"BALIN:" "This is no thunderstorm." "It's a thunder-battle!" "Look out!" "[ALL SCREAMING]" "[THUNDER CRASHES]" "They tried to recreate the conditions of being in a storm and they did that very, very well." "You could imagine that the rock is splitting apart there are huge rocks being chucked at us by the Stone-Giants." "And there's a lot of things to think about." "[YELLING]" "Today's scene, we've got a lot of lightning effects in it." "The way we've done it is we've used fluoros in the roof as a wraparound lightning." "Plus, we've also got around the place a whole bunch of lightning strikes." "I think it may be the first time that people have used fluoros as in Kino Flo, to simulate lightning." "Hey, Rubes, can you take out 115 and 116, will you, please?" "Basically I break up the roof into groups and then turn it into sort of chunks of lightning in the roof." "We can record and then sort of compose it." "And if the bosses like faster or bigger pieces you just kind of go mental on the buttons like you're doing rock 'n' roll." "And then once that's recorded, then I can just kind of play that back." "The guys on the other lightning effects are wearing out their thumbs all day, so" "They don't know about this so don't tell them." "This was a new technique, so we really liked this new use of these lights." "We'll do rehearsals, but there'll be a lot of wind and rain and you should play the cold, the uncomfortableness you know, the sheer drop, hundreds of feet down here." "You know, just make it look miserable." "I mean, it won't be." "You'll be enjoying yourselves, but make it look miserable." "[LAUGHING]" "The rain is the little shower nozzles, yeah." " We've chosen-- MAN:" "Random." "Oh, not random." "No." "[LAUGHING]" "Carefully selected." "HUNTER:" "I bet I'm getting the cold one, I just know." "I didn't-- I shouldn't even have to ask that question." "I fancy a cold water tower, please." "Because it's-- I've been boiling in this costume." "I'm just a little bit disappointed." "I did have a shower before I came to work this morning." "WOMAN 1:" "Bring it on." "Go on." "They're just decontaminating us." "WOMAN 2:" "Turn around, face me again." "MAN:" "Turn around." "This is the best part of the whole job." "Fortunately I don't have any lines." "It's just reactive, basically quite easy days for me." "Apart from the fact I'm gonna be probably extremely cold." "And wet." "Wet." "Bring it on." "NESBITT: it's a Saturday." "Nothing more I want to do on Saturday than get soaking wet in 25 kilograms of clothes." " You're not finished." " I'm supposed to be a light spritz." "MAN:" "No, you're not." "NESBITT:" "I'm a light spritz." "WOMAN:" "No, no, no." "Spritz on the head." " It is." " Oh, no" " Ha, ha, ha." " Oh." "Like a typical Irish summer." "Very wet." "WOMAN 1:" "Can you--?" "You actually might get wet and..." "MAN 1:" "Oh." "Jimmy." "[LAUGHING]" "MAN 2:" "I could" " Yes, go on..." "WOMAN 2:" "Can you do that?" "They'd wet us down completely with hoses they put teeming, teeming water on us." "O'GORMAN:" "Like cattle at the beginning." "Wet us down so we're soaking, then we'd shoot the scene." "Bang, down comes the rain." "They had these huge sprinklers." "MAN:" "Okay." "Here we go." "BOFUR:" "Stone-Giants!" "And they had these huge big wind machines that blew the rain into our faces." "And the noise." "[GASPS AND GROANS]" "The noise was unbelievable." "[FANS BLOWING]" "There were times when I literally didn't have to act." "I thought that we were in the worst storm on the mountainside from hell." "We were just, like, in this full force-9 gale." "McTAVISH:" "And I remember just being behind Martin and he couldn't see anything." "O'GORMAN:" "And I remember Peter saying, "Open your eyes!" "Open your eyes!"" "And Martin was like" " Like, he just couldn't." "MAN:" "Here we go, eyes wide open!" "And second rock!" "There was so much rain and wind that he was just laughing as we were coming around the corner." "He was just:" "[IN HIGH-PITCHED VOICE] "I can't f***ing see anything!" "Wait, wait." "What's going on?"" "[IN NORMAL VOICE] That's my impersonation of Martin Freeman." "[FREEMAN LAUGHS]" "On that particular scene, Bilbo ends up lying completely on top of me." "So I was lying there with Martin Freeman on me." "I'm sure it wasn't great for him either." "And it was just completely drenching." "And Martin got off and I was just lying there and they turned the sprinklers off." "And there was a water pipe that was pouring water straight on to his crotch." "And I was just sitting there, just wetting my pants basically." "For about three or four minutes." "Of course everyone thought it was hilarious." "[LAUGHING]" "It was pretty embarrassing." "[GROANING]" "One of my all-time favorite moments in that whole Misty Mountain sequence was when Ken did his close-up." "He has that huge white beard." "And on action, as the wind came every time Ken went to deliver the line:" ""That's not a so-and-so." "That's a--" The beard would just go pfft." "Look!" "It was like something out of Monty Python." ""That's not a so-and-so, that's a:"" "it's a thunder-battle!" "Eight, nine, 10 times." "JACKSON:" "Whoops." "Can you try not to get that beard in your face?" "McTAVISH:" "I'm convinced Peter did this deliberately." "Just try that again." "I'm sure he had a word with the guy operating the wind machine to just turn it up a couple notches." "It was just too perfect." "JACKSON:" "We just got the beard." "Do it once more without the beard going up." "[LAUGHS]" ""That's a" " Pfft."" ""I'm sorry, Ken, we're gonna have to go again."" "[LAUGHS]" "This beard gets everywhere, right?" "Turns up in the most unlikely places." "[LAUGHING]" "It was quite brutal at times, physically for us as actors." "But I like to think that that really helps the jeopardy and the kind of gritty feeling of the sequence." "MAN:" "And cut it." "Good." "We got that." "Very good." "WOMAN:" "How was that?" " That was great." "I love it, being in the rain tower." "It's fantastic." " The rain tower rocks." "MAN:" "Good?" "It was very fun." "I feel like a big kid again." "WOMAN:" "Are you okay, Jimmy?" " No." "I couldn't get off the tower with the wet" "Our costumes obviously absorb water and retain it so the costumes got heavier." "We were wearing our full costumes that we leave Bag End in." "And then they wetted us down." "NESBITT:" "They were pretty heavy, I have to tell you." "And afterwards, we were all determined to weigh ourselves." "I think I was like 25 kg over, so-- No one took me seriously." "You know, I was carrying 50 kg, which is a lot to be carrying for six hours." "So it's like 115, 110 pounds?" "That he's carrying?" "That's incredible." "You get to a time when it gets hysterical." "That we're on this set inside and there's wind and rain being thrown at us with all these costumes and this weight." "And Pete saying, "There's a big foot gonna stand on you now."" "I have to contain my laughter because I thought at times we were in a Monty Python film." "Yeah, just another day on the set of Hobbit." "Wake up!" "Wake up!" "Whoa!" "[ALL GRUNTING AND SCREAMING]" "WONG:" "The trap door stunt, which led to the Goblin caves was probably the most intricate and dangerous stunt that I've ever been a part of." "That was a tricky one." "That was extremely dangerous, that one." "That was a very nerve-racking outing." "There was a real sense of tension on the set that day." "JACKSON:" "This is all the movements happening on the set so you don't need to be doing much with the camera." "Because it'll sort of start to negate the actual action that's happening on the set." "In the cave, a little crack appears and sand disappearing down this crack." "The Dwarves are all asleep and then these big interleaving pieces of floor set start to fall away gradually:" "[IMITATING THUMPS]" "MAN:" "One, two, three, four, five!" " That's quite good, isn't it?" "MAN:" "Yes." "[MAN CLEARING THROAT]" "[LAUGHING]" "I think at first, as always, the stuntmen were pretty macho about the whole thing till they actually saw better." "It was quiet for about a minute when the full gravity of it sank in, that:" ""Wow." "This could be one of the most dangerous things that we do."" "MAN:" "Once you're happy with what you see now get yourself prepared for a run, eh?" "This was, I think, seven, what they called petals." "These petals weigh tons." "And they're all meant to drop at different times, okay?" "Once you pull the pin, the thing is gonna drop." "Once it drops, nothing can stop it." "This was potentially, you know tons and tons of metal crushing you if it went wrong." "It had to be a fair drop." "It had to be about 4 meters because the nature of the floor that gave way." "And also too, if one guy fell down on top of the other just from that height, it could have caused substantial injuries as well." " I'd probably go that way." " Go that way." " I'd go this way." " Go there?" "WONG:" "And as soon as they hit, they're being given a way they're meant to roll." "So they have to either move-- Roll to their left or roll to their right or stay exactly still." "And they probably have about a second or so after they hit to make that movement." "And if they don't make that movement, then it could potentially go wrong." "Seen the tests." "So far it's all been good, but..." "You know what it's like." "It's always a little bit nervous on the day, you know." "WONG:" "Anyone want a pillow?" "No?" "BOSWELL:" "Big game, this one." "WONG:" "it's a nice soft spot." "We're lucky Glenn Boswell allowed us to do a few rehearsals." "We staggered into it." "We started with a few guys at a time and slowly went back and did a couple of rehearsals today." "We're gonna drop petal one and two at the same time as usual, so this is drop one." "You guys give a set that you're happy he'll give a set to us up here." "Then when you're ready, we'll drop you." "Sand will progressively go along that way." "WOMAN 1:" "Rehearsal in five minutes." "Counting down." "MAN 1:" "Camera's going, watch your backs." "I'm ready to go." "WOMAN 2:" "Are you excited?" " Eh?" "Excited." "I was wondering what's for lunch, actually." "MAN 2:" "Schnitzel." " Curry." "WOMAN:" "Yep." "WONG:" "Okay, stand by!" "And one!" "MAN:" "You guys good?" "BOSWELL:" "You set, buddy?" "Okay, cool." "MAN:" "Set." "WONG:" "Stand by!" "And two!" "Three!" "Stand by!" "And four!" " Yup." "That's safe." "BOSWELL:" "Thanks" " Thanks, guys." "WOMAN:" "Thank you." "That's kind of where, I think, the planning made the stunt guys feel a lot safer anyway where they could actually see where they would drop and do by themselves." "But it's almost like we need to go, "And one and two."" " You know? "And three and four--" WOMAN:" "Like they need recognition..." " ...of what's happened before the next one." " Exactly." "Exactly." "BOSWELL:" "Straight after action Tim will go, "And one and two," and do the call for the" " For them to drop." "So there's not one between." "You have to react to action and you'll be dropping." "I got onto open comms channel, and all the Special Effects guys would pull their pin to my count." "So you can't go in rehearsals:" ""And one, and two, and three, and four."" "Then shoot, adrenaline takes over, you can't go: "And one, and two, and three, and four."" "In my mind, I was sitting there trying to think of a rhythm:" ""And one, and two, and three, and four."" "Over and over again in my mind, I just keep going:" ""And one, and two, and three, and four."" "SERKIS:" "You can only really do these things once because the reset time would have been phenomenal." "So it had to pretty much work first time." "MAN 1:" "B marker." "WOMAN:" "Walk away, Dusty." "Well, do" "Thank you." "And we're going hot." "Cameras are rolling." "WONG:" "Going hot." "One is hot." "Number two is hot." "Three hot." "Four's hot." "Five's hot." "WOMAN:" "All right." "MAN 2:" "We're hot." "WOMAN:" "Here we go." "And everyone's sleeping." " And action." "WONG:" "Stand by!" "WOMAN:" "Wake up!" "Wake up!" "WONG:" "And one, and two, and three, and four, and five!" "MAN 3:" "Cut!" "WOMAN:" "Cutting there." "Everybody okay?" "MAN 4:" "Dave." "WOMAN:" "Nice and easy." "Thank you." "MAN 5:" "You all right?" "Jimmy?" "WOMAN:" "Nice and easy on the tail slate." "MAN 5:" "Dave?" "WOMAN:" "Turn around." "MAN 6:" "Oh, yeah." "SHEERIN:" "That take was actually quite fun and all the guys had a really good time and all went really well." "See, we're happy now." "We wrapped and that's the first shot." "All the guys are stoked." "And, yeah, that's what you get when you prepare and put that training in and become trained professionals as we are." "So see you." "Oof!" "GREAT GOBLIN:" "Abomination." "Mutations." "Deviations." "That's all you're gonna find down here." "Good morning at Day One of Goblins, here at the studio." "Weta Workshop have worked for weeks through the night seven days a week to create these Goblins." "Finally they've been delivered and arrived." "And now, as you can see behind me, we're rapidly dressing the 30 Goblins ready for the shoot today." "Heroes, stunt performers, extras, all in Goblin suits with different masks on, loads of animatronic masks." "And just over to my right now the operators all arriving to set up all the animatronics stations." "Now we've got about two hours left to finish dressing them." "And then it's all go, and shooting all day on set at Day One." "And we've got two weeks of it to go." "[GROWLS]" "Just talcing the inside of a silicone suit." "That makes it a bit more slidy on the inside." "All right, I'm straight up in the air." "How are we gonna get it over this bloody hump?" "NOTARY: it's actually the first day we've all been in the suits at one time." "Usually it's just costume fittings." "So it's a big day." "We're gonna see how it goes." "We're gonna take it slow, hopefully and watch out for overheating." "Down." "Back." "We've been training for about five weeks on the movement." "Go, go." "Hit it." "Hit it." "[GRUNTING]" "Costume's feeling fine." "There's lots of bits and pieces that don't usually go with my bits and pieces." "I've got a good special nipple down here." "I'm a bit alarmed." "But I didn't get a nipple over here." "Oh, wait, that's new." "Well, you turn your back and someone gives you a nipple." "When Pete asked us to make translucent suits with moving bones under the skin that was one thing." "Then asking them to have elephantitis, huge humps on their backs and all sorts of body deformities, it was definitely gonna be a crazy breed." "WOMAN:" "Who has the biggest hump?" " That guy over there." "He's massive." "[WOMAN CHUCKLES]" "So this is the most animatronic characters we've ever had on set at one time." "We've got 40 heads without animatronics and then 10 heads with." "So what we've got here is some spiked movers." "And the silicon sits down onto it." "And it grips really well on there." "So we've got some nice, snarly mechanism going on here." "And then we've also got the eyes." "And this is all operated by cables, which will come out of the back here and go into a cable pack, and it's all operated with remote-control gear." "The guys finished them about one hour ago." "So it was a lot of very tired people." "But excited about the fact we've got all this cool stuff." "FRENCH:" "Some of these guys have been going all night and then straight to set." "A lot of components, a lot of people." "Today's gonna be really full on and we're looking forward to seeing our Goblins looking fantastic on set." "So what's that?" "What's" "[BARKING]" "Oh, gosh." "Zoe's a gritter." "She's a gritter." "MAN 1:" "B marker." "MAN 2:" "Looking at the board or the camera." "Straight at the camera lens, if you can if you can see where that is." "Right there." "TAYLOR:" "it's always going to be restricted." "And when you wear a mask that is this deep off the face no matter how much perforations you put ultimately they just end up being this series of little tiny holes way out on the periphery of your sight." "Dwarves are more than a match for Goblins." "Don't you worry about that." "Come on, buddy." "Come on." "Come on, Pete." "Be nice." "Play nice together." "He's a bit shy." "He don't talk much." "Goblin-town was one of the most demanding sequences that we did." "Because it was a very, very hot set." "BROWN:" "We started off in this kind of cage and we had to look up and have hundreds of Goblins run at you." "MAN:" "Charge!" "[ALL YELLING]" "BROWN:" "And, honestly, it was pretty scary because the lighting was dark and dull and there was lots of screaming involved where I was being caught." "It was really quite frightening." "We were all getting very, very tired when we did that sequence." "[ALL YELLING AND GRUNTING]" "That by far was the roughest day on a film shoot I've ever done." "It was so hot in there." "We had Goblins falling over." "Goblins that were meant to be harassing us were falling over." "We were having to pick them up off the ground." "You couldn't choreograph it." "All you could do is say to the Goblins:" ""Okay, you've gotta go in and get them."" "And all you could say to us was:" ""You have to try and stop them getting you." Action!" "[ALL YELLING AND GRUNTING]" "McTAVISH:" "People were swinging punches and there was all sorts of stuff going on." "Pretty much everyone's been smashed in the face by the Dwarves." "Like Jimmy Nesbitt's elbowed me in the face twice." "I think my highlight was a head butt from Marky Hadlow." "Yes!" "Yeah, there was some bruising that day." "MAN:" "Cut!" "Cut!" "They said, "Look, after each take-- Among the people playing Goblins- -if you don't want to do it, put your hand up and you can stay back."" " People were actually overheating." " Every time there'd be one or two more." "Until, by the end, there was only about four Goblins attacking us." "Because all the rest of them had passed out." "[CHATTERING AND CHEERING]" "WOMAN:" "How was that?" " Good laugh." "Ha-ha." "That was outrageous." "And I couldn't see anything above this:" "You look up and go, "Is that it?"" ""I can see the tips of my fingers." "That doesn't