So what did Amazon buy? “We have the rights solely to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, the appendices, and The Hobbit,” Payne says. We have a group of actual wizards that work on the show and they came up with a huge bag of tricks in which we are constantly able to keep the audience guessing.” Payne promises they will be using “every single trick in the book-old school, new school, everything-in a way that we are told no one has attempted.” Some of the stranger monsters may be digital confections, but when orc-like baddies attack The Rings of Power heroes, it’s guys in suits, not piles of pixels. Who is going to get to Mount Doom first? So it will be down to the millimeter, mimicking the exact same moves, and then the two things get spliced together and create this effect of one person being taller and smaller. It ends up being like an SAT problem where a hobbit and a dwarf and a man and an elf each leave a train station traveling at X miles per hour. McKays says, “You have to shoot everything twice. Payne recalls their visual effects coordinator saying, “Do you want to know what the single most complicated scene that you’ve written in season one is? It’s a scene in which the elf and the dwarf walk down a hallway together.” Instead, they built a lavish version on a soundstage.īut in dreaming up wild, fantastical monsters and ambitious real-world locations, McKay and Payne learned that the trickiest challenges of making a Middle-earth show lay elsewhere. The practicalities of trying to spelunk their cast and 300 crew members soon put that idea to rest. “There’s this place called the Lost World…that has this whole ecosystem and is absolutely crazy,” Payne says. The duo wanted to shoot the dwarven mining city under an actual mountain in New Zealand. “An example would be Khazad-dûm,” Payne says. (That perceived overreliance was something some fans disliked in Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy.) McKay and Payne had a keen interest in practical effects and real-world locations, which didn’t always align with their (admittedly enormous) budget. But there’s been a recent movement, led by Lucasfilm and Star Wars, in both genre filmmaking and its fandom away from an overreliance on digital effects. For example, King Elendil’s legendary broken sword, Narsil, which debuted on one of Prime Video’s promotional posters, does not look identical to the one eventually reforged and used by Viggo Mortenson’s Aragorn in The Return of the King.Īs fans will have already seen in the Super Bowl teaser, there are plenty of innovative digital effects in The Rings of Power. The production design, though similar, is not trying to match the Jackson films. It’s worth remembering, if only for legal reasons, that this is not the exact same world. Even Benjamin Walker, who plays Gil-galad, bears a striking resemblance to Mark Ferguson, who appeared as the elven king in a nonspeaking cameo in The Fellowship of the Ring’s prologue. Actors like Morfydd Clark (Galadriel) and Robert Aramayo (Elrond) were cast, in part, because they could age into the older versions played respectively by Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving in Jackson’s films. In creating this new story, McKay and Payne’s goal was, in McKay’s words, “different but familiar.” While the series is not a precise continuation of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, it shouldn’t clash with the cinematic world fans have come to know and love.
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