And Frodo makes five

Ask “Lord of the Rings” writer-director Peter Jackson and his co-writer-producer-domestic partner Fran Walsh when they met and he says, “1986.”

She says, “Six movies ago.”

Either way, the two were working in their native Wellington, New Zealand, in different areas of the country’s nascent entertainment industry. Jackson was an amateur director who was putting in six days a week as a newspaper printing production crew member to finance what he was doing on the seventh -- making a movie called “Bad Taste,” in which aliens require human flesh for an intergalactic fast-food chain. He’d been on the project for three years when he asked Walsh, an aspiring TV writer, to look at his script.

They were friends for a few years, then lovers, then, in 1995, Oscar nominees in the best original screenplay category for “Heavenly Creatures,” a story of two murderous teenage girls. Their first child, Billy, was born the next year, just before Jackson started shooting “The Frighteners,” a Universal comedy-horror-thriller he and Walsh wrote about a psychic private eye who talked to dead souls. Their second child, Katie, was born just after “The Frighteners” premiered.

In 1995 Jackson, who had set up his own computer-animation studio near his home an hour outside Wellington, also decided to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” In 1997, with a three-picture, $270-million commitment from New Line Cinema, Jackson and Walsh, along with Philippa Boyens, started working on the script. Billy and Katie were babies.

Now, three films later, they are 8 and 7, perhaps the only children who can claim to have grown up in Middle-earth. They have cameos in all three movies, which allowed fans to track their growth and the children to decide that work as extras was not for them, so don’t expect to see their bright eyes in Jackson’s next project, “King Kong.”

“They know that movie sets are boring and they run away from [any further] cameos,” says Jackson. “Makeup and wardrobe early in the morning and then hanging around the rest of the day.”

A project’s duration

There have been many theatrical dynasties, from the Barrymores to the Douglases, but it’s hard to imagine any family tied so inextricably, so totally to a single film project. Billy and Katie don’t remember a time when “Rings” did not dominate life; these days, Jackson and Walsh have a hard time as well.

“I don’t think we really knew what we were getting into,” says Walsh. “When we took it on, there was a sense that maybe it would be two or three years. The idea that our daughter would be half grown up [by the time the last film was released] seemed an incredible thing, and now she is. It’s quite a good way to measure that chunk of time.”

The last weekend in January, Jackson and Walsh are sitting on a couch in a spacious cottage of the Four Seasons Biltmore in Santa Barbara. In less than a week, their film has won four Golden Globes (best drama, best director, best original score and best song from a movie) and 11 Academy Award nominations. Walsh and Jackson each personally snagged three Oscar nominations -- they shared credits as producers for best picture and screenwriters for best adapted screenplay, while Jackson also is up for best director and Walsh shares the best original song nomination. Well worth the 14-hour flight from New Zealand. In the past, when they have come to the U.S. for meetings or to do publicity, Walsh and Jackson usually came alone. But this time they brought Billy and Katie, who are playing somewhere on the hotel grounds with their nanny.

It’s good to have your kids with you when you are racking up awards and nominations; if nothing else, it keeps you humble, as Walsh has discovered.

“The other day Katie said to me, ‘Mom, I want to watch a video.’ I said, ‘Which do you want?’ She said, ‘Lord of the Rings.’ I asked, ‘ “Fellowship”? “Two Towers”? “Return of the King”?’ She said, ‘No, Mom, the [mediocre] animated version.’ That’s a good reality check.”

Physically, the two filmmakers are very different. Jackson, 42, is an overweight, disheveled, gregarious fellow wearing his trademark frayed khaki shorts, dark socks (he hates shoes) and a grape-colored knit shirt. He is inevitably compared to an overgrown hobbit. Walsh is slight, with long dark hair that often hides much of her face. She is more reserved than Jackson and favors dark clothes; and if that keeps her from being noticed, so much the better. Although Jackson and Walsh are practically royalty in New Zealand -- last year, 100,000 people lined the streets of Wellington for the movie’s premier -- Walsh has refused to be photographed for any story, including this one. She would not allow her face to be seen on the “making-of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ ” DVD nor will she offer any information about the family’s logistics, including whether the children attend public or private school.

“Privacy is something once lost, you can’t reclaim,” she says. “I don’t want to be perceived as famous. I don’t wish to have a public life. I want to do the right thing for [promotion of] the movie, but I also want to do the right thing for our family life. It’s frightening going out when you’re on television. I was shocked because I went into a shop the next day [after the Golden Globes] and somebody said, “Oh, I know who you are.”

That was the first time that happened in America. At home, she says, they’ve encountered people hiding in the bushes with cameras. “That felt so invasive,” she says. “It freaked me out....It’s harder on the kids than on me. They have to deal with their dad being constantly recognized and interrupted for autographs when he is supposed to be with them on a family outing.”

She is proud of the way the children handle it. On a recent trip up the California coast, as many people offered congratulations, “the kids made a game out of it; they kept a count.”

“We try not to participate in what I call the celebrity culture,” Jackson says. “We’re filmmakers with a high exposure so we deal with that, but we don’t do interviews with celebrity magazines, we turn down requests for public speaking....We’ve always wanted one of us, which is obviously Fran, to be able to take our kids to the park and not be hassled.

“I just want a boundary,” he says.

