CHAPTER EIGHT

I arrived with my family in New Zealand on the last day of August 1999, and along with the other actors portraying members of the Fellowship, immediately began an intensive training period. With war movies it’s not unusual for actors to be subjected to a ten-day boot camp; our boot camp for The Lord of the Rings consisted of six weeks of training, from dialect coaching to fight training with Bob Anderson, one of the great sword masters of Hollywood (he tutored Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks, among others). Then there were canoe training, weight training, and organized bonding sessions with the cast. It was baptism by fire, inculcation into a regimentation, watching Peter and his crew learn how to organize a vast movie machine.

From the second I got off the plane, I knew making this movie was going to be unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Usually if you travel halfway around the world to film on location, you’re given time to adjust, to get comfortable. There’s a welcome basket and a meeting, maybe a massage or a nap. You talk about stuff and just sort of sit around for a while. You get the movie-star treatment. Not on The Lord of the Rings. Basically, we got off the plane in Wellington and were whisked away to an industrial part of town. You would think that with a $270 million trilogy, filming would take place on something that at least looked like a Hollywood sound set. Uh-uh. There were no wrought-iron gates, no Warner Brothers water tower, no Hollywood sign, nothing. New Zealand, especially in less developed areas, is a breathtakingly beautiful place, but Wellington is a city, and like any city, it has its industrial side. And that, mixed with a nearby quaint neighborhood, is where we set up shop. Specifically, in an old abandoned paint factory.

Peter was there on the day we arrived, and the atmosphere was a little reminiscent of Willy Wonka. There was all this ambient energy and nervousness about the arrival of Peter. “Peter is going to be here now, and his schedule is very tight, so don’t expect too much.” When he came in, bounding around the corner in bare feet and mangy hair and a rumpled T-shirt, looking like a mad scientist who sort of giggles his way through life, I couldn’t help but be amused—and impressed. We shook hands or hugged, and he gave us a quick tour.

A few words about hugging. I was raised in a family and in a culture where everyone hugs—a lot! As a greeting, a parting salutation, or a simple expression of goodwill, hugs have been a big part of my life. I have even used hugs as a way to ask for forgiveness or as an act of reconciliation. As far as Peter Jackson is concerned, I think I chose to hug him more readily and more frequently than he may have been initially comfortable with. But I’m proud to say that over the five years of our working relationship and friendship, he has been willing to enjoy more than a few good hugs!

Peter was the proud papa of an extraordinary display of creativity, and every second I was with him, whether I wanted to or not, I found myself studying him. Not just the way he handled the technical aspects of directing a $270 million production, but how he interacted with people, what it was about his personality that prompted people to be drawn to him, what it was in his decision-making process that made him so much smarter than I was. From the moment I met Peter, I thought, If I can earn the respect of this cat, if I can get him to see me as an equal, I will have achieved what I really want to achieve on this movie. That he was disappointed in me, or frustrated with me, or not willing to use what I had to offer the process, was at times mortally frustrating to me. But that’s more my shortcoming than his. It’s funny: as smart as I sometimes think I am, it’s amazing how stupid I can be when it comes to the way I perceive other people.

As I see it, Peter Jackson’s brilliance, at least as it pertains to filmmaking, stems primarily from his cleverness and his relationship to power, and the way he can exert his power comfortably and with aplomb. I wasn’t in certain rooms with him when critical decisions were being made. I didn’t see how he built the consortium or how he would build consensus, or how he would strategically machinate toward achieving a particular thing at a particular moment. But I did see some things, and I did hear stories. I know at one point, when he was $11 million into the Miramax deal, he found out that Miramax had misgivings about the way the production would be handled. The Lord of the Rings was originally to be divided into two segments, not three, and the studio was questioning the wisdom of that choice; maybe one movie would be enough. So somehow Peter took the project to New Line, which not only agreed to support more than a single film, but a trilogy!

