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The Return of the King By Steve Beard
"I just can't watch it," Walsh told me. "You mean to tell me that you just walked the red carpet and came back to the hotel without seeing the movie?" I asked. She replied, "I am afraid I would be turning around during the entire movie looking at the faces in the audience." Walsh had good reason to feel antsy. After all, she had been given an impossible task of turning The Lord of the Rings, an internationally beloved 500,000-word magnum opus into a cinematic trilogy. She was joined in this quest by Boyens and Peter Jackson, her husband and the film's director. For the three of them, this premiere would be closing one of the most challenging and captivating chapters in their lives. Having seen the movie the night before, I assured her that she had nothing to worry about. Audiences around the globe were going to be grateful for her work. Nevertheless, I understood her anxiety. J.R.R. Tolkien's heroic and tragic mythology is arguably considered to be the greatest book written in the twentieth century--some even consider it the book of the millenium.
The Lord of the Rings lays out an epic journey of a humble Hobbit named Frodo Baggins in order to destroy an all-powerful ring that could enslave and doom the mythical land of Middle-Earth. In order to accomplish his monumental task, he is joined by Legolas the Elf, Gimli the Dwarf, Gandalf the Wizard, Boromir and Aragorn who represent Men, and three fellow Hobbits--Merry, Pippin, and Sam.
The author of the book, J.R.R. Tolkien, was professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and was devoted to the study of languages, as well as having a keen interest in the Norse sagas of heroic tragedy. Personally, he was affected by the two world wars, as well as the environmental devastation of the Industrial Revolution.
Veteran actor Sir Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf the wizard, was a guardian of the Tolkien flame. "There was a pocket in Gandalf's costume and if ever you felt something wasn't quite right or you wanted a little bit of help, out came the Bible [The Lord of the Rings]. And you looked it through and said, 'On page 279, Peter, there is something pretty good.' And he would look it up and say, 'Hmmmm.' If Tolkien wrote it, you were onto a good thing." The Lord of the Rings, published in the mid-1950s, gained an eclectic and nearly fanatical following. The book was embraced by political and religious conservatives who shared Tolkien's worldview, but it was also loved by pot-smoking hippies who agreed with Tolkien's revulsion of smokestacks replacing forests.
C.S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity, credits Tolkien with helping him move from atheism to Christianity. In their literary group "The Inklings," Lewis and Tolkien met weekly to discuss myth, stories, and theology. "He was for long my only audience," Tolkien said of Lewis. "Only from him did I ever get the idea that my 'stuff' could be more than a private hobby." Fran Walsh believes that Tolkien's faith--which is far more subtle than in C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia--informs the third book of the trilogy, The Return of the King, especially by emphasizing life after death. The book points to a "faith that even those who leave us too soon or are lost in war or who die young--and Frodo certainly represents all those--go to another place. They don't just fall into nothingness. They are transitioned to somewhere else."
"So many things fall away as we charge forward into this new century," Walsh continued. "There is so much cynicism and such a lack of ritual and kind of bleak belief system to govern anything. I like stories for that because they still offer it." One
of the most overriding elements of The Return of the King is
the friendship between Frodo, who must carry the ring to Mount Doom
so that it may b Despite being such a monumentally huge epic, the power of The Lord of the Rings trilogy has been the depiction of close, intimate friendships. In reflecting on his role as Sam, actor Sean Astin confessed to being frustrated that he could not be more like his character in the movie. "If I am really honest with myself--I haven't thought about it too much--but I have been disappointed in myself and in my own inability to be more like Sam with my friends," he said. "The more I think about it the more I don't know if I can-in order to survive and be a good husband and good father and have a career. I try, in moments, to manifest the better angel of my nature with my friends, but I am not as good a friend to my friends as Sam is. It's hard to be this sort of emblem for those kind of things." The Return of the King follows in the noble and spectacular footsteps of its predecessors in the trilogy. In adapting J.R.R. Tolkien's beloved novel to the big screen, Peter Jackson has taken on a seemingly impossible task--much like Frodo's journey with the ring.
"This often, for me, felt more like running a studio than running a movie.…I don't think that anyone has ever tackled anything of this scope. And no one has ever made three movies all at once," he said. "And no one will again, I don't think. It was a unique gamble that was really undertaken because of the popularity of the books." The stellar writers, cast, and crew have delivered a magisterial and awe-inspiring film that faithfully delivers on telling the story of courage, honor, simplicity, and faith. This is what epic filmmaking is all about. Three cheers for The Return of the King. Steve Beard is the editor of Good News magazine and the creator of Thunderstruck.org. |
It
was rather surprising to see Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens climb
out of the stretch limo in front of the hotel. After all, they were
supposed to be at the Hollywood premiere of The Return of the King--the
long-awaited final installment in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
I had just interviewed them both (along with more than 100 other journalists)
that afternoon. 
During
our interview time, Walsh made it clear that the primary goal was
to create "engaging entertainment" in filming the trilogy. "We've
always put the cinema audience ahead of the book audience because
the readers of the book have the book," she said. "Yet we have obviously
tried to honor it as much as we can within that perimeter. It's always
been for us a challenge to try to fulfill some of the expectations
that come from fans of the book." 
Their
heroic ordeal is made more difficult by their encounters with the
ghastly and barbaric forces of the Dark Lord Sauron--a disembodied,
all-seeing evil eye and the original owner and creator of the ring
of power. The ring Frodo carries has an addictive lure that is able
to seduce even the most even-keeled soul to its shimmering promise
of absolute power. Those safe from the ring are those who are wise
enough to steer completely clear of it. One cannot watch the movies
without recalling Lord Acton's dictum that, "Power corrupts and absolute
power corrupts absolutely." 
Director
Peter Jackson and his entire crew were devoted to being faithful to
Tolkien's text, while still making a movie that audiences would enjoy.
"We made a real decision at the beginning that we were not going to
introduce any new themes of our own in The Lord of the Rings," said
Jackson. "We were just going to make a film based on what…Tolkien
was talking about." 
Although
his work does not preach a theological dogmatic, Tolkien did believe
The Lord of the Rings to be a "fundamentally religious and Catholic
work…The religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism."
It extols the virtues of love, compassion, and longsuffering, while
painting a very Christian-inspired vision of good and evil, as well
as treachery, addiction, and greed. 
Walsh
also believes the story teaches that we "can all be better than we
are." Tolkien took that from "his own war experience and from his
own profound Christian beliefs," she said. "Those ideas in the book,
we try, as much as you can in film, to place them in the story. Certainly
the values in them give you a sense of hope that it isn't chaos and
it isn't arbitrary. And it is not without a point. I love storytelling
for those reasons," she said. 
e
destroyed in the fiery lava of its creation, and Sam, his faithful
companion who has promised to accompany Frodo to the end. One of the
greatest lines in the movie is at a crisis point when things appear
most bleak, stout-hearted Sam says to Frodo, "I can't carry it for
you, but I can carry you," as he picks up his friend to carry him
up treacherous Mount Doom. 
"Everyone
on this production was devoted to tell the story and bringing it to
life on screen," producer Barrie M. Osbourne said. "In retrospect,
it was an immense undertaking and definitely precedent setting-and
perhaps to never to be repeated again in the history of cinema." There
were 2,350 shooting days (the equivalent of nine years worth of work
on the film) conducted by three major filming units who shot more
than five million feet of film for the trilogy. There were more than
23,000 extras used, and the crew numbered over 2000.