real Dean Martin flick on the screen, with the real Sharon Tate, and it fits. Things in movies are different to life...
Robbie's Tate is deliberately angelic, an almost abstract innocence that floats across the film barely rubbing shoulders with the plot. There have been complaints from the justice police over Tarantino's neglect of the character. You can certainly mount an argument that his structure and intention are not really very woke — Robbie's part is inferior in range and dialogue to what is offered to DiCaprio and Pitt. Tarantino could have written a different film, told a different, more Tate-centric story. But within OUATIH the depiction of Tate makes absolute sense, and the serenity and sweetness given to her by Robbie are something we rarely get to savour in a Tarantino joint...
Indeed, in a recent, illuminating on-stage Q&A with director bud Paul Thomas Anderson (essential OUATIH background to be found here: https://thefilmstage.com/news/listen-...) made the case that Sharon Tate was not one his characters. "Rick’s a Quentin Tarantino character," he explained. "Cliff’s a Quentin Tarantino character. Even McQueen is a bit of Quentin Tarantino character. In a way, I didn’t want Sharon to be a character. I wanted her to be the person that she is." So we're just watching her real life — as reimagined by Tarantino., having read the biographies, talked to her sister, getting as close as he could to what she may have been like. In more ways than one this is an act of resurrection...
It occurs to me now, twice upon a time... in Hollywood, that it is at heart a film about vanity as much as anything. Set in the most vain town of all, among the most vain of its citizens, striving in an industry run on vanity. Can we view Robbie's Sharon Tate, pointing herself out to the box office clerk and getting a picture with the cinema manager, as both charming and, when it comes to it, vain? Was she really like that? Watching for envious eyes on her back? Rick is being consumed by his own vanity — it's virtually an affliction. Cliff, so laidback and sure of himself, vainly puts a vainglorious Bruce Lee in his place (we'll come to this). And in Tarantino's view, the Manson Family, who have supposedly shed the plumage of the times for the unwashed truth, do nothing but rattle on about their own transcendent place in the universe. Manson, when it comes down to it, was an attention seeker...
Quite why Tate reveals grubby souls resting on the seat in front is another mystery of Tarantino's peccadillo for lady feet (of which we get enough close ups to count as a motif). Or it might simply be recognition of how filthy cinema floors got in the sixties. Or maybe she is supposed to chime, softly, with the grubby state of the hippie-chicks of the Family, where innocence has soured...
There's a passing gag about snoring beauties. This is still a fairy-tale...
It is telling that the potpourri of pop cultural ephemera has transferred from the flurries of dialogue into the background: in cinema fronts, restaurant signs, studio billboards and the mythic clutter of sound stages and backlots. Following on from The Hateful Eight (a better film than its current rep as low-wattage Tarantino maintains), the director has gone big on world building. Think Johnny Rockerfellas as a design ethos...
So overall, in a positive way, the film is far less quotable than any Tarantino before it. The script relocates somewhere closer to the rhythms of life. Not that it's devoid of verbose riffs on Italian directors or acting technique, just this is... Hollywood. People tend to talk about themselves...
Newcomer points go to the memorable turns provided by Margaret Qualley as skinny Manson misfit Pussycat, trying her luck on Cliff, and Julia Butters as a precocious child star named Trudi who stirs Rick from his doldrums. That former precocious child star Dakota Fanning crops up, unwashed and chillingly defiant as real-life Manson acolyte Squeaky Fromme, adds another dark irony to the mix...
The corruption of innocence is clearly on Tarantino's mind...
What of Brad Pitt as Cliff, erstwhile stuntman, Dalton gofer, best friend on the payroll and suntanned fix-it guy? Well, you could say, it's his movie. He's the hero. A good soul in a sold out town. But he's got his issues...
Cliff's got a troubled past, which means no one in the stunt game (including Randy, played by big grinning Kurt Russell, a relative perchance to Stuntman Mike in Death Proof?) has got any time for him, as much as Rick begs on his behalf. Cliff's dead-end career brings us back to Tarantino. As much as he's Rick, he's also Cliff — a man whose hopes have been derailed by a former misjudgment. After the whole Uma thing, connected tangentially with the whole Harvey thing, there was talk of Tarantino being cast out of Babylon, metaphorically left to fix aerials and reminisce about bettering Bruce Lee in a fight. Cliff's redemption, if that's what it is, is Quentin's daydream...
That Bruce Lee scene is debatable in theory, but in practice very funny, not least because Korean actor Mike Moh gives such a winningly absurd performance as the fabled fighter. The point, to me, is that this is a fantasy Bruce Lee, in costume and channelling Kato in The Green Hornet (he could be made up in Rick's head). But you're entitled to be offended if you want. We're in Tarantinoland...
Anyway, Cliff...
The film's best sequence takes Cliff, by chance (and momentarily following his pecker), to the Spahn Ranch on the wild hinterlands of LA, recreated in authentic detail for the occasion (what you might call ranch dressing). Cliff knows it from his stunting days on Rick's Bounty Law. It's now the scuzzy domain of the Manson Family, a cackle of unlovely hippies, whose reception is far from welcoming (NB: Manson like Polanski is merely a passing shadow in the story)...
Like a Southern Californian Midsommer, the gear shift into dread is seamless. A chill wind wafts through the glossy Hollywood posturing like the death rattle of the sixties. There is a whisper of Vietnam on the cold breeze, flower power wilting into dementia, murder most foul. Fame's ugly opposite — notoriety...
In a sharp little cameo, Bruce Dern emerges from beneath crumpled sheets like a mole. He's assaying another interloper from the real world — the Ranch's blind old owner George Spahn, caught up in the thrall of the Family's sexual dominion and the cause of Cliff's immediate concern. Dern is fine, but it was a part readymade for Burt Reynolds...
The Spahn Ranch sequence is almost a Sliding Doors invitation. Another film suggests itself, a horror movie pitched at icy realism. That is not Tarantino's bag, but it would have been something to have him truly confront the despair of Manson's stain...
Anyway, the actual non-actual ending...
As it is, exactly how OUATIH unravels is knot of life and art is very funny. But you'll check yourself for laughing. The screams were back at the screening I was in — at the outrageousness of it all; Tarantino's ability to entwine ultraviolence and deranged wit. It' been a while since we've sample such gurgling bad taste.
SO SPOILER ALERT! Okay, ready? Here we go... In a madcap reversal of fortune, Sharon Tate lives on. Just as Tarantino rid us of Hitler a little earlier than recorded history, he adjusts the horrors of Cielo Drive, sending Manson's crazed hippy outliers nextdoor to Rick's diminishing luxury, where they confront Cliff, tripping... And, going right back through True Romance, 12 Monkeys, Snatch, Inglourious Basterds, Brad Pitt can trip the light fantastic. In fact, he is way more fun with craziness bubbling away beneath the grin. Anyway, Cliff, tackles the intruders with in giggle of LSD induced mania. Brandy helps. As does a well aimed can of Wolf's Tooth. And Rick, eventually...
There is an adjustment of tone too. The whole film starts tripping (can we conceive it as a drug-induced fever dream?). The violence is reckless and extreme. You'll wince. Turn away. And the fact that most of it is meted out against women diverts us down a complicated ethical branch line: to beat one woman to death, then cook another with a flamethrower (the single male villain gets Brandy's teeth attached to his unholy of unholies), in order to save another pregnant woman and reconfigure history. You might argue the Manson Family was dominated by women, they really did commit the awful deed, and this is Tarantino's rampage of revenge. We should also mention the late and welcome arrival of Maya Hawke, daughter of Uma Thurman, that voice unmistakable like the ghost of movies past...
I'm not sure I found it as cathartic as others have, but I laughed. And I worried at my laughter. Which feels like an honest and fitting reaction. That willingness to bowl headlong into the pins of propriety — especially in this patrolled era — is a welcome rush of caffeine to our complacent cinema. Stories must challenge us...
Here is a whisper of something deeper — a pondering of the purposes of fiction. Can we really use stories to mend sorry reality? What might be the world be like with Sharon Tate? Maybe the sixties would never have died, as Manson shrunk from view. Maybe the seventies would never have happened. At the end of this new timeline, would we even get Quentin Tarantino, jiving his love for exploitation thrillers and Godard among the aisles of Video Archives, readying himself to reinvent the movies...
