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DISCLAIMER: This transcript is provided on an "as is" best efforts basis and is based on a MiniDisc recording made where speech was not always legible because of noise in the room. Any errors made in transcribing what was actually said are mine, and not those of the speakers quoted, and may include spelling mistakes, incorrect names and other minor typo's. Readers should also bear in mind that statements read in cold print can often convey a completely different meaning from that intended by the speaker and perceived by the original audience.
		Jude Fisher: Hello, my name is Jude Fisher. This is Brian Sibley. Some of you we know - and recognise. To those of you who have seen us talk before we're just going to have to apologise for some repeated material - you'll have to bear with us. So Brian, how did you get into all this... Brian Sibley: Well, for those of you that don't know, it was probably when I was around 6 or 7 or 8 that I first read 'The Hobbit' and fell in love with it. But then I really couldn't manage to read that big fat book that came afterwards. I put it off and put it off and finally got to page 12 or 20 sometimes or 30 if I was really lucky, but never really cracked it. So I have great sympathy for all those people who say "I've never been able to read this book". Then around the age of 21.. I spent my 21st birthday in a unique way by developing a duo-denal ulcer and lying in hospital for six weeks, which seemed like the perfect opportunity to crack this impossible task of reading 'The Lord of the Rings'. I have to say that by the time I had got to 'The Shadow of the Past' chapter and.. as a matter of fact what I did, and this is a secret if you know anybody who's having a struggle, forget all the preface stuff, all that 'Concerning Hobbits' stuff - just ignore all that and read it later, because it's so confusing. By the time I got to that point I was absolutely hooked, and as some of you may know, 20 something years ago I dramatised 'Lord of the Rings' for BBC Radio 4 with Michael Hordern and Ian Holm, who then played Frodo, now playing Bilbo in the movie trilogy. As a result of that I heard there was a movie being made and thought "Well it can only be better than the last one". I remember the last one - that was Mr Bakshi's version. So I sort of plagued Harper Collins to let me be involved in writing something about the making of the films. So that's how I got involved. (FX: turns to Jude) You came to it a different way though didn't you? Jude: I did, yeah. I didn't read 'The Hobbit' to start with. I read 'The Lord of the Rings' when I was about twelve and just completely fell in love with Middle-earth. I think my parents complained that I lived in Middle-earth right through my teens. I just kept going back and reading it again, feeling like being displaced from that world into this one. I'm sure a lot of people felt that way when they read the book the first time. Being that sort of obsessive person, I then took an English degree that specialised in Anglo-Saxon because that was Tolkien's own speciality. From thereonin I took a Masters degree in Old Icelandic because he was so inspired by the old Norse myths and legends and the Icelandic sagas. So I made myself completely unemployable at this stage. I found myself working in a betting shop in Chiswick, as you do with an old Icelandic degree. I bumped into my neighbour one day - I didn't know her very well - and she said she was leaving her job and I said "What do you do?", and she said "I work at George Allen & Unwin publishers" at which point my heart nearly leapt out of my chest because for me that was Tolkien. I knew that name from the spines of all those books that I'd collected. I said "Oh! That's Tolkien's publishers!" and she said "Yes, I work for his editor". I said "And you're leaving?" And she said "Yes. Can you type?" So I lied! I said "Yes". "And shorthand, can you do that?" And I said "Yes". I presented myself for interview the next week and lied through my teeth of course and suddenly found myself with a secretary's job at Tolkien's publishers. Which was wonderful in many ways, but completely terrifying in others because I really can't type, even now. Or do shorthand. Or anything like that! And therefore turned out to be the world's worst secretary, as I realised when my boss was dictating a letter to me in which he apologised for the sheer awfulness of his text. But then he promptly promoted me to editor because he realised that I did actually have a (FX: door bangs making next word indecipherable: brain?). So on the Peter Principle of being out of the way of the actual action he made me editor in charge of Tolkien. The first thing I wanted to do was change the artwork because those of you who remember some of those old editions and the American calendars, will remember some completely disgusting garish artwork had been commissioned. I always hated it with a passion and so the first thing I did was to take on John Howe and Ted Nasmith to illustrate some calendars and, as soon as I was able because I had been a fan of his work for many years, I commissioned Alan Lee to do the illustrated edition of 'Lord of the Rings' for the centenary, which took a considerable amount of