Over time these types of stories become somewhat apocryphal or mythologized, and getting at the truth of them is best left to journalists, film students, or the primaries themselves. Suffice it to say that anyone who could pull off such a miraculous feat had to know something I didn’t know. Probably a lot I didn’t know. There is an idiosyncratic part of my personality, a flaw in my attitude, that has informed a lot of interactions I have had with extraordinary people. For some reason, when I was a kid hanging around movie sets or sound stages, I wanted to be in charge of everything. I wanted to feel as though I could, to some extent, control the environment. Of course, I couldn’t actually compel people to do things, but I developed a knack for being persuasive. People used to say I could sell ice to the Eskimos. I’m not sure where this unctuousness came from, but to a greater or lesser extent, it’s been a component part of my life. I used to joke that I suffered from a rare disease called “proximity to scope.” Because I grew up in such close proximity to filmmakers who routinely achieved greatness in their work, I naturally assumed that I was capable of doing equal or even better work. Imagine Patton inhabiting the body of a ten-year-old Hollywood brat and you’re getting close. Now picture me in New Zealand being exposed for the first time to the brain trust and nerve center of Peter Jackson’s outfit. I was in awe and had to admit to myself that I was at least momentarily out of my depth. Then and there, I resolved to learn everything I possibly could about every aspect of this phenomenal enterprise.

Walking through Weta Workshop, I saw ironsmiths working on swords and shields, and hundreds, if not thousands, of orc masks. We toured the digital workshop, where so much of the films’ groundbreaking computer-generated imagery would be produced, as well as an editing facility and the aptly named 3Foot6 Limited studio, where the hobbit holes had been assembled. There was an oversized hobbit hole, and right next to it, a miniature one, so that when Gandalf walked into the miniature hobbit hole, he would look and feel like a giant. I was struck by the array of techniques being applied to bring Tolkien’s world to life: some of it was clearly on the technological forefront, but some of it was decidedly low-tech. I would learn over the course of the production that anything was worth trying. No good idea would be dismissed as unreasonable.

That the production design seemed to be driven by Alan Lee’s artwork was also readily apparent. I’d been impressed by his drawings, but here I was in awe of his imagination. The man behind the art is more subdued, but no less impressive, than the work he creates. We met on that first day in Alan’s office, a spare, nondescript little room made distinctive only by the drawings he had tacked to the wall. Standing there, soaking up the atmosphere, I had a sense of understanding and clarity that I hadn’t experienced before. There weren’t a lot of drawings in the edition of The Lord of the Rings I had purchased, so this was the first time I felt a strong visual sense of Middle-earth. I’d read the scripts on the plane and found them exciting—all the fighting and the spiders and the trolls and everything—but this was something else.

I wondered how we’d actualize this other world I was discovering. Sure, I knew about blue or green screens, but from the smell of fresh-cut wood from the sets, to the paint and the hum of activity of hundreds of crew folks all around us, it was clear that Middle-earth was under construction. And frankly I wasn’t sure how it would look. Now contemporary actors have a lot of history and information to draw on. Our collective consciousness is pretty strong for us in the area of special-effects pictures. We’ve all seen various “making of” videos. I’d seen Sam Neill running away and looking over his shoulder at a tennis ball that would later be replaced by a digital T. rex in Jurassic Park. I knew what sort of environment I was entering, and I thought I could do that sort of work pretty well, because I have a good imagination. But here, surrounded by Alan’s illustrations, it suddenly felt real.

A few of John Howe’s paintings were there, too, but somehow I wasn’t as drawn to them. In fact, I worried that if they used Howe’s color pallet for the set design, it wouldn’t be the kind of movie I wanted to see; it would just be a real cool fantasy movie. I didn’t know Peter Jackson’s work well enough to know which direction he would choose. The Frighteners had been visually arresting, but I’d had problems with it. I enjoyed the special effects, but I didn’t really like the campiness of some of it, and the third act disappointed me. (Of course, I hadn’t yet watched the extended version, which I’m sure is more satisfying.) What came through in the early pages of The Lord of the Rings was excellence: storytelling in service of important ideas. Not the world, not the characters, not even the story, but rather the richness of the language and the quality of the ideas as they were being presented. It struck me on an intellectual level, rather than an emotional level, and the challenge, in my mind, was to make sure that my artistry would be able to survive in concert with literary work of that caliber. Ridiculous as it may seem now, I was concerned, maybe even a little worried, that Peter wouldn’t understand that aspect of the book.