OUATIH really is a gorgeous, crackpot, really very moving hymn to cinema. Not film, cinema, in the get out there, off your ass and back into a movie house kind of way. Television is a cheap trick, a sideshow, an old hustle, don't go falling for its mountebank wares. Only in the high church of the movie theatre can the world be mended...
By Ian Nathan 8/9/2019
Quentin Tarantino: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work is out October 1 from White Lion Publishing
December 4, 2018
A Boundless Will To Astound
Celebrating the 15th anniversary of The Return of the King
Do you remember the first time? Or, to be exact, the third first time? Watching The Return of the King was a different experience to encountering the first two parts of Peter Jackson's acclaimed adaptation of Tolkien's impossible triptych. We greeted the concluding part of the trilogy with expectation not anxiety. With Fellowship of the Ring desperate hope intermingled with the fear that the series would simply fail to match the books; with The Two Towers there was the concern the second film might not live up to the first with what was most likely to prove the most troublesome of the three parts to shape into a satisfying film.
By the finale, we were relaxed. We were ready. This would be the rousing crescendo we were due. We took a depth and plunged.
Even on the third film, billions of dollars to the good, New Line had fretted about length. Jackson had reached a state of zen bemusement with the studio's neuroses, assured the audience was with him — there was also a groundswell of opinion that the Academy were coming round too. But still the powers that be, trying at this late stage to assert some measure of ownership, insisted that his tame his magnum impulses. Think of those bums on seats, they railed. On the first movie they had issued an edict that the film could be no longer than two and a half hours. "Which we kind of ignored," laughed Jackson. With the third, an edict arrived saying it mustn't be longer than three hours. The final film came in at three hours 20 mins. On Oscar night, Billy Crystal joked about the endless endings, but this was a curtain call on nearly nine hours of epic and we needed epic closure.
By the third and final part of the trilogy, Jackson was only trying to keep up with himself. There was no backing down at this stage. Going bigger was what Tolkien demanded of him. The third film was "all pay off" he liked to joke. But he meant it. What nagged at him wasn't the pressure to surmount the spectacle of all that had come before — up his copious sleeve he had mighty battles, giant spiders, armies of the undead, a phalanx of super-sized elephants and a death scene in which a burning lord leaps from the rocky prow of a city like a flaming meteor. What he sought above all was the completion of a story. That was the strange nature of the third film: it reverse engineered a trilogy into a single film. One of the reasons, we had to go back to The Shire before the credits was to underline where it all began. To come full circle.
Incredibly, this week (December 3) marks the 15th anniversary of the famous, city-wide world premiere for The Return of the King in Wellington. Something Jackson had demanded — a final gift to a city and country that had stayed the course for so long. It felt like the whole of New Zealand lined the streets as the sun shone and Hobbits and wizards waved like royalty from the backseats of convertibles, flanked by Weta-dolled orcs and dancing Maoris as they inched up Courteney Place.
I was lucky enough to see the film at the European premiere which took place at the Odeon Leicester Square and the crowds outside roared the arrival of each cast member; there were screams at the sight of Orlando Bloom and ambulances were unassumingly on hand in case of fainting. Sat near the outer edge of the rows, I saw them line up in the dark awaiting their call to the stage to take a bow. Sir Ian McKellen giggled with Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen brooded, a man immersed in his own thoughts, but slipped into a goofy grin when Bloom, finally rescued from the fervent outside, mock punched him. They were nervous, even now, giddy like school children, the excitement and pleasure of one another's company still present, even now on the victory lap.
They came up one by one, invited by their friend and director, the man who had guided their lives for years — Peter Jackson. Last to the stage, fittingly somehow, was Sir Ian Holm, long experienced in what is required of these affairs: some good old-fashioned tomfoolery. At the top the steps he launched into a gallop, hurtling straight past the proffered hand of his director, skidding to a halt at the far end of the stage, then running back for a bear hug. The audience were delighted at his antics (not least, because they immediately sucked any pomposity out of the occasion) clapping and laughing, but honestly we wanted the introductions done with, the film awaited.
The third film is its own beast and yet the capstone on the whole (which you might say is true of the book too). There are less of the purely sensual New Zealand pleasures of the first two. The battlescape of the Pelenor Fields was ostensibly a digital landscape that utilised plates of real locations. Alan Lee, Tolkien artist in residence, was sent up in a helicopter to sample pieces of the South Island like fabrics from a department store. It was a reflection of changing processes — a signal of digital world-building to come. But pearl-white Minas Tirith was built from real sets, big as cathedrals, and models sculpted so finely the camera could close in to within inches of the walls and still not betray the scale. I remembered visiting the miniature studio, Minas Tirith was the same height as me. Only now it was like a mountain.
Everything about the final film was bathed in an assured magnificence. It was swaggering. I was in bits by the lighting of the beacons, the camera bounding across Middle-earth as if untethered from gravity. By the ride of the Rohirrim, Theoden's white horse unmistakeable at the spearhead, the gulps around me were audible. Such spectacle was raising grand emotions; looking back, Game of Thrones owes this trilogy a debt it can never repay.
That is not to deny the intimate, those lovely character moments that had set the first two films apart from the juvenalia of fantasy. Opening small was a big decision, and so indicative of Jackson's confidence with the material: a willingness to play subtle ironies against our expectations, shaking free from the grip of Middle-earth formula. Gollum's memory of first claiming the Ring, Andy Serkis' face briefly liberated from beneath his digital make-up as Smeagol strangled (thus locating the source of his anguish in his throat) his cousin for possession of the Ring was a startling, psychological move. Have you noticed how all three films begin with memories?
Serkis had fought to play the young Smeagol. There had been a prevailing thought to cast younger, but he wrote a lengthy letter to Jackson, passionately enforcing his desire to marry the CGI triumph with the human. His director had already come round. Serkis represented the conflicted heart of the trilogy. From a certain angle, he is the protagonist.
Something that could be said of Samwise too. Sean Astin's career-defining third-film performance, which flared up as a distinct Oscar possibility (alongside Serkis the Academy's big miss), embodied that stripe of English rectitude under fire that Tolkien brought with him from The Somme. Something so redolently captured in Jackson's superlative World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. Screenwriter Philippa Boyens had marshalled the ADR (dubbing) sessions and remembered sobbing over still ungraded footage of Astin shouldering Elijah Wood to stagger up the flanks of Mount Doom. On set it had crossed the safety conscious Astin's mind that he was suddenly carrying the entire trilogy on his shoulders. On film that moment crystallises their entire filmic endeavour, the determination to complete the quest against all the odds.
Casting an eye back on the reviews from a decade and a half ago, the sense of wonder is palpable. It's as if critics were finally allowed to cut loose, to take the plunge and commit to Jackson's fantasy (eek) as a work worthy of high praise. There was nothing they had to be ashamed of in appreciating the work.
Keith Phipps in the AV Club, by reputation such a hard taskmaster, sang forth his praise: "The Return Of The King ultimately proves up to the series' increasingly difficult task: making movies that echo legends, making legends that reflect life, and reconciling it all with the fact that both legends and lives all eventually meet their ends."
"[The Lord of the Rings] restores faith in the idea that popular entertainment can soar to majestic heights," reported Andres O'Hehir of Salon, another venue that could hardly be dismissed as the nerd crowd.
"As I watched this film, an eager victim of its boundless will to astound, I found my loyal memories of the book beginning to fade," said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. He makes a good point. By the third film Jackson and the audience were free from the hold of the books — the need to compare had been blown away. Tolkien was ever present but all but forgotten.
There were the doubters of course. Those that fretted on ideological grounds about the racial implications (notions bound into the novel from Tolkien's WWI experiences: the threat from the East). Those that simply liked to huff and puff.
