Pen to Paper

I’ve been away from the site for a while, and I’m afraid I’ve just got a short post today. I recently moved from Indianapolis to Seattle, driving the whole way myself. I swung south through California for warm weather and to see a friend from high school, and managed to go the whole way safely (despite significantly reduced visibility pretty much all around the car). I’m still getting settled in here & looking for a job, but I’m going to *try* to start posting regularly.

In the meantime, I have this thought for you: with enough skill and effort, you can make almost anything happen. This afternoon, out of curiosity, I went to imdb.com and checked the budgets for the Lord of the Rings movies. They’re not the official figures, but the estimates were $93 million for Fellowship of the Ring, $94 million for Two Towers, and $94 million for Return of the King. $281 million total.

If you’ve seen the movies, I don’t need to tell you how amazing they were, both visually and from a storytelling perspective. The fact that they did this on a relatively small budget makes the movies all the more impressive. How was this possible?

I think this has at least two important lessons: 1) Buy quality, not flash, and 2) Don’t settle for less than your goals.

Most of the cast and crew for the films were exceptionally talented, but relatively unknown (I think Liv Tyler was one of the biggest names attached before the first movie came out, if you can imagine a time when that was possible). Can you imagine the Lord of the Rings trilogy with George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Angelina Jolie involved? I can’t either.

The documentaries and special features on the DVDs show Peter Jackson’s rigor and devotion to capturing his vision. Most films would shoot a scene a few times and move on; Christopher Lee tells of spending a full day walking down a set of steps over and over until it was right.

You may not have the world handed to you on a platter. You probably won’t – I know it hasn’t happened for me yet. I believe, though, that with enough talent and devotion to the end product you can reach your dreams, whatever they are.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Life, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.