I was wrong, of course. I underestimated Peter, or at least didn’t know him well enough then to understand his cleverness and level of commitment. There’s an old saying by Thomas Edison: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” That’s Peter. Man, he perspires like no one I’ve ever seen. And I mean that in the best possible way. He works at it. Sometimes I think people fail to recognize that trait in artists. They think it’s all about talent or luck or some mystical creative spark. I’ve experienced it myself; I’ve found my own creativity muted by other people’s genius occasionally, because I look at what they accomplish and I think, “I would never have thought of that. How could they be so smart? How could they be so inspired?” Well, inspiration takes work. I’ve heard Peter talk repeatedly about using the art of Alan Lee and John Howe to gain inspiration. But what does that really mean? It’s more than just saying, “Wow, that artwork is incredible!” It’s deeper. It’s saying, “I’m going to communicate with that artist, and I’m going to convince him to work with me.” That’s what Peter did. He figured out what really inspired him.

My read on The Frighteners was that the studio wasn’t interested in the dark, psychological stuff; they just wanted the really scary set pieces. So they turned the sound way up and assaulted the audience. I missed a sense of universality or an optimism in The Frighteners. It seemed designed for people interested in cool effects, and in death and dying. It wasn’t a movie for me. Even so, I liked it because my dad was in it and because I could appreciate the artistry. I liked Michael J. Fox, the star, although I was disappointed that he didn’t look quite right. Only much later did I learn that around that time Michael was just starting to suffer from Parkinson’s disease. I admired that both Peter and Fran seemed to care more about Michael the human being than their movie, despite the stakes being so high. That, too, gave me faith.

Equally impressive was my first meeting with Richard Taylor, whose special-effects work on The Lord of the Rings would be honored with multiple Academy Awards. Richard brought me in to see the “bigatures,” the not-so-miniature miniature sets the crew had painstakingly constructed, and they were so beautiful, so perfect, so real, that I wanted to cry. I had loved miniatures when I was a kid. Not that I was smart enough to figure out how to fashion them or create them. My mother had an assistant, Elaine, who was one of the most artistic people I’ve ever met, and when as a kid I had a brief fetish for Smurfs, she made miniatures for me out of cardboard, the most wonderful, elaborate Smurf houses and Smurf garages you could imagine. She made a train station to go with my train set, a lovingly detailed building based, she said, on the station she often visited near her home in Connecticut. Elaine spent hundreds of hours making these things for me and my little brother, and we’d play with them for days on end. Sometimes I’d film them with my Super 8 camera. Elaine wasn’t just a model maker; she was like a design engineer. And yet she was working as an assistant for my mother, which I found perplexing. Why, I later wondered, hadn’t anyone figured out how to make her a rocket scientist?

Then Star Wars came along, and I loved that, too, especially when I saw how George Lucas had created some of the special effects using miniatures. When I worked on Memphis Belle, I felt like I really understood the process and appreciated it. Miniatures were used to re-create World War II. There were assembly lines of B-17 miniatures, all destined to be blown up in one fashion or another. And they all looked so real.

So now, walking into this room, meeting Richard Taylor and seeing his miniatures, which were obviously the crème de la crème, I was nearly overcome with emotion. Imagine a kid who likes building models and hanging them over his bed. Imagine saying to that kid, “Where do you build your models?” and hearing him say, “I use the dining room table.” Now imagine taking that kid, who loves making model trains or rockets—a kid with an extraordinary attention to detail, for whom building models represents a method of artistic and personal expression—and saying to him, “I’m going to give you a big factory and all the tools and all the time and money you need to build the greatest model ever.”

That kid was Richard Taylor.

I tried to build a replica of the USS Nimitz when I was a boy, but I failed miserably. I tried to make a glider and failed. I wanted to be good at making models and miniatures, but I wasn’t. I did like remote-controlled cars and got fairly adept at making them, but that’s about it. Here I was, though, looking at Richard Taylor and a staff of about twenty-five guys who were spectacularly good at it. They’d been hired by Peter and given seemingly unlimited resources. This paint factory was vast, and the miniatures housed within were almost beyond comprehension. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but I knew it was a representation of a city. I saw orc mines, surrounded by a wall twenty feet high and a couple of hundred feet wide. There was an unbelievable level of detail in these miniatures: like a visitor admiring Renaissance paintings at the Louvre, you could stand and stare at them for hours and not grow tired of the experience. So striking was the level of detail that the cinematographer could take a 35-millimeter camera, put it right next to the miniature, and film it, and the human eye would have no idea it wasn’t full-scale.

