‘Rings’ master

For director Peter Jackson, the time was “seven years that’s got one week left to run.” The seven years was how long he had worked on “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy while the “one week left” was his acknowledgment that he’d soon have to stop tinkering with the last installment, “The Return of the King.” But when he spoke from New Zealand last month, Jackson had those few days before he had to turn over his completed print to New Line Cinema, and he was in his “use every minute” mode, still adjusting the skin tone of actor Elijah Wood and tweaking the sound -- the balance between music and special effects -- on two of the movie’s 10 reels. Nonetheless, he took a break to discuss how his life has changed, the deaths of his parents, the difficulty of depicting evil on screen, his next project, “King Kong,” and the pressure to bring home a key Oscar or two. Jackson started by talking about the impact of these years on the two children he’s had with writer-producer Fran Walsh, his partner in life and filmmaking.

“Lord of the Rings” is all they’ve really known in their lives because our son is 8 years old and our daughter is 7. They have just grown up with their mummy and daddy making “Lord of the Rings.” They were watching us film in 1999 and 2000; that was like four years ago. They were very young and didn’t really understand the process. But now we can watch the movies and they look at a scene from 1999 and Billy, our son, will turn and say, “I was on the set that day,” and I didn’t even know that he knew the word “set.” But he talks about camera angles and he talks about CG [computer generated] shots and whether the CG shots are finished.

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The 42-year-old Jackson insisted that the actors felt the most strain because they had to relocate to New Zealand while he was “sleeping in my same bed.” Only when asked does he speak of losing his parents during those years.

My dad died before we started shooting, and then Mum died about four or five days before we finished the first film. She never saw it. She was trying to hang on but she couldn’t. I was only able to become a filmmaker because I had the support of my parents. I think if you’re a kid who wants to make [airplane] models and get a movie camera for his birthday, to become a filmmaker seems like a dream. I think parents have a choice if they have a child who dreams of an impossible career, of something that sounds crazy. My parents did everything they possibly could to make it happen for me. They were very working class. They emigrated after World War II. They both left [England] within a year or two of each other and they met here in New Zealand. My dad worked for the City Council as a wages clerk, payroll clerk. They bought me cameras for my birthday and Christmas and gave me money to make some of my films when I was a kid. So the fact that they didn’t make it through to see “Lord of the Rings” and the success that’s come off is a great shame to me.

I was always focused on wanting to be a special-effect man and be involved in the film industry as like a stop-motion animator or a model builder. But I realized through my own kind of filmmaking process that the real fun was in the storytelling. I’d be trying to invent little stories so that I could show off my models. I went through a stage of trying to figure out ways with my Super 8 movie camera to shoot a World War II dogfight scene.

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Jackson sees the films as an homage to his parents’ English heritage as well as to J.R.R. Tolkien’s cult-classic novels.

Tolkien did say that very clearly, that he wrote “The Lord of the Rings” because he felt that England’s mythology had been lost. He was a professor [at Oxford] who studied the ancient myths and the languages, and he would study Norse mythology and Greek mythology and all the European traditions. But he always was sad about the fact that England’s mythology was eradicated in 1066, when England was taken over by the Normans. England’s mythology is much more recent -- it’s King Arthur and Robin Hood -- than the ancient myths, and he set about trying to thread a story that would replace them.

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The director sees a link, though, between Tolkien’s own life and the story he created in a fantasy world of creatures, castles and mammoth battles, as when his heroes return to their Shire home after destroying the ring of corrupting power.

“The Return of the King” is very bittersweet. It has dimensions that heroism can triumph and good can triumph, but it comes at a price. Frodo does realize that the world that he returns to is never going to be the same for him, which is sad because the world was for him comfortable and simple. I very much see it being the experience of soldiers coming back from war. Tolkien was a soldier in the First World War and he did see most of his friends die in 1916, and he did go through the experience of being a 19-, 20-year-old kid leaving England and going to France and going through hell and coming back.

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Like many sci-fi and fantasy epics, his focuses on its heroes as they battle evil forces both on the battlefield and within themselves. But we don’t get the same full-dimensional view of that enemy.

Who is the main evil force? We’ve never really been able to get close to him, and that’s one of the frustrations with the book. Sauron isn’t a person. He’s a manifestation of evil that exists in the form of a flaming eyeball. If you were a filmmaker writing an original screenplay, you’d never have a villain who is a flaming eyeball. We decided not to even attempt to make him anything more than what he was in the books, and I think it’s OK. It’s like the old Hitchcock thing, which is the story is about the heroic characters. The film as they journey is not about the nature of what the evil is. We know he’s evil, he’s bad, the world would not be a good place if he’s left to survive. And fortunately in a movie we can get away with it.

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Some directors, such as Martin Scorsese, have resisted the temptation to restore cut scenes in DVD versions of their films. But Jackson has embraced that second bite of the apple. So which is the real film?

I can’t make up my mind. Personally I view the extended DVDs as a great way of avoiding the tragedy -- when you have to leave scenes on the cutting room floor that you think have a lot of merit but you just know the movie cannot be four hours long. I’ll probably say the original theatrical version is the way that we all felt the film should be seen. [But] I have no real perspective on the movies. I do have a lot of people saying that they like the extended ones better.

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While making the trilogy, Jackson swore he’d do a small film next. Then he signed up to remake “King Kong” for a fee of $20 million.

We have little movies that we want to do. But we started on “Kong” back in 1996 and we worked on it for about seven months, and then it got canned by the studio and we had already emotionally committed to the idea of “Kong.” I think fate was being kind to us, [but] it felt like it was an unfulfilled part of our career. So when Universal came back to us last year wanting to do “Kong” again, we wanted to finish the job. And it just felt more sensible that if you know that you’re doing “Kong” that you basically try to keep the “Lord of the Rings” team intact -- the miniature department and the guys that are down here for “The Return of the King,” just go straight into “Kong” [rather] than lose everybody and try to bring everybody back for another big film in two or three years.

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Though Jackson speaks modestly of the “Rings” trilogy (“It’s popcorn, but approached through the dramatic door rather than through the popcorn door”), he can’t avoid the talk of the finale making him a contender for best picture and directing Oscars. He insists his one concern is always “How do I get my next film made?” But the prize season has left many moviemakers feeling like they’ve failed if they don’t win, regardless of the critical or box office success of their work.

It’s not something that is really even part of the filmmaking process. You go on set, you write them, you shoot and edit them and you’re simply focused on trying to make the most entertaining film you can. If I was lucky enough to be nominated, sure, at that point you start to fantasize. You are suddenly plugged into the Oscar machine for two months and you’re spun around, and suddenly the movie is not so important anymore and it’s the Oscar that’s the big thing. I’m not part of the industry that makes films [in Hollywood]. I’m not on the social circuit. [But] it’s not something that you dismiss, it’s not something that you can say, “I don’t really care.”

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If it happens for him, is it fair to assume his speech to the world would mention the parents who never got to see these films?

I would attempt to. It is a very emotional thing for me. The thing with speeches and parents and everything -- that’s become a cliche. But I guess I wouldn’t care about that if the time came.