help."" "I couldn't see a thing." "I could actually see really well." "I was one of the lucky ones." "I had nice big holes, so, yeah, I could see." "I could move around pretty well." "At one stage my fan turned off, so that got pretty warm." "Literally, they would pour the sweat out of their shoes at the end of the day." "I'm serious." "This is a foot that I've been wearing all day and I'm just gonna empty out some of the goodness." "Oh, God." "Very nice." "...and you say cut and these extras guys they're just, they have a smile right then." "At the end of the day they're like, "I loved it, it was amazing I want to come back tomorrow and do more."" "You go:" ""Hmm." "What's wrong with these people?"" "it's pretty impressive to be able to get everyone moving and it's nice to actually see it down so we get an idea of what we're actually doing." "It's good." "It's a good first day." "Really good first day." "Peter made a lot of changes for the better after that day." "And things improved after that but still it was sort of, like it was off to a very, very tough start." "You've suddenly got people who are incredibly hot who can barely breathe who have to have their heads off every three or four minutes because they're literally, it's so stifling hot with the lights on the set." "MAN:" "Action!" "Action!" "Keep it alive." "Keep it moving." "Busy in the background." "Busy in the background, pushing around." "JACKSON:" "And suddenly, you know, you're realizing the Goblins that you're filming are not the Goblins that you had in your imagination nor are they the designs that you saw, nor are they the movement that you saw." "It's coming together and it's not kind of working." "WOMAN:" "Four dwarves, we've got five stunt doubles..." "So we ended up putting on sort of these green heads so they could CG the heads on later." "The performers were able to breathe." "And feel less constricted." "Suddenly the movements that Terry had, you know, trained them they were able to just focus and do more of that." "From my department I really wanted them to be moving correctly, you know?" "And being able to be comfortable enough to where they could perform." "So yeah, that worked out good." " That is the reason they say, "We'll fix it." - "We'll do it with CG Goblins."" " Yeah." "CG." " "Let's do it in post."" "Those Goblins won't die when you do three, four passes in a row." "So using these heads, these rugby helmet hats and putting little markers on and putting reference cameras on everybody we can actually track their position in 3D space and then put the Goblin heads back on the bodies." "You know I take my job very, very seriously, as you can tell by the amount of balls Fritz is putting on me." "The more serious you are, the more balls they put on you." "So at the moment, I'm kind of a big deal." "MAN:" "That way." "HENRY:" "I had a rip in my suit, on my bum." "So, Andy, my minder, had to put a boil to cover it up." "Yep." "Right there." "Whenever you get rips in your suit, you get more boils put on." "So probably by the end of it, we're just gonna be walking boily messes." "It's just part of the daily routine for Goblins, unfortunately." "One minute you're on two legs, the next minute you're on all fours." "And the next minute you're on your front bent over with someone patting your bottom." "WOMAN:" "Is this the best part of your job?" " Putting boils on Johnny's butt is the best part of my job." "JOHNNY: it's the best part of my job." "Definitely." "WOMAN 1:" "You're gonna lick it." "WOMAN 2:" "Lick it!" " That actually tastes like my sweat." "MAN:" "Yeah." "Funny that." " It's not K-Y that's making that" " Yeah." " Oh, yours tastes disgusting!" " I'll get back to that one." " Ha-ha-ha." "It's really dangerous to leave Goblins by themselves." "It's a bit like if you leave your dog in your apartment, it goes a bit crazy." "So we had a couple of days that we turned up at a very early hour to get suited up because we were all expected on set straight away, and we just waited." "And when we were made just to wait, sometimes people got a bit crazy." "Ready, Ben?" "[GRUNTING]" "[PEOPLE LAUGHING]" "MAN 1:" "Don't break the suits." " Oh, shit!" " What's happening?" "MAN 2:" "I don't know." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "Still good." "Still good." "MEISTER:" "And then some people started dancing." "Some people played games and it turned into a bit of a flash mob and the idea that, "Let's put a dance sequence together."" "I was queuing up to get our food in the catering tent and the Goblins got together and did a big dance routine." "Goblins dancing while you're eating your lunch, obviously." "We're all sitting down eating lunch and talking about the day." "Which is weird enough as it is, you know, with a whole lot of Dwarves." "It's a weird experience." "And then there's suddenly a whole lot of Goblins dancing." "[UPBEAT DANCE MUSIC PLAYING OVER SPEAKERS]" "Just one of those random things that happened on set." "WOMAN:" "And action!" "GREAT GOBLIN [SINGING]:" "Down, down, down to Goblin-town." "GOBLINS [SINGING]:" "Down, down, down to Goblin-town it's Day Four of the Goblins and we've finally arrived at the Goblin King's throne." "The Goblin King is played by Barry Humphries, who is fantastic." "Welcome to your kingdom." "You've got a few souvenirs." "Yes." "Grisly souvenirs." "WOMAN:" "Just make sure that I get her." "We'll have you on a platform off to the side." "Because you're actually too small for this platform anyway." "So you're, like, nine or ten foot tall." "[SINGING] Down in Goblin-town." "GOBLIN 1:" "Yeah!" "In spite of the gross repellant appearance of the King of the Goblins he's a highly intelligent man." "No tricks." "I want the truth, warts and all." "Something quite Kiwi about him, in a way." "I played him as a New Zealander." "Search them for every crack, every crevice." "We realize that underneath it all he is a New Zealand intellectual fallen upon hard times." ""Made in Rivendell."" "Second age." "Couldn't give it away." "I suppose in modern New Zealand he would have received a knighthood." "I haven't met a single person on this trip who is not knighted." "[LAUGHS]" "I'm thinking of becoming a New Zealand citizen." "[CHUCKLES]" "Barry Humphries, what a legend." "Working with Barry Humphries." "I used to watch Dame Edna's show every Saturday night with my parents." "Hello, possums." "Hello, darlings, let me look at you." "Oh, you've aged!" "You" "So to meet him was pretty special." "It was like, "Ahh."" "I never meet other actors except at funerals or charitable events." "HUNTER:" "Barry Humphries was incredible." "He got into the whole fun of it." "There's only a certain amount that he could do because it was all CG but he was here on set and he was doing all the off lines." "It was not to be, but comfort yourselves with the thought that you will die a needless and painful death here in the Misty Mountains." "No doubt some Dwarf minstrel will turn the whole sorry episode into an irritating ballad in years to come." "[ACTORS YELLING]" "Very, very hard to keep a straight face through some of his dialogue." "Kiran, are you gonna come around and bloody have it first to beat these guys?" "And having Kiran, heh, Kiran Shah, this annoying little Goblin." "[BROPHY CHUCKLES]" "He's a very naughty little man." "Peter encouraged Kiran to dry hump Mark Hadlow I think out of pity." "KIRAN:" "So Kiran ****** my leg for the whole of the scene." "And I'm trying to throw this little guy off." ""Get off." "Stop ******* my leg."" "This above all is a family film and any depictions of perverse sexual activity could only be described as educational." "[INDISTINCT CHATTER]" "[LAUGHING]" "The whole world's gonna see me beating on a little man who's humping my leg." "Peter Jackson, you've got a lot to answer for." "No, Mark Hadlow enjoyed it." "He can protest all he likes." "And protest he will." "But Mark Hadlow, you know, I really did it for Mark." "I did it for Mark's benefit." "Mark takes it where he can and on that day he took it from a midget." "There's nothing wrong with that." "At one point I thought, "I'm not gonna notice it."" "[LAUGHING]" " So last day as Goblins." " Last day as Goblins?" "Yeah." "Last day." "The thing I will miss the most is the absolute ridiculousness of me and my friends turning up really early in the morning and getting into really big silicone suits, and just sitting around having fun all day." "I'm going to super miss all the Weta people just taking ridiculous care of us." " I'm not even sure my parents did that." " Ha-ha-ha." "I know my parents didn't do that." "WOMAN:" "Dominatrix." "I was in the supermarket and rather than walking upright I was shuffling forward like a Goblin." "I didn't even have this on." " Yeah, it never really leaves though." " It sort of seeps into your soul, you know." " Yeah." " Yeah." "[ALL GRUNTING AND GROWLING]" "Several months later, when we were editing the scene we also were able to enhance it quite a lot by adding completely digital Goblins." "So we were able to put more digital Goblins in the scenes with the people in the suits with no heads and in some cases we replaced the suits entirely with digital Goblins." "It sort of ended up being an amalgam a little bit of each technique." "You may scratch your head and say, "Why just not jump straight from design to the digital characters that we see in the movie?"" "By having the mob in there by having this dynamic, energized group of Goblin extras backed up by the incredible acting skills, bravado, just cool stuff that the stunt guys do, it all just brings a reality to the stage." "SAINDON: it's always better to have something on set." "We did replace Goblins but the creepiness of the Weta Workshop Goblins still came across because the actors had a few days where they did have these guys in these really creepy suits and they were able to get that into their head so they knew what these Goblins were gonna be." "I was actually freaked out by the Goblins." "Oh, dear." "So that was just reality." "That is" " That's giving me the shakes." "And, ultimately, it can only lead to a better experience for the audience when they watch the movie." "[GOBLINS SCREECHING AND GROWLING]" "JACKSON:" "So the fact that we went to digital Goblins actually ultimately gave me an opportunity to make this whole sequence a little more dynamic than what it would have otherwise been." "I was able to get Goblins doing stuff that the guys in suits were just not capable of doing just physically, like a human being wouldn't be capable of doing." " Cut the ropes!" "JACKSON: it was one of those things that ultimately worked out for the best, the fact that they became largely CGI I think just helps to enhance the whole sequence." "[GROWLING AND SCREAMING]" "[GRUNTING]" "THORIN:" "Out of the frying pan." "GANDALF:" "And into the fire." "Run." "Run!" "Morning." "JACKSON:" "Good morning." "Good morning." " Yeah." "McTAVISH:" "Philippa, Fran and Peter are shaping the story continually." "It is a constantly evolving organic process." "That's why you get script changes literally on the day you're shooting." "JACKSON:" "We tweaked a couple of lines this morning" " Well, Aidan's got a line..." "Yes." "A couple of Ian's got tweaked." " This is incorporating some of your thoughts." "McKELLEN:" "Thank you very much." "I've been allowed to make a few suggestions vis-à-vis the script." "All of you, quick!" "Now!" "This way!" "Run!" "Follow me!" " That's all good, that." "That's all good." " Climb!" "Climb!" "High as you can, up the tree!" "All of you, now." "Climb!" "Run!" " That's good." "BROWN:" "Your pack needs to climb up." "Quick!" "BROWN:" "Hurry." " Hurry!" "I'm not one of the scriptwriters." "I'm just a concerned actor probably with a bit too much time on his hands who's made a few suggestions." " This way." " Ian, what I thought with you is that if you draw a couple of them through the front of you here..." "BROWN:" "He's here somewhere." "JACKSON: ...and you stop here..." "Whether it should be "11, 12 and Bombur" or whether it should be "Bifur, Bombur..."" "Or whether we should actually be naming." "McKELLEN:" "I think it'd be better to name." " I think it is better too, isn't it?" "[BOTH CHUCKLE]" "MAN:" "Brilliant." "BROWN:" "You had it done perfectly before." "[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]" "FREEMAN:" "Not my" " Dori, Nori." "Ori!" " That was months back." " Come on, come on." "MAN 1:" "Here we go, rehearsal." "MAN 2:" "You're gonna hit bumps." "JACKSON:" "And action." "McKELLEN:" "Five, six..." "Bifur." "Bofur." "That's 10." "Fili, Kili!" "That's 12." "And Bombur." "That makes 13." "We have to run along and get lifted on to trees by various people." "Get that foot up there, you..." "And then the trees fall onto each other." "We needed to have some trees that would shake with the actors on." "O'GORMAN:" "And they can dial it up to how strong they want it." "So they turn it up a little bit and the tree shakes a little bit they turn it up a lot, and it shakes all the way across." "[GRUNTS]" "O'GORMAN:" "So me and Aidan, we were going, "What are the stunts he's doing?"" "We were like, "We can do that." "We can do all the stunts he did."" "Trying to prove we can do what the stunties do, which we can't." "So Andy, for the last take, went, "Okay, yeah, lock it up."" "And they turned it up really high." "I mean, it literally almost threw us out of the tree." "MAN:" "Will you shut up?" "O'GORMAN:" "And then I sort of fell back." "And as I fell back the tree came forward, like smashed me on the chest." "And I made this involuntary squeak." "It kind of came out just like:" "[SQUEAKS]" "MAN:" "All right, smash!" "[O'GORMAN SQUEALS]" "And everyone heard it." "Like the whole crew just heard me yelling like a tiny scared mouse." "MAN:" "And cut!" "[ALL LAUGHING]" "What's happened at this point is that Gandalf, he's lit a pine cone and he's thrown a pine cone down into the Wargs." "The whole mass of Wargs is down here going crazy." "And they've made these pine cones that" "Pine cone-shaped and had real little lights going all the way around." "We wanted interactive light coming from the pine cones." "So one day, Reg rang me up and he said:" ""Rickster, I want you to make me some flaming pine cones."" "I thought, "I've heard everything now."" "But apparently this is what he wanted." "There were all RF so we could radio control them." "So we could sit down and my board operator could switch them on and dim them up and down, whatever." "So these create the light effect on the faces of the Dwarves." "And they throw them around and hopefully don't break them." "The first pine cone we ever built we brought on set." "This is the baby, right?" "This is pretty awesome because we were very proud of it." "So the executive producer, Zane Weiner, got a hold of this thing and the first thing he did is throw it straight on the floor." "GARSIDE:" "Goddamn it." " And it's on the concrete." "Just" " I gotta say that was not a piece of the scene, that was the studio floor." "GARSIDE:" "He just threw it." "MAN:" "Right." "And we go, "Hang on, we haven't even shown Pete this thing yet."" " Did you get that?" "CAMERAMAN:" "Yeah, I did." "He thought it was a great joke, we didn't, but there you go." "The problem with them was, obviously, once all the Dwarves started getting hold of them they're throwing them everywhere." "MAN:" "Now volley!" "Burn, you Wargs!" "[GRUNT  LAUGH]" "Yes!" "Ha-ha-ha!" "Yeah!" "So I would go, like:" "[SPEAKS IN DWARVISH]" "[SPEAKS IN DWARVISH]" "Which means "fire upon you."" "MAN:" "Yes!" " That was the girliest throw in the world." "You know, you're very much in the hands, in those scenes, of the filmmakers who with the particular angle of the camera, will make it look more dangerous than it actually is." "SERKIS:" "And when you're directing this kind of stuff, which requires timing you know, it's all in the imagination, Wargs appearing down on the floor level." "SERKIS:" "Three, two, one." "Crash!" "You've got to drop down burning pine cones which are actually lights which come on at a particular time." "All of that stuff" " Ian doesn't like getting caught up with that kind of direction." "When you're dealing with Andy as a director" "This is a superb actor." "He can cut straight through, as actors often can with other actors to the root." "You are searching for an answer..." "McKELLEN:" "What's going on?" "So you feel very secure." "Ian has to know exactly what he's thinking and feeling or else it can feel very fake to him." "SERKIS:" "There's gonna be the Dwarves-- The Dwarves arriving first." "Before the b" "They'd arrived." "You didn't see them?" "But he didn't like receiving direction whilst the scene's going on." "SERKIS:" "Just watching the Wargs now, watching the Wargs to see it working." "[McKELLEN GRUNTS]" "SERKIS:" "The Wargs are all below you." "They're barking and they're going crazy." "Here we go." "There was one day I think where he tore me off a strip for doing that." "SERKIS:" "Do you want me to cue you for the judders?" " I'll cue you for the" " I" "I'll say, three, two, one, crash." "Just tell me what happens and then I'll try and do it without you..." "SERKIS:" "Okay." "Yep." " ...telling me." "And then at the end of this, he kind of:" ""You know, because I can't think and I can't do it if you're calling it out because then I can't react to it, you know, truthfully."" "if you tell me what to do, then I do it." "And of course what you do isn't always expressed on your face, and I" "So you say angry... then I go angry and..." "I'd rather be angry inside." "Know what I mean?" "But I was going, "Yeah, but, Ian, actually you need to be cued for that otherwise you'll never know when it's gonna happen."" "And he goes, "Well, yes, of course." "If it's a matter of cueing then..." Heh, heh." "SERKIS:" "it's a matter of timing for the Wargs arriving." "Yes, I appreciate that." "And then you must cue me, of course, in that case." "SERKIS:" "it was very funny." "It was very funny, that." "I do remember