True, the film isn't perfect. The extended edition is better — reinserting the Christopher Lee's death scene gives a more satisfactory trajectory to the Saruman story. The Hobbits trek across the hot sands of Gorgoroth so much more gruelling. It is less shapely than the first, less earthy than the second, you miss the Hobbit banter and Gandalf the Grey's curmudgeonly charms. I never quite get the emotional kick I need from the Fellowship's reunion scene that plays without dialogue. But from the flaring beacons to the Ring being devoured by the flames of Orodruin we gladly abandoned ourselves to the monumental surge of Jackson's storytelling. We left that premiere to head off to a party of special magnificence with the cycle complete but still not quite ready to admit it was all over. That unwillingness to let go is what drove me to write a book, to fathom how such miracles were accomplished.
Looking back so many years later, the film doesn't seem to have diminished. You might argue over technical details (Jackson surely would, unable to rewatch to the films for fear of those blemishes only he can see), but a classicism has taken hold. The great monument of The Lord of the Rings, now one story not three, has become timeless. What better time to clear an afternoon and return to The Return of the King.
Ian Nathan, December 4th, 2018
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-earth is out now.
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
Do you remember the first time? Or, to be exact, the third first time? Watching The Return of the King was a different experience to encountering the first two parts of Peter Jackson's acclaimed adaptation of Tolkien's impossible triptych. We greeted the concluding part of the trilogy with expectation not anxiety. With Fellowship of the Ring desperate hope intermingled with the fear that the series would simply fail to match the books; with The Two Towers there was the concern the second film might not live up to the first with what was most likely to prove the most troublesome of the three parts to shape into a satisfying film.
By the finale, we were relaxed. We were ready. This would be the rousing crescendo we were due. We took a depth and plunged.
Even on the third film, billions of dollars to the good, New Line had fretted about length. Jackson had reached a state of zen bemusement with the studio's neuroses, assured the audience was with him — there was also a groundswell of opinion that the Academy were coming round too. But still the powers that be, trying at this late stage to assert some measure of ownership, insisted that his tame his magnum impulses. Think of those bums on seats, they railed. On the first movie they had issued an edict that the film could be no longer than two and a half hours. "Which we kind of ignored," laughed Jackson. With the third, an edict arrived saying it mustn't be longer than three hours. The final film came in at three hours 20 mins. On Oscar night, Billy Crystal joked about the endless endings, but this was a curtain call on nearly nine hours of epic and we needed epic closure.
By the third and final part of the trilogy, Jackson was only trying to keep up with himself. There was no backing down at this stage. Going bigger was what Tolkien demanded of him. The third film was "all pay off" he liked to joke. But he meant it. What nagged at him wasn't the pressure to surmount the spectacle of all that had come before — up his copious sleeve he had mighty battles, giant spiders, armies of the undead, a phalanx of super-sized elephants and a death scene in which a burning lord leaps from the rocky prow of a city like a flaming meteor. What he sought above all was the completion of a story. That was the strange nature of the third film: it reverse engineered a trilogy into a single film. One of the reasons, we had to go back to The Shire before the credits was to underline where it all began. To come full circle.
Incredibly, this week (December 3) marks the 15th anniversary of the famous, city-wide world premiere for The Return of the King in Wellington. Something Jackson had demanded — a final gift to a city and country that had stayed the course for so long. It felt like the whole of New Zealand lined the streets as the sun shone and Hobbits and wizards waved like royalty from the backseats of convertibles, flanked by Weta-dolled orcs and dancing Maoris as they inched up Courteney Place.
I was lucky enough to see the film at the European premiere which took place at the Odeon Leicester Square and the crowds outside roared the arrival of each cast member; there were screams at the sight of Orlando Bloom and ambulances were unassumingly on hand in case of fainting. Sat near the outer edge of the rows, I saw them line up in the dark awaiting their call to the stage to take a bow. Sir Ian McKellen giggled with Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen brooded, a man immersed in his own thoughts, but slipped into a goofy grin when Bloom, finally rescued from the fervent outside, mock punched him. They were nervous, even now, giddy like school children, the excitement and pleasure of one another's company still present, even now on the victory lap.
They came up one by one, invited by their friend and director, the man who had guided their lives for years — Peter Jackson. Last to the stage, fittingly somehow, was Sir Ian Holm, long experienced in what is required of these affairs: some good old-fashioned tomfoolery. At the top the steps he launched into a gallop, hurtling straight past the proffered hand of his director, skidding to a halt at the far end of the stage, then running back for a bear hug. The audience were delighted at his antics (not least, because they immediately sucked any pomposity out of the occasion) clapping and laughing, but honestly we wanted the introductions done with, the film awaited.
The third film is its own beast and yet the capstone on the whole (which you might say is true of the book too). There are less of the purely sensual New Zealand pleasures of the first two. The battlescape of the Pelenor Fields was ostensibly a digital landscape that utilised plates of real locations. Alan Lee, Tolkien artist in residence, was sent up in a helicopter to sample pieces of the South Island like fabrics from a department store. It was a reflection of changing processes — a signal of digital world-building to come. But pearl-white Minas Tirith was built from real sets, big as cathedrals, and models sculpted so finely the camera could close in to within inches of the walls and still not betray the scale. I remembered visiting the miniature studio, Minas Tirith was the same height as me. Only now it was like a mountain.
Everything about the final film was bathed in an assured magnificence. It was swaggering. I was in bits by the lighting of the beacons, the camera bounding across Middle-earth as if untethered from gravity. By the ride of the Rohirrim, Theoden's white horse unmistakeable at the spearhead, the gulps around me were audible. Such spectacle was raising grand emotions; looking back, Game of Thrones owes this trilogy a debt it can never repay.
That is not to deny the intimate, those lovely character moments that had set the first two films apart from the juvenalia of fantasy. Opening small was a big decision, and so indicative of Jackson's confidence with the material: a willingness to play subtle ironies against our expectations, shaking free from the grip of Middle-earth formula. Gollum's memory of first claiming the Ring, Andy Serkis' face briefly liberated from beneath his digital make-up as Smeagol strangled (thus locating the source of his anguish in his throat) his cousin for possession of the Ring was a startling, psychological move. Have you noticed how all three films begin with memories?
Serkis had fought to play the young Smeagol. There had been a prevailing thought to cast younger, but he wrote a lengthy letter to Jackson, passionately enforcing his desire to marry the CGI triumph with the human. His director had already come round. Serkis represented the conflicted heart of the trilogy. From a certain angle, he is the protagonist.
Something that could be said of Samwise too. Sean Astin's career-defining third-film performance, which flared up as a distinct Oscar possibility (alongside Serkis the Academy's big miss), embodied that stripe of English rectitude under fire that Tolkien brought with him from The Somme. Something so redolently captured in Jackson's superlative World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. Screenwriter Philippa Boyens had marshalled the ADR (dubbing) sessions and remembered sobbing over still ungraded footage of Astin shouldering Elijah Wood to stagger up the flanks of Mount Doom. On set it had crossed the safety conscious Astin's mind that he was suddenly carrying the entire trilogy on his shoulders. On film that moment crystallises their entire filmic endeavour, the determination to complete the quest against all the odds.
Casting an eye back on the reviews from a decade and a half ago, the sense of wonder is palpable. It's as if critics were finally allowed to cut loose, to take the plunge and commit to Jackson's fantasy (eek) as a work worthy of high praise. There was nothing they had to be ashamed of in appreciating the work.
Keith Phipps in the AV Club, by reputation such a hard taskmaster, sang forth his praise: "The Return Of The King ultimately proves up to the series' increasingly difficult task: making movies that echo legends, making legends that reflect life, and reconciling it all with the fact that both legends and lives all eventually meet their ends."
"[The Lord of the Rings] restores faith in the idea that popular entertainment can soar to majestic heights," reported Andres O'Hehir of Salon, another venue that could hardly be dismissed as the nerd crowd.
"As I watched this film, an eager victim of its boundless will to astound, I found my loyal memories of the book beginning to fade," said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. He makes a good point. By the third film Jackson and the audience were free from the hold of the books — the need to compare had been blown away. Tolkien was ever present but all but forgotten.
There were the doubters of course. Those that fretted on ideological grounds about the racial implications (notions bound into the novel from Tolkien's WWI experiences: the threat from the East). Those that simply liked to huff and puff.
