Over on the Lord of the Rings Forum at Hollywood Jesus this last week, a reader posed the question: what is it that has most shaped how we read Peter Jackson's filmed version of Tolkien's novel? For me, the answer is pretty easy. It's the fact that, as a journalist, I've been able to sit down with Peter Jackson and his crew and actually get some first-hand answers to my personal, nagging questions. There's really no substitute for getting information straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

Of course, these tidbits of "insight" are hardly complete—and how deeply can you pursue any given topic in twenty minutes, especially when you're competing with a dozen other journalists for attention? The result, as may be seen in the following interview, is that often Jackson (and others) come off resembling some other aspect of a horse's anatomy, if you get my drift.

To be fair, though, we journalists don't come off much better. This month's warts-and-all transcription of last December's interview with Peter Jackson illustrates that there's plenty of thought-fumbling to go around. It may also give readers a little perspective on "interview-based" articles that seem terribly perceptive and articulate: editors and writers earn their pay.

The questions in the interview are posed by press from a variety of publications, and Jackson's reponses are given verbatim. Where necessary, extraneous, unintelligible or profane remarks are indicated by bracketed ellipses, so: [...].

Here we are in California, and you wear shoes!

I wear shoes in warm climates, and I don't wear them in cold climates, you see. That's the thing. No, no, I just—I don't know.

It's the Hobbit in you.

It is. It is.

Peter, I have a couple of questions for you.

Okay, sure.

The editing seemed different in the third one, in The Return of the King. And the blackouts, faces, the back-story of Gollum—the black as a transitional device. Why?

That was more to do with a sense of finale in the ending where we'd go to black, and we'd wait a moment, then bring things up. We also faded to white at one stage, I think, too.

At the beginning, too, though.

Oh, with the flashbacks. Well, that was really to indicate time passing. I mean, it was just a transitional device because it was showing Shelob—I'm sorry, not Shelob; Sméagol—Sméagol deteriorating over what was basically supposed to be five hundred years in the book. You know, he makes that deterioration from being a Hobbit to being, you know, the Gollum kind of final look, over a five hundred year period. So the blackouts, the fades to black, were really just a device to try to indicate there was some time gone by.

[The interview was here briefly interrupted by a malfunctioning tape recorder.]

The theory that Tolkien wrote, that he used to develop The Lord of the Rings, in the essay, "On Fairy Stories"—one of the things he talks about there is the theory of (and he coined the term) "eucatastrophe." Did that come up in your discussions with Philippa and Fran?

No. What's it mean?

It was a term he coined for the joy of deliverance at the end of the story.

Right.

Which, for him, was the joy of the resurrection of Christ from the grave.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we were very much... I mean, we looked upon the ending, really, as being a metaphor for Frodo passing the shore, that he—you know, that you were "fare-welling" somebody who was, who seems to be dying. I mean, he was going to this blessed land, and he... We do certainly feel that Tolkien regarded that as being a visualization of somebody's death. He said, well, you get on a ship and you sail out into the harbor, and farewell them into this light; but it's fairly obvious what Tolkien was really referring to. And we tried to honor that. We tried to give it that sense of sadness. I feel it's extremely poignant that Frodo effectively is ultimately killed at the end of the story; I mean, he does ultimately die in the film; he can't live. And, yeah—it just makes it very sad.

Peter, what is the—forgive me, everybody, the real fans here—but, what does the Ring symbolize?

Well, what Tolkien symbolizes, The Machine: it symbolizes a loss of free will, really, because Tolkien was... Tolkien hated the way that the English countryside had been taken over by the Industrial Age, in the mid-1800s. And the Shire obviously represents England as before the Industrial Age. It represents his idealized landscape and society, which was a very pre-industrial, farming, rural kind of society. And Tolkien always said that he was born a hundred years too late. He would have preferred to have lived in that society. But the industrial revolution happened in England, the English factories were built, chimneys were belching smoke, townships were built around the factories—you know, [...] housing. Workers were just fed into the factories every single day. When the whistle blew, you kind of went in there, and you didn't get out until five o?clock or six o?clock in the evening. And he came to the... He despised The Machine. He despised the way that The Machine was now enslaving people. And the Ring, really, seems to be a metaphor for The Machine in the sense that it robs you of your free will. As the Ring takes hold of you, you can no longer do what you want to do. You can't make decisions for yourself; it's really guiding and steering you. And I think that he felt that the Industrial Age had brought that upon society.

