Caught in the middle

After the success of the first film, the pressure this time is different, the director says.
By DOUGLAS J. ROWE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ETER JACKSON'S MIDDLE MOVIE MAY suffer a severe case of middle-child syndrome.
"The next one is my favorite. I shouldn't actually say that. I'm supposed to be promoting this film," volunteers the director, who's come from New Zealand to flog the second in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, "The Two Towers."
"In 'The Return of the King' we get to pay it all off in a very triumphant kind of a way," he explains. "There're just great bits of drama; it's very heroic and very emotional."
OK, but before we skip ahead to next Christmas and that film, what about this one?
"The Two Towers" was the toughest of the three, he says, explaining that he pulled apart the book to make it more cinematic and make sure that "the bottom didn't drop out" in any of the three story lines, which will converge in the conclusion.
No beginning, no end
"This one is a classic kind of middle chapter. Which is tough in a sense in that it doesn't have a beginning and it doesn't have an end."
Is he afraid that will leave fans unsatisfied?
"I hope not. The first one didn't have an ending either," he says, laughing. "Only one of them is actually going to have an end. ... We're going to become specialists in movies with no endings."
The absence of a beginning in "The Two Towers" was actually "a blessing," Jackson says, because he didn't need the complicated, introductory exposition that began last year's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring."
And he deliberately eschewed a recap of the first film.
"So many people last year said, 'Oh God, I wish I could have just sat there and seen the second film straight away.' So I thought: Let's treat this film in that way," he says. "We just pretend the year hasn't gone by and we're just carrying the story on from the moment that we left off."
Even though Jackson's cinematic magnum opus has very detailed, definitive source material in J.R.R. Tolkien's books, the 41-year-old New Zealand filmmaker always saw himself and his collaborators as more than just conduits, or brokers, of the legendary literature.
"As filmmakers, we never felt that it was our job to faithfully take everything that Tolkien had written -- in the way that he wrote it -- and just put that on screen," he says. "Our primary responsibility was as filmmakers and to make an entertaining film, or three entertaining films in this case. And by doing that we've had to change a lot of things in the book.
"And I think people have forgiven us."
Changes
Tolkien fans who five years ago would have howled at the thought of any changes have appreciated his efforts, he says.
More things were changed in "The Two Towers" than in the other two films. (Aficionados will notice, for instance, that Jackson developed more scenes for the Gollum/Frodo plot line than the second book contained. And the confrontation with a giant spider, which ends the second book, has been moved to the third movie.)
"Everything deviates from the books in some degree. I mean, we don't have a single scene in any of our films that sort of takes the book and verbatim just translates the dialogue and the events ... into the movie."
Jackson says the first step for him in directing a film is seeing it in his mind. "That's really, I think, what directing is all about: If you can imagine a movie playing in your head, then the job becomes much easier, because it's simply a case of 'OK, I can imagine what I want, and now I just have to go about to achieve it."'
He prepared for three years (1997 through 1999) before he even started shooting. Besides writing the script, he did a lot of story boards, made models of castles and used little plastic soldiers to map out the battle scenes.
He also approached the story as if it were history, rather than fantasy.
"We sort of said: 'OK now, let's just pretend these events really happened -- they happened in our world six or 7,000 years ago, and Tolkien was simply a historian writing about real events.'"
The single toughest thing in adapting it, however, was "just to make a satisfying movie. And then to obviously make three satisfying movies."
Praise for Jackson
"I don't know anybody else who could have done this, who could have gone through this whole period and stayed with these three films," says Mirando Otto, who plays Eowyn, the niece of the king of Rohan, who lost her parents to marauding orcs.
Jackson, she says, seemed to "know exactly what he was looking for in the scene, but also know exactly where it was going to come in the film and exactly where it was going to come in terms of the three films. He seemed to be able to focus on the exact moment that we were working on. ... I think most people would have lost it."
"He just sort of knuckles down and just forges through everything. It's kind of incredible. He never gets upset, or throws tantrums."
With his eyes twinkling through big round glasses amid a forest of long hair and beard, Jackson does come across as unflappable. On a wintry day in New York, he sits on a sofa for an interview in short pants and polo shirt, his Buddha belly and Zen serenity offset by an easy laugh and trademark bare feet, which make him look a bit hobbitlike (though his feet aren't that big and hairy).
"I'm a hobbit at heart," he says. "Which is a bit sad. I should really say I feel akin to Viggo [Mortensen], one of the human heroes [Aragorn]. But I don't. I feel much more hobbity."
Different pressure
After the success of the first film -- $860 million worldwide box office, 13 Academy Award nominations and four statuettes -- he says the pressure this time is different.
"The pressure on the first film was basically, would the studio survive? -- this folly of making three films at once," Jackson says.
New Line Cinema poured $270 million-plus into simultaneously making three films when it wasn't assured that the first would succeed. Jackson's most successful film had been 1996's "The Frighteners," which grossed $16.5 million.
Now the pressure stems simply from not wanting to disappoint people who loved the first film, he says.
Jackson first made a splash with self-described "splatstick" -- comic horror films, including "Dead Alive" -- then gained acclaim with 1994's "Heavenly Creatures," which earned an Academy Award nomination for original screenplay.
Seeing the original "King Kong" as a Kiwi kid made Jackson want to become a filmmaker, mainly because he loved the special effects. His parents had already given their only child a super-8 movie camera, and he made a World War I film with his friends when he was barely 8. He kept making movies through his teens, including a vampire tale.
"I didn't really understand what directing was when I was young," he says. "So I thought that I wanted to be a special effects man."
By 17 or 18, he discovered "that if you wanted to be a storyteller, then the directing job was really the one to have." But his enduring love of FX remains obvious.
He and his longtime domestic and writing partner, Frances Walsh, with whom he has two kids, have a few different ideas for future films; the most specific he gets is to say it'll probably be a New Zealand-set drama. Next year they'll start work on a script after they finish post-production on the final "Rings" film.
"Obviously, we've had quite a long time to think about it since we've been on 'Lord of the Rings,'" he says, chuckling. "We'd certainly like to do something a lot smaller next time around."
So no three films at once.
Will any of them involve mythical creatures?
"There might be one or two," he says with a sly smile.