Having completed their 92-page outline, Peter and Fran flew to New York for creative meetings with Miramax, which took place in a room nicknamed “the sweatbox” after the small airless rooms where, in the early days of film, movies got shown and discussed. In the middle of summer, with no windows and no air-conditioning and the obvious tensions involved in presenting a treatment for an ambitious movie project, the room lived up to its name.

It was the first time that Peter and Fran had met Harvey Weinstein’s brother and business partner, Bob, whom Peter describes as “the canny number-cruncher”. Bob was the man responsible for running Dimension Films, Miramax’s sister company and genre division responsible for such horror franchises as Hellraiser, Children of the Corn and Scream. Harvey explained that, since The Lord of the Rings was bigger than anything Miramax had previously produced, they had decided that it was to be the first Miramax–Dimension Films co-production. The meetings, which were intensive and ran for two to three days, also involved Jon Gordon, Miramax’s production executive, and Cary Granat, then the head of production at Dimension.

“The Weinsteins were highly amusing [Jackson says]. Harvey and Bob are very close and there’s a really strong bond between them, which I admire. But there’s this theatrical game that they play, where they argue and shout at one another.

“When Bob expressed some opinion that Harvey didn’t agree with, Harvey stormed out of the room and disappeared while Bob just kept on talking as if his brother was still in the room. Then, a few minutes later, we heard the stomp, stomp of footsteps and, through the frosted glass, saw this Alfred Hitchcock-style silhouette of Harvey marching back down the corridor.

“He walked into the room holding the Oscar that he had won for The English Patient, which he’d just been to collect from his office, and he slammed it down on the table in front of Bob and screamed: ‘Who knows f****** more about scriptwriting, you or me?’ We sat there watching this going on and, at first, it was pretty unnerving; then, very quickly, we realised that it is a game; there’s no real aggro in these exchanges; they are just playing and having fun.”

It also became clear that while Harvey had read The Lord of the Rings, or at least had a detailed knowledge of the story and characters, Bob Weinstein had not . . .

“Bob had never read the book and was sort of proud of the fact. So it was presented to us that, because he didn’t know anything about The Lord of the Rings, Bob was going to be “the logic policeman”! We had to deliver a treatment and a script that was totally understandable to Bob, because if Bob didn’t understand it, then it had no hope in the big wide world!” Having no allegiance to Tolkien, Bob also felt free to offer suggestions for improving the original plot.

“At one point Bob said: ‘So there’s these four hobbits, right? And, you know, they go on this adventure and none of the hobbits die?’ Well, no, we explained. Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin all survive . . . ‘Well, we can’t have that,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to kill a hobbit! I don’t care which one; you can pick — I’m not telling you who it should be: you pick out who you want to kill, but we’ve really got to kill one of those hobbits!’

“In situations like that, you just nod and smile and say: ‘Well, that’s something we can consider . . .’ It’s not a very useful tactic to sit there and say: ‘I don’t think killing off a hobbit’s a very good idea . . .’ because you’d then get into an hour-long debate about why you should or shouldn’t kill a hobbit. It’s better to disengage when the silly ideas happen and say: ‘Well, we’ll think about that . . .’ and then you go away and hope it will get forgotten!” There were some entertaining highlights to the meetings that Peter still recalls with amusement and affection.

“Bob Weinstein had obviously read the treatment, or skipped through it, but I remember this moment as if a lightbulb had gone on and there was almost a palpable moment of sudden understanding. Bob said: ‘Wait! So the Elf is like a bowman, shooting arrows, yeah? And the Dwarf has got axes and he can throw axes? And Sam, he’s got this magic rope, right? And Frodo’s got this light thing?’ Then he got really excited and you could see there was this moment of utter revelation and he said: ‘It’s like that movie where they had the explosives expert and the code expert and the marksman and they all had their own special skill . . . It’s the f****** Guns of Navarone!’

“The best thing to do in these meetings is try and keep a straight face and, occasionally, kick each other under the table, which Fran and I were prone to doing.”

Creative meetings in Hollywood are essentially about survival:

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