What is it about the Ring that attracts people, even if they realize that it's evil—that it's ultimately going to take away their free will? Why do they ultimately lust after it?

Well, I think it invites you to have power. What the Ring seems to be offering to people is a sense of power, but it invites you to use your power for good. No, now—if you're a good person, you think that you can use the Ring for good. That's what I was trying to say. Boromir, for instance—you know, in The Fellowship of the Ring—he badly wants to take the Ring, and then, since he's vilified in some degree in that story because he wants to take it from Frodo... But he believes—in his heart, he believes—that this ring can be used for good. But his... The people of Minas Tirith are being beseiged by orcs; if they could only could only have this ring, then they could defend themselves. Because it doesn't work that way. Once you have the Ring, then it's impossible to exert your will over it to the extent that you can turn it to good.

Gandalf said the same thing. He rejects the Ring, when Frodo offers it to him. He says, "I would be tempted by the desire to do good?"

Yes. But the Ring would never allow me to do it.

It's a false hope.

Yes. Yes.

Who destroys the Ring?

Well, that's a very good question. That's one thing we did change from the book. Because in the book—and I know exactly why Tolkien wrote it the way he did—you know, basically Frodo is really put out of commission, as it were. He's been injured, and he just watches as Gollum, who now has the Ring, dances on the side—on the edge—of the Crack of Doom, and he accidentally slips and falls in. And that was just a movie thing that we felt... I mean, you may or may not agree with us, obviously; but we felt that we couldn't have three movies where Frodo was... And then ultimately just have Frodo sidelined in the climax of the film. We just felt that movie audiences who don't read the books and don't know anything about it would find that to be very weird. And it would sort of—it would just detract from Frodo. And so what we did is we created an alternative version of it where we still had Gollum dancing for joy, but we now have Frodo coming at him and fighting with him. Now, what I said to Elijah is—I don't know if you've spoken to Elijah yet—I said to Elijah on the day we shot that, I said, "Now, listen. Now, what my feeling is, is that it has to be very ambiguous whether or not you're trying to grab the Ring. So, whether you're going to throw it in and complete the mission, or whether you want it for yourself now: whether the concept of ever actually fulfilling the mission is gone, and you're now just... Gollum has it; you want it back. And you've got no intention of destroying it." And Elijah turned to me, and he said, "I think I want it back," before we shot it. So that's what he was playing; you can check with him on that. But he... So we sort of did what was in the book. Essentially, it is an accidental... They do accidentally fall in, while the two of them are trying to fight for ownership of the Ring.

Which then brings us to, who destroys the Ring? I mean, does pity—does ultimately Bilbo's pity—sort of force that...

Well, it is, because for me, we were still fulfilling that. Because, I mean, if Gollum hadn't existed... Because the pity of Bilbo was all about placing Gollum at the Crack of Doom—that, without the pity, Gollum would never... He would have been dead before they even got to the Crack of Doom. And we know, from even what we staged in the movie, we know that Frodo has no intention of destroying it; he can't destroy it once he gets there. So we still felt that it worked, that it was Gollum's presence there that did ultimately help get the Ring destroyed. I mean, we didn't take that away from the story.

No, no. I thought it was very clear.

We were trying to have our cake and eat it, too. We were trying to honor the fact that it was only Gollum's presence there that actually ultimately ended up having the Ring destroyed. But we were trying to involve Frodo in the action a little bit more than what was in the book.

From Tolkien's perspective, it's Frodo's decisions of goodness and pity, earlier, that end up saving himself in the end. Even though he makes the wrong choice, standing on the edge, about not wanting the Ring destroyed.

Yes.

He's saved by his own good actions earlier.

Yes.

Which puts Gollum there.

Yes.

What about Providence?

Yes. Yes. Well, I mean...

It's not the same thing as ?accident.?

No. No, I mean, I think it's— I don't think what we did is too different to the book. I mean, it was because Gollum had that moment where he took the Ring off Frodo—he bit Frodo's finger off when he took the Ring for himself—that actually was the catalyst that then led to it being destroyed. And I think we still honor that concept from the book.