The experience was nothing short of stunning, and it took my breath away.

Wow! Peter Jackson gets it. He really, really gets it.

In hindsight, that sounds like such an ungracious, stupid thing to say, but everyone has their level of skepticism about how things can or should be done. What got me down to New Zealand was the possibility, not the certainty, that The Lord of the Rings would absolutely be done right. It’s one thing to look at pictures, one thing to know there’s a franchise, one thing to understand the potential of a director. It’s another thing entirely to look and feel and smell and hear the results. The armory, the weapons, the leather, the level of detail in every inch of the production was exactly what I would have wanted it to be. The actors were just arriving, and already Peter had accomplished so much. He had assembled a legion of artisans and craftspeople so devoted and committed that you’d get a little wave of anxiety just watching them at their stations: God, I hope when it comes time for me to do the thing I’m here to do, I can produce a fraction of the integrity, talent, and emotion that all these other people bring to their work.

There was so much to see and soak up. Richard was talking nonstop; Peter was chiming in whenever the mood struck him. At every stop on the tour, someone would interact with us intensely and briefly, just long enough to provoke a sense of wonder and confidence, to give us the feeling that we were all going in the right direction and that it was going to be an unforgettable ride. So much was thrown at us at once, so many bewildering tidbits of information—“Weta has ordered more foam rubber than any other company on the face of the earth!”—that the effect was almost disorienting. Each person we met seemed to have some specific, almost arcane area of expertise, and each was utterly and completely thrilled to be on this production. They were devotees of the literature, experts in their field, and they were totally committed to the dream of actualizing this movie.

Some people on the production had only the slimmest of connections to the film business, yet they possessed particular talents that merited inclusion. Others used The Lord of the Rings as an opportunity to break out of a box, to demonstrate themselves worthy of a landmark project. Consider the case of Ngila Dixon, who would win an Academy Award for her costume work on The Lord of the Rings. Ngila had been working on Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules, a pair of campy, good-looking television shows, but representative of a specific type of entertainment. I wouldn’t necessarily expect the wardrobe people to take their jobs too seriously on those programs, but you know what? They do. They absolutely do, and you realize after watching them work that the people who do Hercules can also do The Lord of the Rings, provided there’s the right leadership and resources. All in all, extraordinarily talented people were working at every level of the production, but often the lines just got blurred. It became nearly impossible for me to tell who was responsible for something or who deserved credit, because it was such a gigantic, cooperative venture.

“Authenticity” was a buzzword. Peter wanted everything to be based on a kind of history, even if that history existed only in the mind of J. R. R. Tolkien. That’s one reason why Alan Lee’s illustrations provided more guidance than did those of John Howe. Similarly, the armor worn during battle scenes was not simply the product of a designer’s imagination, but was based on real armor. The amount of intelligence and sophistication applied during the research phase of the project, coupled with the money that was invested, allowed everyone to do their jobs at a level I had never seen on a movie set. Still, there was always a sense that cash was being burned. And while $270 million may seem like a ton of money, it goes fast. So fast, in fact, that at each level people felt they didn’t have quite enough money to do their jobs. Even so, they were doing more with what they had than anyone else would have been able to do. Why? Because they cared. They knew they were part of something extraordinary.

It was almost impossible not to feel that way. I remember during Peter’s guided tour, stopping at a glass case filled with costumes and masks, including those worn by my father as the decrepit judge in The Frighteners.

“Look, Alexandra,” I said, pulling my daughter close. “There’s Granddad.”

She didn’t respond, just scrunched up her nose disapprovingly, as if to say, What? That mangy old character?

It’s funny, when you’re in the movie business, you cycle through stages: awe, then disillusionment, and then hopefully, a new appreciation for it. And then you get lost in it all over again. You go through waves of how you experience reality and fiction. The Lord of the Rings, for me, was a psychological cyclone, an emotional, analytical torture chamber out of which grew something magical: a sense of wonder that I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. And I am so very grateful for it.

