Peter Jackson Almost Got Hypnosis To Enjoy ‘Lord Of The Rings’ As A Fan Again

Bringing the Lord of the Rings to screens is now Amazon’s problem, but Peter Jackson will never truly be able to shake free of the J.R.R. Tolkien series and its seismic impact the films had on the Hollywood landscape. Amazon Prime’s hefty budgeted TV series is gearing up for release later this summer, but the director of three film adaptations of Tolkein’s work is certainly interested in how the series will shake out.

And unlike those movies — and a few Hobbit-related films to boot — Jackson won’t have anything to do with the show. Which means he can enjoy them as a fan. Well, maybe. It’s extremely hard to separate work from ring-related recreational viewing when you already have several films set in the same universe. And it’s something Jackson has grappled with in the Tolkien-verse before.

As IndieWire detailed, Jackson appeared on the Hollywood Reporter podcast Awards Chatter and lamented that he put so much time and effort into the film trilogy that he never truly got to enjoy them as an impartial observer.

“When we did The Lord of the Rings movies I always felt I was the unlucky person who never got to see as a coming-out-of-the-blue film,” Jackson says. “By the time there were screening I was immersed in it for five or six years. It was such a loss for me not be able to see them like everyone else.

Jackson’s award-winning efforts for the films were obviously worth all that work, but he claims he really did try to figure out a way to enjoy them for himself. And he landed on one thing: hypnosis.

“I actually did seriously considered going to some hypnotherapy guy to hypnotize me to make me forget about the films and the work I had done over the last six or seven years so I could sit and enjoy them. I didn’t follow through with it, but I did talk to [British mentalist] Derren Brown about that and he thought he could do it.”

It’s difficult to say that Jackson is kidding when he uses words like “seriously” and also name-drops a hypnotist, so it’s safe to say that he really did some preliminary digging here. But it would be extremely interesting to live in a world where a legendary director was living out his own Severance-like existence just so he can enjoy Lord of the Rings movies like the rest of us.

[via THR]