LOTR pitch meeting

I’ve been spending some time while recuperating from a really nasty bout with the flu watching through the bonus materials on the Two Towers Extended DVD. It’s always fascinating to watch the creative process, and even more so when it’s such a monumentally huge production.

One thing that’s not included in the bonus materials is the story of the business angle of how the trilogy got made. There’s some reference to a switch of movie companies, but not much else (unless I missed that part). You have to wonder about the pitch meetings for the trilogy:

“So we’re going to make the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. At once. In New Zealand.”

“Huh?”

“It’ll be insanely expensive. We’ll have 20,000 orcs and stuff.”

“Ok?”

“Nobody’s ever been able to pull it off before.”

“Hah?”

“Tolkien fans are a completely rabid bunch of freaks, and they’re going to scrutinize everything we do and second-guess us at every turn. We’ll use mostly unknown actors. And Gollum, one of the central characters, will have to be completely digital. Nobody’s ever done that successfully before. Oh, and did we mention that the way Lord of the Rings is written makes it incredibly difficult to translate to a movie?”

“Glurg.”

“So how about signing up for it? We’ll need gobs and gobs of money and the whole thing could blow up in our faces.”

“Let me get my check book.”

Posted Tuesday, 09 December, 2003 by Nic Lindh

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