“The Lord of the Rings”: 20 years of the epic that changed everything

“The Lord of the Rings”: 20 years of the epic that changed everything

Although today marks the 20th anniversary of the premiere of the first part, it is difficult to talk about it individually if we are going to review its history, since once the story was always conceived as a whole, which was finally presented in three films.

Jackson knew how to capture the epic, fantasy and empathy that Tolkienian characters awaken and give life to the images of the landscape, the battles, persecutions and the literature of the book itself. A vast universe with countless creatures of different races, creeds, ambitions and ways of relating to each other and to the planet and life.

With the result in place, the bet seemed ideal and logical. The film was a grossing success with $ 871 million in worldwide earnings, making it the second-highest grossing film of that year, behind only another that turned 20: harry potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

But before getting to this, the road was not easy, it was a blockbuster that required eight years of work. It all started in the mid-nineties, Jackson came from directing “Scared to death”, a comedy with touches of horror starring Michael J. FoxAlthough he already had a certain career, he was still a young director and somewhat unknown to the general public. “Celestial Creatures” 1994 had given him his first Oscar nomination as a screenwriter, and it earned him the Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival.

With the aforementioned antecedents is that Peter Jackson I was looking for a way to film the fantasy world of Middle Earth created by Tolkien. Together with your partner Fran Walsh, started a project to adapt The hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to whom.

Their agent informed them that Saul Zaentz He had owned the rights to the works since the early 1970s, so they contacted the president of Miramax Films, Harvey Weinstein, who was very interested in the project.

The initial plan was to make the movie The Hobbit and, if successful, to continue with The Lord of the Rings, divided into two parts, but the negotiations with Zaentz were prolonged and also only owned the production rights of the first novel, not the distribution ones, which were owned by United Artists, so the project would be put on hold.

By 1997 Miramax got the rights, the first scripts began to be made but the costs were getting bigger and the company founded by Weinstein could not take over, that’s how New Line Cinema came to the project.

The hard work spanned eight years, with all three films being shot simultaneously and shot entirely in Jackson’s homeland of New Zealand. From there and for two decades, the country became the dream destination of the legions of followers of the stories created by J.R.R. Tolkien.

The-lord-of-the-rings.jpg

New Line Cinema

With “The Fellowship of the Ring”, released in December 2001, the general public accessed the fantasy universe devised by Tolkien and that they admired so much Peter Jackson, a world populated by humans, elves, dwarves and hobbits, and other fantastic creatures in which, as in the real world, the fight between good and evil is a constant that marks the destiny of the protagonists.

“A Ring to rule them all, a Ring to find them, a Ring to attract them all and bind them in darkness”, then became a perfectly recognizable phrase, and actors like Elijah Wood (Frodo), Ian McKellen (Gandalf), Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn), Orlando Bloom (Legolas), Cate Blanchet (Galadriel) Christopher Lee (Saruman), Andy Serkis (Gollum), Sean Bean (Boromir), Liv Tyler (Arwen) Hugo Weaving (Elrond), Billy Boyd (Pippin) and Sean Astin (Sam) became the definitive faces of the characters that countless readers could only conceive in their imaginations for so long.

Source From: Ambito

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Latest Posts