Lord of the Rings on Film

Lesson 7: Places in Middle-earth

New Zealand locations II

Weathertop: explanation by Brigitte Wuest, head sculptor on the team that created the statues of the kings on Weathertop, from the official film site: http://www.lordoftherings.net

"Throughout the production, the process of creating the sculptures for the set was always the same. We would get the drawings from Alan Lee and he created these wonderful sketches from which to work from. We would then make a maquette out of plasticine. A maquette is a reduced model, to scale, of the final piece. Then we would show it to Alan for his approval.

With the model approved, we would start by marking out the center lines of the maquette and then mark the same centerlines on big blocks of polystyrene. Then we scale it up, draw the figure on the polystyrene and cut out the rough shape first with the hot wire. To give the figure more shape, we would use a chainsaw and some sandpaper. When we started getting to the finer detail, we would then use a knife and more sandpaper.

Alan was there the whole time and we worked together very well. He could describe or draw the feeling the sculpture had to evoke and I was able to read the emotions he put forth in his sketches. Alan has such a fine style of drawing. He once said to a woman who was trying to draw a rock, that she must feel the rock in order to draw it. Alan really feels the figures, the person he draws, they come alive. When I look at his drawings, I felt like our department can bring them to life when we re-create them as three-dimensional figures.

Once Alan told me the meaning behind the statue of the broken king at Weathertop. Of the four statues of the kings that were there, we replicated this one in a larger scale so that we could shoot Frodo beside it. Frodo crawls under the statue and we have the king’s arm stretched over him. This shows that Frodo is protected, yet the king is broken and that shows the king’s vulnerability as well.

In order to achieve a weathered look, Alan had to distress the statues on Weathertop using a hot wire. He did it himself, as he didn’t think that the creators of the pieces would be happy intentionally destroying their work. I must say that, in the beginning, it was quite difficult to watch that happen. Those four statues were the first ones my team worked on. It was quite unusual to see them all finished nicely and then wrecked. But later on we got used to it. When we saw them on set, we realized it was how they had to look and it all just felt right.

At one point, Alan got very busy and didn’t have time to do as many sketches. That’s when he would leave some design decisions up to us. Sometimes he would create a basic sketch, tell us what was needed and say, 'Come up with something and show me the maquette.' That was fun when we got to do that"P>

Edoras (Rohan)

Explanation by Mike Heffernan, construction manager for Edoras.

"The set for Edoras was located at Mt. Sunday, in the Rangatata Valley on the South Island of New Zealand, and it was about a 30 minute drive to the nearest town. We started building in March 2000 and finished seven months later.

The main buildings of Edoras were built on a rock sticking out of a valley floor carved by glaciers thousands of years ago. Some mornings there would be ice on the ground and it would be freezing cold, but it was absolutely stunning. The scenery was just breathtaking.

Edoras was built on such hard rock, and in such a high wind area, that we had to get a drilling team to put rock anchors into the ground. On top of the rock anchors we erected a steel frame, bolted it to the anchors and covered that with four by two or two by four lumber and plywood.

The wind was the biggest challenge. You could get 120 knot winds whistling down the valley, but there were only two days when we couldn’t work because of the wind. We had a full time safety officer there, as we were actually working on the side of a cliff face. Before we started construction, we put all these safety points and clip on points around the site. If there was an accident, we had our safety man ready to go.

Peter Jackson came down two or three times during the construction, just to have a look around and work out what he was going to shoot. If he had any problems he’d go through production designer Grant Major or conceptual designer Alan Lee and they’d come back and redesign.

We had about 50 people in the construction department at Edoras. Two foremen, 20 odd chippies (carpenters), 10 to 15 hammer hands and 10 to 15 laborers. We had an engineer as well doing all the welding. And there were probably 10 people in the greens department for the duration.

On an average day, we’d get up at about five in the morning, have breakfast and jump on the bus at about quarter to six. The bus would arrive on the site at about seven o’clock and we would start work. We had a cook on the set and at 10 o’clock we’d have breakfast. Then we’d work until about one o’clock, have lunch and work right through to six. After that, everybody would jump back on the bus and we would head into town, getting back about 7 at night.

The main roof of the Golden Hall took about three weeks to make. We had to buy 25 acres of wheat and get it cut in the old style so that we got the long stalks to make the thatching on the roofs.

A lot of the detail work on the outside of the building was created in Wellington and shipped down to us. To get other architectural features, like the horses, we would cut out a piece of plywood in the shape and then put polystyrene on both sides of it. Then the carvers would carve the horse’s face into it.

When we arrived on the location we had to remove a lot of the natural vegetation, so we set up a big nursery area and it was all kept alive and fed. When we finished, we had to re-establish everything that was there before we came. So we had to put everything back, plus of course we had to bring truckloads of other stuff in that didn’t survive and replant the whole area. That was one of the biggest jobs, getting the site back to its original condition. It took us another year after we finished filming there to return the site to what it was before we arrived.

We worked closely with the New Zealand Department of Conservation. They would come out every couple of weeks just to make sure what we were doing was within our agreement. They were totally happy with what we were doing there."

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