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THE ESSENCE OF EVENTSPeter Jackson's Adaptation of "The Fellowship of the Ring" Page 1
This paper was given at the Tolkien Society Seminar "Dramatising Fantasy" held at Whitby Museum in July 2002; and again at Oxonmoot in September 2002. It was written (and read) jointly with Alex Davidson, also a long-standing member of the Tolkien Society, who is far more knowledgeable about films and film-making than his mother. [In a couple of places there is a note as to whose opinions are being expressed.] While writing this paper, we realised that there was a word missing from the title, but since the program was already printed it would have to stand. The word we forgot is ‘film’— but if anyone is unaware that Peter Jackson has directed a film version of LotR, then they can have no interest in either Tolkien or cinema, or, indeed, current events. Our main title refers to a quote from Peter Jackson where he says, “The trick is to take the essence of events that Tolkien wrote.”1 In this interview as in many others, Jackson expounds on the necessity of simplification; The Fellowship of the Ring takes at least 8 hours to read, so to condense it into a 3-hour film was certainly going to involve some fairly drastic pruning. Fran Walsh, one of the scriptwriters who worked closely with Jackson on the screen adaptation, puts it this way: “The needs of a cinema audience and readers of prose are very different. To just take the book and divide it into scene headings and turn the prose into action would doom the film to failure. It would collapse under the sheer weight of detail.”2 Leaving the cinema 6 months ago, we personally felt that Jackson had not only succeeded in capturing the ‘essence of events’, but had, with a few notable exceptions, presented everything which we were hoping to see. However, upon sitting down, Fellowship of the Ring in hand, to analyse the changes in detail, the list in front of us grew way beyond expectations. We were, ironically, faced with a similar task to Jackson, as discussing all the minutiae here would probably leave no room for other papers. We found that the changes fell broadly into a handful of categories. Firstly, there are the stylistic interpretations of vision and sound which do not necessarily match with those of our own imaginations, or even those of Tolkien himself. Peter Jackson has said on many occasions that this film is primarily his personal interpretation of Tolkien's world. We leave any explanation of those choices to him. The changes which we will discuss
are those which significantly alter plot, timing and, perhaps most importantly,
characterisation. Changes include additions, subtractions, replacement,
resequencing of events, and alteration of character and dialogue. Additions
cover both incidents and even characters not found in the book, as well
as ‘enhancements’ to scenes described by Tolkien. The visual medium of
film sometimes demands amplification; where Tolkien’s writing stimulates
the reader’s imagination, a film has to generate the scene in detail and
put it on the screen. Jackson explains that it is necessary Enhancements are generally special effects, like the extended action with the Watcher in the Water (whirling Frodo around for what does seem a surprisingly long time) and the sequence of the collapsing stairs in Moria, serving to build tension as the sequence moves towards its climax. Added scenes include the battle between Gandalf and Saruman, done in order to show visually the power and evil of Saruman, and the conversation between Gandalf and Elrond at Rivendell, inserted to explain some necessary background. Tolkien uses the Council of Elrond as his major piece of exposition, but Jackson prefers to make this scene much more dynamic, even explosive, as the power of the Ring begins to work on the peoples of Middle-earth. |
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Soon to be published by the Tolkien Society ©Christine Davidson, Alex Davidson |
