LOTR Harvey Weinstein Threatened To Fire Peter Jackson For Tarantino

LOTR: Harvey Weinstein Threatened To Fire Peter Jackson For Tarantino

In the early days of The Lord of the Rings films, Harvey Weinstein threatened to replace Jackson with Tarantino if he couldn’t make it in one movie.

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LOTR Harvey Weinstein Threatened To Fire Peter Jackson For Tarantino

In the early development of The Lord of the Rings films, Harvey Weinstein threatened to fire Peter Jackson and replace him with Quentin Tarantino. The immensely popular trilogy adapted J.R.R. Tolkien’s genre-defining fantasy novel of the same name, releasing one after the other in three successive years from 2001-03. Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings remains one of the most successful movie franchises ever, both critically and financially, with The Return of the King still tied for the record number of Oscar wins with 11.

The process of making the beloved trilogy, in which all three films were shot together in Jackson’s native New Zealand over the course of a year, was a famously difficult undertaking. Jackson had to juggle a massive production involving locations across the country, daily script re-writes, and multiple filming units he monitored via video screens while also shooting on his own. Overcoming challenges such as Aragorn needing to be recast after the first month, Jackson supposedly got only four hours of sleep a night, and his hard work ultimately paid off with the biggest successes of his career.

But, as it turns out, he almost never got the chance to try. As part of a profile by The Independent in honor of the 20th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring hitting theaters, Jackson’s manager, Ken Kamins, relives a dark period in the early history of the project in which the now-disgraced Weinstein threatened to force the director out. Disney was putting pressure on his Miramax company to squash the budget, and Weinstein told Jackson if he couldn’t adapt the novel in a single film, he’d find someone who could – possibly even his frequent collaborator Tarantino:

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Harvey was excited. We found that very encouraging and thought we’d have room to tell the stories, only we weren’t paying attention to the political dynamic between Miramax and Disney. Disney had set a budget cap on Miramax and Lord of the Rings was well in excess of what they could greenlight on their own. When Disney realised the budget and that we were going to shoot the films back-to-back, and the director was not exactly an A-list name, they made it very clear they were not on board. So then begun the very tortured process of Harvey not wanting to admit to the Disney pushback and then at the same time saying to Peter, “This is what you have to do.”

Bob Weinstein suggested at one point that we kill three of the Hobbits. Disney didn’t want [the adaptation] and the relationship between Peter and Miramax soured. Harvey would go from acting empathetically to turning on a dime into Mr Hyde and would threaten Peter. He’d threaten to get Quentin Tarantino to direct if Peter couldn’t do it in one film that was two-and-a-half-hours – which was the exact opposite of what he initially told us he wanted.

Kamins explains that Jackson had signed a first-look deal with Miramax that gave them the initial rights to their next project, and when they requested the opportunity to shop it around, Weinstein gave them only three weeks before he’d fire Jackson. The director ended up giving a presentation at New Line Cinema, with which he’d already had some correspondence, suggesting to adapt Tolkien’s novel into two feature films. More than just embracing Jackson’s vision, the studio head said he’d be better off doing a full trilogy, and they managed to buy out Miramax’s stake in time to save the films.

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Jackson & Co. were clearly no fans of Weinstein’s after that, and star Elijah Wood has since shared that one of the initial orc masks was designed after the producer’s likeness. Though he spent many years as a powerhouse in the film industry, his routine abuses of power were somewhat of an open secret, and his 2018 arrest and 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges helped the #MeToo movement topple many such figures across multiple professions. He also had a history of bullying filmmakers into submission, so The Lord of the Rings fans can take heart knowing that his truncated version of Jackson’s vision never came to pass.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/lord-rings-peter-jackson-quentin-tarantino-harvey-weinstein/

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