*   *   *

The notion that I’d have the opportunity to focus on my numerous entrepreneurial ventures during “downtime” in New Zealand was revealed to be pure folly within moments after we arrived in Wellington. As Peter explained some of the logistics—there would be at least three crews shooting at once, using twenty-four cameras at various locations around the country—it dawned on me: Holy shit! There isn’t going to be any downtime. I realized quickly that work would expand to exceed the time allotted. Indeed, there was never a time, in nearly a year and a half of principal photography, when Peter or any of his assistants were complacent or even satisfied. They rarely, if ever, said, “Great shot, we’ve got it; let’s move on.” Instead, we kept going back and redoing things, rewriting and reshooting scenes that, to even a trained eye, seemed to have been captured in a perfectly acceptable manner. Peter had taken all the money and resources he could extract from New Line, and then he went about the business of doing things his way, the way of a perfectionist. Early on I got the sense that no one at New Line truly understood what was happening on location.

Sure, they were getting all the dailies, but that was practically irrelevant, since no one human being could possibly watch everything that was photographed on any given day. There weren’t enough hours on the clock. Consider that there were nine hundred-plus days of miniature photography, and every day an hour of footage, maybe an hour and a half, could be shot. And that was just the miniatures. Then you had the insert units shooting a half-day, the second unit shooting three hours a day, and the main unit shooting an hour a day with multiple cameras. So while on most films the dailies usually amount to maybe ninety minutes of footage, on The Lord of the Rings, daily footage could average four to six hours a day. That is astounding. At the time, it was also a bit depressing, and not simply because of the exhaustion such a schedule provoked. There was also the nagging feeling that reel upon reel of great stuff would never see the light of day, simply because there was no room for it. Yes, Peter needed a lot of material. We were shooting three movies, not one, and each was going to run for more than three hours. Nevertheless, there was no question that Peter’s schedule was so ambitious, and his vision so broad, that only a portion of what we shot would be used in the final movies.

There were times when this presented a problem, when Peter asked for a tenth take, or a twelfth take, or a twentieth take, and I wanted to scream, for I just started losing track of what I had done.

An actor develops a shrewd sense of what’s likely to end up on the screen. On the set of Courage under Fire, I shot a scene in a bar with Denzel Washington, and in the middle of the scene, in between takes, or when they were turning the cameras around to do my close-up after Denzel’s close-up, I had this horrible feeling that the entire plot of the movie was coming to a screeching halt while we indulged in a scene devoted to the backstory of Denzel’s character. I walked up to Ed Zwick and said, “Ed, maybe I shouldn’t be asking you this, but what are the chances that this scene is going to end up in the movie?”

He laughed. “Pretty much none.”

“Then why are we shooting it?”

The reason, Ed explained, was that it was an important piece of the puzzle—not for the viewer, but for Denzel, who was trying to sort out his own character. Actor and director hadn’t arrived at a point where they felt comfortable cutting the scene from the movie, so they filmed it, possibly as a courtesy to the star, or as a way for the director to feel the nuances of the scene. I think they needed to shoot it in order to cut it from the movie. Usually, in cinema, you can put a lot more money on the screen if you get to those answers sooner; similarly, as an actor, you don’t want to get married to such indulgences. I’m not saying Ed was being wasteful—it always happens, but as an actor, you don’t want to show up at the premiere looking for the scenes you fell in love with, only to discover that they’ve been left on the cutting-room floor. That has happened to me on several occasions, and it would happen with The Lord of the Rings.

Not that I was surprised. I knew the movie was going to be spectacular, but I wondered what would become of those little moments, those nuances that were captured somewhere on take seven, eight, or nine, with a C camera or a D camera whirling around the set, picking up reaction shots, when I was fully in character and emoting like crazy, and something magical, but peripheral, was happening. What were the odds a director could find those? One of the director’s primary tasks in the editing phase is to tell the story, or to search and destroy those moments that don’t work. But finding every little nugget that does work? Who has the time or the energy for that? It’s not the way the process is designed.

I hoped that Peter Jackson would know just what to do, but I couldn’t imagine how anyone could budget their time and marshal their energy to accomplish the mission. What I did know, from the very first day, was that he seemed excited and inordinately confident. Talent and ambition aside, Peter remained, at his core, a fan. During that first tour, Peter joked that he wanted to have his memory erased, so he wouldn’t know how the film was made. He wanted to see it and enjoy it, just like anyone else. That’s when I really understood how unique Peter is. Even though he needed to have confidence and faith and be this titanic figure on the set, there was an overriding sense that he was engaged on a purely emotional, almost childlike level. Despite the pressure and the exhaustion and the sheer enormity of the task, he was genuinely happy to be there. I remember looking at Peter one long afternoon, roughly halfway through the production, and saying, “I’ll bet you can’t wait until this is over so that you can get a good night’s sleep.”