effort and organisation, and it was the first illustrated edition of 'Lord of the Rings' which took a lot of discussion with The Estate as well. But in the end we had a book that we felt enormously proud of. Then in about 1998 I had a phone call from a very small production company in New Zealand from a chap who I had never heard of before called Peter Jackson. He said "Can you give me the addresses of John Howe and Alan Lee because we're making a movie." I thought "Well I've heard that one before" because we'd had a lot of approaches about film rights - as Brian has mentioned, the Bakshi movie - and a lot of people who thought they'd quite like to turn it into a proper film, but we knew it would never come to anything. So I happily gave out their contact numbers and never thought another thing about it. Brian: I can take this story slightly further because Peter was remembering ringing you for the details and then sending a package to Alan Lee of stuff for him to look at, deciding that maybe it wasn't a good idea to send Alan Lee 'Bad Taste' and 'Braindead' and 'Meet The Feebles', all of which are perhaps in a genre that wouldn't necessarily encourage an artist like Alan to think that this was a project that he ought to join in with. So he sent instead 'Heavenly Creatures', which is of course a completely different film although it does contain fantastic elements to it... How many people know Peter Jackson's other work, interrupting myself for a moment? (FX: very few hands go up) Yes, I find that very interesting. This isn't necessarily a criticism of any of those of you who don't but I'm intrigued, really intrigued, that Peter Jackson has become a phenomenally successful and beloved by movie goers for three movies without many people knowing about the rest of his work - that really does fascinate me! Anyway, he sent 'Heavenly Creatures' which, if you don't know it, it's a film about a true-life murder case which took place in New Zealand, in Christchurch, where two girls murdered one of their mothers. They live a kind of child fantastical life and indeed there's a lot of fantasy elements in it, and the fantasy scenes were created quite remarkably by Weta Workshop. And he also sent a film which probably even less of you have heard of, which is called 'Forgotten Silver'. It's not available over here. If you have DVDs or videos that play American system order it and have a look at it. It's called a 'mockumentary' - it's about the life of a New Zealand film-maker called Colin McKenzie, who does not exist. It's about him and his silent movie epics of the 1930's, all created by Peter and Weta Workshop, and the film contains, amongst others, Harvey Weinstein, Sam Neal, the American film critic Leonard Maltin, all attesting to the truth of this. It's a wonderful spoof and a brilliant film and it shows you an intriguing aspect of Peter Jackson, about a New Zealand film maker making an epic movie in the 1930's, which has a strange kind of resonance with what ended up being what Peter did. Anyway, he sent 'Forgotten Silver' and 'Heavenly Creatures' to Alan and was obviously very anxious because he wanted Alan's involvement, so he asked his PA, Jan Blenkin, to track the journey of this tape from New Zealand to Dartmoor where Alan lived. They got various phone calls at various points because the courier couldn't find Alan's cottage so they were getting this kind of think like "We're in the next village but we've gone into the post office and they've told us that it's down there" Eventually of course this was all in the middle of the night because of 12 hours difference. They finally got this message "Yes, we have now delivered it". They clocked the fact that it had been delivered to Alan at something like 2 o'clock in the afternoon say, and they worked out that 'Heavenly Creatures' ran for 90 minutes and 'Forgotten Silver' ran for an hour and ten minutes and they just clocked off the time and at exactly the time of the two joint running times the phone rang, and it was Alan Lee saying he'd like to speak to Peter Jackson and he'd be fascinated to talk about the project, which is amazing. I asked Alan if it was true because I thought it was probably apocryphal and Alan said yes, the moment they arrived he stopped what he was doing, put the first video in the machine, watched it, put the second one in and then went and rang Peter Jackson. (FX: turns to Jude) But anyway you had another call after that, didn't you?! Jude: Yes. After that I had a call in June 2000 saying "Would you like to come and visit us on the production and see what we've done to your books?" Not actually my books, but how could you resist? I had just come out of a 20-minute screening of some very early material they had been cut together - some scenes in 'The Prancing Pony', hobbits on the road, some of the Hobbiton material.. and I just sat there in this screening cinema and, it's pathetic to admit, but with the tears running down my face because I had commissioned a lot of the artwork on which the book was based and it was bizarre to see it coming to life in front of my eyes from the book that I had loved all my life, with characters that were definitely recognisable in my imagination. I was quite amazed because I had been extremely worried about anybody