Lord of the Rings on Film

Lesson 7: Places in Middle-earth

New Zealand locations III

The Dead Marshes

Explanation by Andrew Lesnie, director of cinematography from the official film site: http://www.lordoftherings.net

"Peter Jackson wanted an ominous feel to the Marshes…He needed a misty, eerie, unsettling reality where there is no escape. A vast, never-ending landscape."

Initially, Jackson and Lesnie considered the large marshes near Te Anau, on New Zealand's South Island. But they soon realized that location wasn't a realistic option.

"We discovered that it is incredibly difficult to negotiate those marshes on foot, and a step in the wrong direction resulted in sinking up to your waist," Lesnie remembers. "We also heard from local farmers that some livestock disappear altogether. Consequently the decision was made to create our own marshes, for practical and safety reasons."

That meant building a water-ready facility in their Wellington studios.

"Apart from one aerial shot of the real marshes, the rest of the Dead Marshes was created on three 'wet sets', one indoors and two outside," Lesnie explains. "The biggest exterior set was a flooded carpark spanning thousands of square meters and skillfully dressed by the art department with structural landmasses and moss and vegetation transported from the real marshlands.

"The set was strategically positioned facing north to guarantee maximum backlight over the course of each shooting day, and massive sky backdrops or bluescreens were backed by shipping containers and scaffold ran along the north, east and western edges of the set."

Shooting was divided into distinct tanks, depending on the demands for the particular scene.

"The majority of the sequences were filmed on the big, exterior wet set," Lesnie says. "The smaller outdoor set was created in the studio carpark to offer more control for WETA Workshop's 'spectral corpses' [the "dead" who give the marshes their name]. Night and pre-dawn scenes were filmed on the interior set in order to avoid subjecting the actors and crew to freezing night temperatures."

But even indoors or on the warmest days, shooting the marsh scenes was a chilly affair for all concerned, especially the actors.

"Their clothing would become sodden as the day progressed," Lesnie recalls. "Elijah, Sean and Andy Serkis are wonderful actors who never complain, but it was a fragile and dangerous environment to work in, and everybody could feel the dank moisture permeating their bodies. Filming Frodo falling in and the immediate aftermath required Elijah to be soaked and Sean and Andy to be wet for hours at a time.

"I don't remember how cold the water was, but even though the actors had wetsuits and crew wore waders or wetsuits, it was bloody cold! You could feel it no matter what you had on."

The only antidote? "Plenty of hot soup," Lesnie says with a laugh.

As for creating the eerie world of lost souls--the spectral corpses that drift throughout the Dead Marshes-Lesnie credits his own crew and Richard Taylor's WETA Workshop.

Taylor's team crafted prosthetic figures, and in some cases even used real people for the most realistic bodies, while Lesnie's experienced but water-logged cinematographers Richard Bluck and Brian Van't Hul shot the images for posterity.

By using nets, shading and polarization techniques, Lesnie was able to curb the natural reflectiveness of the dead marshes and achieve just the right opacity for the water.

Smoke machines sent steady mists floating across the set to add atmosphere and by using the massive exterior tank in conjunction with computer-generated extensions, Lesnie was able to convey the scope of the marshes required by Jackson.

Even Lesnie admits he was impressed by the realism of the sets. "When you have people of the genius of production designer Grant Major, art director Dan Hennah and Richard Taylor creating environments that come alive, sometimes you would climb into the tank wondering if you were ever going to get out!"

Also see http://www.jasons.co.nz/lordoftherings/l... for details of which areas in New Zealand were used as locations for the trilogy.

Diolla le! I hope you enjoyed the lesson. Onto the next...

Bibliography

Tolkien, J.R.R., The Lord of the Rings. Houghton and Mifflin, 2001.
Peter Jackson (dir.), The Lord of the Rings. New Line Cinema, 2001-3
Karen Wynn Fonstad, Atlas of Middle Earth (revised edition). Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

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