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.