True, the film isn't perfect. The extended edition is better — reinserting the Christopher Lee's death scene gives a more satisfactory trajectory to the Saruman story. The Hobbits trek across the hot sands of Gorgoroth so much more gruelling. It is less shapely than the first, less earthy than the second, you miss the Hobbit banter and Gandalf the Grey's curmudgeonly charms. I never quite get the emotional kick I need from the Fellowship's reunion scene that plays without dialogue. But from the flaring beacons to the Ring being devoured by the flames of Orodruin we gladly abandoned ourselves to the monumental surge of Jackson's storytelling. We left that premiere to head off to a party of special magnificence with the cycle complete but still not quite ready to admit it was all over. That unwillingness to let go is what drove me to write a book, to fathom how such miracles were accomplished.
Looking back so many years later, the film doesn't seem to have diminished. You might argue over technical details (Jackson surely would, unable to rewatch to the films for fear of those blemishes only he can see), but a classicism has taken hold. The great monument of The Lord of the Rings, now one story not three, has become timeless. What better time to clear an afternoon and return to The Return of the King.
Ian Nathan, December 4th, 2018
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-earth is out now.
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
June 20, 2018
They Have a Cave Troll: How Weta Digital Remade the Visual Effects Landscape
Inside a former panel beater's shop on Manuka Street, in the leafy suburb of Miramar that slides so serenely out into Wellington Bay, can be found the HQ of Weta Digital. Many moons ago, on a guided a tour, I was granted entry into the server room which hummed and blinked and hissed like the engine room of the Enterprise. At that point, as they strained to meet the demands of Return of the King, I was reliably informed that Weta Digital had the largest amount of processing power in the Southern Hemisphere.
Which was all a far cry from a small house on Tasman Street, near the cricket ground, with old furniture stacked against the walls upstairs while they created supernatural wonders for The Frighteners on the cramped ground floor. And back before then, right at the inception point on Heavenly Creatures, when they had a single computer, operated by a fellow named George Pond — the very first keyboard jockey in what is now a thousandfold operation filling buildings all over Wellington deeply embedded in the most ambitious digital project currently being mounted, a set of films that will surely redefine once again what a computer is capable of providing an artform: James Cameron's sequels to Avatar.
It may go relatively uncelebrated, but one of the themes I explore in my new book is how The Lord of the Rings trilogy marks the most important transition in visual effects since Jurassic Park. Not only in technical advancement, but in the strategies with which they are put to use in storytelling. Like so many blockbusters, the three films are built upon digital (and practical) spectacle, but such wonders never seem the point of the films. The point was Tolkien. Nonetheless, Weta Digital revolutionsed the way things were done and perhaps even more radically where they were done.
The responsibility Weta Digital were given in realising Tolkien's many creations (and Jackson's elaborations thereon) was New Line's biggest gamble. Even once the films had heaved into production like an ocean liner leaving dock, the studio still took convincing that Jackson's New Zealand outfit were up to the task of provisioning Middle-earth with visual effects of sufficient quality. There were teething problems. An early summit led to the arrival of the American Jim Rygiel (who'd worked on films as diverse as Multiplicity and Starship Troopers) to help establish of an efficient production line. Weta Digital as was needed to shake off its 'everyone trying their hand at everything' enthusiasm for the streamlined practices of ILM if they were going to achieve the volume of effects required. They needed departments, specialists. Even then, New Line's CEO Robert Shaye was determined Gollum, still at this point only to be animated in CGI, was wholly beyond their capabilities.
Effects were a real bone of contention between director and his backers.
Still, with Rygiel at the wheel, Weta Digital began making significant advances, not only in productivity but stylistically. In short, they began to do things their own way. Or more to the point, they became an enormously important constituent part of the holistic vision of the trilogy. Housed in the neighbourhood, within shouting distance of Weta Workshop, ten minutes by car from Stone Street Studios, fifteen from the director's house on Karaka Bay, they were part of a community.
The Cave Troll was the defining moment. This emphatic statement that Weta Digital was outpacing industry standards was revealed as part of the early trumpet blast of footage unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. It had been a battle to get it ready in time, but Jackson was intent the press see a complete sequence from the films and the confrontation between the Fellowship and the monstrous Troll (only a baby according to Richard Taylor) in the bowels of Moria encapsulated both an iconic branch of Tolkien's subcreation and Jackson's thrilling embodiment of it.
Their approach has been to build the creature up from a skeleton, adding layers of digital muscles and ligament, giving it life. "I don't think many other people had approach it like that," Jackson explained to me. "They usually just made a digital puppet that they moved around on the computer." More than that, it was a creature capable of expressing emotion: a quizzical expression when he thinks he puts an end to Frodo; a childlike look of dismay on reaching his own demise.
They had based the look loosely on the Hunchback on Notre Damme, as well as a homage to the repertoire of Ray Harryhausen, with the skin of a rhino.
Incidentally, the battleground of Balin's Tomb was part set and part digital environment and Jackson had previsualised all the moves of the ensuing combat, demonstrating them to his actors, often filling in for the missing Cave Troll.
After that, every size and shape in Tolkien's bestiary was a matter of meeting the designs that fell from the book into the collective pool of Jackson, concept artists Alan Lee and John Howe, and the many sculptors and dreamers of the Workshop, who would walk around the corner with a monstrous maquette on a tray. When it came to Shelob the Digital crew caught a Funnel Web spider and studied its motion (before releasing it again).
Gollum, much debated, much extolled, is to my mind the chief accomplishment of the entire production. Shaye had finally been won over by the test footage, Weta Digital had hastily put together in advance of one of his rare visits. Joe Letteri was still transferred in from ILM to manage the slippery character, but he took to Jackson and Miramar, and ended up staying forevermore. Gollum's hitherto unthinkable fusion of actor, art and technology redefined what visual effects were capable of bringing to character, and for that matter how far acting could be extended into another dimension.
The battles were something else entirely. A challenge that worked in the opposite direction to Gollum, required termite sprawls of digital friend and foe that could somehow respond to direction. The answer was the development, virtually from scratch, of MASSIVE software. A fellow Wellingtonian named Stephen Regelous was the mastermind. He came with a facility for stretching the limits of traditional programs and a strange fascination with AI. He gave thousands of digital agents 'brains' enough to make decisions based on an increasingly detailed set of parameters (called "logic nodes") the programmers could set.
"What was wonderful to me was to watch people's reactions," Regelous recalled. "It is one thing to ascribe what agents are doing, but is a whole other thing to see what people think the agents are doing." When during one test battle one agent seemed to be running for the hills, he was in fact simply in search for his next opponent, they just hadn't programmed him to turn around if he was facing the wrong way. Through such unforeseen mistakes the software had begun storytelling.
The Hobbit trilogy was dominated by the prowess of Weta Digital, with so much of their achievement now taken for granted. "Full environments," Letteri told me keenly, "that was the evolution." They could control everything, even the weather — Olympian Gods breaking for lunch at The Larder on Darlington Road.
Let us not downplay the might of Smaug. The best sequence in the second trilogy going supra book as the dwarves and Bilbo do battle through the titanic halls of Erebor with a seething dragon mo-capped by Sherlock Holmes. The lithe camerawork was pre-ordained by the director working within the volume, in effect stepping into the mountain with his own camera to describe shots as freely as using a paintbrush.
For Jackson a key motivation in even taking on Tolkien was the future possibility of Weta Digital standing on its own two hairy feet. A portion of his motivation of even taking on Tolkien was to provide Weta Digital with work — to establish this visual effects kingdom on the other side of the world. So they wouldn't be reliant on his filmmaking choices. The work soon came, via Jackson and from elsewhere.
Weta Digital's work on Avatar (where Massive was used to populate an entire planet, the ecological opulence of Pandora left to grow and intertwine along the paths of life before it was ready for the film) took leaps and bounds, as did the mo-cap advances and filigree hair work that came with King Kong and then the revived Planet of the Apes franchise (with Andy Serkis never far from the action).
Today, Manuka Street, The Big House and the other sites are more than equal to ILM. They have put in years of R&D on Avatar 2, 3, 4 and is it 5? Produced by Jackson and directed by former Weta comrade Christian Rivers, Mortal Engines, with its far-flung future of mobile cities and airships, occupies different floors and buildings. Letteri presides over multiple productions. Middle-earth must seem a long time ago, but it is not forgotten. It is in their genes. And who knows, maybe a certain Amazon television series will knock on their door.
