The New Hobbit Hole

This is a continuation of the infamous thread New Zealander Builds Hobbit Hole originally posted on January 26, 2001 by John Farson, who at the time undoubtedly thought he had found a rather obscure article that would elicit a few replies and die out. Without knowing it, he became the founder of the Hobbit Hole. For reasons incomprehensible to some, the thread grew to over 4100 replies. It became the place for hobbits and friends of hobbits to chit chat and share LoTR news and views, hang out, and talk amongst ourselves in the comfort of familiar surroundings.

In keeping with the new posting guidelines, the thread idea is continuing here, as will the Green Dragon Inn, our more structured spin-off thread, as soon as we figure out how to move all the good discussion that has been had there. As for the Hobbit Hole, we will just start fresh, bringing only a few mathoms such as the picture above with us to make it feel like home, and perhaps a walk down memory lane:

To fun but heartfelt debates about the integrity and worth of some of the characters…

So as you can see, everything JRR Tolkien (and Peter Jackson) is welcome here in our New Row, our soon-to-be familiar New Hobbit Hole…; philosophy, opinion, good talk and frequent silliness.

Perhaps an interview or two will help keep you awake:

FORGING THE RING: BARRIE OSBORNE AND RICHARD TAYLOR

12.12.02
By Devin Faraci
Contributing sources:

Producer Barrie Osborne is no stranger to CHUD readers. The New York native also produced Face/Off and The Matrix.

With him in this interview is Richard Taylor, director of the Weta special effects company. He has worked on every Peter Jackson movie since Braindead (known in the States as DeadAlive), and won two Academy Awards for Weta's work on The Fellowship of the Ring.

Q: How would the special effects of the movies look if they were started development today? Has there been a change since you started production back in 99?

Taylor: I don't think necessarily they would be visually improved, because I think we fulfill people's vision fully with what we were trying to achieve. Gollum had its first breakthrough in the translucency that was achieved earlier this year. That brought him to life and we just pulled him in by the skin of our teeth. But I do think that the reality we wanted Middle Earth to possess is definitely there in the films. There's no doubt that there would be greater speed if we were to start it today. But it has a freshness and a beauty and a clarity that came through the personal interaction as opposed to the technical interaction.

Osborne: In addition to that I can say that between film one and film two we totally upgraded Weta to a Linux, PC base. We rebought almost every single work station in the facility and greatly expanded the Weta capacity for rendering. There's an amazing, staggering amount of rendering and processing power that it took to be able to generate Gollum and Treebeard and all the Ents and all the Uruk-Hai on the screen.

Taylor: It's one of the largest processing powers in the world now. It's incredible to think that in the backwaters of Miramar in New Zealand there's this huge thing coming awake. They had to put in their own power station in the neighborhood because it's been flattening the local batteries.

Q: The battle at Helm's Deep is an amazing scene. How much of that is CGI, how much of that is real?

Taylor: Six years ago we sat with Peter on the floor of his house, eating fish and chips, and he said he wanted to make Lord of the Rings like Tolkien imagined. One of the things is that the quintessential Tolkien battles are battles of epic proportion unlike anything we had seen on screen before. Spartacus attempted it with extras, and there's been Japanese movies that have attempted it with tens of thousands of people, but never on the sort of scale that Tolkien imagined. Helm's Deep is our first opportunity to really bring those forces to bear. Primarily it was achieved through human interaction: a hundred Uruk-Hai, two hundred and fifty Rohan, a hundred elves on set each day each night. Striving to get all the foreground interaction on massive sets - they built the whole of Helm's Deep on a quarry at life size. Then it was built at quarter scale and thirty fifths scale.

But then a huge amount of digital augmentation was started through the use of Massive, which is asoftware written by a young New Zealander called Stephen Regalus who works at Weta Digital. That program significantly has changed the face of battle scenes in cinema. Every one of those digital agents draws from his own repertoire of military moves and can analyze intelligently how to take on his foe in battle. That adds a real clarity and reality to the scenes that you see at Helm's Deep.

Osborne: The amazing thing is that the digital figures hold up really close to the camera, but a lot of the people in the foreground are stunt guys or actors. To give you a sense of how long that took us to shoot - we shot that live action sequence over four months. There was one poor unit out there shooting nights for probably three of those four months.

Taylor: At Helm's Deep we had forced rain and that was incredibly difficult. Getting hundreds of people into wet prosthetics every day.

Osborne: Every night!