that." "It's the director and the people behind the camera who know exactly what they're doing and have planned for it over months, if not years." "The day comes to film it and we just have to do what we're told, really." "Now, if I'm not doing it right, darling, you must shout out, but" "SERKIS:" "Okay." "This behind me is the forest ledge set." "It's a set we built a few months ago." "We shot a lot of action on it." "There was always a point where we were gonna have to come back bring it back and resurrect it and burn it." "This is pre-burn." "We're just getting ready now to do the big burning scene." "INGRAM:" "You know, we were sort of being told that if we can just do sort of a token flame here and there that would be enough, and we'll put in CG flames later and" "Us, as a group decided that even though, you know, we actually have only got one night to plumb it that we're gonna do as much as we can to put as much fire as we physically can and have it, you know, real." "Pete's asked for some foreground elements that the camera can sort of head past that's on fire." "That's what we're running at the moment." "Keeping a plan of what's going on is our biggest thing." "So we always draw up little sketches." "So we've all gone to art school for this." "Heh, heh." "And we just number everything so all our operators know what's going on." "We probably had about 18 or 20 sources of flame." "And it was quite scary for a lot of people when we did our first test on the night Peter wanted to see it." "So we lit it all up, everyone was, you know, quite taken back, I think by how much fire there was." "As long as you control it, you know, that's what we do." "If you hear this:" "[BLOWING]" "It means we want you to evacuate out of the building." "SERKIS:" "Should we just assume that in terms of the length and number of resets that we-- You will make the call as to when it is--?" "Or someone will make the call as to when to stop and tell us then we'll just--?" "MAN:" "Right." "Steve, you probably want to sprinkle a bit of burning crap on this rock here." "INGRAM:" "This rock?" " Yeah." "That's right in the foreground." "WOMAN:" "Striding scenes, thank you." "Striding, Richard!" "You see all these flames, then I heard somebody saying:" ""We just need the flames as a reference." "They're gonna be CGI flames."" "And I'm like, "Why am I walking through these flames if it's gonna be CGI?"" "But I'm kind of glad that they did do that because it gave me what I needed to feel that moment of heroism." "There was one day where I was doing that run down the log it was with Andy on Second Unit." "SERKIS:" "Great, Richard, one more." "I was running from the beginning of the day till the end of the day." "[YELLING]" "MAN:" "And reset." "WOMAN:" "Reset it." "[YELLING]" "And I didn't stop running all day." "And I was determined." "I knew what Andy had done on the Rings." "I knew the physical demands that he put on himself." "WOMAN:" "This way, Andy." "I'm out of breath there." "That was" "MAN:" "How cold?" " It was cold." "It was freezing, but it was the energy needed to keep going through." "I remember him saying, "You got another one in you?"" "WOMAN:" "Reset." "MAN:" "We got time for one more." "One more?" "WOMAN:" "Thank you." "Still rolling." "ARMITAGE:" "And I was like, "Yup, I got another one in me."" "Knowing that my legs were about to go underneath me." "[YELLS]" "SERKIS:" "Reset." "Are you all right, Richard?" "WOMAN:" "Resetting." "SERKIS:" "By then it was the modus operandi, was to do rolling resets, was to" "Because it's shooting pixels, you can go straight in for another take." "[YELLING]" "Okay, just reset." "We'll do one more." "I would just" " I was not gonna give in." "I was gonna keep running for Andy Serkis." " And cut." "Cut, cut, cut." "WOMAN 1:" "Cutting there." "WOMAN 2:" "Thank you." "Making safe." "MAN:" "All the way down." "WOMAN 2:" "Cutting and making safe." "Look." "[SCREAMS]" "Okay, now we got these guys on eagles." "Okay, how are we gonna shoot that?" "We'll take out the steepness and just do the flap, flap, glide, and then bank." "Yeah." "The Special Effects built a great motion-based body of an eagle." "It was all computer-operated." "MAN 1:" "Thank you." "Rehearsing, and action." "MAN 2:" "And now the top down." "Right down, right down, right down." "CLAYTON:" "When we were prevising the eagle sequence we went to the trouble of creating quite a well-animated flight cycle on the eagle so that our previs would have the right scale and feel majestic and sort of get the tone of the sequence." "So we would take the previs data and we could extract the movement data from it and program our base to replicate exactly what the creature was doing in previs." "So our base scenes are moving just like the animated model moves." "So what it means is the Digital Department and the Physical Effects Department are both working with the same motion as one another." "When that comes back to us in the form of the live action that they shot we know that the wings and everything are in the right poses so we can just apply our cycle at that point and we have the confidence to know:" ""Yes, it's gonna work." "It's gonna interact with our digital eagle."" "We sort of had a short amount of time, and the word came that, you know we were gonna get the actors onto the eagle and shoot all the stuff." " This one's very-- it's very safe." " I should go up?" "Yeah, I think the time has come." "WOMAN:" "Okay, Ian's ascending." "MAN:" "We're gonna" "WOMAN:" "Ian, we'll just hook you up before you get up there, sir." "We'll just hook you up from the back before you get up." "Ian would, you know, do as many physical things as he could." "O'GORMAN:" "Ian McKellen sets a pretty good precedent, like, he works a lot." "He takes it all with good grace." "MAN:" "Action." "INGRAM:" "Ian, you know, he just killed it, you know, so" "Did everything perfectly, enjoyed it, and said thanks at the end of the day." "JACKSON:" "And cut it." "Good." "I think that's great, Ian." "All the actors from then were like:" ""Oh, well, I'm gonna enjoy it, then." You know, "I can do it."" "The eagle." " Now you ride an eagle and look cool." "O'GORMAN:" "Yeah." "Well, that's good." "Oh." "JACKSON:" "Okay, here we go." "All right, and action." "I can't believe" "JACKSON:" "Can somebody just step in and grab Adam's trouser leg?" "Pull it down a bit." "Not you." "You can take your hands off his trousers." "[BOTH LAUGHING]" "JACKSON:" "That looks good." "It's a bit more of a Bilbo-ish kind of eagle flight..." " ...than a Harley-Davidson sort of ride." " Okay." "Sure." "[LAUGHING]" "It was great fun because it was on hydraulics." "And Bifur, of course, being a little abnormal decides to stand up on his eagle." "NESBITT:" "Bifur!" "KIRCHER:" "And Bofur looks out and goes, you know:" ""Get down, get down." Drags him down." "I did it with Bill Kircher." "And he was, of course, going bananas, you know." "And that's" " So I was just trying to make sure that I could also be seen in shot." "Which is often a challenge with Bill Kircher." "Peter and Andy Serkis, and saying, you know:" ""We'll be talking you through the various emotions you'll be feeling."" "And it was just a great kind of marriage of what your acting imagination can do beside an extraordinary and unusual constructive bit of machinery." "And I love that." "Really great." "It's fireworks." "Good." "Pretend fireworks." "That's what you have to do." "It's the first day of being Hobbits, and we are shooting on a stage." "We have been filming at Old Took's party, which is when Bilbo is 4 years old." "Look at his hair." "Look at his hair." "It's a scene where Gandalf actually lays eyes on a young Bilbo Baggins and so we wanted a lot of children." "I'm gonna go "three, two, one," kaboom." "And Gandalfs gonna let off a particularly big firework right up above us in the sky here." "And another one, bang!" "[CROWD GASPS]" "Maybe you lock arms." "Lock arms." "Let's see." "[SCATTING AND GIGGLING]" "Maybe not." "Ha, ha, ha, we tried that one." "Peter said to me, "You know, Dan, how would you like to be Old Took?" "You could be Old Took."" "And I said, "Oh, you--"." "Well, what a great opportunity." "I must say, it's interesting to be able to see your nose." " Yes." " Ha, ha, ha." "HENNAH:" "Peter's sense of humor wouldn't let my nose just be a big nose." "It had to be a huge nose." "Good morning, sir." " Especially made for you?" " It was especially made for me." "I think Peter had a hand in making my nose." "[BOTH LAUGHING]" "Well, I gave him about the biggest nose of all." " But you don't need a wig." " No, I don't need a wig." "I think you may be the only character in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit not to wear a wig." " Interesting." " A good quiz question." "I should check that one out." "Of all the people on the films, his appearance has changed the least over the 13 years." "There's still a mass of unruly white hair and the beard and mustache and always a ready smile." "He's one of the most comfortable people to have around." "So to see him all dressed up and smiling even more broadly was very pleasant." "[LAUGHING]" "HENNAH:" "Hello." "Hello." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "Look at Grandpa." "GIRL:" "Take your nose off." "I can't take it off." "It's gotta stay on all day." "Oh, my goodness, the whole day?" "HENNAH: it was a great experience to be in a set that we've created." "And Dan, you plop yourself down there." "You're the biggest Punch and Judy fan." "You're watching a Punch and Judy show and you're kind of enjoying it more than the kids." "The whole thing was just exciting, and lots of energy, lots of laughter." "No, I won't." "All right, you can have-- All right, you can have it." "Amazing how being on a family show where you have access to all these children to work as actors." "And they're all beautiful and wonderful and know how to perform." "Hi, darling." "How are you?" "So there I was at the mercy of three monstrous trolls." " Hey, darling." " Hi." "It's great, because he's working so much throughout the day I don't get to see him." "So when I do come on the set and I'm able to kind of work with him, it's just great." "I think I've got the biggest Hobbit feet." " Holy Mary." " Out of everyone." " It's bigger than the boys' as well." " Holy God." "FREEMAN:" "Oh, my gosh." "Was that the plan, that you've got really big feet?" " No." "No, not at all." " Right." " It's just my feet size." "GIRL:" "Yeah." "[ALL LAUGHING AND CHATTERING]" "JACKSON:" "Let's put Amelia down in the front here too." "My main memory of that day is, A, we had to hire a clown to entertain the children." "So we were all about the clown in the production office." "Hi." "Heh, heh." "That wasn't me, by the way." "I didn't do that smell." " Let's look at Harry." "HENNAH:" "Yes." "JACKSON:" "And then fireworks." "GANDALPH:" "Look up!" "Oh, ho!" "It was a crazy day because that was the day we were packing to go on location." "MAN:" "Off we go." "YORKE:" "Production wasn't concerned about what was actually going on on set apart from the clown." "Peter drove up in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that day." "I think that really set the tone for that day." "JACKSON:" "I've got the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car." "It's one of my prized possessions." "So on that day, we had all the kids and I brought the car in." "Incredibly magical day." "You turn up to work there's the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car, just sitting in the parking lot." "The keys are in it." "Let's go around the block." "JACKSON: it was interesting, very few of the kids were interested in the car but all the 40- and 50-year-olds went crazy about it." "WOMAN:" "He wants to meet the car." " That is so awesome, man." " It's pretty awesome." "MAN:" "Yep." "JACKSON:" "Thank you very much, everybody." "Thank you very much, Hobbits." " Thank you." "WOMAN:" "Finished." "[ALL APPLAUDING]" "YORKE:" "it kind of had a holiday feel about it that we were going on the road which is the bit everyone looked forward to the most." "You've been in the studio for so long, you're finally getting outside." "I mean, that's the part of filming that everyone just loves, is being on location." "Hi there." "Good to see you all back again." "Uh, here we are at Hobbiton." "That's another one down, yeah." "Only 16 to go." "We got security on the gate just to stop any infiltrators." "There's plenty of people who will give it a go." "Up on the corner there is one place where we invariably find somebody packed up." "Just gonna walk across the field there." "We get suspicious as soon as we see a car, if any of my spies see a car." "We've catch them halfway in." "The other day we caught them three-quarters of the way in." "Hello, hello, hello." "What's going on here?" "So we escorted them off but they'd had a look, and they're quite pleased with their..." "Their adventure, that's for sure." "[ALL CHATTERING]" "Shall we go for a wander, eh?" "Let's go down to Bag End." "Actually, coming down into Bag End." "Yes." "Bilbo has no privacy." "WOMAN:" "Look at that." "MAN:" "Yeah." "When we shot Ian in London, we kind of" "The idea was that he came out of this doorway." "Ha, ha, ha." "He wouldn't miss a chance to let off his Whizpoppers." " You know, stood here..." "MAN:" "Yup." "...and then Frodo was gonna run off down that hill." "But we've also got the other one-- The earlier shot of Frodo collecting mail." "WOMAN:" "That's what we're doing." "Yeah." "JACKSON:" "Right." "WOMAN:" "Go." " Heh, hey, dude." "JACKSON:" "Heh, heh, heh." "Made it." "[BOTH LAUGHING]" "WOMAN:" "All right, we're shooting." "MAN 1:" "He'll never make it to the east." "MAN 2:" "Yeah." "MAN 3:" "Here we go." "MAN 4:" "Ready." "MAN 3:" "And action!" "WOOD:" "The experience of making Rings and the friendships forged making it and the growth that I experienced in making it will always be one of the greatest experiences of my life." "It's incredible to be back." "I think when we finished pick-ups of Return of the King in 2003 I didn't anticipate playing Frodo again or ever returning to Middle-earth." "And, in a way, it kind of feels like vacation for me because I get to return to New Zealand and see old friends, so it's just all fun." "I have none of the, heh, responsibility that I had before." "Of the stress, of the weight of the entire story." "FREEMAN:" "And I'm older than Elijah and certainly I'm older now than he was." "There's quite an age difference between what I'm going through in Hobbiton and what he was going through." "What ultimately those three films meant for him in his life and what they're going to mean for me in my life." "[CHATTERING]" " Action." "WOMAN:" "Action." "For him, you could tell it was weird." "He was saying, "This is weird for me."" "Do you think he'll come?" "It's a mixture of nostalgia and surrealism and, uh..." "Not being able to process it." " Okay." "We're all good, aren't we?" "MAN:" "Yes." "Shall we--?" "Do you wanna do a rehearsal with this or do you wanna shoot it?" "JACKSON:" "Should we rehearse on" " Why don't we do that?" "WOMAN:" "Action!" "The thing I loved about it is it so cleverly sits us right back in a moment that happens just before we see them in Fellowship." " Do you think he'll come?" "BILBO:" "Who?" "Gandalf." "WOOD:" "He has a book in his hand and he's going to the East-farthing Woods to wait for Gandalf." "And the first moment you meet Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring is sitting in the tree, reading the book, hearing Gandalfs arrival, meeting Gandalf." "So it's just so cleverly constructed." "So I think you come back and you look at that sign and then you realize Bilbo is there and" "That feeling of asking about Gandalf should be sort of slightly excited..." " ...but a bit tentative, you know" " Yeah." "It's a bit sort of childish, but you're kind of excited about doing it anyway, so" " You know, that sort of feeling will be great." " Okay." "JACKSON:" "Here we go, please." "Rehearsal time." "And action!" " What, it's Elijah's last shot?" "Last shot." " Ha, ha, ha." " Is it?" " "Last shot" last shot." "Oh..." " Is it?" " I remember the last" "Last time we did this in Lord of the Rings, it wasn't fun." "One of the lasting memories of The Lord of the Rings is the last day of the shoot and actually shooting Elijah's last shot." "It's been four years to the day since Weathertop, Sam." "It has never really healed." "JACKSON:" "And having this rather devastating feeling that I would never work with Elijah as Frodo Baggins again..." "And cut." "Lovely." "Lovely last shot." "WOOD:" "Thank you." "JACKSON:" "Take good care, all right?" "WOOD: it's been so amazing, Peter." "JACKSON:" "You've been so amazing." "You did great." "Thank you very, very much." " What a shot to go out on, huh?" " Yeah." " Right, then." "I'm off." "BILBO:" "Off to where?" "East-farthing Woods." "I'm going to surprise him." "BILBO:" "Well, go on, then." "You don't want to be late." "So, everybody, that was Elijah's last shot." "[ALL CHEERING]" "MCKELLEN:" "I mean, "Oh!"" "WOOD:" "I didn't quite know how to react." "MAN:" "Elijah Wood." " Whoa!" "All right?" "WOOD:" "What a treat." "Who would've thought it would ever happen again?" " I know." " Another last day." " Indeed." " There's not too many last days." "We have to make this the "last" last day apart from the next time we have a last day." "It was kind of like stepping back into time and connecting with your family and having a kind of family reunion." "Where were you running off to?" " To see you." " Intimate-  intimate moment too." "WOOD:" "That's right." "JACKSON:" "To the trilogy." "WOOD:" "Yeah." "Running off into 1999." "I know." "When they called last shot, I didn't-- I didn't know how to" "Ha, I didn't know how to process it." " I turned 19 at this location." " Did you?" "WOMAN 1:" "Yes, I do." "WOMAN 2:" "Birthday boy." "Mwah!" " Happy birthday." "MAN:" "Yes, well, of course." "WOMAN 1:" "Nineteen today." "I'm 30 now." " Jesus." " Ha, ha, ha, ha!" " That puts things into perspective." " Oh, God." "Here we go." "We can film something." " Say hello." " Hello." "Goodbye." "[BOTH LAUGHING]" "JACKSON:" "Elijah's last shot." " Yes." " We were here" " And the sun came out for it." " The sun came out for it." "We were here in 1999." "And it's 2011." "My God." "Same location." "WOOD:" "And it looks no different." "There's a few more extra Hobbit-holes this time around." "JACKSON:" "Right." " That's it." "The scary thing is you look no different, Elijah." "[WOOD LAUGHS]" "JACKSON:" "Very good." "The market in Hobbiton." "Day one." " He means" " Oh, sorry." "Cheers." " Cheers." "Good morning, Hobbits." "Thank you for coming." "My name's Carol." "This, of course, is Peter." "This is Bilbo." "Hello." " Good morning." " Good morning." "We're just chatting." "[ALL GIGGLING]" "We love casting Hobbits." "Casting Hobbits is always a really fun casting." "Hobbit-type people are really close to their characters." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "They're really lovely and sweet and chatty and gorgeous." "They're Hobbits." "My daughter wanted to go to the auditions and so I went to keep her company." "And she didn't get to be a Hobbit, but I did." "And I was so thrilled." "Because she's a lady, she can choose which husband she wants." " Oh, okay." " I can't do that." "Have the good-looking one." " I'm too short to reach" " Ha, ha, ha!" " Perhaps" "They're short and round and cheerful and they have round eyes and round cheeks." "[CHUCKLES]" " I'm a natural." "MAN:" "Guys, you ready?" "And they have a naughty twinkle in their eye I tell you." "MAN:" "Sweep that up." "I've smoked better stuff." "[CHUCKLING]" "When we cast extras, we always like to use locals from the area." "It makes a lot of sense to use people who live nearby to the set." "I auditioned in Matamata." "I actually went for a friend who wanted some company and unfortunately he didn't get in, but I did." "So I feel slightly bad about that." "And if he's watching, I'm terribly sorry." "I thought my mom was joking at the start." "She was serious when she said:" ""You should audition to be a Hobbit."" "And I think after about two and a half thousand people here we are." "Fantastic." "A lot of people turned up saying, "I've always been told by my friends I was a Hobbit."" "Hello." "I've always wanted to be a Hobbit." " Yeah." "Just random." " All my life." "And all my friends, they're jealous, and I can't tell them anything or I'd have to kill them." "We had some familiar old faces who are now really old." "A few that had originally been in Lord of the Rings you know, turned up." "Gorgeous." "The Lord of the Rings, we had-- We were on as a Hobbit quite a bit." "There was more main actors and more, you know..." " With this, we have people say-- MAN:" "There's more of everything." "JACKSON:" "Have a bit of fun, here we go!" "Okay, background, action." "Go!" "And action." "WOMAN:" "What's your name?" "Sometimes the shots are so wide and there's so many extras Carol, the first AD wants to communicate with someone on set, in frame to adjust the position of the extras if need be." " I'm gonna send you later." " Okay." "So the timing is gonna be better." "So we're dressed as Hobbits because they keep telling me I look like a Hobbit anyway." "They're like, "Put a costume on."" "WOMAN:" "He makes a good Hobbit." "They'll never know." "MAN:" "He does make a good Hobbit." "What I love about working with Peter and Fran is that" " And Philippa is that they get this whole family thing." "It's really lovely when people can get their children and crew members can get their little cameos." "Hi." "RIVERS: it really makes it feel like you own the project." "That made it such a special day for us all." "MAN:" "You wanna tell us what you're doing?" " Behind the scene!" "Absolutely best day of their lives." "WOMAN:" "How's that look?" " This is Terry and Ruby." " Guys, this is Martin." "FREEMAN:" "Yes." "Hello, both of you." "You're beautiful." "One of the things I'm really pleased about that this production does is give fans a chance to come onto the set." "A lot of stuff with the Make-A-Wish Foundation." "And there was a woman in a wheelchair who came in and she was made up as a Hobbit and she was" "You know, she could barely move." "And she communicated, I think, through..." "I'm not sure if it was through blinking." "You see just in her eyes the joy that she had being on set on The Hobbit." "It's actually very hard to sort of work on things when you know" "You think, "We're making a film." "It's really important."" "Then you see something that's really important and you go, "Oh, Jesus." "God."" "But... it is important because..." "Because it's important to them." "And so" " You know, I really" "Oh, God, I feel such idiotic" "But this is how" " You know, this is how it sort of made me feel." "That's what I really remember from that marketplace scene, actually." "That this is her wish, and..." "I'm very proud of" " I don't know." "How we looked after them." "I'm such a dufus." "[CHUCKLES]" "JACKSON:" "How are you?" " Yeah." "You know, good." " So how's your week been?" " It's been a great week." " Yeah?" " It's been good." "We got everything done." " Great." " Haven't left you too many bits to tidy up." "You've only got your wonderful shots you have to do first, but not" " Ha, ha, ha." " Not much clean-up work to have to do." "We'd sometimes bump into where Main Unit were leaving." "So Second Unit would literally come in as Main Unit were pulling away." "JACKSON:" "One of the other shots you could do could be running out of the door of Bag End." "He should just slam the door behind him." "Don't have him be too fussy, you know?" "He's really kind of racing-- And he's got the contract in his hand." "Comes bounding out through the gate and racing down this path." "We're supposed to be doing some shots in beautiful sunshine but as you can see, that it ain't." "Not today." "What we're shooting at the moment is the moments leading up to Bilbo's departure." "Action." "JACKSON:" "I think this is the one." "So it's the sense of everyday mundane life in Hobbiton and a dawning realization that, "Is this gonna be it?" "Is this as good as it gets?"" "MAN:" "Action!" "SERKIS:" "The dawn shots and the dusk shots have been fantastic." "And we did one the other night and" "People coming home from the fields." "The Green Dragon door should open, people are making their way back along that path." "All the supporting artists have become fully into character and they're gonna find it hard to leave, I suspect when they go back to their normal lives." "It's rather sad." "But we've decided we'd have this party on the last day just to celebrate and put the Green Dragon to good use." "So cheers." "Mm." "GANDALF:" "This way, you fools!" "THORIN:" "Come on, move!" "[WARGS HOWLING]" "JACKSON:" "We wanted to use this location primarily because it's a chase." "The dynamics of everyone running, weaving in and out of rocks with helicopter shots zooming over the top and Wargs coming through the rock formations." "We just thought that would give us a dynamic kind of energy and be the right landscape for this." "BROPHY:" "it looks very otherworldly." "Perfect for running." "You go from one rock formation, and you sprint between that rock formation and the next one." "And it seemed to be just a series of 100-meter sprints." "JACKSON:" "We've got you guys, we got all the stunt doubles here." "We can go whichever way we want." "So we're here, I figured we'll just use people until they start falling over and then we'll bring the next lot on in." "And, um, ha, ha..." "MAN:" "Action!" "KIRCHER:" "We did a lot of running on Strath Taieri." "And that was part of, again, scene 88, which has become famous." "The ongoing scene 88 was never-ending." "MAN 1:" "Come on." "MAN 2:" "Run." "Oh, my gosh." "Scene 88, we ran and we ran and we ran." "Up mountains, through streams, we ran and ran and ran." " Not only Dwarves can fight." " We can run." "And we ran some more from Wargs." "A long way." "Probably the length of the country." "Ha-ha-ha." "I don't know." "We need you to be powering like an Olympic athlete." "That scene went on forever." "Go, run." "JACKSON:" "Run." "Look back over your shoulder." "Run." "FREEMAN:" "Jesus Christ, it was tedious." "First days, okay." "But it just seemed to go on and on and on." "Quick!" "Your lives depend on it." "JACKSON:" "Down you come." "Keep moving." "MAN 1:" "And cut." "MAN 2:" "Cut." "MAN 3:" "We're just gonna find out what we're doing next." " I guess it's gonna be running." "MAN 4:" "Oh, really?" "MAN:" "Action!" "[ALL GRUNTING AND SHOUTING]" "I've got a singlet, "Middle-earth Fun Run, proudly sponsored by scene 88."" "Scene 88 became like a full-length feature in itself." "And took as long to make as some films." "I think there was another movie somewhere called Warg, which is scene 88." "Brain Warg, Warg dead." "Heavenly Wargs." "Warg creatures." "And the list goes on." "If you said, "Jed, do you wanna do 10 push-ups?"" "He'd go, "I'd love to." He'll do 10 push-ups." "He loves being active and moving around." "So he became like our canary in the mine." "I remember Jed bent over, he looked at me and he goes:" ""I don't know if I can do another take." Ha, ha." "I thought for Jed to say that then we must be pretty close to, you know, calling it quits." "But then we did do another take, and we did another couple, another couple." "Peter likes to do one more for safety or one more for light." "And we were very safe on that day." "JACKSON:" "Whoa." "Oh, careful." "Hard work on difficult terrain." "You have to watch your step." "Come on." "McKELLEN:" "And sometimes when Gandalf is striding over the tussocks leading the Dwarves, even running, it may not be me because we need to distinguish between the heights of Dwarves and Wizards." "Therefore, you have to have a Big Paul." "Big Paul used to be a policeman." "Still is a policeman." "He was spotted on the street because how could he not be?" "He's nearly 7 feet tall." "JACKSON:" "Top of the hat, please." "Top of the hat." "Pull his hat." "WOMAN:" "Nobody can reach, Pete." "Turned out to be a very difficult sequence to shoot." "There was a lot of shots and it had to be split between main unit and second unit." "You know, it required previs that we did beforehand so we had to do some quite tricky camera moves to put the Wargs in it." "Pete's brief was he wanted a large-scale cat-and-mouse chase across a landscape." "The Dwarves are kind of being smart in using gullies and hiding behind rocks." "And these Wargs are kind of tearing across the landscape looking for them." "Fran actually called them on this, and goes, "They're dogs, predators." "They'll just smell them and find them."" "So they introduced Radagast." "So he's actually trying to lead them away." "You know, other Wargs show up and he has to turn, and he actually inadvertently ends up bringing them across the trail of the Dwarves." "It was what I call a jigsaw puzzle scene where you're just shooting a little piece here and there over a long period of time." "The chase starts in one environment and it moves through another and it ends in a third environment." "And these were hundreds of miles apart these different locations." "For the actors, it's like, "Hey, we gotta do more running for scene 88, guys."" "Then a week or two later, "We gotta do more running for scene 88."" "That kind of went on and on." "I'd never had the time or the energy to go back and look, but maybe one day I will to see how many times it actually appeared on a call sheet." "Particularly second unit's call sheet." "[ALL CHATTERING]" "SERKIS:" "As we pan off from Wargs here." "Coming in to here, rise up above, and Wargs are running in the distance." "WONG:" "We were helicoptered on top of peaks and mountains, nowhere." "And it'd be, "What we're gonna do is we're gonna fly over you and you're gonna run as far as you can."" "And there'd be days and days and days of that." "We've got running for the next 10 days or so." "Hopefully the helicopters and the mountains will make up for this weather." "Do some warming up, boys, so you don't go straight into it cold." "Run, run, run." "MAN:" "Action!" "Cut there." "Cut there." "Whoo!" "Well that's our thousandth shot on second unit." "That's our thousandth shot, everyone." "[ALL CHEERING]" "One thousand shots, and we've just done an 11-minute take." "It was a bit of an experimental vibe..." "And it was a thing of beauty." "And here we all are, and we're gonna go and celebrate." "FREEMAN:" "I like location, but I-- it's not my favorite part of the job." "It's not my favorite part." "I like being in a studio, actually." "And I think I may be the only person who thinks that." "So I don't really shout about it." "Because-- if everyone else is like:" ""We're outdoors." "What are you talking about?"" "At one point, we were strewn out across the landscape and I saw all the Dwarves lined up, and Martin and" "The Hobbit." "Couldn't help but feel there was kind of a brotherhood." "That is something that will live with me for a long time because that was us." "There was the Hobbit, there was the 13 Dwarves together." "I'm like, "Yeah, but, you know, we're ******* running around again," you know." "From imaginary Wargs." "As opposed to real Wargs." "Which they didn't-- They didn't even get those in." "We had to imagine the ******* Wargs." "DORI:" "Where's Gandalf?" "He's abandoned us." "Stand your ground!" "This way, you fools!" "THORIN:" "Come on, move!" "Seven months later" " Six months later, I think we shot the pick-up back at the studio." "MAN:" "And he's quite harshly lit on the side there too." " No worries." "Right up my alley." " And, um..." "[LAUGHING]" "This way, you fools!" "That's funny." "That's very funny." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "In a bad way." "This way, you fools!" "And you can have your hand on the rock too." "THORIN [ON SCREEN]:" "Gandalf!" "McKELLEN: "Fly, you fools!"" "No. "This way, you fools."" " "This way, you fools."" " Yeah." "MAN:" ""Fly, you fools" is from the wrong movie." " We've done that." " Yes, we've done it." " Done that one 12 years ago." " Oh." "JACKSON:" "Okay." "Here we go." "And action." "This way, you fools!" "It was supposed to be, literally, a kind of part of the prologue very small kind of vignette." "Erebor." "You've come out from Erebor, but the Orcs have taken over." "So you are leading the Dwarf army into Moria." "If I remember rightly, I read in the script, a few lines..." "This was this laughable idea that we were gonna shoot that in I think two days." "It took 10." "[CHUCKLES]" "MAN:" "Three, two, one, action!" "Keep pushing forward!" "Push down the hill!" "SERKIS:" "it was amazing piece to put together." "I really, really enjoyed that." "I mean, just mayhem, fighting, crazy, crazy, crazy fighting." "ARMITAGE:" "it's an absolute slaughter." "We really tried to achieve that that they're so overwhelmed with Orcs that it's a bloodbath." "MAN:" "That looks so good." "Absolute carnage." "RIVERS:" "Most battles, everyone ends up on a flat field." "Pete wanted it on that really interesting Mt." "Hollin terrain." "[GROWLS]" "You know, he wanted just this brutal kind of skirmish." "Pete decided that it would be nice to use the same location in which we see the Fellowship running out of Moria." "A very striking environment, a limestone mountain with very distinctive rock shapes." "It was like a giant concrete pimple in the middle of the studio." "So it was this sort of domey, rocky mound that was the battle area." "[GRUNTING AND SHOUTING]" "BOSWELL:" "We actually purposely made it so people couldn't swing their weapons." "They used different parts of their weapons to fight." "It was so congested." "MAN 1:" "What are we on?" "MAN 2: it's on concrete." " Really?" " Yeah, really." "So I just make sure somebody's under me." "Hopefully one of these scalers, mate." "[LAUGHING]" "Scale became quite an issue." "Because you've got Orcs and Dwarves." "And Dwarves are usually smaller than Orcs." "So there was a lot of full-sized stuntmen doing a lot of the principal fighting." "But also quite a few of the scale doubles." "WOMAN:" "How are you feeling, girls?" " Hairy." " Yeah." "We're a bunch of sexy ladies." " Yeah." "I don't know how guys can grow a beard." "My husband will never look at me the same." "MAN 1:" "Look." "MAN 2:" "Seriously." "No way." "Because when Dwarves start painting their nails, it gets weird." "They actually did an excellent job, and they loved it anyway because a lot of times they're waiting just to get into a fight." "Heh." "I was hoping to die as soon as possible, so you just get to lay down." "It was really funny because once they fell down, they found it very hard to get up." "I'm kind of a bit like a turtle at the moment." "I can't really get up properly." "So I'll just chill out here." "This guy has been working his socks off." "He's been here since yesterday." "And he's so Method, I can't tell you." "He won't go to lunch, he won't, um-- You know." "He came in, lay down, did his thing." "He's not complained once." "I mean, I think it's all gone to his head, really." "This armor was actually designed originally for the Battle of the Five Armies." "We had been designing and starting to manufacture these characters." "But the story idea of the Battle of Moria came to the fore and Pete was enjoying these suits of armor so much and we would just come up with new suits of armor for the battles yet to happen." "The neat thing is that because of their proportions we could make them almost tank-like." "Aside from the Goblins, the Dwarves in armor is the worst." "The hottest, heaviest." "They can barely move, and you can't see." "You got these little slots for-- You know, to see through." "And a lot of times the camera would just be moving back and forth finding random cool shots that worked and they would just keep going." "They would just keep going." "The guys'd just keep repeating stuff." "And finally when they call "cut," it's like, phew." "And cut." "[GRUNTING]" "Wow." "I'm really old." "I'm so old." "What is that?" "Oh, heh, heh." "WILSON:" "We got out there, obviously, it's supposed to be a battle." "So we started off the day a few spritzes of blood here and there, you know." "And then we got the, "More blood."" "it's like this is the-- The echoey voice came from afar." "MAN:" "Blood, guts." "Blood everywhere." "A few more, "No, more blood."" "So it was, "Oh, okay, I'll get a little cup and throw that."" ""More blood." So literally in the end, there were these drums of blood being thrown over this giant pimple that just began running blood all down it everywhere." "[LAUGHING]" "SERKIS:" "As each shot kind of went by the floor got covered in more and more blood and more and more blood." "To the point where everyone was sticking to the floor." "It was like this bloody battlefield." "It just looked horrendous." "Ladies and gents, we'll be back at Moria Gate tomorrow." "Battle of Moria became Second Unit's own private hell, I think." "It definitely became bigger than anyone expected." "BOSWELL:" "Turned out like our scene 88." "Every time you say "gates of Moria" to the stunt guys they all cringe, "Oh, no!" "Oh, no!"" "B marker." "MAN:" "Action!" " Action!" "MAN:" "Action!" "Advance down the hill, Orcs!" "If you're having trouble breathing, just put your hand up." "And we'll come and get you." "MAN:" "Action!" "[GRUNTING]" " Reset, reset." "MAN:" "Action!" "And cut!" "MAN 1:" "Catch it." "MAN 2:" "Okay, baby." "ALL:" "Oh!" "MAN 3:" "I'm out of here." "Yeah." "MAN 4:" "That was nice." "MAN 5:" "Yeah." "[GRUNTING]" " Boom, that was a great hit, that one." " Yeah." "We really wanted to go for a sense of really dirty, messy street fighting." "How do you feel about having two people jump on your back for that foot stab?" "Two people?" "Yep." "[GRUNTING]" "McTAVISH:" "That's" " That last two beats they're supposed to sever his jugular." "JACKSON:" "Right." " And then bury it in his chest." " Right, right, right." "So that's the intention." " As you do." " As you do." "What are you doing?" "What am I doing?" "I'm doing the Battle of Moria." "Why do you have this big tufty on your head?" "My big tufty on my head is because I'm younger." "This is the younger Dwalin." "So Dwalin wasn't bald when he was younger." "He lost his hair through stress." "I was interviewed by my own daughter." "She asked some pretty good questions, if I remember rightly." "Why are you fighting the Battle of Moria?" "Uh, that is a very good question, Anna." "The Battle of Moria is in a sort of flashback in the film to when we were desperately fighting to stay alive and we were nearly losing the battle." "And then Thorin turns the tide of the battle and we rally and we defeat the Orcs." "[THORIN SHOUTING IN DWARVISH]" "I remember having a big shield." "[GRUNTING]" "Every single time, I managed to bounce this shield off of an Orc and hit myself in the face." "And one take, I actually smashed myself in the lip and kind of put my teeth through my bottom lip." "I remember Andy coming up and going-- And sort of calling Tammy over and saying:" ""You know, the makeup's changed." "The makeup's changed."" "And Tammy was like, "No, no, no." "He's just bit half of his face off."" "I didn't need any Orcs to take me out." "I was doing a good job of hitting myself in the face." "[GRUNTING]" "Some of the scale doubles we used played their parts as their younger selves." "So Mark, as Thorin, played a younger Thorin." "As did Stephen as Balin and also Gareth as Dwalin." "So they went through the whole rigmarole of getting into prosthetics." "Yeah, see you out there, big boy." "Mark was used quite a lot for the actual fight sequence itself." "He learned the sequence completely." "As you're doing it now, just flick it across your body." "Tshh!" "Flick it, grab the" " Yeah." "Bam." "Bwoosh." "WOMAN:" "Action!" "[GRUNTING]" "Ran out of gas at the end, though, I have to say." "I swung the sword, and the weight of the sword took me over." "WOMAN:" "I thought it was great acting." "It was great acting." "I'm actually fine." "It's Method." "MAN:" "That's it." "ATKIN:" "Just a pleasure to be able to put together those fight scenes and be really proud of the end product." "This is the birth of the legend of Thorin Oakenshield that we're shooting." "It's what we call the Oakenshield moment." " Three, and then four, boom, five, boom, six." " Three, four, five." "Unh!" "WOMAN:" "Action!" "[GRUNTING]" "ARMITAGE:" "I think it's quite important to show the character perhaps at his peak, in his defining moment because that's really what it is." "Where he earned his name, for his prowess and his bravery." "So it was great to get the chance to play that." "[YELLS]" "SERKIS:" "And then seeing Thorin Oakenshield being born." "You know, striding up the hill." "This heroic shot of him striding up the hill with his oaken shield, ready to take it all on." "[THORIN SHOUTING IN DWARVISH]" "[ALL YELLING]" "I really like your kilt." "Thank you." "Yes." "Yes, you're wearing a kilt as well." " It's nice that" " But we don't have the same kilt." "No, no." "No, that would be silly, wouldn't it?" "Do you think we buy our kilts at the same shop?" " Yes." " We do, okay." "Yeah." "Well, thank you." "It's been a pleasure being interviewed by you." " Thank you so much." " Hee, hee, hee." "[BOTH LAUGHING]" "THORIN:" "We'll take it as a sign." "A good omen." "BILBO:" "You're right." "I do believe the worst is behind us." "Something we do on every film we make is to build in what we call pickup shooting which is basically two, three, four weeks of additional shooting at the end of the main shoot of the movie." "There's a lot you don't know about the story until you see the film for the first time." "We could have an Orc flying through the air up in this shot here." "OLSSEN:" "And once you see it put together, you know, things become obvious about what's needed to clarify the story and make it work better." "Pickups are very much the process of crafting the finished film." "It's never really reshooting scenes that you didn't get right the first time." "It's usually actually inserting extra emotional beats into preexisting scenes." "And now you can fill in that card." "JACKSON:" "Thank you." "There's things like Bilbo trying to save Thorin's life when the Wargs attack." "We never had that in our original shoot." "By the end of the first film, you needed to feel that Bilbo was one of them and is actually, in his own way, extremely brave." "It's gonna be kind of vulnerable and endearing the way this little Hobbit just throws himself in there and risks his life to try to save Thorin." "So having Thorin taking on Azog by himself is great but once he gets knocked to the ground we wanted Bilbo to stand up and find his courage to be that little Hobbit who is able to step forward with a sword and tackle the Orcs." "Do the classic sort of thing, which is like a one, a two and on the third, it comes..." "Thorin has more cause than most to hate Orcs." "HENNAH:" "Often, the cutting process is taking place at the same time as the pickup shoot." "So you're only finding out today what you need tomorrow." "Just whack him in here for the time being." "So we've got two weeks to shoot all our pickups and we're spread over four stages." "And we're bouncing between each one of them or maybe even two sets in a day." "HENNAH:" "As a rule, you're not building a whole set you're building a piece of set that is sufficient to shoot one close-up of a piece of dialogue that may be needed." "ELROND:" "Have you forgotten?" "A strain of madness runs deep in that family." "His grandfather lost his mind." "His father succumbed to the same sickness." "Can you swear Thorin Oakenshield will not also fall?" "JACKSON:" "Great." "We can cut that script." "Thank you very much." "Shh." "We're not allowed to ride the bikes in the studio." "Shh." "Second unit wrapped and there were still some pickups that Peter still wanted to get so they asked me to direct the splinter unit." "We're on our fifth set up for today, picking up lots of little pieces." "A movie isn't shot until it's shot." "You got the staff and the weight forms and it goes:" "And splinter unit, we are there to do a lot of shots that Peter don't have time to do." "And it's a lot of shots that involve sometimes action." "So stunts or sometimes just insert of picking up a sword or..." "The biggest part of our day today was getting Terry Notary as the new Orc, Yazneg." "It's the last week of shooting and Peter has asked me to play Yazneg." "Go on!" "And Terry was given, I think it was something like nine Orcish phrases that we needed to record." "And he got them that morning." "So..." "Everyone needs a little help sometimes." "Even Orcs." "And it was like, "Hey, there's new lines." "Oh, great." "They're in Black Speech." "Oh, greater."" " Tolkien, baby." " Tolkien, baby." "[SPEAKING ORCISH]" "RIVERS:" "So it's fun to be shooting on Weathertop again." "I remember the first day we shot on Weathertop was actually Viggo Mortensen's first day of shoot and as Aragorn fighting the Ringwraiths." "MAN:" "And action!" "RIVERS:" "it was a long, long time ago now." "[SINGING OPERATICALLY]" "[ALL CHUCKLING]" "MAN:" "Jeez." "All right." "All right." "Standing back." "Shoot and three, two, one." "Action." "[ALL SCREAMING]" "DORI:" "We're dead!" "We're dead!" "Cut!" "Mark, you'll be on much of the wire and basically just be kind of holding his leg." "Why don't you shout?" " Because" " Why don't you ******* shout?" "[ALL LAUGHING]" "We're doing your ******* close-up." "Shut the **** up." "Take the wire out." "Have a cold glass of water, chill down." "If not, you won't be up for your stunt this afternoon." "Mark always gave me a lot of trouble but I gave him a hard back." "Adam, you should be there, grabbing his foot, and we'll do his ******* close-up." " You all right?" " It will be cut from the movie anyway." "So..." " Here we are." "That's your nose." " Lovely." "OLSSEN:" "Peter usually does a cameo in all of his films." "And he left his one for the first movie till the last minute." "I've either gotta be an Elf, which I really am not that cut out to be an Elf." "The only other options are a Hobbit or a Dwarf." "And I never got to be a Hobbit, so I've run out of choices now." "That's another sense in which this is a home movie." "Often people who work behind the camera do get their moment in front of it." "Caro called up and said Peter had suggested I do this this morning." "So yeah." "Sounded good." "I kind of do it now because everyone expects me to do it." "I get asked about it, so I kind of think the day I say, "I didn't bother doing a cameo" it somehow feels like I don't care about the movie or something." "I kind of find myself having to do these cameos now." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "[ALL CHEERING]" "I'm taking one for the team here, I tell you." "And then we'll go into the sword pulling." "I mean, if you just start that action it'll give us a cut into what will be done." " And testing." " Thank you." "I've gotta get my direction from Peter, if you could send Peter in." " Who is this?" " I'm a little wanker." "WOMAN:" "He's a stand-in." " That little wanker is taking some time off." " Did you?" "Jesus." "That's like Kiran." " We've got a real man now." "I was directing the splinter unit when Peter and Jabez do cameos as Dwarven refugees." "It's complicated directing the director of the film in his own film." "You wanna be tracking with me for a while." "We were thinking we'd spend a lot of time on you." "If you get some Richard that's fine." "I mean, Richard is not so important." "Pete's a wonderful performer and he gives it a lot of energy." "But sometimes he purposefully manages to find ways to hog the screen time." " If you could look more worried." " More worried?" " But carefree." " Carefree but worried." " Yeah." " Okay." "All right." "Thank you very much." "Go away." "Thank you." "[ALL LAUGHING]" " Camera set." "MAN:" "Action." "Quickly!" "Run for your lives!" "Not only does he have a limp but he actually turns towards camera and stays looking past camera, then reveals Thorin." "JACKSON:" "There's Richard pushing me out a bit too quickly." "You ought to linger on me a bit longer." "MAN 1:" "Linger longer?" "MAN 2:" "Yeah." "Come on." "There's a mischief to him, which I have not seen in other directors which I think is maybe what defines him a wee bit from other directors." "WOMAN:" "Pete, stop it." "[SNARLING]" "[ALL LAUGHING]" "We were hoping for a bigger fright, Victoria." "Oh, sorry." "I've worked in the movies too long." "JACKSON [WHISPERING]:" "Gandalfs asleep." "MAN:" "Poke him in the ear." " And action." "JACKSON:" "Action." "[ALL CHUCKLING]" "Peter, I always called the 12-year-old with the beard." "Because he is just doing what he wanted to do pre-beard." "You know what I mean?" "And probably with no difference." "He's just got more toys." "You know what I mean?" "Don't wanna end up the back here." "There's room on my horse for two." "Two little boys had two little toys." "Each had a wooden horse" "[HUMMING]" "There is room on my horse for two." "Would you like to be wetted down now?" "[JACKSON LAUGHS]" " That's what I'd say." "Quick, get the hose." " Get the hose out." "It was fun." "It was relaxed." "It was collaborative." "It's a long shoot but it was enjoyable." "Every single day was kind of fun." "You can go just as fast with two." "I can go just as fast with two" "[WHISTLING]" "We shot for 266 days." "And, you know, it's a big piece of your life that you spend making these films." "The end was in sight so I just wanted to make sure that we ended on an up note, really." "You're not a volunteer, you're conscripted." " Where do you want me?" " Anywhere you want to make yourself comfortable." "JACKSON:" "I loved everyone that I worked with." "We had a great cast, great crew and we were in a kind of a giddy mood." "MAN:" "Go on action too." "MAN:" "Okay, all right." "WOMAN:" "Let's do it." " The last sun." "MAN:" "The last sun." "So we are on the last day of shoot and we're shooting the last scene of film one." "We have a very emotional scene where Thorin realizes that Bilbo is a hero." "And they turn around and they look to their future, which is Erebor." "Only a few more hours to go, guys and you never have to wear these fat suits again till next year." "Last day of pickups." "Very exciting." "It was the actual last shot in the movie, it's a really nice way for everyone to finish." "And you've kind of all gone on this journey, not just the characters in the movie." "We'd all gone on this journey and come to this really nice, hopeful ending." "Everyone was in a very joyful mood that day." "[LAUGHING] Yay!" " How many set ups left after this?" " Well, we've got this one." "Go napping all year." "Production manager has Gandalfs staff." "I'm a bit worried." "She might steal it." "I got my eyes on her." "Shh." "FREEMAN:" "She's doing balls like Columbia." "MAN:" "Yeah." "Like a flaming torch." "HENNAH:" "What's interesting is that on these huge shoots with way, way more people the camaraderie doesn't develop over 6 weeks or 10 weeks it develops over 262 days." "MAN:" "Just go back into the hug for me, please." "Just hold that for a moment." " You want a little ding under there?" " Okay." "HENNAH:" "Finally reaches a point it feels comfortable with your brothers and sisters." "You cannot get as close as we've all got on a film like this." "Whether people like each other or not, the emotions are still there." "It was a very happy environment on set." "Generally it always was, but everyone was pretty happy to have made it to the end." "Especially the cast." " Glad we made it." "MAN:" "Getting really cold." "This is it." "Last shot. 2012." "The Hobbit was our life for two years." "It was very, very long." "Thank you." "So when the shoot come to an end you've got all that excitement but it's sadness as well." "YORKE:" "You look around and think, "We got here."" "We're all still here." "We're all standing." "It's a great feeling." " Thank you." " You too, man." "Gee, it's too much." "The dynamic on this film, I think has been quite, I hope, egalitarian among the cast." "I mean, the crew are scum, so we don't treat them well." " Yeah, definitely." " I hope I see you gain." "That probably won't happen." "Don't delude." "I mean, it's unfair." "It's unfair." "Just cut" " No, I won't call you." "Drinks are only for the cast and crew, okay?" "You are now moribund." "FREEMAN:" "But among the actors it's been quite equal, I hope." "That much testosterone and that much male ego around the place it would be very, very easy to get frayed with each other but we haven't." "It's been really, really good." "[GRUNTING]" "WOMAN:" "My God, that's so funny." "Literally, I suggest you use the peak of Ian's hat plus another three or four inches to be where you look." "Don't look Ian in the eye." "Just above his head." "Never look him in the eye." "JACKSON:" "Above his head." "He's on his contract." "He doesn't wanna make any eye contact with anyone." "McKELLEN:" "Thank you, Peter." "Shall we give it a go?" "So it's..." "WOMAN:" "Bye now." "Thank you." "MAN:" "Love you." " All right." "Here we go." "MAN:" "Okay." "MAN:" "Okay." "HAMBLETON:" "That was an amazing day." "Towards the end, we realized that a lot of people were gathering in the studio space other members of the crew and production team." "So it was an important, almost sacred moment, the final shot." "YORKE:" "I think there was hundreds of people hidden behind Peter's tent watching the monitors." "You couldn't move." "Everyone standing, waiting." "JACKSON:" "Last thing we had to do when we were done with the shot, end of the movie end of the shooting and the Dwarves came up to me." "They said they wanted to do something special for Martin." "I was aware of the fact that we hadn't really done anything where we just kind of had somebody on." " Has nobody told you what we're doing?" " No, nobody's told me." "We set this thing