eter Jackson looks at ease—in spite of the fact that the second installment of his epic trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, is just weeks away from opening. Never mind New York's blustery weather—clad in a short-sleeve shirt and knee-length shorts, his feet as bare as those of the hobbits he directs, at first glance Jackson appears unaffected by it all.
But if you look more closely, the salt-and-pepper flecks in his beard and hair betray the months of hard work that have gone into polishing Two Towers in post-production, and making it a film Jackson is proud to present as a follow-up to the critically acclaimed, and incredibly successful, The Fellowship of the Ring. Although the New Zealand-based director says he's satisfied with the choices they had to make in order to achieve the movie's two-hour-59-minute running time, Jackson is already thinking ahead to what content will find its way back into the film on the extended-edition DVD release next year.
How difficult was it to make a decision on what aspects of the novels to use in the films?
Jackson: What we tried to do is honor the things that were important to Tolkien—but without really emphasizing one thing or another. We didn't want to make it a religious film, but he was religious, and some of the messages, some of the themes of [LOTR], are based on his beliefs. But he has other incredible life experiences, [such as] being in the trenches in the first World War; and he wrote the books between 1937 and 1949, during a decade of incredible turmoil in the world.
So a lot of this feeds into the books, and we try to capture those feelings in the film. We tried to make the films for him, to be his movies.
When the elements are broken down, do you view the stories as being a tale of good versus evil?
Jackson: I don't think Tolkien was quite as simple as good versus evil. On some level, he was, obviously, but he also seemed to be very concerned about enslavement and the loss of freedom. And that is something that does definitely inform a lot of what he wrote with these stories.
That Frodo is doing what he does because he's trying to protect his land of the Shire and Hobbiton from being enslaved. The Ring itself is really a metaphor for enslavement. What the Ring ultimately does is it takes away your free will; it takes away your ability to make decisions for yourself, because now you're making decisions based on the way that this thing is impacting on you.
[Although] his whole theme about the environment was based on factories and furnaces and the countryside being destroyed, you could say that the factories were another form of enslavement, that he hated the idea of the way the Industrial Age has made prisoners of and enslaved human beings, [such] that you have to turn up at the factory at nine o'clock in the morning, and you can't leave until the whistle blows at six o'clock at night.
It's a bit more complex than just good versus evil.
There's a lot of talk about going to war in Two Towers. Do you see a lot of parallels to the unstable world situation today?
Jackson: Well, definitely the world is a much more unstable place today than it was. We shot these films in 1999 and 2000, so it's weird for me. For you, you see the Two Towers in 2002, and obviously you're dealing with the moment now. But we shot that film two, two and a half, three years ago. But I agree; the world is unstable now, terribly unstable.
When you revisited the film during the summer, what sorts of things did you do to enhance the footage you already had shot during principal photography a couple of years ago?
Jackson: We didn't really reshoot anything, because reshooting implies that we didn't get it right the first time, and we're going to have a second go [laughs]. What happens—and we're doing this for all three movies, we did it for the Fellowship just as much as we did it for Two Towers, and we have the actors coming back next year for Return of the King—is that we're allowing ourselves the ability to put some final finishing touches onto these films, because we did shoot them all back to back. And now, when we have a year on the post-production for each film, we're basically coming up with ideas that we didn't have the first time around.
Everything that we shot for a few weeks this summer, it was all scenes that we never even wrote back in the days that we originally shot. They are all ideas that were born from the edit of the film. We shot things like the scene in the film when Frodo and Sam have the argument, and Frodo's getting really angry with Sam, and Sam's saying, "It's the Ring that's affecting you," and Frodo's saying, "It's not, it's not." That was something that we shot this summer, because we wanted that effect [from the argument]. We looked at the things that we had, and what we did [came out of that footage].
With Gollum, we shot a scene where he has the monologue with himself. Obviously, the Sméagol/Gollum thing existed in the rest of the scenes we had, but we decided to write a new scene that really nailed that dynamic, so that everybody understood it and got it.
How did you approach creating a Gollum that could stand up to the acting of the likes of Elijah Wood [Frodo] and Sean Astin [Sam]?
Jackson: The problem with Gollum was that he was always going to be a computer-generated character; there was never any debate because of the physical look of him—we wanted him to be really thin, with big eyes and non-human-looking. But the difficulty was that he had to be able to act, he had to be able to hold his own with Elijah Wood and Sean Astin, who are both very strong actors. And Gollum had to be as good as them.