Taylor: Yeah, right. We shot twelve weeks at night, which is a long time to be shooting at that capacity. You're dealing with hundreds of extras, trying to keep them warm - and alive! The sleep deprivation, the physical exhaustion those guys endured was immense. There's an interesting thing: a huge part of the Uruk-Hai army was Samoan people. Samoan and Maori, the native nationality of New Zealand. They're extremely musical and we would have these guys in full prosthetics, full armor, on ukuleles, strumming out whole dance routines they had figured out to keep themselves warm in midwinter New Zealand.

Osborne: Those guys were great, because they started with us early on in production, on the south island, a lot of them, and flew themselves to Wellington to be in that sequence.

Taylor: They paid for their own accommodation, their own travel.

Q: Sounds like you got a savings.

Osborne: They wanted to come up there! We were going to cast locally. They were so inspiring with the music that Richard's talking about. They were unhappy with the performance of the elves and they decided to rally and fire up the elves by doing a haka, which is this Maori war chant.

Q: When making these you knew the majority of your success rested on the first one. If the first one tanked, no one would see two and three. How did you deal with this Barrie, from a money angle, and Richard from a technical angle?

Osborne: It goes for any movie you make - you have to really care, and I think most people in the film business really care about what they are doing. This picture we had the opportunity to pour in a lot of care and love for the film and we developed a great camaraderie. If you look at the workmanship on screen that Richard's team brought to the film, where they even put inside Bernard Hill's [King Theoden] armor, there are his marks as king of Rohan.

Taylor: All of his regal motifs. It's interesting when you have an actor on set you have to get them under the mantle of the character, they have to feel like they are getting the weight of the culture dropped on to them. So we went to great efforts to detail even the insides of the armor. It sounds carried away, but it allows the actor to feel like they are actually entering that world a lot more easily.

Osborne: You put that much care and devotion into the film. I feel like I do that on every film that I do. You never become paralyzed by the fear of whether the movie is going to perform or not, you just put the best effort in that you can. Because we did have such a collective group that put much effort into it - one of the beauties of doing it in New Zealand was that this group of people, in that team there's not the rigid demarcation of labor. That devotion to the film shows on the screen, then it's up to the audience. And yes, if the film tanked all this effort put into the film - all three films - would have gone down the tubes.

Q: A year ago Lord of the Rings was an unknown entity. This year it's a known element. What are the expectations facing you?

Osborne: It's an interesting challenge. On the first film you have to live up to the expectations of the Tolkien fans. On the second film you've built up an audience and a huge expectation, and you have to deliver on that. I feel confident that we have so it's really not an issue. It's always a struggle to finish a movie, and I remember going right up to the wire on this film, being very nervous about when we would complete. But I wasn't nervous about the quality of the movie.

Q: Peter Jackson said you completed it three weeks ago. What were you still doing three weeks ago?

Osborne: Everything you can imagine. We were scoring and at the same time we were cutting parts of the movie.

Taylor: We actually shot some pick ups four weeks ago, of a helmet dropping on the ground. People could find that as a criticism of Peter, that he must therefore in some way be disorganized. Barrie and I don't believe that all. We set up a facility that allows Peter to craft this film to the very end. I see that as a strength in Barrie and Peter's relationship. Our facility at Weta has been set up for fifteen years now to service a number of films, but specifically Peter's, so that he can treat it like a ball of clay, meld it and shift it and move it through the process as he goes through his own journey. You can't expect to storyboard Lord of the Rings six years earlier and stick to it like a blueprint. It's too complex a journey. And if it requires a pick up three weeks before the release date, then so be it!

Q: Do you think it's harder to get Oscar recognition on a sequel?

Osborne: If the film is nominated and recognized then great. It's a reaffirmation of the amount of effort and creativity that went into making the movie. You can't dwell on it. Is it harder? Godfather II probably performed a lot better than Godfather I at the Oscars. In a sense Lord of the Rings gives up the opportunity to introduce new characters. In film two for example we have Gollum and Treebeard, which are great CG characters. Gollum, which is backed up by what I think is unique - a soul that comes from Andy Serkis, the actor that portrays Gollum, which is a depth I don't believe you see in any other CG character I've ever seen.

Taylor: We have a saying at Weta: It's about heartware, not hardware. At the end of the day it's got to be about the heart, it's got to be about the soul. Why is Gollum different from the other digital characters that we've seen on the screen over the last five years? It's because you honestly can feel that character, Smeagol/Gollum, has a soul.

Q: How does the tone change in Return of the King?

Osborne: For me, I've seen a cut of film three, and film three is a very dramatic, emotionally moving movie. Also of epic scale. The major shift is that it resolves all these characters. One of the blessings of doing the movies all at once is that you get to look at film two, as we did at the beginning of this year, and film three, as we are doing now, almost like they are movies you made years ago. You can revisit it to see where it is strong, where it's weak. So the film will evolve, even though there's a cut. A great cut of the film right now. When Peter sits down in that editing room in January…

Q: How has the success of the first film affected you in the past year?