taking on 'Lord of the Rings' and making a movie that I would enjoy out of it. So in September 2000 off I went to New Zealand and after that incredibly long flight, which we've both done a few times, 27 hours or so in transit, I found myself on the side of a mountain in completely inappropriate clothing because I'd never been on a film set before and had this bizarre idea that it would have been very comfortable and glamorous, and found myself standing ankle deep in water and snow swirling round my head and looking up the hillside to see Boromir and four hobbits and I just never thought for a second "That Sean Bean and four very small people in costume". It was just like walking into Middle-earth. By the end of that first trip, which was about two and a half weeks long, I came straight back to the office where I was actually no longer in charge of publishing Tolkien - I'd moved on to do other things - walked into the Tolkien editor's office and said "I want the commission to do one of the film-type books. Please, there's no point in casting around for another Tolkien expert. Please give this to me." I'd almost have paid to take on the commission but of course I'd never admit to that. So Brian, tell me about your first visit to New Zealand... Brian: Do you know what was fascinating... we've just come from walking around the Science Museum LOTR exhibition - Jude hadn't seen it - and I think one of the intriguing things is seeing things that we've both seen in different contexts now in a very nice careful preserved museum situation, where they weren't before. Jude: When I last saw Sauron's helmet it was actually lying on the floor at Weta Workshop underneath a lot of bramble bushes that had been Fangorn Forest. Brian: You saw Treebeard in action - they were trying to get his eyes moving. He was in a plastic bag when I saw him! My encounter with Boromir was probably the most striking. If any of you have read one of my books you'll know how it happened, but I was visiting one of the artists who worked on the film, a guy who did a lot of the prosthetics work, called Gino Acevido. Gino said "Oh would you pass me that book off the shelf round the other side of my desk?" and he was working on his drawing board. So I walked round the desk and nearly had heart failure because that Boromir which is lying out there was lying on the floor of his office. He'd done all the make-up. He's a prosthetics make-up artist who's now actually, like quite a number of people, been wooed away from his make-up brushes and his air brush and has taken to the computer keyboard. He's currently working on... well he did all of the skin creations of Gollum - the CGI Gollum, and is soon to be working on 'King Kong' as well. So that was Gino's idea of a big joke. He's a big, cuddly American guy who's now a sort of honourary Kiwi. It looked completely different of course, from seeing it in the boat here. I don't know whether any of you have noticed but you can see the blue light of the display case coming through the planks of wood - that boat would not have stayed afloat long enough to get to The Falls of Rauros - probably just as well as we'd have lost the effigy. So, that I remember. I remember seeing the Hobbiton Mill, which is probably my favourite exhibit in the exhibition I think. I remember seeing that for the first time standing in Weta Workshop, and it was jammed between the Gates of Minas Tirith which were built to break away when hit by the battering ram Grond in the third film. It was all covered in dust and dirt and I really wanted to show a picture of it in the book. At that time of course I didn't know it was going to scarcely be seen in the movie, but we got a picture of it in the book eventually. I know it's one of John Howe's favourite models that they made from something that he designed and it seems to me a uniquely John Howe-like creation, as so many of the... Jude: The monstrous stuff! When I was commissioning calendars from John I used to get to a certain point when delivery was due and I'd phone him up and I'd say "How are you getting on, John?" and he'd say "Well I've done about eight of the images now". I'd say "Tell me what you've done, John?" and he'd give me a long list of monsters and I'd say "Right, OK. Can we have some non-monsters now?" Brian: Well John has done more pictures of the Balrog, I think, than any other artist. He just can't resist doing it. Falling off. Falling down. Gandalf on it. Gandalf about to fall on it... I think for me that was the great thrill, all the way through the film. I think it's inevitable... you can't help but have some reservations about aspects of the films as they emerged. One of the things that's most strong to me is the fact that you see this absolutely clear transition between the work of the artists - Alan and John - which are themselves both very different but, at the same time, quite compatible. I think it is extraordinary that you've got two very, very different artists - not only do they have a different style but they have a different style of working - and they both worked of course habitually in different materials. John never worked initially with pencils where Alan always worked to being with with pencils and watercolour. So John had to learn about the business of using