That need for boundaries began early in the process when it became clear that making “The Lord of the Rings” wasn’t just a project, it was a life phase. It took years to write the script, and then came the famous 274-day shoot all over the country’s North and South islands with virtually no breaks except 10 days at Christmas. Jackson and Walsh were on set every day. Their children, who were not yet in school, joined them on location with their nanny. They’d often come to the set for lunch, but it was a rare night when the four sat down for dinner together.

After the film was shot, there were literally years spent in the editing lab, filming special effects, overlaying them on live action, putting the whole thing together, then cutting it, over and over, to get it to a manageable size. Jackson takes pride in how Tolkien’s epic took over Wellington, turning it into “Wellywood” with practically every resident having some role in the films, but he and Walsh tried to minimize the invasion of their family.

“If Fran and I were on a seven-day shooting schedule,” Jackson says, “the children might come [with their nanny] to spend a few hours on the set. If they’re just sitting there playing Game Boy, at least they can do it with us.”

After the shooting, Walsh tried to pull back to spend more time with the children, “but post-production proved to be more demanding than the shoot itself.” Fortunately the family lives only five minutes from Jackson’s editing studio.

No matter how late Walsh and Jackson stayed up, no matter how much they crammed in on the weekends, the work was never quite finished. There was always another film to begin.

“There were lots of times we needed breaks and most of the time we never got them,” Jackson says. “I get into situations where my weekends would be consumed by the cutting rooms. It seems strange when you suddenly stop. You know, something feels like it’s missing -- but in a positive way,” he adds with a laugh. “It is just a movie and it is just something you do and it’s never become so consuming we can’t function.”

When he felt overwhelmed, Jackson would delegate to Walsh, who weighed in on casting, wardrobe, makeup and design. Jackson also gave Walsh her first fill-in director job.

“We were running behind schedule,” Jackson says. “I found myself a hundred miles away shooting scenes when I should have shot the climax for [first installment] ‘Fellowship of the Ring.’ ... So Fran was drafted in to direct the scenes between Elijah [Wood] and Sean [Astin] on the boat on the lake at the end of the first film.”

“My first thought when I saw my name on the call sheet was: This is a mistake,” says Walsh.

Being raised in Middle-earth has had no discernible effect on the two children, who are as different in their temperaments as their parents.

“Billy’s a conformist,” Jackson says. “He wants rules and regulations and appreciates them in his life; Katie rebels against them.” He turns to Walsh. “He’s probably more like me and Katie’s more like you.”

Themes resonate

Jackson vows he will never push either toward filmmaking -- “I have no desire to influence them.” Yet there are those Hollywood-insider moments that seem particularly odd when they occur around a 7-year-old Kiwi.

“One day Katie was playing with ‘Lord of the Rings’ toys,” says Jackson. “Any normal child would be using the characters’ names, but she was calling them by the names of the actors: ‘Viggo [Mortensen] comes over and Liv [Tyler] will jump off her horse.’ ”

Both parents say that many of Tolkien’s themes -- loyalty, perseverance, the triumph of the little guy -- have given them a lot to work with parent-wise. Over the past five years both of Jackson’s parents died, and one of the things the parents referenced with the children was Frodo’s departure from Middle-earth.

“I think it’s been quite helpful to them in that regard. I think they understand that at the end of the [third] film, Frodo crosses over to be somewhere else in spirit and they have a pretty strong sense of that; they often refer to people who have gone but who are very much with them in spirit, and I think that’s quite a beautiful thing to have.”

During the seven years of the project, Walsh, perhaps not surprisingly, became the emotion caretaker not only of the cast and crew but of the characters. Jackson’s passions run to battle scenes, monsters and other creatures, and Walsh sought to balance that, to give characters motivation as they face their various obstacles.

“Philippa and I were very invested in the emotional content of the story,” she says. “It’s easy for those things to be obscured by spectacle and the sheer sort of exhaustion of that final ascent to Mount Doom. But we just wanted to touch the audience in a meaningful way. Maybe that’s an easier thing for us to do because we’re women.”

This duality is what allowed Jackson and Walsh to continue to work together despite multiple pressures and the seeming endlessness of it all. They reassured each other that they would get through the difficulties and tried to focus no further than the day ahead. “We have so much the same taste and sensibilities,” says Jackson. “We both sort of conceived the project at the beginning [and] we always split duties.”

“When you have spent so much time together,” Walsh adds with a laugh, “you come out with the same phrases. That’s a bit creepy.”

The couple and Boyens have already begun writing the script for a remake of “King Kong,” the project Jackson was envisioning when he got the “Rings” bug. Walsh is signed on as writer/producer, but how extensively she’ll be involved, she says, “is difficult to know ahead of time.”

First they have to get through the Oscars. And as Jackson found out at the Golden Globes, the only thing more traumatic than not winning an award is winning it.

“Right as the envelope gets opened,” he says, “there’s a moment in time where you just hope your name isn’t going to be read out; it’s the realization of, ‘Oh, God, if it’s me I’m going to go up and accept the award and give a speech and there are 26 million people watching,’ and then it is your name, and you kind of go numb and the whole table erupts, and it’s a deafening roar of people on either side of you that kind of jolts you to your feet. Then you stagger toward the stage and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, what on earth am I going to say?’ And suddenly you forget the names of everybody that you knew.”

Except, of course, your partner and your two lovely children.