Taylor: It hasn't changed it on a personal level. Down in New Zealand, it's a very real world. We've been on this amazing journey with Peter and Barrie, but life continues at the end of the day. There's this old saying, "The emperor will never remember you for your medals or your diplomas. He will only remember you for your scars." It's about getting back into battle.

Winning two Oscars for our facility was a wonderful experience. Beyond that you have to continue on with your work if you're going to continue on as a professional technician. The one thing it's really brought for us is the recognition that allows us to work on other great projects.

Q: Such as?

Taylor: We're on Master and Commander at the moment. We're doing The Last Samurai, we're doing Peter Pan. It's really wonderful.

Q: What is the future of this franchise? Is New Line pushing for the Hobbit or the Silmarillion?

Osborne: I think we're all ready to take a break from it. I imagine there will be a move for someone to do something with it, but we're ready to take a break.

Q: Would you be interested in coming back eventually?

Osborne: [smiles] Possibly.

The above and the following are from Cinematic Happenings Under Development (Chud.com):

THE TAMING OF SMEAGOL: ANDY SERKIS INTERVIEW

12.15.02
By Devin Faraci

There is a lot to love in The Two Towers, but for my money it's easy to pick out the best thing in it: Gollum. An amazing creation of pixels and personality, Gollum is the first CG character that has character. He stole every scene he was in, and not through flashy animation but through the brilliant work of actor Andy Serkis.

The Two Towers is Serkis' first big role and ironically he is never really seen in it. But that isn't stopping New Line from pushing his performance as best of the year in the Oscar race.

Q: There's been talk of you being pushed for an Oscar nomination. Do you think that's plausible?

Serkis: That's a bit of an awkward one to start off with. I'll tell you what though, we were just talking about this. For instance, John Hurt was nominated under all that make-up for The Elephant Man.

Q: But he was onscreen. The Academy voters are - well, they're old farts. Do you worry that you are paving the way for the next digital character to get a nod, without getting one yourself?

Serkis: The way I look at it is: It's an acted role. I created the voice and the physicality and it's not latex stuck all over my face, it's pixels. It's like wearing virtual prosthetics.

Q: And you can see yourself in the character?

Serkis: Oh, majorly. The whole facial structure of the character is based around mine. I went through a long process - and that's the best way to go about it, I'll talk you through the whole thing. It is kind of a long thing, but if you bear with me it might demystify it all a bit.

It started with Peter's vision of Gollum as a CG character with an otherworldliness about him, but he wanted it to be completely actor-led. None of us knew how we would achieve that. It was going to be he wanted an actor playing him emotionally, psychologically, physically, making all those character decisions as an actor. We shot every single scene conventionally. I was there, you have the reciprocal energy you have as actors working off each. Which is something that had never been done before, I mean truly. Not just standing there being an eyeline, but real acting. We'd always shoot two versions - we would shoot a version with me in, and a version with me out, which left avenues to work on with the animators. One was that they rotoscoped, which is painting over me, frame by frame. So for instance, all the interactive stuff, me holding a cloak or pulling Frodo out of the water or the fight coming down off the rock, we did. They literally painted over every move.

In the version where I stepped out and did the voice off, there's this kind of void that they act to, which I then fill, in post-production - which I have been doing all this year - in the motion capture studio. Which is putting a suit with dots all over it; the dots refer to joints and whatnot, anything that can move. Those dots are picked up by cameras and fed into computers. We had the plates, the footage of what we shot, with the hole where I was, with Sean and Elijah looking down at me, and then onscreen I could see a computer generated image of Gollum. A very simplified mannequin of him which moved in real time to my movements. It could pick up incredibly sensitive movements. So if I moved my right arm the puppet on screen would move it at the same time. I redid every single scene, putting myself back into the void, acting off of Sean and Elijah.

Q: It's a very athletic looking role, did you have to train for it?

Serkis: As an actor I tend to play physical roles. That aspect was kind of there. I'm a rock climber, which is incredibly useful. And I have done a little bit of dance. In Topsy Turvy I played a choreographer, which I had to train a few months to do that. So there's a combination of a couple of different things. But mostly it was done kind of there, really. It's more to do with how he moves, it was kind of to do with the pain that I found in him. I wanted to find the kind of wear and tear on his body, and that's what motion capture can do versus key frame animation, where it kind of skates over. In motion capture you can just slip a bit, and that's real. It gives it that extra level of reality. It's quite subtle. If you're crawling along, which Gollum would be, and you trip over a rock, an animator might not think to put that in, but an actor gives it that kind of a weight, and he reacts to the environment much stronger.