He laughed softly under his breath. “I’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight, Sean.”

And he meant it, too.

Peter’s enthusiasm was infectious, particularly in the early days, when the entire production was bathed in optimism and energy and a sense of limitless opportunity. This feeling extended to the interaction between actors. Each time I met someone, it was like bonding with a fellow explorer. Among the first was John Rhys-Davies, who played the warrior dwarf, Gimli. We met in the Portacom, a ten-by-twenty-foot mobile hut, the kind of thing you might see at a construction site, which initially served as a green room for the cast. I was looking forward to meeting John—I’d been a fan of his ever since I was a kid, watching him as Sallah, Harrison Ford’s comic sidekick in Raiders of the Lost Ark. John was boisterous and funny, not unlike the characters he’s often played. He walked in, extended a hand, and introduced himself. “I’m John Rhys-Davies and I live on the Isle of Man, otherwise known as ten thousand alcoholics clinging to a rock in the middle of the Irish Sea. Hello, my lad!”

Well, this is going to be interesting.

To John’s amusement (and sometimes chagrin), I quickly jumped into an accurate impersonation of his voice as Sallah. I’d pass him on the set and say something like, “Indy, they’re digging in the wrong place!” And if he didn’t love it, he was at least tolerant. One day he did sort of raise an eyebrow and say, “You know, my boy … sometimes it borders on parody.”

I loved being around John, even though we have generally opposing political viewpoints. He’s a very conservative man—the polar opposite of, say, Viggo Mortensen, who played Aragorn. I’m more of a centrist, so even though I don’t necessarily agree with John, I can appreciate where he’s coming from.

It was difficult not to feel for John, who suffered like Job throughout the entire production. His face reacted badly to the makeup—and it took a long, long time for the artists to apply the makeup for Gimli. John spent countless more hours in the makeup chair than I did, and I admired his perseverance, although his discomfort was so great that his double, Brett Beattie, was called on to do an unusual amount of work—so much work, in fact, that there was discussion about Brett getting co-credit for the role of Gimli. He wasn’t the voice of Gimli and he didn’t appear in close-ups of Gimli, but day in and day out, the amount of time he spent in makeup and on the set was sufficient to prompt consideration of a co-credit from the people who were with him on the set so much. Several more close-ups of John were added in pickups, though, and the controversy, such as it was, faded away. (“I’m not in the habit of giving away the credit for my character,” John once said.) And John was a terrific, if sometimes overzealous, promoter of the film.

“Rrrrrrraise your expectations!” he shouted at our first press conference, while thrusting an index finger into the air. “This movie is going to be bigger than STAR WARS!”

To which Peter replied, “Settle down, John.”

I absolutely love the combination in tone of what John achieved with his character. He strikes the perfect comic bravado and layers it with gravitas. During the premiere in Wellington, I felt like I had achieved some rite of passage when John and I rode in the same car during the ticker-tape parade.

I met Billy Boyd (aka Pippin) in those first days, too. My first impression of Billy was magical. I was totally enamored of him, in no small part because of his voice. I loved listening to Billy, and even though I could barely understand a word he said through his thick Scottish brogue, I got the feeling (borne out over the course of the production) that he was a really appealing, sweet, kind of guy, the sort of man with whom I wanted to be friends. He was gentle and funny and very cool, very comfortable in his own skin. Both Billy and Dominic Monaghan (aka Merry) have a natural grace when it comes to performing humorous scenes, or when improvising for the amusement of the cast and crew. They worked well together, and that was reflected on-screen. The friendship that developed between Dom and Billy transcends description in any book I could ever write. They are unique human beings with exceptional talent. Living in close proximity to them over the years of making and promoting The Lord of the Rings taught me a lot about myself. There are cultural differences between us, to be sure. I think they were much better prepared emotionally to become pop culture figures than I was. Their sense of personal style and their comfort with themselves were qualities I occasionally found in short supply for myself. But the connection we formed was real and permanent.

