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

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

Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth

Preview
Try Premium Plus free
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

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

By: Ian Nathan, Andy Serkis - introduction
Narrated by: Tristram Wymark
Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

About this listen

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’.

Direction & Production Entertainment & Celebrities Entertainment & Performing Arts Film & TV History & Criticism Celebrity Entertainment Magic Magic Users Fiction Thought-Provoking Fantasy

Listeners also enjoyed...

Why We Love Middle-earth cover art
Blood, Sweat & Chrome cover art
Reading the Silver Screen cover art
Raising Hell cover art
Secrets of the Force cover art
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls cover art
The Silmarillion cover art
The Fall of Númenor cover art
Beren and Lúthien cover art
Tales from the Perilous Realm cover art
Unfinished Tales cover art
Daniel Day Lewis cover art
The Secret History of Star Wars cover art
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe cover art
The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years cover art
As You Wish cover art

Critic reviews

‘This book truly is the definitive history of the Lord of the Rings films. Nearly every single element of the productions is coverd here, from writing, to shooting, to Oscar-night jitters. Nathan’s prose does exactly what you want from a book like this: it makes you feel as if you’re really there.’
SlashFilm

‘In breezy and often cheeky prose, Nathan tells a grand story worthy of the annals of great filmmaking… there is much to learn, to chuckle over and to admire as Jackson and his band of indefatigable Kiwis face down the naysayers.’
Daily Mail

All stars
Most relevant
Well read (although Tolkien fans will spot a number of mis-pronunciations!) and informative story of the development and realisation of the LOTRs film trilogy. The Hobbit is very much treated as ‘and then he made the Hobbit’ with far less content, but given it was (in my opinion) far less of an achievement, I think the balance was right. Highly recommend for all Tolkien fans.

Excellent and informative.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Excellent book, an in depth discovery and history of the making of the films, right up to Amazons announcement of a show.
The only issue is the reader - who has clearly never seen any of the rings or hobbit movies. He can’t pronounce any of the names or places, which is embarrassing - you’d think of you were going to spend 22 hours reading a book on a set of films, you’d at least watch one of them.

Great book, shame about the reader

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

As an avid LotR fan, this was thrilling! So many new details and stories on the making of the trilogy and told in a forthright and honest manner. My only issue was the performer clearly has never watched the films or read the books as his pronunciation of characters and place names (so important to JRRT) was truly woeful and distracting.

Loved the content!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

A fantastic look at the laborious process of getting the amazing LOTR trilogy made. It really goes to show how this was the biggest low-budget film trilogy ever made.

Great for any fan of the films!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

As a huge lover of the lord of the rings ESPECIALLY the documentaries provided in the extended edition DVDs, this book brought me more knowledge about the making of LOTR, the cast and crew and the difficulties they faced that were only hinted at in the documentaries. I have always had a huge respect for Peter Jackson and his team’s work and during the book’s progression I found myself ping-ponging between thinking of them as ordinary people doing extraordinary things and thinking of them as godly. What they did with middle earth is amazing.

TL;DR I really enjoyed this book.

The extended extended documentaries

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

See more reviews