And also the whole thing was that I played him like an addict. He's tortured and wrecked by this addiction, which is the ring. It's left him and he has that craving and lust, the desire to get it at all costs. He's a compulsive liar, he has the pathology of an addict. He's kind of schizophrenic.

Q: Is he one character in your mind or two?

Serkis: He's one character but he has different sides of his personality. It's like I'm schizophrenic, I know I am. I mean, most of us are, there are lots of little sides of our personality which rear up at different times of our lives. You know, get behind the wheel of a car and get into traffic and you're Gollum, and when you're home with your two year old child, you're Smeagol. That's something I really felt strongly about, from an audience point of view. You're going to spend a lot of time with this guy, you're going to need to not just think he's a black and white villain, you have to think that he's a real human being who is just tortured.

Q: Is doing the voice rough on your throat?

Serkis: I got used to it. My vocal chords are pieces of leather now. That was born out of a desire to find where his pain is trapped. Gollum is called Gollum because of the sound he makes. It's a constriction in his throat, and I wanted that constriction to be like a muscle memory. It's a sense memory of him killing his cousin to get the ring. I started thinking about the animal connection to that, because Tolkien describes him in animal terminology. I don't know if you have cats, but when they get furballs their whole body sort of convulses. [He makes a series of choking hairball sounds that morph into the "Gollum" sound]

Q: When you look onscreen and look at Gollum, do you see yourself?

Serkis: Totally. I think people who know me will know because they're all my expressions. Like my wife will know. It's modeled on my face.

Q: What role do you see Gollum playing in the films?

Serkis: He's an every man character in a way, he's the dark side of an every man character. In the way that Frodo that becomes the hero, he's inextricably linked to Frodo. As Gandalf said, one day Gollum will play a big part in the fate of the ring. Frodo's necessity to understand him is because Gollum is like this guy with a terminal disease and Frodo sees that's where he is going. They become very strongly linked. He's like a fallen angel, he's a Lucifer character. And in more Biblical terms, Cain and Abel. He killed his brother and is kind of almost rejected from Eden. The dark side is like the flip side of Frodo.

Q: We heard about a little film you did with Gollum being interviewed?

Serkis: Yeah, this is motion captures early this year. I can't wait to see it. It was like an E! interview. They talked about how Gollum prepared each day for work and then the phone rang and it was his agent who was just offered a reality TV program. Then Jar Jar phoned up, and he said [Gollum voice] "Hey Jar Jar, how're you doing?" And then Dobby popped up. He said he auditioned for Dobby but didn't have big enough ears.

Q: Were you familiar with the character before you started the movie?

Serkis: Yeah, I read the Hobbit when I was a kid. I remember him being terribly mysterious, Riddles in the Dark. He was sort of this slimy creature. But I hadn't read Lord of the Rings.

Originally the first phone call I got from my agent was, "Andy, do you want to do this voice over thing for three weeks in New Zealand?" That's how it worked. I go, "God this sounds pretty boring, what does an actor have to do to get a decent role?" And of course it was Gollum.

Q: When did you see Gollum? When did you know what he would look like?

Serkis: It's been kind of incremental. It's evolved. The whole face is now like my face. I had input in his skin being rubbed to shreds. I said, "He's crawling around all the time, you've got to see the wear and tear on his body, you have to see the callouses on his elbows and knees. I was influenced by Alan Lee's drawings. Plus they had all the conceptual art before I started principal photography. So there were whole rafts of prototypes of how he looked. But as I say that evolved along with my physicality and the voice.

Q: Peter told you right up front that you would never be seen on screen.

Serkis: Right. Except the transformation and that wasn't originally going to be in it.

Q: Did you have to give up some ego?

Serkis: One thing as an actor that you do, to get into a role, you have to assume total ownership of the character. When you're working in this way, it's much more collaborative. Forty animators are working on it, a whole load of other technicians are working on it. It isn't just coming from me - although it is coming from me - it's being massaged by other people, and not just the director. That was my main concern. But that has been a great lesson, because I've learned a huge amount of stuff. About the process of animation, about the whole motion capture thing.

Q: Speaking of the transformation, Gollum's origin was supposed to be in this movie, but has been cut. Are you annoyed at that?

Serkis: If I didn't know it was going to be in the third movie I would be. You get to see me onscreen, transforming into Gollum. He kills Deagol and then there's this whole descent into madness and you see him getting more and more decrepit until he turns into the CG Gollum. When Peter and Fran told me it wasn't going to be in this film, they thought it would fit better in the third one. In a way it's quite nice. It's almost like it will be a great reveal.

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