Christopher Lee and Peter jackson they liked each other very well after meeting and were friends for a long time. However, there were several years in which Lee was confronted with Jackson because of the montage of ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’, to the point of boycotting the premiere of the film and withdrawing his word for several years.
The mess with the death of Saruman
To understand what exactly happened, we must first go back to ‘The Two Towers’, since Saruman, the character played by Lee, was going to die at the end of the film. That in itself was an important change from the book of Tolkien, as Saruman appears in that ending which Jackson decided to change because it was anticlimactic. The problem came when Saruman’s death did not fit him there either, commenting at the time the following to Ain’t It Cool News:
The problem is that the sequence was originally shot for ‘The Two Towers’. Since ‘The Two Towers’ couldn’t take seven minutes of closing time after Helm’s Deep, we thought it would be a good idea to save it for the start of ‘Return of the King’.
That decision already bothered Lee, but the actor ended up accepting that his character’s farewell would come in the last film of the trilogy. Things got more complicated when Jackson was aware that he was getting in the way of ‘Return of the King’, since “it felt like the opening scenes brought closure to last year’s movie instead of starting a new one“. For this reason, Saruman’s death ended up being left out of the cinematographic montage, which angered Lee.
The actor himself pointed out years later in a talk with students at the University of Dublin that “they showed us the movies in private and when the third came I couldn’t believe what I saw because it didn’t appear in it“. He was not the only one who complained about Jackson’s decision, because many fans complained about the lack of closure for Saruman in the trilogy.
It’s it happened even before the movie was releasedbecause the information was leaked and Lee then stated that “if you want to know why you would have to ask the New Line company or the director Peter Jackson and his associates, because I still don’t really know why. I can’t say anything more because I signed a confidentiality agreement and kept my word“.
To Lee also did not like the solution of including the scene in the extended version of the filmbecause he considered that artistic integrity was thus being sacrificed in order to continue squeezing the work financially, something that in that talk at the University of Dublin he summarized as follows:
No one could understand it. There were millions of people on the Internet, not just fans of Tolkien or the movies, but everyone who had seen the first two was saying “What happened to Saruman?” Buy the extended version on dvd.
They made peace
Jackson admitted that he knew that Lee was very angry, but it seems that time heals everything, because the actor ended up agreeing to return to the orders of the director of ‘Get me those ghosts’ in the trilogy of ‘The Hobbit’, an agreement that was closed in January 2011 but that was surely in the making for a longer time.
And it is that Lee was willing to participate in an adaptation of ‘The Hobbit’ already in 2008 (although lending voice to Smaug and not retaking the role of Saruman as he would finally do), although at that time he said that he had no interest in returning to shoot in New Zealand. It is true that at that time the director was going to be William of the Bull but also that Jackson was already actively involved in the project.
In fact, Jackson even joked about his feud with Lee during the premiere of ‘The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey’noting that “I talked to Christopher the other day about coming to the premiere and he said “Am I still in the movie?” And this time I could say yes“. The grudges had been forgotten by then and Jackson ended up writing an emotional letter when Lee died in 2015 which highlighted the following:
There will never be another Christopher Lee. He has a special place in the history of cinema and in the hearts of millions of fans around the world. The world will be a worse place without him.