where we had a code from Peter and that it was the last take." "Because Peter was always saying, "Just one more for luck."" "Let's just do one last for luck." "Should we just do one more for luck, Richard?" "That's great." "Just do one last one for luck." "One last for luck." "Let's do it." "I said instead of that, without telling anyone, "Can we just do one more for extra luck?"" "One more for extra luck." "So the code is extra luck." "When you hear that you know that this is the one we're gonna do it on." "So I thought it would be really nice, without telling Martin, to give him a bit of a send off and say thank you for doing such an amazing job being a Hobbit." "All right, here we go." "I guess we call this one more for extra luck." "JACKSON:" "Ready, steady." "Here we go and action." "And we played the whole sequence out so Thorin, Richard, went up and hugged Bilbo." "THORIN:" "Did I not say you were a burden?" "That you would not survive in the Wild?" "That you had no place amongst us?" "I have never been so wrong in all my life." "Party group hug!" "HAMBLETON:" "And it was a fantastic moment." "And then Peter came up on the set and we all embraced." "Whoa, whoa, whoa." "[ALL CHEERING]" "MAN 1:" "Well done, Pete." "MAN 2:" "Well done." "MAN 3:" "Well done, mate." "Well done." " Oh, you guys have been amazing." "MAN 4:" "Cheers, Pete." "I must admit when I had my little experience as a Dwarf, I absolutely hated it." "Very uncomfortable and hot." "So I don't know how you guys did it." "MAN 5:" "Thank you." "HAMBLETON:" "So a lot of hilarity broke out." "And it was a really lovely celebratory way to express the last shot." "It's been such a huge journey for myself and all my brothers." "And we are brothers, all the Dwarves." "It'll be a part of my life that I'll never forget." "MAN:" "Galadriel, well done." "God, you've had to put up with some shit." "It's going." "It's going." "I'm taking it off." "I'm taking it off." "[ALL CLAPPING AND CHEERING]" "You know, to top it all off, the entire crew is there and we are given some absolute treasures." "We were given a reverential remembrance of a piece of equipment important to us." "I was given my boar spear, which I loved." " Just what you always wanted." " I love that." " It's the sling shot." " I think it might be." "Thank you very much." "Thank you, sir." "JACKSON:" "And this is a very, very special gift." " Lego Bifur." " Lego Bifur." "One of the most exciting things for me was Lego Bifur." "The hottest two Dwarves on the planet." "It's so huge." "McTAVISH:" "And I showed it to my daughter when I got home but she's not allowed to play with it." "It's mine." "We all got our back of these chairs with our name on it." "All I need now is a chair to go with it." "MAN:" "I'm sorry." "To the leader of our company, Thorin Oakenshield." "Thorin got given Orcrist which is that special sword that Thorin has for battling all of the goblins." "Apart from wanting to say thank you to Pete in front of Phil I just wanna say I've never seen a crew work as hard as you guys have." "And I apologize for being so grumpy all the time." "I've never seen anything like it and I can't wait to come back next year and see you all again." "So thank you." "We've all been working long and hard on a movie called The Hobbit." "And here he is." "MAN:" "Jesus Christ." "Is that Kiran?" "[ALL LAUGH]" "MAN:" "You wish." "This has been my home for 18 months and if I've gotta be away from home which I have, that's contractual I couldn't imagine anywhere that would make me feel more welcome and more warm with a lot of people, cast and crew, production." "And that's a hard gig when we're on the other side of the world." "So thank you so, so much." "I've had a real blast with my fellow actors." "As Richard said, the crew has been ******* outstanding." "And I get this." "So thank you so, so much and thanks for the Holy Trinity." "We've had an incredible cast and now we have to say goodbye to somebody who is, I think, one of the world's most beloved and fantastic actors." "Ian." "When I first met Peter in London with Fran you know, it did cross my mind that they were a little bit Hobbity." "And then when we came to do this second lot of films I thought, "Well, no, because he's not a Hobbit, he's a Dwarf."" "But actually the truth is that he's a wizard." "And the greatest wizard of them all." "And working with you, Peter, and everybody here and completing these films is better than winning a gold medal at the Olympics." "THRANDUIL:" "Where does your journey end?" "MAN:" "if you can't see me, I can't see you." "I want everyone to represent." "Okay, here we go." "And now." "Awesome, thank you." "All done." "[ALL CLAPPING AND CHEERING]" "That is not the end." "That is not the end by a long ways." "It's the last day, but it's not the last day, you know." "So it's hard to know where the emotions are at then." " We're here next year" " Get into a harness." "For several months, so" " You know." "Between now and then, we'll just be drinking." "That's it." " Still more time with these idiots." "Yeah." "MAN:" "You guys" " Ha, ha." "It is a slow goodbye." "We wrap and then we do pickups, and there's the premiere but each day, it gets less and less, you know." "There's less and less to do." "And I think, you know" "I think I'll miss the people." "[CHUCKLES]" "Aw..." "Getting through principal photography and then the pickups in the first film certainly" "You know, you feel like you" "[JACKSON CHUCKLES]" "You're not at the top of the mountain yet, but at least the peak's in sight." "You've got oxygen, a bit of food." "You think you can actually get there now." "I don't remember the first day." "It was before my 21st birthday." "Every film was a challenge to craft it and so by the time we're done with our photography we've shot, you know, essentially three movies, plus the pickups of the first film." "You really" " All your focus and attention just goes onto that first film at that point." "OLSSEN: it's always good to get out of the shoot and get into the cutting room and get the director there and start focusing just on the editing." "[YELLING AND GRUNTING]" "JACKSON:" "Dean is making his own sound effects." "MAN:" "Yeah." "It saves the sound guy a week." "If all the actors do that..." " ...we would save so much time." " Well, quite a few actors do do it." "You don't really think too much about the fact you've got two more." "There's so much at stake now to get that first film out the door and to make it as good a film as you can possibly, you know, make." "There's too many." "We can't fight them." "Only one thing will save us, daylight!" "JACKSON:" "What do you think, Fran?" "FRAN:" "An improvement." "JACKSON:" "Good." "Premiere." "A week to go until the premiere." "Seven days, it said on The Embassy when we went there." "If we snuck in there, put up a sign saying "10 days"..." "MAN:" "Yeah, yeah." " ...we might be able to buy ourselves a few extra days, which would be quite good." "The clock is ticking." "[TROLL GROANS AND SOUND EFFECTS]" "SAINDON:" "Digitally we started off 800-shot movie, really." "That's what the original idea was for the movie and we went up to about 2400 shots." "So the movie crew, just from day to day... if I was younger, more new to this game I might have been more terrified." "Because the task that we had set to us was huge." "The number of shots we delivered in the time frame that we've delivered them has been phenomenal." "WETA was working around the clock thousands of technicians, trying to get these shots in." "Little Goblins I've added here." "Awesome stuff." "Pete wasn't liking this or that." "LEVINSON:" "This last shot that we had to" "We were chasing is a shot of the dragon." "That was a huge shot." "It was a big, long shot." "We were pulling through millions of gold coins and revealing Smaug in close-up detail and an eye that we had not yet seen before in the film." "We did all-nighter after all-nighter on that last shot." "It was the last shot we worked on." "It was down to the wire." "I just had to jump in and do it myself because we had no time." "I think it's working okay now." "We delivered that last shot the day of the premiere, essentially." "As long as we've got some petrol in the car and we can drive the movie to The Embassy on time, we're okay." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "MAN:" "Good morning." "[PEOPLE CHATTERING AND CLAMORING]" "We launched a premiere in style, with half a kilometer of red carpet and tens of thousands of fans lining the red carpet." "[ALL CHEERING]" " I hope you enjoy it, guys." " Thank you." "I didn't think that many people were interested but when you're walking down the red carpet people were just screaming and so excited." "WOMAN:" "Thank you." "And we got" " Only have two more to go." "Ha-ha-ha!" "Unfortunately I fell asleep at the premiere from all the all-nighters, heh, heh, before." "[PEOPLE CHEERING]" "JACKSON:" "it's one thing to be working on a project that no one's ever seen and you don't know what anyone's-- How anyone's gonna react." "Once that first movie's out there, it's doing okay, people are enjoying it you kind of get a lot more excited about the second and third." "You're thinking of ways you can improve it." "All right, shall we shoot?" "I mean" "I'm really excited about The Desolation of Smaug." "It's the middle film, which is often the hardest film to write." "But actually, in this instance, it hasn't been." "It's been great." " You get to meet all these new characters." " Shh." "Welcome." "Welcome." "The question of how many of those you can eat" " And keep down, that's the key." " Yeah." "And then afterwards" "That was probably one of the least pleasant scenes I've ever had to do." " It's disgusting trouble." " Yes." "Look at him, with his little pointy crown." "BLOOM: it's a good look, Dad." " Thanks, son." "BLOOM:" "Okay." "I've done a fantastic amount of Orc slaying again." "Let's do this." "MAN:" "Action!" "BLOOM:" "I've lost count, but it works out really well." "BLOOM:" "Oh!" "Whoa!" "A bit of Elf/Orc love?" "[YELLS THEN LAUGHS]" "LILLY:" "We were killing Orcs and chasing after Dwarves and" "Just generally looking badass." "We were hacking and slashing to make up for the Elves with their fancy moves." "We need to get some of our-- Get some Dwarf style in there" " Wah!" "Not a sight that you see every day, is it?" "[ALL GROANING]" "I've been eating these mushrooms and I'm hallucinating." "I feel like I'm..." " You're on the wrong set, old bean." "FREEMAN:" "Are you ******* serious?" "I've been there, I've been..." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "I am concentrating in this film." "It's just there's a lot of bears and Wargs and Orcs." "This is a very heavy book." "MAN:" "Hold on, guys!" "Aah, it's gonna go!" "WOMAN:" "Reset." " Look at his little face." "WOMAN:" "Reset." "We completed a 70-meter circuit in just over 20 seconds." "It was just mayhem." "[ALL CHEER]" "We get to the mountain." "We get to our goal." "Right where this rock is just imagine a huge foot either side and a statue that rises up and everyone is searching for the secret entrance." " There must be a way." "MAN:" "Shake." "Was that an earthquake?" "BALIN:" "That, my lad was a dragon." "The Smaug that I worked with was a tennis ball on the end of a stick with an angry face drawn on it." "I just kept thinking of Benedict Cumberbatch's face." "Not good because it's not gonna look like Benedict Cumberbatch, ha-ha-ha!" "There will be nudity." "This is not your usual ADR session." "Uh..." "Smaug likes to slither about in and amongst lamb wool." "And I wonder why I get into trouble." "[GROWLING]" "JACKSON:" "I mean, there's a lot more work to do on both the second and the third." "The second's obviously coming up pretty soon after people see this but the third is another year away." "It sort of becomes a bit more fun actually than it does when you go back two years and you haven't shot a thing." "Because you are now aware that there's so many people looking forward to the second movie." "Which is a pressure, but it's also-- it's a motivator." "It sort of energizes you to really wanna make that second and third film as good as they can possibly be." "You wouldn't wanna wake up to that in the morning, would you?" "[ALL CHUCKLING]" "MAN:" "Quick." "Quicker!" "[YELLS]" "MAN:" "Very good." "Whatever comes, stay on the path." "Don't leave the path." "Wait, Gandalf." "It might be a trap." "I thought I was rather good in that." "[PEOPLE LAUGHING]" "BALIN:" "This is no thunderstorm." "It's a thunder-battle!" "Look out!" "[ALL SCREAMING]" "[THUNDER CRASHES]" "They tried to recreate the conditions of being in a storm and they did that very, very well." "You could imagine that the rock is splitting apart there are huge rocks being chucked at us by the Stone-Giants." "And there's a lot of things to think about." "[YELLING]" "Today's scene, we've got a lot of lightning effects in it." "The way we've done it is we've used fluoros in the roof as a wraparound lightning." "Plus, we've also got around the place a whole bunch of lightning strikes." "I think it may be the first time that people have used fluoros as in Kino Flo, to simulate lightning." "Hey, Rubes, can you take out 115 and 116, will you, please?" "Basically I break up the roof into groups and then turn it into sort of chunks of lightning in the roof." "We can record and then sort of compose it." "And if the bosses like faster or bigger pieces you just kind of go mental on the buttons like you're doing rock 'n' roll." "And then once that's recorded, then I can just kind of play that back." "The guys on the other lightning effects are wearing out their thumbs all day, so" "They don't know about this so don't tell them." "This was a new technique, so we really liked this new use of these lights." "We'll do rehearsals, but there'll be a lot of wind and rain and you should play the cold, the uncomfortableness you know, the sheer drop, hundreds of feet down here." "You know, just make it look miserable." "I mean, it won't be." "You'll be enjoying yourselves, but make it look miserable." "[LAUGHING]" "The rain is the little shower nozzles, yeah." " We've chosen-- MAN:" "Random." "Oh, not random." "No." "[LAUGHING]" "Carefully selected." "HUNTER:" "I bet I'm getting the cold one, I just know." "I didn't-- I shouldn't even have to ask that question." "I fancy a cold water tower, please." "Because it's-- I've been boiling in this costume." "I'm just a little bit disappointed." "I did have a shower before I came to work this morning." "WOMAN 1:" "Bring it on." "Go on." "They're just decontaminating us." "WOMAN 2:" "Turn around, face me again." "MAN:" "Turn around." "This is the best part of the whole job." "Fortunately I don't have any lines." "It's just reactive, basically quite easy days for me." "Apart from the fact I'm gonna be probably extremely cold." "And wet." "Wet." "Bring it on." "NESBITT: it's a Saturday." "Nothing more I want to do on Saturday than get soaking wet in 25 kilograms of clothes." " You're not finished." " I'm supposed to be a light spritz." "MAN:" "No, you're not." "NESBITT:" "I'm a light spritz." "WOMAN:" "No, no, no." "Spritz on the head." " It is." " Oh, no" " Ha, ha, ha." " Oh." "Like a typical Irish summer." "Very wet." "WOMAN 1:" "Can you--?" "You actually might get wet and..." "MAN 1:" "Oh." "Jimmy." "[LAUGHING]" "MAN 2:" "I could" " Yes, go on..." "WOMAN 2:" "Can you do that?" "They'd wet us down completely with hoses they put teeming, teeming water on us." "O'GORMAN:" "Like cattle at the beginning." "Wet us down so we're soaking, then we'd shoot the scene." "Bang, down comes the rain." "They had these huge sprinklers." "MAN:" "Okay." "Here we go." "BOFUR:" "Stone-Giants!" "And they had these huge big wind machines that blew the rain into our faces." "And the noise." "[GASPS AND GROANS]" "The noise was unbelievable." "[FANS BLOWING]" "There were times when I literally didn't have to act." "I thought that we were in the worst storm on the mountainside from hell." "We were just, like, in this full force-9 gale." "McTAVISH:" "And I remember just being behind Martin and he couldn't see anything." "O'GORMAN:" "And I remember Peter saying, "Open your eyes!" "Open your eyes!"" "And Martin was like" " Like, he just couldn't." "MAN:" "Here we go, eyes wide open!" "And second rock!" "There was so much rain and wind that he was just laughing as we were coming around the corner." "He was just:" "[IN HIGH-PITCHED VOICE] "I can't f***ing see anything!" "Wait, wait." "What's going on?"" "[IN NORMAL VOICE] That's my impersonation of Martin Freeman." "[FREEMAN LAUGHS]" "On that particular scene, Bilbo ends up lying completely on top of me." "So I was lying there with Martin Freeman on me." "I'm sure it wasn't great for him either." "And it was just completely drenching." "And Martin got off and I was just lying there and they turned the sprinklers off." "And there was a water pipe that was pouring water straight on to his crotch." "And I was just sitting there, just wetting my pants basically." "For about three or four minutes." "Of course everyone thought it was hilarious." "[LAUGHING]" "It was pretty embarrassing." "[GROANING]" "One of my all-time favorite moments in that whole Misty Mountain sequence was when Ken did his close-up." "He has that huge white beard." "And on action, as the wind came every time Ken went to deliver the line:" ""That's not a so-and-so." "That's a--" The beard would just go pfft." "Look!" "It was like something out of Monty Python." ""That's not a so-and-so, that's a:"" "it's a thunder-battle!" "Eight, nine, 10 times." "JACKSON:" "Whoops." "Can you try not to get that beard in your face?" "McTAVISH:" "I'm convinced Peter did this deliberately." "Just try that again." "I'm sure he had a word with the guy operating the wind machine to just turn it up a couple notches." "It was just too perfect." "JACKSON:" "We just got the beard." "Do it once more without the beard going up." "[LAUGHS]" ""That's a" " Pfft."" ""I'm sorry, Ken, we're gonna