They are a marvellous bunch, proud of what they did, but pragmatic as they invented worlds. Every time I visited, they would bring laptops and explain their artistry with Power Point presentations, pointing out microscopic detailing, nearly impossible to detect amid the hurly burly of story, yet to their eyes vital to the whole.
Is there such a thing as a house style for Weta Digital? A different flavour to ILM or the other citadels of Hollywood's effects industry? I think there is. It is undoubtedly infused with the flights of Tolkien, the visions of Jackson and the reputation it gained from both. Weta Digital won Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards three years on the bounce. Another reason why so many other productions came to them for more of that good stuff. Mo-cap would inevitable be a mainstay, the teasing representation of living matter and 'real' movements. But it is organic world-building, more dreamlike and poetic perhaps than the Sturm und Drang of ILM. Not that they cannot be gritty and realistic, but there is a strangeness in the New Zealand light that glows within their work. Something like magic.
Ian Nathan 19/6/2018
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-earth is out now.
Which was all a far cry from a small house on Tasman Street, near the cricket ground, with old furniture stacked against the walls upstairs while they created supernatural wonders for The Frighteners on the cramped ground floor. And back before then, right at the inception point on Heavenly Creatures, when they had a single computer, operated by a fellow named George Pond — the very first keyboard jockey in what is now a thousandfold operation filling buildings all over Wellington deeply embedded in the most ambitious digital project currently being mounted, a set of films that will surely redefine once again what a computer is capable of providing an artform: James Cameron's sequels to Avatar.
It may go relatively uncelebrated, but one of the themes I explore in my new book is how The Lord of the Rings trilogy marks the most important transition in visual effects since Jurassic Park. Not only in technical advancement, but in the strategies with which they are put to use in storytelling. Like so many blockbusters, the three films are built upon digital (and practical) spectacle, but such wonders never seem the point of the films. The point was Tolkien. Nonetheless, Weta Digital revolutionsed the way things were done and perhaps even more radically where they were done.
The responsibility Weta Digital were given in realising Tolkien's many creations (and Jackson's elaborations thereon) was New Line's biggest gamble. Even once the films had heaved into production like an ocean liner leaving dock, the studio still took convincing that Jackson's New Zealand outfit were up to the task of provisioning Middle-earth with visual effects of sufficient quality. There were teething problems. An early summit led to the arrival of the American Jim Rygiel (who'd worked on films as diverse as Multiplicity and Starship Troopers) to help establish of an efficient production line. Weta Digital as was needed to shake off its 'everyone trying their hand at everything' enthusiasm for the streamlined practices of ILM if they were going to achieve the volume of effects required. They needed departments, specialists. Even then, New Line's CEO Robert Shaye was determined Gollum, still at this point only to be animated in CGI, was wholly beyond their capabilities.
Effects were a real bone of contention between director and his backers.
Still, with Rygiel at the wheel, Weta Digital began making significant advances, not only in productivity but stylistically. In short, they began to do things their own way. Or more to the point, they became an enormously important constituent part of the holistic vision of the trilogy. Housed in the neighbourhood, within shouting distance of Weta Workshop, ten minutes by car from Stone Street Studios, fifteen from the director's house on Karaka Bay, they were part of a community.
The Cave Troll was the defining moment. This emphatic statement that Weta Digital was outpacing industry standards was revealed as part of the early trumpet blast of footage unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001. It had been a battle to get it ready in time, but Jackson was intent the press see a complete sequence from the films and the confrontation between the Fellowship and the monstrous Troll (only a baby according to Richard Taylor) in the bowels of Moria encapsulated both an iconic branch of Tolkien's subcreation and Jackson's thrilling embodiment of it.
Their approach has been to build the creature up from a skeleton, adding layers of digital muscles and ligament, giving it life. "I don't think many other people had approach it like that," Jackson explained to me. "They usually just made a digital puppet that they moved around on the computer." More than that, it was a creature capable of expressing emotion: a quizzical expression when he thinks he puts an end to Frodo; a childlike look of dismay on reaching his own demise.
They had based the look loosely on the Hunchback on Notre Damme, as well as a homage to the repertoire of Ray Harryhausen, with the skin of a rhino.
Incidentally, the battleground of Balin's Tomb was part set and part digital environment and Jackson had previsualised all the moves of the ensuing combat, demonstrating them to his actors, often filling in for the missing Cave Troll.
After that, every size and shape in Tolkien's bestiary was a matter of meeting the designs that fell from the book into the collective pool of Jackson, concept artists Alan Lee and John Howe, and the many sculptors and dreamers of the Workshop, who would walk around the corner with a monstrous maquette on a tray. When it came to Shelob the Digital crew caught a Funnel Web spider and studied its motion (before releasing it again).
Gollum, much debated, much extolled, is to my mind the chief accomplishment of the entire production. Shaye had finally been won over by the test footage, Weta Digital had hastily put together in advance of one of his rare visits. Joe Letteri was still transferred in from ILM to manage the slippery character, but he took to Jackson and Miramar, and ended up staying forevermore. Gollum's hitherto unthinkable fusion of actor, art and technology redefined what visual effects were capable of bringing to character, and for that matter how far acting could be extended into another dimension.
The battles were something else entirely. A challenge that worked in the opposite direction to Gollum, required termite sprawls of digital friend and foe that could somehow respond to direction. The answer was the development, virtually from scratch, of MASSIVE software. A fellow Wellingtonian named Stephen Regelous was the mastermind. He came with a facility for stretching the limits of traditional programs and a strange fascination with AI. He gave thousands of digital agents 'brains' enough to make decisions based on an increasingly detailed set of parameters (called "logic nodes") the programmers could set.
"What was wonderful to me was to watch people's reactions," Regelous recalled. "It is one thing to ascribe what agents are doing, but is a whole other thing to see what people think the agents are doing." When during one test battle one agent seemed to be running for the hills, he was in fact simply in search for his next opponent, they just hadn't programmed him to turn around if he was facing the wrong way. Through such unforeseen mistakes the software had begun storytelling.
The Hobbit trilogy was dominated by the prowess of Weta Digital, with so much of their achievement now taken for granted. "Full environments," Letteri told me keenly, "that was the evolution." They could control everything, even the weather — Olympian Gods breaking for lunch at The Larder on Darlington Road.
Let us not downplay the might of Smaug. The best sequence in the second trilogy going supra book as the dwarves and Bilbo do battle through the titanic halls of Erebor with a seething dragon mo-capped by Sherlock Holmes. The lithe camerawork was pre-ordained by the director working within the volume, in effect stepping into the mountain with his own camera to describe shots as freely as using a paintbrush.
For Jackson a key motivation in even taking on Tolkien was the future possibility of Weta Digital standing on its own two hairy feet. A portion of his motivation of even taking on Tolkien was to provide Weta Digital with work — to establish this visual effects kingdom on the other side of the world. So they wouldn't be reliant on his filmmaking choices. The work soon came, via Jackson and from elsewhere.
Weta Digital's work on Avatar (where Massive was used to populate an entire planet, the ecological opulence of Pandora left to grow and intertwine along the paths of life before it was ready for the film) took leaps and bounds, as did the mo-cap advances and filigree hair work that came with King Kong and then the revived Planet of the Apes franchise (with Andy Serkis never far from the action).
Today, Manuka Street, The Big House and the other sites are more than equal to ILM. They have put in years of R&D on Avatar 2, 3, 4 and is it 5? Produced by Jackson and directed by former Weta comrade Christian Rivers, Mortal Engines, with its far-flung future of mobile cities and airships, occupies different floors and buildings. Letteri presides over multiple productions. Middle-earth must seem a long time ago, but it is not forgotten. It is in their genes. And who knows, maybe a certain Amazon television series will knock on their door.
They are a marvellous bunch, proud of what they did, but pragmatic as they invented worlds. Every time I visited, they would bring laptops and explain their artistry with Power Point presentations, pointing out microscopic detailing, nearly impossible to detect amid the hurly burly of story, yet to their eyes vital to the whole.