The same could be said about my bond with Elijah Wood. The friendship between Frodo and Sam resonates with audiences because it appears to be genuine. There is chemistry, and chemistry rarely happens between actors who do not care for each other. I can honestly say that I love Elijah like a brother. And like any sibling relationship, ours is at times a complicated one. When we met in New Zealand (which was the first time I’d seen him since our brief introduction at the Ma Maison Sofitel), I had the weird feeling that Elijah was something of a chameleon. It happened at a restaurant called Castro’s, where the cast and the “upper echelon” of the production team (including Peter, Fran, cowriter Philippa Boyens, Barrie Osborne, and then producer Tim Sanders) gathered for a preproduction party. Elijah and I shared a big hug, but I sensed something a little bit different abut him, something I hadn’t noticed when we met in L.A.

He was happy to be there and happy to see me, but he had a more cosmopolitan air about him. He was smoking his ubiquitous clove cigarettes, and he was dressed very sharply—it was apparent he had a clear sense of his own personal style. In sum, he looked like a movie star, and I remember marveling at him. Here I was, just a guy trying to put a jacket on so I wouldn’t be cold or look out of place, trying to figure out what the hell to wear to dinner, while Elijah seemed unburdened by such trivialities, even though it was obvious that in fact he gave such things considerable thought. It just seemed to come naturally to him. He was ten years younger than I, but already he had figured out how to move elegantly in virtually any crowd.

Much has been made of the bond between the hobbits, of the camaraderie that extended from the set to the pubs of Wellington and back again. To some extent, that’s an accurate portrayal, for indeed we all got along well and indeed there were nights of debauchery and drunken revelry. For the most part, however, I was on the fringe of this scene. My circumstances were different. Billy, Dom, and Elijah (as well as Orlando Bloom, who played Legolas) are all young, single men, and to varying degrees they enjoyed the status and benefits of being movie stars in an exotic location. On the night of the first party, while others mingled comfortably, I fretted about whether I was stepping on toes by bringing my wife and daughter with me. I worried about things like that. Christine would always just roll with it. She seemed respectful of my concern, but also thought I was a fairly bad judge of propriety.

As much as I wanted to be respectful of other people and the dynamic of the set, I knew I had to carve out a place for myself and my family. I didn’t think it was a big deal, since my father had often talked about Peter and Fran and how cool they were when it came to familial matters. He described their hotel room during the promotion swing for The Frighteners as being laden with baby paraphernalia; surely they would understand my trying to find the same balance with my family. As a young father I was a little out of my element. As someone who craves a sense of control, I found that the universe was playing a little trick on me. While everyone was getting comfortable with each other, I was eager to fit in. I wanted to prove to myself that I could be a good husband and father, while simultaneously thriving among this auspicious group of artists.

To that end, I tried to make sure that my dressing room on the set was like another room at the house: anytime Christine and Ali wanted to be there, they were welcome. I wanted that and needed that, and I wanted the production to understand. I could work eighteen, nineteen hours a day, but I also knew that I’d be better on the set, better at my job, if my family was there when I got back to my dressing room. Everyone had their own thing. Viggo Mortensen had his artwork, his photography. The “boys”—Elijah, Billy, Dom, Orlando—had their video games and their music and their movies. Such things were considered sacred, for they provided a much needed respite from the endless slogging that the production became. I didn’t smoke cigarettes or play as many video games. My diversion was my family—having my wife and daughter there if they wanted to be there.

When we first landed in New Zealand, we felt a little like a military family in a new community, but eventually we got into a pretty comfortable rhythm. Ali went to school with Peter and Fran’s children, and everyone found their own routine. Christine took a philosophy class and nurtured a coterie of friendships. She was even allowed to apprentice in the editing room. This was an interesting dynamic. During the filming, the actors weren’t generally privy to things relating to postproduction. We all knew that the films were being assembled concurrently, but I think it’s fair to say that we didn’t have too much access to that realm. Peter or Fran would show us clips if we really wanted to see something, or send us moments to help reconnect us to our character if it felt like we were drifting over time. Also, the cast and crew were treated to edited sequences after the return from a holiday or a given two-week break in order to reenergize and refocus everyone on what we were doing. These screenings were an adrenaline shot to the soul during production and helped keep everyone sane. But beyond that, I don’t think many of us in front of the camera spent too much time seeing the stuff we were shooting. I was respectful of the boundaries when Christine started volunteering in the editing room, but I couldn’t help feeling a little sneaky every time I would pick her up at the editing facility. I could see the elves working to put the movie together in their workshop, and it was exciting.

