I wanted to do something fantastical, and I thought that that would be so much fun to take that sort of Sinbad genre and combine it with computer effects. Because Jurassic Park had come out. We had seen the great dinosaurs had now been done, but to actually take fantastical monsters and swashbuckling heroes, and something like Sinbad, and do a movie like that, I thought would be really neat. So I started to think about that being our next film after Frighteners, and needed to write a story — didn’t have a story — and started to talk to Fran (Walsh) about it, and we kept referencing Lord of the Rings all the time. We just kept thinking, saying, “Well, it’s got to be like Lord of the Rings,” or “It should be just like that, but like Lord of the Rings, something like that’s got to happen.” After a few days of doing this, we thought, “Well, why don’t we find out about Lord of the Rings? We talk about it all the time, and it was just an absolute assumption that Lord of the Rings would be tied up, unavailable. Just assumed that. I mean, it’s such a big title, but I thought it was worth a phone call. So eventually, I called my agent and said could he find out who has got The Lord of the Rings rights.