Many franchise fans can’t imagine The Lord of the Rings directed by anyone but Peter Jackson, especially when you consider that the first film scored 13 Academy Awards nominations, made $897 million at the box office, and is on IMDB’s Top 10 movies by rating.
Before all the success, though, director Jackson was pressured to make the films differently from how he envisioned them. So in celebration of the upcoming 20th anniversary of the release of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Independent spoke with Peter Jackson’s manager, Ken Kamins, as well as a number of others who were involved in the film hitting the big screen.
In the interview, Kamins stated that the now-disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein would scarily flip from being nice to threatening to replace Jackson with Quentin Tarantino if he didn’t do what Weinstein wanted.
“Harvey would go from acting empathetically to turning on a dime into Mr Hyde and would threaten Peter. He’d threaten to get Quentin Tarantino to direct if Peter couldn’t do it in one film that was two-and-a-half-hours – which was the exact opposite of what he initially told us he wanted.
Anyone who has seen the trilogy would find it difficult to imagine all three films wrapped up in a single two-and-a-half-hour movie, especially when you consider that the first movie alone ran for nearly three hours.
This wasn’t the only pressure Jackson was facing from producers who also wanted him to kill off one of the Hobbits, which Quentin Tarantino probably would have been happy to do.
These pressures could likely have tanked the franchise if Jackson were to cave to them, but luckily, Jackson and the team were able to sell the rights to the movie to a different studio that was far more supportive. Jackson wasn’t the first person to struggle to get the movie made, with many others failing before him, including The Beatles, who attempted to make The Lord of the Rings decades earlier.
Fans of the franchise can breathe a sigh of relief that everything worked out in the end for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with Jackson bringing an authentic vision of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books to life.