have to go again."" "[LAUGHS]" "This beard gets everywhere, right?" "Turns up in the most unlikely places." "[LAUGHING]" "It was quite brutal at times, physically for us as actors." "But I like to think that that really helps the jeopardy and the kind of gritty feeling of the sequence." "MAN:" "And cut it." "Good." "We got that." "Very good." "WOMAN:" "How was that?" " That was great." "I love it, being in the rain tower." "It's fantastic." " The rain tower rocks." "MAN:" "Good?" "It was very fun." "I feel like a big kid again." "WOMAN:" "Are you okay, Jimmy?" " No." "I couldn't get off the tower with the wet" "Our costumes obviously absorb water and retain it so the costumes got heavier." "We were wearing our full costumes that we leave Bag End in." "And then they wetted us down." "NESBITT:" "They were pretty heavy, I have to tell you." "And afterwards, we were all determined to weigh ourselves." "I think I was like 25 kg over, so-- No one took me seriously." "You know, I was carrying 50 kg, which is a lot to be carrying for six hours." "So it's like 115, 110 pounds?" "That he's carrying?" "That's incredible." "You get to a time when it gets hysterical." "That we're on this set inside and there's wind and rain being thrown at us with all these costumes and this weight." "And Pete saying, "There's a big foot gonna stand on you now."" "I have to contain my laughter because I thought at times we were in a Monty Python film." "Yeah, just another day on the set of Hobbit." "Wake up!" "Wake up!" "Whoa!" "[ALL GRUNTING AND SCREAMING]" "WONG:" "The trap door stunt, which led to the Goblin caves was probably the most intricate and dangerous stunt that I've ever been a part of." "That was a tricky one." "That was extremely dangerous, that one." "That was a very nerve-racking outing." "There was a real sense of tension on the set that day." "JACKSON:" "This is all the movements happening on the set so you don't need to be doing much with the camera." "Because it'll sort of start to negate the actual action that's happening on the set." "In the cave, a little crack appears and sand disappearing down this crack." "The Dwarves are all asleep and then these big interleaving pieces of floor set start to fall away gradually:" "[IMITATING THUMPS]" "MAN:" "One, two, three, four, five!" " That's quite good, isn't it?" "MAN:" "Yes." "[MAN CLEARING THROAT]" "[LAUGHING]" "I think at first, as always, the stuntmen were pretty macho about the whole thing till they actually saw better." "It was quiet for about a minute when the full gravity of it sank in, that:" ""Wow." "This could be one of the most dangerous things that we do."" "MAN:" "Once you're happy with what you see now get yourself prepared for a run, eh?" "This was, I think, seven, what they called petals." "These petals weigh tons." "And they're all meant to drop at different times, okay?" "Once you pull the pin, the thing is gonna drop." "Once it drops, nothing can stop it." "This was potentially, you know tons and tons of metal crushing you if it went wrong." "It had to be a fair drop." "It had to be about 4 meters because the nature of the floor that gave way." "And also too, if one guy fell down on top of the other just from that height, it could have caused substantial injuries as well." " I'd probably go that way." " Go that way." " I'd go this way." " Go there?" "WONG:" "And as soon as they hit, they're being given a way they're meant to roll." "So they have to either move-- Roll to their left or roll to their right or stay exactly still." "And they probably have about a second or so after they hit to make that movement." "And if they don't make that movement, then it could potentially go wrong." "Seen the tests." "So far it's all been good, but..." "You know what it's like." "It's always a little bit nervous on the day, you know." "WONG:" "Anyone want a pillow?" "No?" "BOSWELL:" "Big game, this one." "WONG:" "it's a nice soft spot." "We're lucky Glenn Boswell allowed us to do a few rehearsals." "We staggered into it." "We started with a few guys at a time and slowly went back and did a couple of rehearsals today." "We're gonna drop petal one and two at the same time as usual, so this is drop one." "You guys give a set that you're happy he'll give a set to us up here." "Then when you're ready, we'll drop you." "Sand will progressively go along that way." "WOMAN 1:" "Rehearsal in five minutes." "Counting down." "MAN 1:" "Camera's going, watch your backs." "I'm ready to go." "WOMAN 2:" "Are you excited?" " Eh?" "Excited." "I was wondering what's for lunch, actually." "MAN 2:" "Schnitzel." " Curry." "WOMAN:" "Yep." "WONG:" "Okay, stand by!" "And one!" "MAN:" "You guys good?" "BOSWELL:" "You set, buddy?" "Okay, cool." "MAN:" "Set." "WONG:" "Stand by!" "And two!" "Three!" "Stand by!" "And four!" " Yup." "That's safe." "BOSWELL:" "Thanks" " Thanks, guys." "WOMAN:" "Thank you." "That's kind of where, I think, the planning made the stunt guys feel a lot safer anyway where they could actually see where they would drop and do by themselves." "But it's almost like we need to go, "And one and two."" " You know? "And three and four--" WOMAN:" "Like they need recognition..." " ...of what's happened before the next one." " Exactly." "Exactly." "BOSWELL:" "Straight after action Tim will go, "And one and two," and do the call for the" " For them to drop." "So there's not one between." "You have to react to action and you'll be dropping." "I got onto open comms channel, and all the Special Effects guys would pull their pin to my count." "So you can't go in rehearsals:" ""And one, and two, and three, and four."" "Then shoot, adrenaline takes over, you can't go: "And one, and two, and three, and four."" "In my mind, I was sitting there trying to think of a rhythm:" ""And one, and two, and three, and four."" "Over and over again in my mind, I just keep going:" ""And one, and two, and three, and four."" "SERKIS:" "You can only really do these things once because the reset time would have been phenomenal." "So it had to pretty much work first time." "MAN 1:" "B marker." "WOMAN:" "Walk away, Dusty." "Well, do" "Thank you." "And we're going hot." "Cameras are rolling." "WONG:" "Going hot." "One is hot." "Number two is hot." "Three hot." "Four's hot." "Five's hot." "WOMAN:" "All right." "MAN 2:" "We're hot." "WOMAN:" "Here we go." "And everyone's sleeping." " And action." "WONG:" "Stand by!" "WOMAN:" "Wake up!" "Wake up!" "WONG:" "And one, and two, and three, and four, and five!" "MAN 3:" "Cut!" "WOMAN:" "Cutting there." "Everybody okay?" "MAN 4:" "Dave." "WOMAN:" "Nice and easy." "Thank you." "MAN 5:" "You all right?" "Jimmy?" "WOMAN:" "Nice and easy on the tail slate." "MAN 5:" "Dave?" "WOMAN:" "Turn around." "MAN 6:" "Oh, yeah." "SHEERIN:" "That take was actually quite fun and all the guys had a really good time and all went really well." "See, we're happy now." "We wrapped and that's the first shot." "All the guys are stoked." "And, yeah, that's what you get when you prepare and put that training in and become trained professionals as we are." "So see you." "Oof!" "GREAT GOBLIN:" "Abomination." "Mutations." "Deviations." "That's all you're gonna find down here." "Good morning at Day One of Goblins, here at the studio." "Weta Workshop have worked for weeks through the night seven days a week to create these Goblins." "Finally they've been delivered and arrived." "And now, as you can see behind me, we're rapidly dressing the 30 Goblins ready for the shoot today." "Heroes, stunt performers, extras, all in Goblin suits with different masks on, loads of animatronic masks." "And just over to my right now the operators all arriving to set up all the animatronics stations." "Now we've got about two hours left to finish dressing them." "And then it's all go, and shooting all day on set at Day One." "And we've got two weeks of it to go." "[GROWLS]" "Just talcing the inside of a silicone suit." "That makes it a bit more slidy on the inside." "All right, I'm straight up in the air." "How are we gonna get it over this bloody hump?" "NOTARY: it's actually the first day we've all been in the suits at one time." "Usually it's just costume fittings." "So it's a big day." "We're gonna see how it goes." "We're gonna take it slow, hopefully and watch out for overheating." "Down." "Back." "We've been training for about five weeks on the movement." "Go, go." "Hit it." "Hit it." "[GRUNTING]" "Costume's feeling fine." "There's lots of bits and pieces that don't usually go with my bits and pieces." "I've got a good special nipple down here." "I'm a bit alarmed." "But I didn't get a nipple over here." "Oh, wait, that's new." "Well, you turn your back and someone gives you a nipple." "When Pete asked us to make translucent suits with moving bones under the skin that was one thing." "Then asking them to have elephantitis, huge humps on their backs and all sorts of body deformities, it was definitely gonna be a crazy breed." "WOMAN:" "Who has the biggest hump?" " That guy over there." "He's massive." "[WOMAN CHUCKLES]" "So this is the most animatronic characters we've ever had on set at one time." "We've got 40 heads without animatronics and then 10 heads with." "So what we've got here is some spiked movers." "And the silicon sits down onto it." "And it grips really well on there." "So we've got some nice, snarly mechanism going on here." "And then we've also got the eyes." "And this is all operated by cables, which will come out of the back here and go into a cable pack, and it's all operated with remote-control gear." "The guys finished them about one hour ago." "So it was a lot of very tired people." "But excited about the fact we've got all this cool stuff." "FRENCH:" "Some of these guys have been going all night and then straight to set." "A lot of components, a lot of people." "Today's gonna be really full on and we're looking forward to seeing our Goblins looking fantastic on set." "So what's that?" "What's" "[BARKING]" "Oh, gosh." "Zoe's a gritter." "She's a gritter." "MAN 1:" "B marker." "MAN 2:" "Looking at the board or the camera." "Straight at the camera lens, if you can if you can see where that is." "Right there." "TAYLOR:" "it's always going to be restricted." "And when you wear a mask that is this deep off the face no matter how much perforations you put ultimately they just end up being this series of little tiny holes way out on the periphery of your sight." "Dwarves are more than a match for Goblins." "Don't you worry about that." "Come on, buddy." "Come on." "Come on, Pete." "Be nice." "Play nice together." "He's a bit shy." "He don't talk much." "Goblin-town was one of the most demanding sequences that we did." "Because it was a very, very hot set." "BROWN:" "We started off in this kind of cage and we had to look up and have hundreds of Goblins run at you." "MAN:" "Charge!" "[ALL YELLING]" "BROWN:" "And, honestly, it was pretty scary because the lighting was dark and dull and there was lots of screaming involved where I was being caught." "It was really quite frightening." "We were all getting very, very tired when we did that sequence." "[ALL YELLING AND GRUNTING]" "That by far was the roughest day on a film shoot I've ever done." "It was so hot in there." "We had Goblins falling over." "Goblins that were meant to be harassing us were falling over." "We were having to pick them up off the ground." "You couldn't choreograph it." "All you could do is say to the Goblins:" ""Okay, you've gotta go in and get them."" "And all you could say to us was:" ""You have to try and stop them getting you." Action!" "[ALL YELLING AND GRUNTING]" "McTAVISH:" "People were swinging punches and there was all sorts of stuff going on." "Pretty much everyone's been smashed in the face by the Dwarves." "Like Jimmy Nesbitt's elbowed me in the face twice." "I think my highlight was a head butt from Marky Hadlow." "Yes!" "Yeah, there was some bruising that day." "MAN:" "Cut!" "Cut!" "They said, "Look, after each take-- Among the people playing Goblins- -if you don't want to do it, put your hand up and you can stay back."" " People were actually overheating." " Every time there'd be one or two more." "Until, by the end, there was only about four Goblins attacking us." "Because all the rest of them had passed out." "[CHATTERING AND CHEERING]" "WOMAN:" "How was that?" " Good laugh." "Ha-ha." "That was outrageous." "And I couldn't see anything above this:" "You look up and go, "Is that it?"" ""I can see the tips of my fingers." "That doesn't help."" "I couldn't see a thing." "I could actually see really well." "I was one of the lucky ones." "I had nice big holes, so, yeah, I could see." "I could move around pretty well." "At one stage my fan turned off, so that got pretty warm." "Literally, they would pour the sweat out of their shoes at the end of the day." "I'm serious." "This is a foot that I've been wearing all day and I'm just gonna empty out some of the goodness." "Oh, God." "Very nice." "...and you say cut and these extras guys they're just, they have a smile right then." "At the end of the day they're like, "I loved it, it was amazing I want to come back tomorrow and do more."" "You go:" ""Hmm." "What's wrong with these people?"" "it's pretty impressive to be able to get everyone moving and it's nice to actually see it down so we get an idea of what we're actually doing." "It's good." "It's a good first day." "Really good first day." "Peter made a lot of changes for the better after that day." "And things improved after that but still it was sort of, like it was off to a very, very tough start." "You've suddenly got people who are incredibly hot who can barely breathe who have to have their heads off every three or four minutes because they're literally, it's so stifling hot with the lights on the set." "MAN:" "Action!" "Action!" "Keep it alive." "Keep it moving." "Busy in the background." "Busy in the background, pushing around." "JACKSON:" "And suddenly, you know, you're realizing the Goblins that you're filming are not the Goblins that you had in your imagination nor are they the designs that you saw, nor are they the movement that you saw." "It's coming together and it's not kind of working." "WOMAN:" "Four dwarves, we've got five stunt doubles..." "So we ended up putting on sort of these green heads so they could CG the heads on later." "The performers were able to breathe." "And feel less constricted." "Suddenly the movements that Terry had, you know, trained them they were able to just focus and do more of that." "From my department I really wanted them to be moving correctly, you know?" "And being able to be comfortable enough to where they could perform." "So yeah, that worked out good." " That is the reason they say, "We'll fix it." - "We'll do it with CG Goblins."" " Yeah." "CG." " "Let's do it in post."" "Those Goblins won't die when you do three, four passes in a row." "So using these heads, these rugby helmet hats and putting little markers on and putting reference cameras on everybody we can actually track their position in 3D space and then put the Goblin heads back on the bodies." "You know I take my job very, very seriously, as you can tell by the amount of balls Fritz is putting on me." "The more serious you are, the more balls they put on you." "So at the moment, I'm kind of a big deal." "MAN:" "That way." "HENRY:" "I had a rip in my suit, on my bum." "So, Andy, my minder, had to put a boil to cover it up." "Yep." "Right there." "Whenever you get rips in your suit, you get more boils put on." "So probably by the end of it, we're just gonna be walking boily messes." "It's just part of the daily routine for Goblins, unfortunately." "One minute you're on two legs, the next minute you're on all fours." "And the next minute you're on your front bent over with someone patting your bottom." "WOMAN:" "Is this the best part of your job?" " Putting boils on Johnny's butt is the best part of my job." "JOHNNY: it's the best part of my job." "Definitely." "WOMAN 1:" "You're gonna lick it." "WOMAN 2:" "Lick it!" " That actually tastes like my sweat." "MAN:" "Yeah." "Funny that." " It's not K-Y that's making that" " Yeah." " Oh, yours tastes disgusting!" " I'll get back to that one." " Ha-ha-ha." "It's really dangerous to leave Goblins by themselves." "It's a bit like if you leave your dog in your apartment, it goes a bit crazy." "So we had a couple of days that we turned up at a very early hour to get suited up because we were all expected on set straight away, and we just waited." "And when we were made just to wait, sometimes people got a bit crazy." "Ready, Ben?" "[GRUNTING]" "[PEOPLE LAUGHING]" "MAN 1:" "Don't break the suits." " Oh, shit!" " What's happening?" "MAN 2:" "I don't know." