Posted on: Friday, December 28, 2001
Filmmakers look at big picture in simultaneous sequel shoots
By Anthony Breznican
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Director Peter Jackson has nearly completed his own epic quest.
The New Zealand filmmaker took on the biggest feature-film production in Hollywood history with the trio of three-hour movies adapting J.R.R. Tolkien's prodigious fantasy "The Lord of the Rings" — and he shot them simultaneously.
"It was like fighting a war, really," Jackson said. "At times, we had six or seven units shooting at once, and we all pushed ourselves to the point of exhaustion. ... Doing three films all at once is three times as hard as doing them separately."
With the first film just opened and the follow-ups set for release in the next two years, Jackson's endeavor is part of a growing Hollywood trend of filming sequels back to back — or at the same time — to save costs and effort in the long run.
"Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" hadn't even opened when director Chris Columbus began its sequel, and Warner Bros. hopes to continue through all seven of the J.K. Rowling novels.
Meanwhile, director brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski are filming the next two installments of "The Matrix" franchise simultaneously.
"It's easier to do it all as one giant picture because the boys had the story and the material and knew what they wanted to do," said Joel Silver, producer of "The Matrix Reloaded" and "The Matrix Revolutions," set to come out in 2003 and 2004 respectively.
"It's like one giant movie cut in half and shown at two different releases."
That plan saved filmmakers from having to retrain the actors in martial arts, and will shorten the time between releases to one year instead of three. Silver said that makes it harder for other filmmakers to mimic any breakthrough special effects.
Until recently, studios were fearful of dedicating resources to multiple film shoots.
Historically, massive stories have been cut to one movie of just a few hours (epics such as "Gone With the Wind" and "Dr. Zhivago" stretched to 3 hours, 42 minutes each), and any hope that filmmakers had for continuing the story depended on the box-office receipts of the first installment.
That's what happened with "Star Wars" and "The Godfather," two epic films that produced popular sequels.
Otherwise, long scripts were relegated to the realm of the television miniseries.
Stephen King chose to make his 1,100-page apocalypse novel "The Stand" into an eight-hour ABC miniseries (essentially four mini-movies) rather than trim the tale for one feature film.
"For a long time I pushed for doing it in two sections — 'Stand I' and 'Stand II,' " King said in the interview collection "Bare Bones." "I thought it would be possible to build a big artificial climax in the middle that would satisfy audiences for the time being."
He wanted George A. Romero, director of "Night of the Living Dead," to film the two movies together and release them a few months apart. Studios scuttled the idea in the mid-1980s, however, and "The Stand" languished for several years before turning up on television.
Robert Zemeckis was one of the first feature directors to make concurrent sequels, with parts two and three of his time-travel comedy "Back to the Future." Both films, one set in the future and the other in the Old West, were made together in 1989 to take advantage of an extended opening in star Michael J. Fox's busy schedule.
But the earnings dipped considerably on each film, from $210 million for the original to $119 million for part two and $88 million for part three, and few filmmakers were willing to repeat such a gamble.
If "The Lord of the Rings" is a success, studios may be more willing to take a risk on such projects.
Jackson consulted with Zemeckis before starting on "The Lord of the Rings," which, at a cost of more than $270 million for all three films, could determine the future of studio New Line Cinema.
"I asked, 'What's it like, a bit mad?' and all he said is, 'You just get up every day for a year and go shoot a film. That's what it's like.' He was not wrong," Jackson said.
In Jackson's case, filming lasted 15 months and required many scenes to be shot simultaneously across New Zealand each day. Much like the "fellowship" in the story — a group of wizards, humans, elves, dwarves and hobbits who set out to destroy a malevolent, magical ring — the director, cast and crew had to form unusual bonds of trust.
Jackson delegated significant responsibility to second- and third-unit directors.
"The important thing is communication," Jackson said. "While I'd be working on a key scene, I had a bank of TV screens in front of me showing what the other units were doing."
Watching those screens, Jackson could remotely direct the scenes without worrying about the mechanics of each setup.
"Otherwise, we'd still be shooting today," he said with a laugh.
Actor Sean Astin, who plays the devoted hobbit Samwise Gamgee, said the hardest part was maintaining a sense of the story arc over three films because scenes were shot out of chronological order.
"It was too big for me to get my head around sometimes," Astin said. "You'd be filming scenes from the start of the first movie and the end of the third movie all in the same day."
The trick, he said, was to think of the three films as "one big movie."
"That's what we wanted anyway," he said. "The appearance is consistent, the story is consistent."
Although making the movies together has a huge up-front price tag, it may end up saving New Line money. Costs would have likely ballooned if the studio had to renegotiate contracts for the second and third installments.
"People would go off to other movies. It would be harder to get them back and our rates would go up," Astin said. "From the studio's point of view, it's definitely cheaper."
