John Boorman’s The Lord of the Rings

After making Leo the Last for United Artists, Boorman was asked by head of production David Picker to make a film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. The prospect of creating an adaptation of Tolkien's seminal work intrigued the director, who would go on to say:It was a heady, impossible proposition. If film-making for me is, as I have often said, exploration, setting oneself impossible problems and failing to solve them, then the Rings saga qualifies on all counts.Recognizing a kindred spirit in then-architect Rospo Pallenberg, Boorman flew the aspiring scriptwriter to Ireland and spent six months developing a script with him. To accomplish this task, Pallenberg pasted every page of The Lord of the Rings to the four walls of a room in Boorman's house. They then made charts of characters, chronologies, and elaborate cross references - tracking character's movements across a map of Middle-earth they had devised. In these early stages, they also experimented with many of their own unique ideas, one of which was casting Tolkien to appear at the beginning of the film in order to introduce the story and provide background detail.

However, the script would be written in a time when a smattering of British films had failed in the United States. American filmmakers set their sights on films with American locales, making the prospect of producing a prohibitively expensive Lord of the Rings Film infeasible. After facing rejection from Disney and other studios, Tolkien wrote and asked Boorman how he would do the film. Boorman replied that it would be filmed in live action, which was to Tolkien's great relief.

However, Tolkien's relief would go unfounded, as United Artists would go on to produce an animated The Lord of the Rings film directed by Ralph Bakshi in 1978. Boorman could never bring himself to watch the film and, to his relief, Tolkien would pass away in 1973 before having the opportunity to see it. However, the director would join forces with Rospo Pallenberg again to create the Arthurian epic Excalibur, wherein many concepts from their Lord of the Rings script were used.

Though Boorman was disappointed that the film didn't get made at the time, he was later grateful that it didn't. More than thirty years later in 2012 he said,[We] couldn’t get it made. And really I’m so pleased we didn’t because if I’d made it, rather clumsily at the time, it would mean that Pete Jackson‘s fantastic trilogy would not have been made. So he owes a lot to me.

John Boorman's The Lord of the Rings was planned to run as one long movie with an intermission. The first half of the script was largely based on The Fellowship of the Ring, but many things were changed and added. Following the intermission, writers Boorman and Pallenberg "dropped things out" and "invented as they went along".

The story makes many departures from the novel, such as the trip to Rivendell is framed as a drunken vacation spurred on by Gandalf (who has just finished telling Frodo to put on the ring only if he really needs to) after the appearance of the Ring Wraiths in the Shire during Bilbo's farewell party. Their journey to Imladris is further enhanced by an obese Merry's jolly belching and a scene in which Frodo eludes being captured by two farmers by performing acrobatics and using the ring to disappear, all while taunting them with poetry.

The story includes other unfamiliar events, such as when Frodo and Galadriel have sex near the Mirror of Galadriel. However, the Hobbit can hardly be blamed for succumbing to her seduction, as when the Fellowship first lay eyes on her, Legolas breaks into a bird-like dance while singing of her beauty and Boromir throws back his cloak to reveal his muscles. Later on the Fellowship goes on to beat up Gimli (also known as Lord of the Axe) outside of Moria, and Aragorn dual-wields both shards of Narsil, with the hilt-less half having a makeshift leather handle.

Other additions include leather-clad beekeepers weaponizing bees at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, Aragorn killing Denethor, Frodo and Sam being burrowed through the walls of Mordor by a helpful tree, and Frodo being hailed as the "Lord of the Ring" after the One Ring is destroyed.

A copy of the script currently resides in Marquette University's Tolkien collection.

1. Esta ficha se ha importado inicialmente de TolkienGateway.net el día 26/05/2026.