Is there such a thing as a house style for Weta Digital? A different flavour to ILM or the other citadels of Hollywood's effects industry? I think there is. It is undoubtedly infused with the flights of Tolkien, the visions of Jackson and the reputation it gained from both. Weta Digital won Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards three years on the bounce. Another reason why so many other productions came to them for more of that good stuff. Mo-cap would inevitable be a mainstay, the teasing representation of living matter and 'real' movements. But it is organic world-building, more dreamlike and poetic perhaps than the Sturm und Drang of ILM. Not that they cannot be gritty and realistic, but there is a strangeness in the New Zealand light that glows within their work. Something like magic.
Ian Nathan 19/6/2018
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-earth is out now.
June 8, 2018
Farewell then Peter Jackson
However well-intentioned Amazon's Young Aragorn* series without Peter Jackson it will never quite be the same
*As of yet unconfirmed
Peter Jackson has gracefully put paid to the lingering rumour — for some a lingering hope — that he would be involved in Amazon's expensive venture into Middle-earth. "I’m not involved at all in the Lord of the Rings series,” he made clear, honest to the last in an interview with French website Allocine. “I understand how my name could come up, but there is nothing happening with me on this project.”
When Amazon announced their ambition to go big with Game of Thrones-trouncing Tolkien TV, I started to perceive my recent book differently. For those who don't know, I have written the full filmmaking story behind Middle-earth with over 25 (non-consecutive) hours of brand new interviews with Jackson, cast and crew. It runs to over 500 pages, with a foreword by Gollum.
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
At that point, with the possibility — however remote — that Jackson would return to the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood, it served almost as a bridge between eras and reflecting the changing times in Hollywood. Where once there was wildly ambitious trilogies created by shooting back-to-back movies, now it is television shows, where length is never an issue. The road goes ever on as long you have an audience.
With Jackson's admission, I now like to think that Anything You Can Imagine (the title a reference to his ready mantra, "Anything you can imagine, you can put on film") stands as a capstone, the history of another age — a legendarium to a legendarium if we're getting into the thick of geek-speak. The likes of it which we will never see again.
As you may have read — and theonering.net have been avidly covering the story from every conceivable angle, and I have pitched in with some thoughts in the new issue of Empire — rumours lean toward a storyline focused on a young Aragorn, most likely his years quite literally in the wilderness. This hasn't yet been confirmed by Amazon, who have still to announce much of anything beyond their purchase of the rights and an assertion that they were not going to tamper with what has come before. No one is talking about the heresy of a remake. Not that they don't reserve the right to change their mind. Hey, if Sam Raimi or Benioff and Weiss or the Russo brothers (I hasten to emphasise that this is only my speculation) walk into Jeff Bezos' shiny office with a grand plan to being again from scratch, who is to say that they won't get a greenlight?
Jackson's was a swift, succinct, polite dismissal. He's moving on, thanks for the memories and the Oscars, the golden lustre it left him with. The Rings trilogy especially will always be "a great island" in his career — there was before Middle-earth and now, finally, there is after. He certainly didn't rule out the participation of Weta Workshop or Weta Digital. And it's not as if he gets to say who can or can't shoot in New Zealand. Quite the contrary, he has championed his country on a world stage. He would no doubt welcome the production as a neighbour. Although it would surely be strange to see hobbits and elves or even Sir Ian McKellen marching to another's beat.
Especially as the great fabric of his creative endeavour in Tolkien's realms may still be put to use, the accumulated IP of which now lies in Amazon's eager palms, right down to Gimli's codpiece, and there is every sense that they are positioning their show within the world that Peter built. There is an ever so slight hanging note to that use of the word "happening" isn't there? Isn't there?
Nevertheless, Jackson never entered into Lord of the Rings as a Tolkien zealot, and would never lay claim to any kind of ownership beyond the bounds of his own films. Way back then, keen to grow Weta in the wake of The Frighteners, he had been stirred by the potential of a fantasy film of the ilk created by his all-time hero Ray Harryhausen, only instead of the painstaking ritual of stop-motion he would utilise the growing potential of digital effects. He had only read Tolkien's trilogy once when he was a teenager, and largely forgotten the ins and outs of Frodo's quest.
The problem was that when he and his partner Fran Walsh sat down to brainstorm a cinematic fantasy, Walsh, whose memory is impeccable, began shooting down everything Jackson came up with: "That's Lord of the Rings... That's Lord of the Rings." "It was getting frustrating," Jackson told me. Indeed it got to the point where the squarely pragmatic side of his Kiwi personality came to the obvious conclusion: "Why don't we make Lord of the Rings then?"
Give or take four tortuous years of pre-production, that is pretty how it happened.
I think it helped that he wasn't a purist. He came at Tolkien without the reverence that would have crippled a disciple. It is quite because he was willing to face the inevitable flack of the book's army of followers that he found a way. It wasn't The Bible after all (The Bible didn't have Balrogs) I am making my version of Lord of the Rings he kept reiterating in interview. In other words, feel free to go and make your own. The strange thing was that the further he down went the road kept turning back toward Tolkien. Sure there was no Tom Bombadil or Fatty Bolger, but the films are recognisably Tolkien's world to a degree beyond which the faithful had any hope of seeing.
And yet, whoever Amazon find to run their show, and however mighty the ensuing lump of event television, something will undoubtedly be missing from the mix. When Jackson says he is not involved, we can safely assume this also includes Walsh and fellow writer Philippa Boyens too. And that working bond, led by the indomitable man of impeccable Bad Taste, was the rock on which those films were founded. More than that, though, they are imbued with his spirit as much as Tolkien's.
Will some poor soul have to emulate the stylistic curves, the black humour and the bold emotion that belong to this director alone? The Middle-earth we know and love is tuned to Jackson's vision, it is set in New Zealand in more ways than one: that wondrous, outrageous panoptic vision that could scale mountains and plunge down the flanks of obsidian towers, that could course over twisted forests and yet still showed Middle-earth through the eyes of its characters, and reflected the bitter twists of the story in the landscape of those fabulous faces. He staved off the absurdity of Tolkien by recognising it was there to begin with. Above all, he made the place breath.
Finally, Jackson will be wanting to get past all this conjecture about Middle-earth as he is in the midst of midwifing a new universe with Mortal Engines, directed by his longtime compadre and Middle-earth fellow traveller Christian Rivers. It's a different jaunt entirely: a post-post apocalyptic vision taken from Philip Reeve's fast-paced YA series in which cities rove the devastated landscape on gigantic wheels hunting down smaller, weaker towns, while teens jostle with parents, mete out revenge and save the world. There is the potential for large-scale franchise if it works. And beyond that Jackson will have his plans. His WW1 doc is due, and that subject remains close to his heart. There will hopefully be something more epic in mind for himself some day soon. Or smaller, more intimate things. Maybe he'll finally get around to Bad Taste 2. That would be a blast from the past.
Ian Nathan 7/6/2018
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
*As of yet unconfirmed
Peter Jackson has gracefully put paid to the lingering rumour — for some a lingering hope — that he would be involved in Amazon's expensive venture into Middle-earth. "I’m not involved at all in the Lord of the Rings series,” he made clear, honest to the last in an interview with French website Allocine. “I understand how my name could come up, but there is nothing happening with me on this project.”
When Amazon announced their ambition to go big with Game of Thrones-trouncing Tolkien TV, I started to perceive my recent book differently. For those who don't know, I have written the full filmmaking story behind Middle-earth with over 25 (non-consecutive) hours of brand new interviews with Jackson, cast and crew. It runs to over 500 pages, with a foreword by Gollum.
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
At that point, with the possibility — however remote — that Jackson would return to the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood, it served almost as a bridge between eras and reflecting the changing times in Hollywood. Where once there was wildly ambitious trilogies created by shooting back-to-back movies, now it is television shows, where length is never an issue. The road goes ever on as long you have an audience.
With Jackson's admission, I now like to think that Anything You Can Imagine (the title a reference to his ready mantra, "Anything you can imagine, you can put on film") stands as a capstone, the history of another age — a legendarium to a legendarium if we're getting into the thick of geek-speak. The likes of it which we will never see again.
