Ring of Fire
Mary McNamara

Lounging about in bed one Sunday afternoon, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh inexplicably felt up to the impossible. They were in the middle of shooting their third movie collaboration, The Frighteners, and rather than think about how that was going, they were daydreaming about what they would do next. Which is, Jackson says, what you do when you're in the middle of shooting a movie. Jackson and the nascent physical-effects company WETA Digital had bought a slew of computers for the digital effects in The Frighteners, and Jackson thought it might be nice to keep them busy in his next project.

"I thought to myself, We should do something like 'Lord of the Rings,'" he said. "Then a bit later I thought, Hang on, why not just do 'Lord of the Rings?'"

That was in 1995, and the intervening years supplied many valid answers to that question. There is one very good reason no one has ever attempted a live-action film of J.R.R. Tolkien's 1,100-page, three-volume epic fantasy. It is a very, very difficult thing to do. Beyond securing the rights, which took more than a year; beyond finding a studio that would finance the paterfamilias of a genre that has never done particularly well at the box office; beyond figuring out how many movies it would take to do the story justice; beyond all that was the prospect of actually writing the damn script. Or in this case, the damn scripts.

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