Smash hit

“Fran and I like to think we have fairly strong creative instincts and we certainly have strong creative opinions. We also have a certain independent spirit: we never have liked being given edicts or mandates or being told what to do.

“You have to attend these creative meetings with studio people but you would really rather just be left alone to do the job. In our experience, we have worked with great studio people whose ideas you respect, but you also can find yourself in the room with . . . the word ‘idiot’ comes to mind. In these situations, somehow you’ve got to create the illusion that their notes and ideas have been incredibly helpful and that they have steered you in a direction that you otherwise wouldn’t have gone. With a bit of luck, their ideas will be ones that you’ve already had yourself, so that you can credit them back to them afterwards, and quite often the next time you meet they’ll have forgotten most of what was actually talked about.

“So, basically, you simply play a very political game: you have the meeting, come out, and go and write exactly the same screenplay you would have written anyway!”

By the end of the meetings, apart from some ideas that were clearly never going to find their way into any script, Miramax had accepted that The Lord of the Rings was two films, not one: “They blanched at the prospect,” says Fran, “but they nodded . . .”

Peter’s recollection is that, in view of the wealth of essential story material, there was a bid — albeit unsuccessful — to push the project to an even more ambitious scenario:

“Once we had started to get into the book and were working on the treatment, we realised that three films would obviously be the more natural way to do it. We actually shaped our treatment into three parts at one point, but Harvey said: ‘No! Let’s just stick with two!’ ”

Two movies or three, it is certain that, as far as Peter and Fran were concerned — and regardless of whatever anybody else might have thought or subsequently said — it was never going to be one movie. Later events suggest that there may have been a prevailing wish that was never truly relinquished, that this epic tale could be dispatched in a more straightforward fashion with a single picture. It was an argument that would return, although not for a while . . .

What was a known issue from the outset was the budget. The top figure for both movies was not to exceed $75 million (£40 million). At the time the maximum budget spent on a Miramax picture was in the region of $40 million. The $75 million was a lot of money for the company to be committing to and, in all likelihood, was a cap imposed by Harvey and Bob Weinstein’s masters at Disney.

“Harvey was very adamant from the beginning that going over $75 million was never an option. At that point we had no script and no budget. All we had to go on was the fact that we had just made The Frighteners for $27 million and that had involved a lot of computer effects. Looking at it like that, we thought $27 million up to $75 million was certainly going to pay for a lot more production value, a lot more effects, a lot bigger film, and so we had every reason to believe that we would be able to do it for that. With hindsight, of course, we were incredibly off the mark . . .”

Unable to rework the Lord of the Rings trilogy to suit the demands of Miramax, in 1999 both sides agreed to a compromise. Miramax would recoup its $15 million investment and relinquish control of The Lord of the Rings to the rival New Line Cinema. Miramax, though, would receive 5 per cent of first-dollar gross, and both Bob and Harvey Weinstein would be given executive producer credits to acknowledge that they had got the project started.

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