Journey to the Middle of the Earth

Taking the trip with The Lord of the Rings’ cast and crew.



Ring of fire: Frodo (Elijah Wood) contemplates his destiny in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Given that J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy has inspired a fanaticism that’s spanned most of the last 40 years, it makes sense that the cast and crew who worked on the books’ conversion to film seem to have been possessed by a similar kind of madness. Over the course of a press day for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, the first three-hour installment, you could hear Richard Taylor, who supervised the film’s copious digital effects, opining that Tolkien’s books represent "serious and real moments in our history," or composer Howard Shore revealing that the Gothic chants that accompany the film’s darkest moments are sung in "actual Elvish." And, of course, there’s the since-revealed fact that several cast members had themselves tattooed with the Elvish equivalent for the number nine, a reference to the nine members of the fellowship who pledge to keep the titular ring from falling into the wrong hands.

If Fellowship’s personnel have a tendency to occasionally forget that what they’re talking about is, after all, just a movie, it’s perhaps understandable, since in scope and scale it dwarfs any mere movie in recent history. Rather than shoot each part of the trilogy as a separate production, director Peter Jackson and company pushed for and were granted the resources to film the entire trilogy in one go. As Jackson puts it, "It was one big 15-month shoot of an 8- or 9-hour movie."

Jackson and producing partner Fran Walsh began not as rabid Tolkien fans, but rather with the desire to film an original large-scale fantasy film. "Fran and I started talking about an original script," Jackson recalls to the handful of journalists in the room, "and as we started to talk about ideas, we kept saying, ‘It should be like The Lord of the Rings, it should be a Lord of the Rings-type story.’ We had enough of those kind of conversations to finally pick up the phone and inquire about the rights." The next couple of years are a mini-epic in themselves, but after a stint in turnaround and a jump to New Line from Miramax (who tried to talk Jackson down to two or even a single film), they’d finally secured the required $270-plus million.

No one, it seems, can remember anything quite on LOTR’s scale, though two Back to the Future sequels were filmed simultaneously, and two sequels to The Matrix are currently under way. In fact, the excitement of breaking new cinematic ground seems to have been more of an attraction for the cast as a whole than the books themselves, which less than half of them had read beforehand. Now, of course, it’s a different story. The book, says Liv Tyler, who plays the elf Arwen, was "the bible" on set. "I’d say we all used the book even more than the script sometimes, because the scripts were constantly changing, and we were adding new lines and switching things around."

The "we" in that last bit is quite literal. Despite the project’s size and watertight production schedule — Viggo Mortensen recalls "three or four months, never less than six days a week, never less than 16 hours a day" just to meet the stop date — Jackson always left room for input from his cast. In Tyler’s case, that meant approaching co-screenwriter Philippa Boyens with a handful of lines from the appendix that she felt were crucial to her character; the end result was an entire new scene, which wound up in the third movie. Big-budget, effects-driven movies have become notorious for requiring their actors to do no more than hit their marks and look pretty, but on the LOTR set, Tyler says, collaboration "was required, like they expected it of us. It’s not that they weren’t going to do it for you, but because it was such a big cast, we needed to care as much about our characters and the film and our performances as they did, and that took some getting used to." (One imagines Armageddon wasn’t quite so actor-friendly.)

Taylor estimates that as much as 80 percent of the movie’s shots were digitally altered, including digitally re-saturation to make the film’s New Zealand locales look more like the perpetually moist countryside of the British Isles, Tolkien’s template for the terrain of Middle-earth. But perhaps precisely because so much of the movie is digital, you find yourself giving up the game of trying to decipher what’s real and what isn’t. Besides, for every shot that was accomplished with the latest technology, there’s one where the "effect" was achieved through decidedly more crude means. One of the movie’s most obvious trickeries is that used to reduce each of the actors playing hobbits to somewhere between 3-foot-6 and 4-foot-2, and simultaneously to make Ian McKellen’s Gandalf look somewhere in the vicinity of 7 foot. In one of Fellowship’s earliest scenes, Gandalf and hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm) bustle around each other in Bilbo’s tiny hobbit-hole, each handling what looks to be the same teapot but was in fact two separate scale models. But there are also shots where McKellen stood on a box and the actor playing a hobbit sank to his knees. The end result is often seamless, a mixture of tactile realism and digital wizardry. "Peter always said he wanted people not to feel like they were paying 10 bucks to see a movie," says producer Barrie Osborne, "but like they were buying a ticket to Middle-earth." McKellen admits he was "worried" about the film’s effects, only having seen them in rough form, but admits he’s won over by the final results. "It seems to me a film without any special effects at all," he says, "You are there, in Middle-earth."

See Sam Adams’ review.