The gentle, meandering drama of the Lord of the Rings trilogy won Peter Jackson and his team 17 Oscars and a place in the cinematic pantheon. But the fantasy epic very nearly didn't happen: if Harvey Weinstein had his way, JRR Tolkien's Middle Earth would have been condensed into a snappy two-hour film, directed by none other than Quentin Tarantino.

Tarantino, known for his gratuitous, cartoonish violence and provocative scripts in films such as Django Unchained and Pulp Fiction, was the back-up Weinstein had in store after Lord of the Rings director delivered a two-film script to Weinstein costing $12 million in development. This, Weinstein said, according to a new book on the film, was a “waste”.

“Harvey was like, ‘you’re either doing this or you’re not. You’re out. And I got Quentin ready to direct it’,” Ken Kamins, a producer who worked for Weinstein on the project, told Ian Nathan, author of Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-Earth.

Jackson said he received a memo dated June 17, 1998, from the Jack Lechner, who was head of development at Miramax, Weinstein's company, demanding “a more radical, streamlined approach”, that would allow the sprawling narrative to fit into one film.