Can we just switch gears for a minute? I'm just fascinated with the casting. Because each person, of course, is that in our mind. But they were perfect. And this a huge cast. I don't know that there's ever been this many amazing actors in all the parts.

Twenty-two key, speaking roles. Twenty-two major roles.

Can you tell us about the process that you went through? Did you cast anybody and then go, "Oh, this is not right!?" Did you have to recast? Just a little bit of that process.

We cast somebody for Aragorn early who we ultimately felt was wrong before we got Viggo—that was too young. We were looking for actors who didn't have a strong persona prior to the movies. I mean, obviously we wanted largely experienced actors, and most of our cast had been in many films before. But we didn't want sort of the personality to overwhelm... I mean, that's why somebody like Sean Connery would have been wrong for Gandalf. You know, a lot of people had been saying, "Sean Connery should be Gandalf." You know, I always felt, well, he would bring too much baggage to the role. He wouldn't be Tolkien's Gandalf, he would be Sean Connery's Gandalf. And we wanted an actor who would look at what Tolkien wrote and bring Tolkien's Gandalf to life. So that was the way that we generally went with most of the casting, was to try to not put movie stars there that would bring a lot of baggage, but to put actors there that would actually be able to create the—bring the characters to life. We had to make some fundamental decisions very early, obviously, regarding the Hobbits. Whether they should be played by real little people, or whether they should be people shrunk down—rather, actors shrunk down. And we chose to shrink the actors down because that afforded us a much greater range of choices for casting. We could then look at, you know, a much greater range of actors for Hobbits. But then we realized that we started to cast a physical type for Hobbits—because when we did experiments with shrinking people down, if you were like six-foot-three, and you were tall and thin, you'd look strange if you were shrunk down. You'd look kind of weird. So we ended up having to cast—we ended up with Hobbits. And we did a lot experiments just with people, and the effect of shrinking people down. And we ended up looking for people that were around about five-foot-five to five-foot-seven. Yeah, only a two or three inch range. Because anything over—if they were taller than that, they didn't look right. So, if you look at the four Hobbits that we cast, I mean they're all exactly the same size. They're all like five-foot-six. Every single one of them. Because they worked better being shrunk. Gimli—Gimli, again, we felt we could cast a much bigger actor and shrink him down to play the Dwarf. And John is a big guy. That he worked fine being shrunk, because we padded him out and put a lot of prosthetics on, of course.

And the English actors were Sean, Elijah and Liv, right?

The... American—?

Sorry, the American, right.

Well, we set out assuming we were going to make quite an English-feeling movie, so we looked—we actually did a lot of auditioning in England for Sam and for Frodo. We met many many young British actors for those roles. But Elijah had heard we were casting in England, and we didn't really intend coming to Los Angeles for casting for that particular role, and so he wanted us to think about him. So he shot his own audition tape. He just took some scenes from the book, because he didn't have a script or anything, and he learned the lines from two or three scenes in the book. And he had a friend of his videotape him, and he wore a costume. And he sent us the videotape while we were in the U.K. doing the casting. And this arrived in the casting office from Elijah Wood. And I didn't actually really know Elijah Wood that well before then. I'd never actually seen a single film before that. But I knew his name, and Fran said, "Ah, he could be very very interesting." And we put the tape on and Elijah, he'd done some dialect training before he did the tape, so his—he did an English accent on the audition tape. And he was—we just looked at the tape and thought he was perfect. And so Elijah actually got the role as soon as we saw his tape. And it was strange. It usually doesn't happen that way. Because I'd been looking at about two hundred Frodos over in England, and Elijah just suddenly jumped out at us. And again, Sean Astin got his part the hard way. He actually got his part because we couldn't really find a great Sam in England. Again, we just thought that Sam would be English; but he is such an English character. You know, in the book. And we didn't really—we weren't that happy with anybody we saw in England and we were coming back through L.A. to meet Elijah, as a matter of fact. We received this tape and we thought we should meet him and just have a talk with him. And so we thought we'd look for a few Sams over here. And I'd worked with Sean Astin's dad on The Frighteners—John, John Astin—so I was sort of aware of the family. And we thought that Sean could be quite good. And he came and read for us.