You can do good special effects today, and you can do reasonably realistic-looking scenes, but what are the chances of Gollum coming out of the special-effects company as a good actor? That was our concern.
The way we thought we should approach that was to cast an actor as Gollum. We found Andy Serkis, the British actor, and cast him in the role. And we said to Andy, "Listen, the drawback is that nobody will ever see your face. But we want you to actually own the character of Gollum." He shot the film in New Zealand, along with everybody else, and he wore a skin-tight costume, just a leotard, while he would be on set acting Gollum.
What was important with that is that there was one person, an experienced, skilled actor, making all of the decisions on behalf of Gollum. So he would decide how Gollum would move, how he would act, what emotion he would have, what pauses he would put where, what weight he'd put into a particular scene—just as any actor, like Elijah and Sean, would be doing for their characters.
So Serkis not only provides the voice for Gollum, but he also helped form the character we saw on-screen.
Jackson: What we did is, for most of the scenes in the film, we painted Andy out, and then the animators animated the computer version of Gollum, on top of Andy—so they copied everything that Andy did. So if Andy decided to move back like that [Jackson jerks backwards in a sudden movement to illustrate his point], then the animators did exactly the same thing.
I think that what Andy has ultimately achieved with Gollum is as relevant an acting performance as The Elephant Man's John Hurt. It doesn't look like John Hurt, but he has to use his acting skill to push this rubber prosthetic around to make you feel the character, and Andy's really doing the same thing. Andy's performing Gollum and he's manipulating him; he's ultimately the vehicle, the driver, that manipulates this prosthetic, pixilated kind of skin that is what we see in the film.
Do you think Serkis' performance could garner an Academy Award nomination?
Jackson: I'd love to think that he could. It would need a little bit of a mental leap [laughs]. The trouble with that is that he absolutely deserves one based on what he did, but people are just not aware of the technical process involved and how much he contributed to it.
We have some amazing scenes—which are not in the movie—from the monologue where Gollum is talking to himself. This sequence looks fantastic: Andy Serkis is in closeup doing the role, and next door to him, on the same frame, we have the computer Gollum, and he's exactly copying what Andy is doing. And you can see from that just how rigidly the animators stuck to what Andy was doing, and how much he did. I'm sure that footage will find its way into the DVD eventually.
With so much source material captured on film, how difficult was the editing process on Two Towers, so you could bring this picture in at three hours?
Jackson: The Two Towers was much, much harder from an editorial point of view. I think that was mainly because The Fellowship was such a linear story, so it started with Frodo, and it just basically followed Frodo all the way through. Those decisions were then about what to have in, and what do you cut out—the story was the story, and you didn't change the order of things; you simply followed the plot.
But with this one, because we had essentially three different plotlines, all branching out, we had a lot of flexibility with how long we stayed with one particular plot before we cut to another, and what order we did them in. We had Gollum, Frodo and Sam—do we now cut to Aragorn, or do we cut to Merry and Pippin and Treebeard? We had those choices all the way through, which we'd never had to do the first time around.
It was actually more fun, because it was much more of a creative exercise for us this year, but ultimately it was quite tough. We did all sorts of things—at the moment, Gollum appears in like the second scene of the film, but we did do [a cut of the film] earlier this year where he didn't appear for half-an-hour. We were holding him back, and then we decided to bring him forward. Those sorts of things.
Two Towers is chock-full of action sequences and battles. Would you have preferred to cut back on the action in favor of more character development?
Jackson: That's an interesting question, "Would I have preferred it?" My responsibility, ultimately, is to try to make the most successful film I can, really, on different levels—both artistically and financially. And I think we're making appropriate decisions in that case.
But the beauty, the wonderful thing about DVDs is that you can present an alternative version of the film with a slightly more relaxed pace—which I'm incredibly appreciative of.
We've taken full advantage of that with The Fellowship, because we had these scenes that we liked very much, and virtually all of them were revolving around character development and backstory of characters. And rather than have a DVD that included just chapters of deleted scenes, like a lot of films do, I really wanted to put these scenes back into the film and create a version of The Fellowship of the Ring that had a more relaxed pace—and, obviously, a longer running time.
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