Harvey Weinstein is a mark of disgrace in the entertainment industry. The former producer is now a convicted s*x offender and is now serving two sentences of 23 years and 16 years, which must be served separately. Given the fact that Harvey Weinstein is 71 years old, the disgraced producer is most likely to pass away in prison.
However, apart from his crimes, Harvey Weinstein is known to be difficult to work with and The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson can vouch for this. while Harvey Weinstein proved to be a huge roadblock in Peter Jackson’s vision for the beautiful film franchise, the filmmaker found a subtle yet hilarious way to get back at his foe.
Harvey Weinstein Threatened to Replace Peter Jackson with Quentin Tarantino
Fans of The Lord of the Rings cannot think of a better director to bring J.R.R Tolkien’s books to life. But if Harvey Weinstein got his way, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino might have had his name attached to the franchise and not Peter Jackson. Talking to The Independent, Jackson’s manager, Ken Kamins revealed how Weinstein would threaten to have Jackson removed from the project if he didn’t condense his vision enough.
“Harvey would go from acting empathetically to turning on a dime into Mr. Hyde and would threaten Peter. He’d threaten to get Quentin Tarantino to direct if Peter couldn’t do it in one film that was two-and-a-half hours – which was the exact opposite of what he initially told us he wanted.”
After a ton of back and forth, Weinstein and Jackson were able to get through the arguments. In a win-win situation, Jackson neither lost his job nor did he have to give up on his vision for the franchise. However, some resentment was always there between the two which Jackson let out quite creatively.
Peter Jackson Lets His Anger Out
It’s only fair to say that Jackson had a lot of in-built anger thanks to Weinstein’s unfair threat. However, instead of taking the producer to the ring, he decided to take a more creative approach to let all of his frustration out – art.
Jackson took a few hidden jabs at Weinstein in the films. For starters, in the end credits of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Jackson placed the executive producers’ names (Weinstein, Bob Weinstein, and Mark Ordesky) in front of a figure fighting two giant trolls. This was his way of showing his battle against the Weinstein brothers.
Next, the filmmaker had the prop department make an Orc mask made by taking Weinstein’s face as an inspiration.
Elijah Woods, who plays Frodo in the films, recalled,
“It’s funny, this was recently spoken about because Dom [Monaghan] and Bill [Boyd] have a podcast, The Friendship Onion. They were talking to Sean Astin about his first memory of getting to New Zealand…He had seen these Orc masks. And one of the Orc masks — and I remember this vividly — was designed to look like Harvey Weinstein as a sort of a f*ck you”.
Here is your reminder that there are much better (and more hilarious) ways of taking revenge on the people who hurt you!
You can stream The Lord of the Rings trilogy on Max.
Source: The Independent