As you may have read — and theonering.net have been avidly covering the story from every conceivable angle, and I have pitched in with some thoughts in the new issue of Empire — rumours lean toward a storyline focused on a young Aragorn, most likely his years quite literally in the wilderness. This hasn't yet been confirmed by Amazon, who have still to announce much of anything beyond their purchase of the rights and an assertion that they were not going to tamper with what has come before. No one is talking about the heresy of a remake. Not that they don't reserve the right to change their mind. Hey, if Sam Raimi or Benioff and Weiss or the Russo brothers (I hasten to emphasise that this is only my speculation) walk into Jeff Bezos' shiny office with a grand plan to being again from scratch, who is to say that they won't get a greenlight?
Jackson's was a swift, succinct, polite dismissal. He's moving on, thanks for the memories and the Oscars, the golden lustre it left him with. The Rings trilogy especially will always be "a great island" in his career — there was before Middle-earth and now, finally, there is after. He certainly didn't rule out the participation of Weta Workshop or Weta Digital. And it's not as if he gets to say who can or can't shoot in New Zealand. Quite the contrary, he has championed his country on a world stage. He would no doubt welcome the production as a neighbour. Although it would surely be strange to see hobbits and elves or even Sir Ian McKellen marching to another's beat.
Especially as the great fabric of his creative endeavour in Tolkien's realms may still be put to use, the accumulated IP of which now lies in Amazon's eager palms, right down to Gimli's codpiece, and there is every sense that they are positioning their show within the world that Peter built. There is an ever so slight hanging note to that use of the word "happening" isn't there? Isn't there?
Nevertheless, Jackson never entered into Lord of the Rings as a Tolkien zealot, and would never lay claim to any kind of ownership beyond the bounds of his own films. Way back then, keen to grow Weta in the wake of The Frighteners, he had been stirred by the potential of a fantasy film of the ilk created by his all-time hero Ray Harryhausen, only instead of the painstaking ritual of stop-motion he would utilise the growing potential of digital effects. He had only read Tolkien's trilogy once when he was a teenager, and largely forgotten the ins and outs of Frodo's quest.
The problem was that when he and his partner Fran Walsh sat down to brainstorm a cinematic fantasy, Walsh, whose memory is impeccable, began shooting down everything Jackson came up with: "That's Lord of the Rings... That's Lord of the Rings." "It was getting frustrating," Jackson told me. Indeed it got to the point where the squarely pragmatic side of his Kiwi personality came to the obvious conclusion: "Why don't we make Lord of the Rings then?"
Give or take four tortuous years of pre-production, that is pretty how it happened.
I think it helped that he wasn't a purist. He came at Tolkien without the reverence that would have crippled a disciple. It is quite because he was willing to face the inevitable flack of the book's army of followers that he found a way. It wasn't The Bible after all (The Bible didn't have Balrogs) I am making my version of Lord of the Rings he kept reiterating in interview. In other words, feel free to go and make your own. The strange thing was that the further he down went the road kept turning back toward Tolkien. Sure there was no Tom Bombadil or Fatty Bolger, but the films are recognisably Tolkien's world to a degree beyond which the faithful had any hope of seeing.
And yet, whoever Amazon find to run their show, and however mighty the ensuing lump of event television, something will undoubtedly be missing from the mix. When Jackson says he is not involved, we can safely assume this also includes Walsh and fellow writer Philippa Boyens too. And that working bond, led by the indomitable man of impeccable Bad Taste, was the rock on which those films were founded. More than that, though, they are imbued with his spirit as much as Tolkien's.
Will some poor soul have to emulate the stylistic curves, the black humour and the bold emotion that belong to this director alone? The Middle-earth we know and love is tuned to Jackson's vision, it is set in New Zealand in more ways than one: that wondrous, outrageous panoptic vision that could scale mountains and plunge down the flanks of obsidian towers, that could course over twisted forests and yet still showed Middle-earth through the eyes of its characters, and reflected the bitter twists of the story in the landscape of those fabulous faces. He staved off the absurdity of Tolkien by recognising it was there to begin with. Above all, he made the place breath.
Finally, Jackson will be wanting to get past all this conjecture about Middle-earth as he is in the midst of midwifing a new universe with Mortal Engines, directed by his longtime compadre and Middle-earth fellow traveller Christian Rivers. It's a different jaunt entirely: a post-post apocalyptic vision taken from Philip Reeve's fast-paced YA series in which cities rove the devastated landscape on gigantic wheels hunting down smaller, weaker towns, while teens jostle with parents, mete out revenge and save the world. There is the potential for large-scale franchise if it works. And beyond that Jackson will have his plans. His WW1 doc is due, and that subject remains close to his heart. There will hopefully be something more epic in mind for himself some day soon. Or smaller, more intimate things. Maybe he'll finally get around to Bad Taste 2. That would be a blast from the past.
Ian Nathan 7/6/2018
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
June 5, 2018
Inside The Making of the Making Of The Lord of the Rings
An introduction, or what I thought I was writing about when I wrote Anything You Can Imagine, a not so brief history of Peter Jackson's Tolkien marvel
A number of years ago, I wrote a well-received book about the making of Alien going by the hard to misinterpret title of ‘Alien Vault’. To my eye, Ridley Scott’s dank, nightmarish future-gothic vision of the universe is as vérité as Peter Jackson’s expansive, feel-the-drizzle Middle-earth. Thinking about it, these two cinematic worlds are not so stylistically distant; unsurprisingly Jackson is a big fan of Alien and counts a genuine H.R. Giger model of the derelict among his diverse collection of movie memorabilia.
As I began researching Alien, however, I found myself a little stricken, cornered by the profusion and quality of what had already been written on the film as well as the slew of documentaries (a quick name check here for Charles de Lauzirika’s extraordinary work on the Alien Quadrilogy box set) that have accompanied its DVD afterlife. How could I hope to compete? What was there left to say? Where do you begin afresh with a beloved, 30 year-old sci-fi chestbursting classic? Writers you will find are insecure creatures.
The only way out of the maze was to think of my book as a biography of a film in which I could attempt to find a different take on Alien, my take, which would hopefully translate into a more personal approach. All great stories and all valid histories, whatever the subject, are finally about people (those who write them as much as those who appear within the text). That meant interviews and more interviews, and using the thirtysomething years since the film to my advantage. After all, how many biographies of Hitler or Churchill have their been?
Like a drunkard drawn to the bottle, I have been caught reading reviews of my latest book, the less pithily titled ‘Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth’. I was struck how, for good and bad, some have deemed it a straight biography of Peter Jackson. To be fair, this is entirely how it has been packaged by the publisher and categorised on Amazon. And who am I to gainsay the commerce of the book trade?
Woe betide any author who attempts to tackle the misgivings presented by a critic (which may be entirely fair), but I come back to the idea of my own definitions. ‘Anything You Can Imagine’, as I see it, is not a biography of Peter Jackson, at least not directly. As with Alien, but even more so in this case, my intent was to tell the story of an incredible filmmaking moment. One that represents a unique and seemingly unrepeatable period in Hollywood history. This is a book about the journey of The Lord of the Rings trilogy from inception to triumph via a multitude of tribulations, serendipitous events and unforeseen successes. A path that could be defined as fate, if you are of that way of thinking. This is the biography of three films that serve as one. The biography too of a kind of endeavour only this artform can inspire, at once utterly insane, passionate, overreaching and brilliant. The epic.
Ironically, one of my key literary touchstones was ‘Final Cut’, Steven Bach’s beautifully written and compellingly detailed depiction of everything that befell the making of Heaven’s Gate. It is the biography of how a film could break a studio. Bach was on the inside of that derelict in a way I could never emulate — he was the United Artists executive in charge of production at the time and the tone he engenders carries the manifest doom of Shakespearean tragedy. I am not comparing myself with the late, great Bach, who was a supreme writer (if indifferent studio executive), and despite the many who sounded a death knell for New Line, my story takes flight in the opposite direction. Like Alien, it is the story of a towering success.
For the record, this was never to be a book that encompassed the making of The Hobbit, and whatever pressures lay therein, beyond that divisive trilogy’s place as a legacy of the initial success of The Lord of the Rings.
