Ian Nathan is the author of a new book about Sir Peter Jackson and the making of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He talks to Stephen Jewell about one of the world's most uncompromising directors.

As a writer and contributing editor to Empire magazine, Ian Nathan has enjoyed special access to Peter Jackson and the cast and crew of The Lord of the Rings. Visiting New Zealand on a dozen occasions to date, the London-based journalist was in an ideal position to chronicle in his new book, Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and The Making of Middle-earth, how the Pukerua Bay-raised film-maker somehow succeeded against all odds in rescuing the then-floundering film adaptation of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings from almost certain cinematic oblivion. He not only turned it into one of the most successful film franchises of all time, he also established a flourishing movie industry in his hometown of Wellington. "Empire was the first film magazine to put The Lord of the Rings on our cover in early 2000 because we just felt that it was a winner," says Nathan.

"Not just because we had a degree of faith in Peter Jackson, but because it was The Lord of the Rings."

STUFF: Two decades on from when the trilogy was initially green-lit, it's hard to believe that it almost didn't happen…

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IN: I don't know if there's such a thing as fate or destiny, but sometimes it must have felt like that. All of these things came up against them, and it must have been heartbreaking the number of times that The Lord of the Rings fell apart. Peter had this team of designers and digital artists that he wanted to keep in jobs. He wanted to create this community, and it must have been awful to keep letting them down. But it must have seemed like there was some cosmic force that was making it happen, as all these hurdles were knocked out of the way.

Harvey Weinstein could have ended up producing The Lord of the Rings, as Peter Jackson had a first look deal with him in the late 1990s. Would they then have been very different movies, especially as Weinstein only wanted to make two movies?

The truth of it is that I don't think it would have been made, as it got to the point where Weinstein couldn't finance them. Peter wasn't willing to compromise and do what he thought would be a terrible version of the books. But Harvey really wanted Peter to do it, and when he said to him: "If you go, I'll give it to Quentin Tarantino or John Madden," who is a slightly more likely candidate, I don't know if he actually planned to do it that way. But it was costing him too much money at that point, and thankfully it didn't happen that way.

Weinstein gave Jackson an almost impossible ultimatum, giving him just a fortnight to find new backing…

In Hollywood, a two-week turnaround is usually unthinkable, as they usually give you six months to a year to see if you can sell it elsewhere. But to have just two weeks, they must have thought it was a dead duck. Also Weinstein wanted all his money back on signature, which was a nightmare. All the other studios went: "It's too quick, we can't agree," so the fact that New Line agreed to it was just miraculous. And they didn't just want to make two films, they wanted to do three, so they were prepared to go the extra mile.

Did Jackson's formative experience of shooting his early films like Bad Taste and Meet the Feebles on a shoestring budget come in handy for The Lord of the Rings?

People have trouble seeing how the guy who made those comedy/splatter films, would two or three films later be adapting the biggest fantasy novel of the 20th century. But there is something in that, which is to do with how hands-on those films were, and the experience of literally making a film from the ground up. It took him longer to make Bad Taste than The Lord of the Rings, but it was a labour of love. Somewhere in his DNA was the ability to go the long distance, and strive where others would give in.

You mention how the archetypal Kiwi "No 8 wire" approach to problem solving was a crucial part of Jackson's working method…

One of the things I wanted to find out in writing the book was: "What was in the New Zealand psyche that emboldened them to do the impossible?" Because The Lord of the Rings was always thought of as an impossible adaptation. A lot of it came down to the fact that you're at the end of the world, and you have to make do. You have to figure it out because there's nowhere else to turn to. The Lord of the Rings wasn't something that was "figured out", it was something that was gloriously made in highly sophisticated ways. But at the same time, he and people like Richard Taylor had that ability to look at a problem like "how do we make small Hobbits out of these big actors?" and then come up with five or six ways of doing it.

There's no better example of that Kiwi ingenuity than the revolutionary motion capture technique created to film Gollum, which has become industry standard…

If you want to look at one particular element of The Lord of the Rings that embodied that whole way of thinking, it has to be Gollum. At the beginning, they didn't know how they were going to do it but when they met Andy Serkis, they just knew he was Gollum.

When he performed Gollum, they thought: "How do we get that into the film?" It's just unbelievable that they came up with this technology that allowed them to capture his performance, put it into the computer and put it together with animation. It was such an incredible breakthrough because even after the success of The Fellowship of the Ring, they weren't home and dry – because if they'd mucked up Gollum, we would have been laughed at every time he appeared on screen in The Two Towers. The real victory is that it only takes the audience two or three minutes to accept that he's a character, even though we know he isn't real, he's CGI. He was ever present emotionally in the drama, so it was just a triumph.

The Lord of the Rings elevated Peter Jackson from a promising film-maker to one of the world's most iconic directors…

After Heavenly Creatures and The Frighteners, he was big enough for Hollywood to pay attention to him but certainly not at a The Lord of the Rings level. There was also already some tension about how he wanted to make films in New Zealand, as he was known as someone who stuck to their guns, which made him a slightly awkward proposition in terms of "we can't just sling him onto the latest blockbuster because he'll want to shoot it elsewhere". He was in a sense making his way in Hollywood but he was also becoming an auteur in that he wanted to make films on his own terms.

But he also had some vital help from many others, not least of all from Sir Richard Taylor, Philippa Boyens and his partner Fran Walsh…

You can say he's an auteur but an auteur with an entire country behind him. There were lots of other people who made it happen, so it's a team story in some respects with Peter at the centre of it. You can make an argument that Fran Walsh actually co-directed it with him. She was the driving force with the screenplay and the music, and she ended up directing a lot of Gollum material, as well as a lot of second unit stuff. Philippa Boyens was the soul of JRR Tolkien, and she would come in and safeguard the text. And Richard Taylor was the model-maker, the genius, the mad professor… If Peter told him he needed a thousand skulls overnight then Richard would get them for him, because that's what he did in his wonderful workshop.

Was Peter in a no-win situation after agreeing to direct The Hobbit at the last minute after Guillermo del Toro's departure?

He didn't intended to make The Hobbit but after Guillermo del Toro dropped out, it was make or break for the production. Again, it came back to Peter being conscious that he's got to keep the industry going in New Zealand, and it was vitally important that the films were made and were made there. Warner Bros said to him: "Either you're going to do it or we're going to write this off and can the whole thing."

Peter stepped up for various honest reasons, and it was difficult for him. But he hit the ground running and had to find the film that he hadn't intended to make.

You describe Peter Jackson as one of the few filmmakers inexorably associated with their homeland…

Obviously, there's such a thing as French directors, who are associated with a kind of French cinema. But you don't think of James Cameron as a Canadian director or Steven Spielberg as an American director. Peter and New Zealand are so symbiotically related to each other. He says that he never wants to make a film anywhere else. There's something in New Zealand that he feeds off, and that's a part of how he makes films, as it's in his blood. You can say that The Lord of the Rings films aren't New Zealand films as they were financed by Hollywood and they don't tell New Zealand stories. But somehow they are New Zealand films because of who Peter is, and how he makes them, and their particular personality.

Ian Nathan's Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and The Making of Middle-earth (HarperCollins) is out now.