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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Copyright © Ian Nathan 2018
Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Cover photograph © Paul Stuart/Camera Press London
Ian Nathan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008192471
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008192488
Version: 2019-03-27
For Kat, who can’t abide hobbits.
‘The artist-initiated epic is an obsessive testing of possibilities … It comes, too, from a conviction, or a hope, that if you give popular audiences the greatest you have in you they will respond.’
Pauline Kael
‘It would be easier to film The Odyssey. Much less happens in it.’
J.R.R. Tolkien
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword by Andy Serkis
Prologue: Journey's End
1: Sillification
2: An Unexpected Director
3: Many Meetings
4: Words and Pictures
5: Concerning Hobbits
6: Heavenly Creatures
7: Jamboree
8: Miramar’s Mecca of Merry Souls
9: Proof of Concept
10: The Monsters and the Critics
11: To the Edge of the World
12: Junkie
13: MASSIVE
14: Return to the Edge of the World
15: The Music of Middle-earth
16: King of a Golden Hall
17: Legacy of the Ring
18: There and Back Again
19: Augmented Reality
Afterword
Picture Section
Footnotes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Picture Credits
About the Author
Also by Ian Nathan
It feels like there was life before and life after.
I can remember the first time I saw Gollum. A finished Gollum. It was the sequence by the Forbidden Pool where he turns around to see Frodo, and he knows that something’s going on. It’s almost like an animal instinct; he can sense it. It was absolutely extraordinary.
You don’t know, you could never know. Here, finally, was the first proof that a level of psychological and emotional detail could be conveyed through ones and noughts. That thought could be conveyed through the combination of my performance and what they were doing at Weta Digital. I could sense that thought. I could feel that was exactly as I played it. That was incredibly gratifying.
Then I remember seeing The Two Towers for the first time. It was in New York, I was with Miranda Otto, Bernard Hill and Karl Urban. It was mind blowing. I knew every single frame.
I sensed that my life was never going to be the same again.
I supposed