Mine was also never to be a book about swords and elves, Hobbits and the disposal of magical rings, not directly. There were to be no runes or maps. Rather this was the tale of a gang of unruly Kiwis (and that unruliness I mean as a quality) who outwitted Hollywood to adapt a book long dismissed as impossible. This was both a Hollywood and an anti-Hollywood story. As much as anything, it was to be a book about something ineffable but vital in the New Zealand spirit that made the impossible merely a hurdle to be overcome. The same DNA that climbed Everest. They are such New Zealand films in flavour as well as location. Of course, the parallels with Tolkien’s tale of the little men who overcame added to the whole scheme.
More than ever, this demanded to be a book about people. From my copious interviews, with time given so very generously by so many, I wanted to sew together a series of significant, parallel human stories that embodied the filmmaking journey (a fellowship within the Fellowship). Peter, of course, was bound to be the central figure — and in that sense there is an element of Jacksonian biography. Nevertheless, even at the end of the endeavour there remains something enigmatic about him. Then so too was this a biography of writers, producers, partners and saviours Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. My focus also fell upon Elijah Wood and Andy Serkis, the strange journey of Viggo Mortensen, behind the scenes master craftsman like Richard Taylor and Joe Letteri, the influence of the artists Alan Lee and John Howe, producers and managers like Mark Ordesky and Ken Kamins, lesser sung heroes like first AD Carolynne ‘Caro’ Cunningham, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, miniatures genius Alex Funke, and MASSIVE maestro Stephen Regelous. This is only a taste of the individual endeavour involved in the Rings moment, and what the book covers, but you catch my drift. As I say within the text, Jackson was an auteur with an entire nation at his back.
Furthermore, I was wholly conscious of the host of DVD extras with which Jackson has provisioned the films. My approach was to spread the net wider, outside of a studio’s watchful eye, and drill down further into the detail with the hindsight of the twenty years that have passed since these films were first greenlit allowed me. To get to the root, I hope, of the famous last ditch Viggo Mortensen casting story; the Sean Connery as Gandalf rumour; that epoch-defining New Line greenlight; the hilarious battle of the golds versus the silvers when they first tested the MASSIVE software; that glittering but bizarre night of Oscar glory: all the famous tales that have coalesced into myth. This I feel I have achieved.
When you write about any moment of history there are those historians that come before you, and those who will follow afterwards. This is my contribution.
So judge my success or failure as you will. There are many things I would go back and change as I flick through the pages. That is the fate of the author. You are in the end dragged away. Ultimately, what I set out to write was a work of biographical film criticism slash historiogeographical fandom of The Lord of the Rings, or There and Back Again.
Ian Nathan 20/5/2018
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
A number of years ago, I wrote a well-received book about the making of Alien going by the hard to misinterpret title of ‘Alien Vault’. To my eye, Ridley Scott’s dank, nightmarish future-gothic vision of the universe is as vérité as Peter Jackson’s expansive, feel-the-drizzle Middle-earth. Thinking about it, these two cinematic worlds are not so stylistically distant; unsurprisingly Jackson is a big fan of Alien and counts a genuine H.R. Giger model of the derelict among his diverse collection of movie memorabilia.
As I began researching Alien, however, I found myself a little stricken, cornered by the profusion and quality of what had already been written on the film as well as the slew of documentaries (a quick name check here for Charles de Lauzirika’s extraordinary work on the Alien Quadrilogy box set) that have accompanied its DVD afterlife. How could I hope to compete? What was there left to say? Where do you begin afresh with a beloved, 30 year-old sci-fi chestbursting classic? Writers you will find are insecure creatures.
The only way out of the maze was to think of my book as a biography of a film in which I could attempt to find a different take on Alien, my take, which would hopefully translate into a more personal approach. All great stories and all valid histories, whatever the subject, are finally about people (those who write them as much as those who appear within the text). That meant interviews and more interviews, and using the thirtysomething years since the film to my advantage. After all, how many biographies of Hitler or Churchill have their been?
Like a drunkard drawn to the bottle, I have been caught reading reviews of my latest book, the less pithily titled ‘Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth’. I was struck how, for good and bad, some have deemed it a straight biography of Peter Jackson. To be fair, this is entirely how it has been packaged by the publisher and categorised on Amazon. And who am I to gainsay the commerce of the book trade?
Woe betide any author who attempts to tackle the misgivings presented by a critic (which may be entirely fair), but I come back to the idea of my own definitions. ‘Anything You Can Imagine’, as I see it, is not a biography of Peter Jackson, at least not directly. As with Alien, but even more so in this case, my intent was to tell the story of an incredible filmmaking moment. One that represents a unique and seemingly unrepeatable period in Hollywood history. This is a book about the journey of The Lord of the Rings trilogy from inception to triumph via a multitude of tribulations, serendipitous events and unforeseen successes. A path that could be defined as fate, if you are of that way of thinking. This is the biography of three films that serve as one. The biography too of a kind of endeavour only this artform can inspire, at once utterly insane, passionate, overreaching and brilliant. The epic.
Ironically, one of my key literary touchstones was ‘Final Cut’, Steven Bach’s beautifully written and compellingly detailed depiction of everything that befell the making of Heaven’s Gate. It is the biography of how a film could break a studio. Bach was on the inside of that derelict in a way I could never emulate — he was the United Artists executive in charge of production at the time and the tone he engenders carries the manifest doom of Shakespearean tragedy. I am not comparing myself with the late, great Bach, who was a supreme writer (if indifferent studio executive), and despite the many who sounded a death knell for New Line, my story takes flight in the opposite direction. Like Alien, it is the story of a towering success.
For the record, this was never to be a book that encompassed the making of The Hobbit, and whatever pressures lay therein, beyond that divisive trilogy’s place as a legacy of the initial success of The Lord of the Rings.
Mine was also never to be a book about swords and elves, Hobbits and the disposal of magical rings, not directly. There were to be no runes or maps. Rather this was the tale of a gang of unruly Kiwis (and that unruliness I mean as a quality) who outwitted Hollywood to adapt a book long dismissed as impossible. This was both a Hollywood and an anti-Hollywood story. As much as anything, it was to be a book about something ineffable but vital in the New Zealand spirit that made the impossible merely a hurdle to be overcome. The same DNA that climbed Everest. They are such New Zealand films in flavour as well as location. Of course, the parallels with Tolkien’s tale of the little men who overcame added to the whole scheme.
More than ever, this demanded to be a book about people. From my copious interviews, with time given so very generously by so many, I wanted to sew together a series of significant, parallel human stories that embodied the filmmaking journey (a fellowship within the Fellowship). Peter, of course, was bound to be the central figure — and in that sense there is an element of Jacksonian biography. Nevertheless, even at the end of the endeavour there remains something enigmatic about him. Then so too was this a biography of writers, producers, partners and saviours Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. My focus also fell upon Elijah Wood and Andy Serkis, the strange journey of Viggo Mortensen, behind the scenes master craftsman like Richard Taylor and Joe Letteri, the influence of the artists Alan Lee and John Howe, producers and managers like Mark Ordesky and Ken Kamins, lesser sung heroes like first AD Carolynne ‘Caro’ Cunningham, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, miniatures genius Alex Funke, and MASSIVE maestro Stephen Regelous. This is only a taste of the individual endeavour involved in the Rings moment, and what the book covers, but you catch my drift. As I say within the text, Jackson was an auteur with an entire nation at his back.
Furthermore, I was wholly conscious of the host of DVD extras with which Jackson has provisioned the films. My approach was to spread the net wider, outside of a studio’s watchful eye, and drill down further into the detail with the hindsight of the twenty years that have passed since these films were first greenlit allowed me. To get to the root, I hope, of the famous last ditch Viggo Mortensen casting story; the Sean Connery as Gandalf rumour; that epoch-defining New Line greenlight; the hilarious battle of the golds versus the silvers when they first tested the MASSIVE software; that glittering but bizarre night of Oscar glory: all the famous tales that have coalesced into myth. This I feel I have achieved.
When you write about any moment of history there are those historians that come before you, and those who will follow afterwards. This is my contribution.
So judge my success or failure as you will. There are many things I would go back and change as I flick through the pages. That is the fate of the author. You are in the end dragged away. Ultimately, what I set out to write was a work of biographical film criticism slash historiogeographical fandom of The Lord of the Rings, or There and Back Again.
Ian Nathan 20/5/2018
Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