That first dinner party went well, but at a certain point Alexandra became tired and started nodding off, so we arranged a chair for her to sleep in. Meanwhile, the boys broke off and were having an intense conversation, the subject of which was, Which pub should we hit first? I was torn. I wanted to go out with the guys, but I also wanted to make sure that my wife and daughter were taken care of. Tim Sanders sensed my inner conflict and approached to offer his sympathy. Sort of.

“Oh, it’s gonna be hard for you, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

He smiled. “You’re the married one.”

My first thought was, Screw you, dude! But you know what? He was absolutely right. It was hard for me, because I wanted to be able to hang out with the guys and enjoy my time with them, and Christine wanted that for me. And yet my fundamental priority was (and is) my family. For the most part I went home to Christine and Ali, and I found strength in seeing them and holding them every night. There were times when Christine and I would get a babysitter and go out with the gang, and there were times when Christine would stay home and I’d join the guys on my own. But my stamina was nowhere near theirs in terms of drinking or carousing, which I considered a reminder that I was indeed older and at a different place in life than they were.

We were fairly deep into the process of making the first movie before I finally had a night out with the boys, a chance to really bond with the other hobbits. We met in the lobby of the Plaza International in Wellington, in a lounge area where you could get appetizers before going into the restaurant for dinner, and we all sat around with our drinks, talking and laughing and having a good time. In some way, I think I had begun to internalize the Frodo-Sam relationship in the Elijah-Sean relationship. I wouldn’t exactly call it method acting, but I liked the idea of playing those roles—at least once in a while—away from the set. I’m older than Elijah, I’m the married father of (now) two children, and I’ve been in the movie business most of my life. It would be a gross simplification to suggest that I could be Elijah’s mentor, because he’s quite an experienced and worldly young man himself—and was even then, at only eighteen years of age. Ours is a wonderful and complicated relationship. By the time we met, Elijah had already worked opposite some of the biggest stars in the business. By a creative standard, his career was arguably much more successful than mine, and yet according to some people (Dom, for example), I was more well-known than he was. It’s not important, just a little something that provides a fuller understanding of our friendship and professional rapport.

Anyway, we were all having fun that night. I was particularly happy to be experiencing a taste of grown-up, child-free time, and I liked hanging out with my costars. I discovered that Elijah had inadvertently locked his keys in his apartment, and instantly I took it upon myself to say, “Don’t worry. Enjoy yourself; I’ve got it covered.” With the help of the hotel concierge, I found a locksmith who went over to Elijah’s apartment, got his key out, and delivered it to me. Elijah never had to lift a finger, never had to worry about anything. I did this because I wanted to be Sam, so Elijah could just keep being eighteen and in Wellington. I wanted to serve Elijah, just as Sam might have done for Frodo.

But there were other times when I tried to look after Elijah in a much more serious manner, more like the big brother that I sometimes felt I was. Elijah could be courageous and even inattentive when it came to some of the more elaborate action sequences in the film. If a scene called for a stunt, the crew would wrap something around Elijah’s leg and use a cherry picker to haul him up into the sky, and Elijah didn’t mind at all. He’d do it in a heartbeat! He just didn’t care. He was so trusting. But I did care. I’d grown up on movie sets. I’d seen people get injured. The guy who was my teacher on The Goonies also had the misfortune of working on the set of The Twilight Zone many years earlier. That film, of course, is infamous for a stunt that went tragically awry, resulting in the deaths of three people, including two children. I believe that on a movie set you have to share the responsibility for your own safety, but Elijah was not concerned about that. He knows that I think he was too trusting of the production. I was perhaps more cautious than I needed to be, and sometimes I’d annoy people. But I didn’t want to be the guy on the set who wasn’t paying attention when Elijah’s leg was ripped out of its socket.

On this particular social night out, however, I didn’t think it was important for Elijah to learn a lesson about being careless with his keys. I thought it was more important that he have a good time, courtesy of “Sam.” So while I ran around and rescued his keys, he continued drinking, smoking clove cigarettes, connecting with cast and crew, perhaps eyeing the ladies. Not that Elijah was a rake, mind you. He was much more elegant than that with the fairer sex. For an eighteen-year-old, I thought, he was remarkably graceful and sensitive and thoughtful.