pencils as opposed to immediately getting onto his ? and poster paints and working directly onto big canvasses. So they both had to learn things about new techniques. But I think there is a melding of their styles which somehow now is what we think of as Middle-earth. Jude: The most bizarre thing for me is when I was down there last time, which was last Summer, was to see Alan Lee working on a computer. I just never expected to see that in my life because he's the quintessential fine artist. You're sitting with Alan anywhere in the world and he'll have a sketchbook and a selection of pencils and these exquisitely detailed pencil drawings will appear at your elbow - it's just extraordinary! He's doing the same thing with a computer which is quite extraordinary, and he's so gleeful about the fact that he doesn't have to keep redrawing things - he can just rub it out and start again. Amazing to see that! So yes, they've just become completely different artists now by taking on their own techniques. Brian: What's interesting is that John, after spending the first ten months or so there really felt that he's got family and life was... well he really didn't want to make that his entire life and went back to Switzerland, and I think that he slightly regrets having not been involved in some of the design work that went on subsequently, but of course has managed to claw back his own life, where Alan has gone on and if any of you have seen the box set for the box that contains the new Extended Two Towers DVD - you will see a piece of Alan's work. So Alan has gone on doing anything and everything - not just on the film but all these other creative images and I think it's going to be quite an interesting experience for him when he goes back to his little cottage on Dartmoor and realises he's no longer part of this great bonanza. (FX: asks audience)What is everybody going to do when it all ends?
Jude: It really has swallowed people's lives. The thing that really amazed me when I went down was just how everybody had put their lives on hold. Not just the cast who were obviously there for something like 14 months. Everybody behind the scenes was just working round the clock on this production and, OK with the occasional union meeting, but it was really done with tremendous team spirit and I've never encountered that before anywhere. It was nice to see everybody pulling together for this one project that I loved as well, because they had really got into the book. Everybody was carrying the book everywhere they went with them and we just saw so many copies of our editions out on set.. people referring to it. That really pleased me because I'd obviously gone down there thinking "I wonder what they're going to do with it" and, as Brian says, we have our reservations about some of what's actually come out of the theatrical releases but Peter's made his own version of the book and he never claimed to be doing anything other than that when he set out on this long road. It was always going to be HIS version of 'Lord of the Rings'. We were talking about this earlier on, and I'm sure we'll talk about the whole Saruman question later, but in a way the fact that films diverge so much from books, I find it somehow easier to deal with that because the book remains .. even more than it would do so if it were such a faithful rendition of what we have on the page from Tolkien. So the book retains a very special life, I think, because they are different. Brian: I think one of the problems about all films from books is that you get this situation where when you read a book - particularly if you've read the book in an unillustrated version - where you create the pictures for yourself. People do have immensely strong feelings about this particular book I think. I remember when we did the radio version people wrote and said "Robert Stephens sounds wrong as Aragorn" and you think "Well, wait a minute, how do you KNOW what Aragorn sounds like?" and of course you do know because you paint the scenery and you make the voices in your head and you have a very strongly developed sense of what this book is like. I think the people for whom it's been hardest to appreciate 'The Lord of the Rings' are those who probably know the books the best. I was intrigued to read somebody on a web site today saying "Thank God I've never read the books otherwise I think I'd find it really quite difficult". And in a way I find that quite side because part of me would really love everybody to read the books because... In a way I'm sure Peter would say the same thing, because it is a film not a book and one doesn't supplant the other, it merely maybe supplements it at times. Jude: Our book sales soared, I have to say. Especially in the year running up to 'Fellowship'. I think we were up 1,012%, which is just incredible. The trouble is, that working for a big corporate publishing company is that they expect that the next year and no matter how much you explain to them the dynamics of these things they don't really take it on board. Brian: I think the good thing is that they were read. I'm old enough to remember, as some of you probably are if you're Tolkien fans, the publication of 'The Silmarillion' which, like the publication many years before that of 'The New English