What in your mind is the difference between, like, the three-hour and twelve-minute movie and a three-hour and thirty-minute? In a theatre—

Well, our biggest fear—and it wasn't so much about specific running times—but our fear with The Return of the King is we felt we could make this longer than the other two. We felt we had the latitude to make it a bit longer. If we needed to. Because we didn't really know what we needed until we were cutting and things, of course. And our biggest fear was, we wanted that last thirty, forty minutes of the film to be quite emotional. You know, the climbing up Mount Doom; and then ultimately the destroying of the Ring, and the denouement—the closure—of the film. We wanted that to be as powerful and as emotional as it could possibly be. And we were worried that there's a certain level of exhaustion that would happen to an audience if the film was too long: that you wouldn't be investing in those moments. You wouldn't buy... You'd be sore, you'd want to just be getting out of there and going home. And because we wanted all of this emotion at the end of the film—not at the beginning, but at the very end—we were very scared, basically, of... If it was too long, it was going to outstay its welcome, and these scenes would no longer be as effective. And so we just cut it down. It's just instinctive. There's no rules. There's no three-ten or three-twenty or three-thirty; there's no time, it's just feeling. I mean, I saw a four-hour and fifteen-minute version of the movie at one stage. And that's not—it doesn't have much impact at the beginning because you are so tired of it by the time it comes to an end, you know. It's just—it's one of those things—

Will there be an extra special edition?

Well, there will be. I mean, we've done this before, where we—it's sort of a... It's strange for me, because I, you know, I think the theatrical cuts are the ones that I feel play right, and they have the right sort of pacing. And then we, for the fans—because we're doing up lots of good scenes, left over, that we don't put in the movie—for the fans we created these special editions because we just figure: how many fans are going to want to buy them to see them? And they are quite entertaining scenes. And it's an opportunity to let people see stuff that they didn't see at the movies. And so we put back thirty minutes in The Fellowship, and I think we put forty-two minutes in...

Forty-three.

Forty-three minutes in The Two Towers; and then I read all the reviews where all the people are saying,"Ahh, this is so much better than the theatrical version..." And I'm thinking... But I don't—I don't know. The big unknown thing is, what impact is between the cinema and your home? People see, like, The Two Towers... forty-three extra minutes in their home, and they think: well, this is a better movie. Now, would they have thought that if they had sat there for forty-three minutes longer in the cinema?

Speaking for myself, the answer is: I can pause it.

You can see it over two night if you want.

So therefore the story is more satisfying simply because there's detail. [...]

I want to ask you about the extras. Because these movies you see with all these extras, I want to know how many they were, and how much of it was computer generated, and say, like Braveheart. They just had to get them in their garb, but this you had to—they all had their own nasty, gnarly look. Every one of them. Can you tell us about—

We generally, for most of the battle scenes, never had more than a hundred people. A hundred was generally sort of our... We used to have, you know, sometimes fifty good guys and fifty bad guys. Sometimes we had a hundred orcs and fifty Rohans or something. So, you know, we had a hundred and fifty. The horse scenes, we had—for the biggest horse day, which was the day where Theoden was doing his speech to the horsemen about the charge—we had two hundred and fifty horsemen, which was pretty spectacular. I mean, two hundred and fifty looks like a lot of horses when you've got them together. But in the scenes in the movie, there's six thousand horses, because we added to them and we made... So two hundred and fifty looks huge when you see it in person, on the set, but you can make it look a hell of a lot more spectacular when you do it with a computer. And Richard Taylor, who runs the physical effects, the make-up effects, they had to—we had to be very careful, because once you put a hundred orcs in make-up, and you've got these rubber masks on that you're pulling over their faces, they can't breathe that well. Yeah, they can breathe, through holes, but it's really uncomfortable. And then you're under the baking sun, and you can dehydrate and people could collapse. We had to be really careful, and we generally had—I mean, Richard, I don't know if you're going to meet Richard today, but he's the person to ask about it—we had a ratio of like one person looking after five orcs or three orcs, so that they'd always be giving them bottles of water with straws, or having to get them drinking and keep them comfortable. You had to look after people once you got things over their faces—rubber over their faces—you had to look after them very carefully. There was a certain danger involved.

[...] With Viggo's casting—I've seen so many pictures on Jesus Christ. This guy looks like what you would picture Jesus Christ as. Was that done on purpose?

I don't know what Jesus Christ looks like.

Jeffrey Overstreet, at Looking Closer, offers a transcript from another interview with Peter Jackson, conducted on the same day.