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    Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
    Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
    Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth
    Audiobook22 hours

    Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth

    Written by Ian Nathan and Andy Serkis

    Narrated by Tristram Wymark

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    The definitive history of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth saga, Anything You Can Imagine takes us on a cinematic journey across all six films, featuring brand-new interviews with Peter, his cast & crew. From the early days of daring to dream it could be done, through the highs and lows of making the films, to fan adoration and, finally, Oscar glory.

    Lights
    A nine-year-old boy in New Zealand’s Pukerua Bay stays up late and is spellbound by a sixty-year-old vision of a giant ape on an island full of dinosaurs. This is true magic. And the boy knows that he wants to be a magician.

    Camera
    Fast-forward twenty years and the boy has begun to cast a spell over the film-going audience, conjuring gore-splattered romps with bravura skill that will lead to Academy recognition with an Oscar nomination for Heavenly Creatures. The boy from Pukerua Bay with monsters reflected in his eyes has arrived, and Hollywood comes calling. What would he like to do next? ‘How about a fantasy film, something like The Lord of the Rings…?’

    Action
    The greatest work of fantasy in modern literature, and the biggest, with rights ownership so complex it will baffle a wizard. Vast. Complex. Unfilmable. One does not simply walk into Mordor – unless you are Peter Jackson.

    Anything You Can Imagine tells the full, dramatic story of how Jackson and his trusty fellowship of Kiwi filmmakers dared take on a quest every bit as daunting as Frodo’s, and transformed JRR Tolkien’s epic tale of adventure into cinematic magic, and then did it again with The Hobbit. Enriched with brand-new interviews with Jackson, his fellow filmmakers and many of the films’ stars, Ian Nathan’s mesmerising narrative whisks us to Middle-earth, to gaze over the shoulder of the director as he creates the impossible, the unforgettable, and proves that film-making really is ‘anything you can imagine’.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 3, 2018
    ISBN9780008192501
    Author

    Ian Nathan

    Ian is the longstanding executive editor for the world-famous Empire film magazine and has written widely about, or from, the sets of many major movies. His published books include Alien Vault (2011) and Terminator Vault (2013). He is currently developing a book on the Coen brothers and another on the filmmaking career of Peter Jackson.

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    Reviews for Anything You Can Imagine

    4.5/5

    20 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book is a must for fans of Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings movies! Also the performance is amazing, with the narrator doing an impression of every actor when he reads their quotes!
    • 4/5
      While this was a fun read as a huge fan of the LotR film trilogy, there may not be much here for people who don't fit that description. This book focuses hard on the machinations of Hollywood spending a large chunk of the book on the various maneuverings at the beginning trying to find a studio home for the films. While this was interesting, it comes at the expense of more time spent during the actual making of the films.
    • 4/5
      A terrific book that unfortunately dwindles as it goes on (much like a delicious meal with two many courses or portions too large). At first, the author's depiction of the behind-the-scenes drama prior to the movies being greenlit is absolutely riveting stuff, reminiscent of The Late Shift or And the Band Played On (with lesser stakes, granted). The thought of how close this terrific films (I'm a fan) came to non-existence made this gripping reading.

      Depictions of how the cast were cast (and how perfect were they!) moved me to tears at points, which is awfully unusually for a backstager. But by the middle of the book we ended up with a lot of information that would already be well-known to aficionados of Extended Edition DVDs' Special Features, and one quickly comes to realise that at this point in the story, the author has been invited to New Zealand and is witnessing first hand. And, oddly, the story becomes less urgent/historical/critical and more puff-piece. It's still very entertaining (esp. if you've only seen the films on screen and not immersed yourself in all-things LOTR) but not as moving as not as necessary.

      By the time he gets to The Hobbit movies, of which I was expecting almost as much information, it's swiftly dispatched in one or two chapters, about 5% of the book, which seems a slight disservice given the subtitle. It's not the Making of LOTR, it's Middle-Earth, and the Hobbit movies cover almost as much ground.

      So 5 stars for the first half, dwindling to 3, giving us a 4 average.

      (Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).