Bible', was one of those books that everybody went out and bought and then only a very small percentage of them actually read. Probably only 'A Brief History of Time' is the next example. If you doubt that I was talking to someone who worked for the American publisher and they inserted into the book, really jammed into the gut of the book quite late on, a reply card that said "If you return this to the publishers we will refund the price of your book" and they measure from that how far people read a book. Probably it's entirely an American thing. Apparently with 'A Brief History of Time' they had hardly any of these cards returned! But what I was going to say was the great thing about 'Lord of the Rings' is that with you saying so many copies had been sold, but you couldn't move in London - you couldn't get on a tube or bus without seeing people with their noses wedged into the book - so I don't think people just bought it and then ... well I'm sure some people bought it and couldn't get past 'Concerning Hobbits', like me... but I think the majority of people have then gone on to read and enjoy the book, which is great. Jude: It may win 'The Big Read'! Brian: I think that's a foregone conclusion! Jude: I don't think it is. I'm not saying 'Go out and vote for Tolkien' of course I'm not, but... It's been very interesting because I've watched the whole British media reaction to Tolkien over the years, and when 'Lord of the Rings' won 'Book of the Century' it was just ... well you all saw... the book slated everywhere and the whole nation was cast off as being infantile, and I just find it extraordinary. It's not something that I understand but it's always been the case with the British media, that fantasy fiction in particular is something that they have no regard for at all. It's regarded as completely childish literature, something that you're supposed to grow out of in some bizarre way as if you're supposed to put your imagination in a box when you turn 21 and put it in the cellar and that's the end of that. Even now I see the BBC leaving the Tolkien presentation quite late in the day, having done 'Pride and Prejudice' on the cover of 'Radio Times', talking about it a great deal. It's interesting how spin works on these things. There are 23 fantasy and Science Fiction titles in that Top 100 and I think that says a great deal about what we like to read. I just wish the newspapers would reflect that. It's been a tremendous frustration to me as an editor and as a writer as well not to see that truly reflected in the media. Brian: Well you ought to tell us about.. I don't have a book to sell today by the way - I have some old books! But you do have a new book. Jude: Well I have 'The Visual Companion', as you might expect, to 'The Return of the King' - out two days ago, November 6th. It's got some pretty fantastic images in it, I have to say. There's quite a story behind the fact we have some really powerful, dramatic images in that book because at the eleventh hour, when we were due to go to press in three days, the author had a little hissy fit and said "We've got nothing because New Line are being so tight on the release of imagery because they don't want any big plot points to be given away obviously, but I have nothing" So much of it was not yet digitalised at that point anyway - so a lot of the really dramatic scenes they didn't exist anyway. Beyond that point we weren't allowed to show anything beyond Mount Doom because nobody knows what happens! We had nothing from 'The Paths of the Dead' because that was still being digitalised, and I really didn't have any dramatic images in the book at all! So eventually I'm afraid I played the very badly behaved author and emailed Peter and said "Look, you know, here's this book. It works with the movie. It's something of an advert for what's coming. People want to see something that's going to want to make them go and see the movie. " Not that we aren't all going to go anyway! And eventually Peter himself selected about a dozen fantastic images, which we then just threw out things that we already had in that we'd had designed and ready to go, and just put them straight into those holes. And it's made for a very dramatic looking book. So I'm quite looking forward to seeing the context that those pictures fit into, I must say. Brian: And weren't you lucky that those didn't include the Voice of Saruman, how lucky was that?! Jude: Well we can talk about that in a minute. Shall we throw it open to questions? Brian: Indeed. Somebody asked earlier about the third 'Lord of the Rings' book under my authorship, 'From script to screen', will one day appear. Those of you who might have been following the fact that the script does change, right, literally up to the eleventh hour, will know why that book is not out now because it would have been far too dangerous to publish a book about the script before the script had finally been filmed. And also because of the problems of getting illustrations. But hopefully next year that will be out. Hopefully together with, possibly, my biography of Peter Jackson, but we'll see. Questions? Click here to read the Question and Answer panel (second half of the transcript)
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Email: ian@iansmith.co.uk