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "Still good." "Still good." "MEISTER:" "And then some people started dancing." "Some people played games and it turned into a bit of a flash mob and the idea that, "Let's put a dance sequence together."" "I was queuing up to get our food in the catering tent and the Goblins got together and did a big dance routine." "Goblins dancing while you're eating your lunch, obviously." "We're all sitting down eating lunch and talking about the day." "Which is weird enough as it is, you know, with a whole lot of Dwarves." "It's a weird experience." "And then there's suddenly a whole lot of Goblins dancing." "[UPBEAT DANCE MUSIC PLAYING OVER SPEAKERS]" "Just one of those random things that happened on set." "WOMAN:" "And action!" "GREAT GOBLIN [SINGING]:" "Down, down, down to Goblin-town" "GOBLINS [SINGING]:" "Down, down, down to Goblin-town it's Day Four of the Goblins and we've finally arrived at the Goblin King's throne." "The Goblin King is played by Barry Humphries, who is fantastic." "Welcome to your kingdom." "You've got a few souvenirs." "Yes." "Grisly souvenirs." "WOMAN:" "Just make sure that I get her." "We'll have you on a platform off to the side." "Because you're actually too small for this platform anyway." "So you're, like, nine or ten foot tall." "[SINGING] Down in Goblin-town" "GOBLIN 1:" "Yeah!" "In spite of the gross repellant appearance of the King of the Goblins he's a highly intelligent man." "No tricks." "I want the truth, warts and all." "Something quite Kiwi about him, in a way." "I played him as a New Zealander." "Search them for every crack, every crevice." "We realize that underneath it all he is a New Zealand intellectual fallen upon hard times." ""Made in Rivendell."" "Second age." "Couldn't give it away." "I suppose in modern New Zealand he would have received a knighthood." "I haven't met a single person on this trip who is not knighted." "[LAUGHS]" "I'm thinking of becoming a New Zealand citizen." "[CHUCKLES]" "Barry Humphries, what a legend." "Working with Barry Humphries." "I used to watch Dame Edna's show every Saturday night with my parents." "Hello, possums." "Hello, darlings, let me look at you." "Oh, you've aged!" "You" "So to meet him was pretty special." "It was like, "Ahh."" "I never meet other actors except at funerals or charitable events." "HUNTER:" "Barry Humphries was incredible." "He got into the whole fun of it." "There's only a certain amount that he could do because it was all CG but he was here on set and he was doing all the off lines." "It was not to be, but comfort yourselves with the thought that you will die a needless and painful death here in the Misty Mountains." "No doubt some Dwarf minstrel will turn the whole sorry episode into an irritating ballad in years to come." "[ACTORS YELLING]" "Very, very hard to keep a straight face through some of his dialogue." "Kiran, are you gonna come around and bloody have it first to beat these guys?" "And having Kiran, heh, Kiran Shah, this annoying little Goblin." "[BROPHY CHUCKLES]" "He's a very naughty little man." "Peter encouraged Kiran to dry hump Mark Hadlow I think out of pity." "KIRAN:" "So Kiran ****** my leg for the whole of the scene." "And I'm trying to throw this little guy off." ""Get off." "Stop ******* my leg."" "This above all is a family film and any depictions of perverse sexual activity could only be described as educational." "[INDISTINCT CHATTER]" "[LAUGHING]" "The whole world's gonna see me beating on a little man who's humping my leg." "Peter Jackson, you've got a lot to answer for." "No, Mark Hadlow enjoyed it." "He can protest all he likes." "And protest he will." "But Mark Hadlow, you know, I really did it for Mark." "I did it for Mark's benefit." "Mark takes it where he can and on that day he took it from a midget." "There's nothing wrong with that." "At one point I thought, "I'm not gonna notice it."" "[LAUGHING]" " So last day as Goblins." " Last day as Goblins?" "Yeah." "Last day." "The thing I will miss the most is the absolute ridiculousness of me and my friends turning up really early in the morning and getting into really big silicone suits, and just sitting around having fun all day." "I'm going to super miss all the Weta people just taking ridiculous care of us." " I'm not even sure my parents did that." " Ha-ha-ha." "I know my parents didn't do that." "WOMAN:" "Dominatrix." "I was in the supermarket and rather than walking upright I was shuffling forward like a Goblin." "I didn't even have this on." " Yeah, it never really leaves though." " It sort of seeps into your soul, you know." " Yeah." " Yeah." "[ALL GRUNTING AND GROWLING]" "Several months later, when we were editing the scene we also were able to enhance it quite a lot by adding completely digital Goblins." "So we were able to put more digital Goblins in the scenes with the people in the suits with no heads and in some cases we replaced the suits entirely with digital Goblins." "It sort of ended up being an amalgam a little bit of each technique." "You may scratch your head and say, "Why just not jump straight from design to the digital characters that we see in the movie?"" "By having the mob in there by having this dynamic, energized group of Goblin extras backed up by the incredible acting skills, bravado, just cool stuff that the stunt guys do, it all just brings a reality to the stage." "SAINDON: it's always better to have something on set." "We did replace Goblins but the creepiness of the Weta Workshop Goblins still came across because the actors had a few days where they did have these guys in these really creepy suits and they were able to get that into their head so they knew what these Goblins were gonna be." "I was actually freaked out by the Goblins." "Oh, dear." "So that was just reality." "That is" " That's giving me the shakes." "And, ultimately, it can only lead to a better experience for the audience when they watch the movie." "[GOBLINS SCREECHING AND GROWLING]" "JACKSON:" "So the fact that we went to digital Goblins actually ultimately gave me an opportunity to make this whole sequence a little more dynamic than what it would have otherwise been." "I was able to get Goblins doing stuff that the guys in suits were just not capable of doing just physically, like a human being wouldn't be capable of doing." " Cut the ropes!" "JACKSON: it was one of those things that ultimately worked out for the best, the fact that they became largely CGI I think just helps to enhance the whole sequence." "[GROWLING AND SCREAMING]" "[GRUNTING]" "THORIN:" "Out of the frying pan." "GANDALF:" "And into the fire." "Run." "Run!" "Morning." "JACKSON:" "Good morning." "Good morning." " Yeah." "McTAVISH:" "Philippa, Fran and Peter are shaping the story continually." "It is a constantly evolving organic process." "That's why you get script changes literally on the day you're shooting." "JACKSON:" "We tweaked a couple of lines this morning" " Well, Aidan's got a line..." "Yes." "A couple of Ian's got tweaked." " This is incorporating some of your thoughts." "McKELLEN:" "Thank you very much." "I've been allowed to make a few suggestions vis-à-vis the script." "All of you, quick!" "Now!" "This way!" "Run!" "Follow me!" " That's all good, that." "That's all good." " Climb!" "Climb!" "High as you can, up the tree!" "All of you, now." "Climb!" "Run!" " That's good." "BROWN:" "Your pack needs to climb up." "Quick!" "BROWN:" "Hurry." " Hurry!" "I'm not one of the scriptwriters." "I'm just a concerned actor probably with a bit too much time on his hands who's made a few suggestions." " This way." " Ian, what I thought with you is that if you draw a couple of them through the front of you here..." "BROWN:" "He's here somewhere." "JACKSON: ...and you stop here..." "Whether it should be "11, 12 and Bombur" or whether it should be "Bifur, Bombur..."" "Or whether we should actually be naming." "McKELLEN:" "I think it'd be better to name." " I think it is better too, isn't it?" "[BOTH CHUCKLE]" "MAN:" "Brilliant." "BROWN:" "You had it done perfectly before." "[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]" "FREEMAN:" "Not my" " Dori, Nori." "Ori!" " That was months back." " Come on, come on." "MAN 1:" "Here we go, rehearsal." "MAN 2:" "You're gonna hit bumps." "JACKSON:" "And action." "McKELLEN:" "Five, six..." "Bifur." "Bofur." "That's 10." "Fili, Kili!" "That's 12." "And Bombur." "That makes 13." "We have to run along and get lifted on to trees by various people." "Get that foot up there, you..." "And then the trees fall onto each other." "We needed to have some trees that would shake with the actors on." "O'GORMAN:" "And they can dial it up to how strong they want it." "So they turn it up a little bit and the tree shakes a little bit they turn it up a lot, and it shakes all the way across." "[GRUNTS]" "O'GORMAN:" "So me and Aidan, we were going, "What are the stunts he's doing?"" "We were like, "We can do that." "We can do all the stunts he did."" "Trying to prove we can do what the stunties do, which we can't." "So Andy, for the last take, went, "Okay, yeah, lock it up."" "And they turned it up really high." "I mean, it literally almost threw us out of the tree." "MAN:" "Will you shut up?" "O'GORMAN:" "And then I sort of fell back." "And as I fell back the tree came forward, like smashed me on the chest." "And I made this involuntary squeak." "It kind of came out just like:" "[SQUEAKS]" "MAN:" "All right, smash!" "[O'GORMAN SQUEALS]" "And everyone heard it." "Like the whole crew just heard me yelling like a tiny scared mouse." "MAN:" "And cut!" "[ALL LAUGHING]" "What's happened at this point is that Gandalf, he's lit a pine cone and he's thrown a pine cone down into the Wargs." "The whole mass of Wargs is down here going crazy." "And they've made these pine cones that" "Pine cone-shaped and had real little lights going all the way around." "We wanted interactive light coming from the pine cones." "So one day, Reg rang me up and he said:" ""Rickster, I want you to make me some flaming pine cones."" "I thought, "I've heard everything now."" "But apparently this is what he wanted." "There were all RF so we could radio control them." "So we could sit down and my board operator could switch them on and dim them up and down, whatever." "So these create the light effect on the faces of the Dwarves." "And they throw them around and hopefully don't break them." "The first pine cone we ever built we brought on set." "This is the baby, right?" "This is pretty awesome because we were very proud of it." "So the executive producer, Zane Weiner, got a hold of this thing and the first thing he did is throw it straight on the floor." "GARSIDE:" "Goddamn it." " And it's on the concrete." "Just" " I gotta say that was not a piece of the scene, that was the studio floor." "GARSIDE:" "He just threw it." "MAN:" "Right." "And we go, "Hang on, we haven't even shown Pete this thing yet."" " Did you get that?" "CAMERAMAN:" "Yeah, I did." "He thought it was a great joke, we didn't, but there you go." "The problem with them was, obviously, once all the Dwarves started getting hold of them they're throwing them everywhere." "MAN:" "Now volley!" "Burn, you Wargs!" "[GRUNT  LAUGH]" "Yes!" "Ha-ha-ha!" "Yeah!" "So I would go, like:" "[SPEAKS IN DWARVISH]" "[SPEAKS IN DWARVISH]" "Which means "fire upon you."" "MAN:" "Yes!" " That was the girliest throw in the world." "You know, you're very much in the hands, in those scenes, of the filmmakers who with the particular angle of the camera, will make it look more dangerous than it actually is." "SERKIS:" "And when you're directing this kind of stuff, which requires timing you know, it's all in the imagination, Wargs appearing down on the floor level." "SERKIS:" "Three, two, one." "Crash!" "You've got to drop down burning pine cones which are actually lights which come on at a particular time." "All of that stuff" " Ian doesn't like getting caught up with that kind of direction." "When you're dealing with Andy as a director" "This is a superb actor." "He can cut straight through, as actors often can with other actors to the root." "You are searching for an answer..." "McKELLEN:" "What's going on?" "So you feel very secure." "Ian has to know exactly what he's thinking and feeling or else it can feel very fake to him." "SERKIS:" "There's gonna be the Dwarves-- The Dwarves arriving first." "Before the b" "They'd arrived." "You didn't see them?" "But he didn't like receiving direction whilst the scene's going on." "SERKIS:" "Just watching the Wargs now, watching the Wargs to see it working." "[McKELLEN GRUNTS]" "SERKIS:" "The Wargs are all below you." "They're barking and they're going crazy." "Here we go." "There was one day I think where he tore me off a strip for doing that." "SERKIS:" "Do you want me to cue you for the judders?" " I'll cue you for the" " I" "I'll say, three, two, one, crash." "Just tell me what happens and then I'll try and do it without you..." "SERKIS:" "Okay." "Yep." " ...telling me." "And then at the end of this, he kind of:" ""You know, because I can't think and I can't do it if you're calling it out because then I can't react to it, you know, truthfully."" "if you tell me what to do, then I do it." "And of course what you do isn't always expressed on your face, and I" "So you say angry... then I go angry and..." "I'd rather be angry inside." "Know what I mean?" "But I was going, "Yeah, but, lan, actually you need to be cued for that otherwise you'll never know when it's gonna happen."" "And he goes, "Well, yes, of course." "If it's a matter of cueing then..." Heh, heh." "SERKIS:" "it's a matter of timing for the Wargs arriving." "Yes, I appreciate that." "And then you must cue me, of course, in that case." "SERKIS:" "it was very funny." "It was very funny, that." "I do remember that." "It's the director and the people behind the camera who know exactly what they're doing and have planned for it over months, if not years." "The day comes to film it and we just have to do what we're told, really." "Now, if I'm not doing it right, darling, you must shout out, but" "SERKIS:" "Okay." "This behind me is the forest ledge set." "It's a set we built a few months ago." "We shot a lot of action on it." "There was always a point where we were gonna have to come back bring it back and resurrect it and burn it." "This is pre-burn." "We're just getting ready now to do the big burning scene." "INGRAM:" "You know, we were sort of being told that if we can just do sort of a token flame here and there that would be enough, and we'll put in CG flames later and" "Us, as a group decided that even though, you know, we actually have only got one night to plumb it that we're gonna do as much as we can to put as much fire as we physically can and have it, you know, real." "Pete's asked for some foreground elements that the camera can sort of head past that's on fire." "That's what we're running at the moment." "Keeping a plan of what's going on is our biggest thing." "So we always draw up little sketches." "So we've all gone to art school for this." "Heh, heh." "And we just number everything so all our operators know what's going on." "We probably had about 18 or 20 sources of flame." "And it was quite scary for a lot of people when we did our first test on the night Peter wanted to see it." "So we lit it all up, everyone was, you know, quite taken back, I think by how much fire there was." "As long as you control it, you know, that's what we do." "If you hear this:" "[BLOWING]" "It means we want you to evacuate out of the building." "SERKIS:" "Should we just assume that in terms of the length and number of resets that we-- You will make the call as to when it is--?" "Or someone will make the call as to when to stop and tell us then we'll just--?" "MAN:" "Right." "Steve, you probably want to sprinkle a bit of burning crap on this rock here." "INGRAM:" "This rock?" " Yeah." "That's right in the foreground." "WOMAN:" "Striding scenes, thank you." "Striding, Richard!" "You see all these flames, then I heard somebody saying:" ""We just need the flames as a reference." "They're gonna be CGI flames."" "And I'm like, "Why am I walking through these flames if it's gonna be CGI?"" "But I'm kind of glad that they did do that because it gave me what I needed to feel that moment of heroism." "There was one day where I was doing that run down the log it was with Andy on Second Unit." "SERKIS:" "Great, Richard, one more." "I was running from the beginning of the day till the end of the day." "[YELLING]" "MAN:" "And reset." "WOMAN:" "Reset it." "[YELLING]" "And I didn't stop running all day." "And I was determined." "I knew what Andy had done on the Rings." "I knew the physical demands that he put on himself." "WOMAN:" "This way, Andy." "I'm out of breath there." "That was" "MAN:" "How cold?" " It was cold." "It was freezing, but it was the energy needed to keep going through." "I remember him saying, "You got another one in you?"" "WOMAN:" "Reset." "MAN:" "We got time for one more." "One more?" "WOMAN:" "Thank you." "Still rolling." "ARMITAGE:" "And I was like, "Yup, I got another one in me."" "Knowing that my legs were about to go underneath me." "[YELLS]" "SERKIS:" "Reset." "Are you all right, Richard?" "WOMAN:" "Resetting." "SERKIS:" "By then it was the modus operandi, was to do rolling resets, was to" "Because it's shooting pixels, you can go straight in for another take." "[YELLING]" "Okay, just reset." "We'll do one more." "I would just" " I was not gonna give in." "I was gonna keep running for Andy Serkis." " And cut." "Cut, cut, cut." "WOMAN 1:" "Cutting there." "WOMAN 2:" "Thank you." "Making safe." "MAN:" "All the way down." "WOMAN 2:" "Cutting and making safe." "Look." "[SCREAMS]" "Okay, now we got these guys on eagles." "Okay, how are we gonna shoot that?" "We'll take out the steepness and just do the flap, flap, glide, and then bank." "Yeah." "The Special Effects built a great motion-based body of an eagle." "It was all computer-operated." "MAN 1:" "Thank you." "Rehearsing, and action." "MAN 2:" "And now the top down." "Right down, right down, right down." "CLAYTON:" "When we were prevising the eagle sequence we went to the trouble of creating quite a well-animated flight cycle on the eagle so that our previs would have the right scale and feel majestic and sort of get the tone of the sequence." "So we would take the previs data and we could extract the movement data from it and program our base to replicate exactly what the creature was doing in previs." "So our base scenes are moving just like the animated model moves." "So what it means is the Digital Department and the Physical Effects Department are both working with the same motion as one another." "When that comes back to us in the form of the live action that they shot we know that the wings and everything are in the right poses so we can just apply our cycle at that point and we have the confidence to know:" ""Yes, it's gonna work." "It's gonna interact with our digital eagle."" "We sort of had a short amount of time, and the word came that, you know we were gonna get the actors onto the eagle and shoot all the stuff." " This one's very-- it's very safe." " I should go up?" "Yeah, I think the time has come." "WOMAN:" "Okay, Ian's ascending." "MAN:" "We're gonna" "WOMAN:" "Ian, we'll just hook you up before you get up there, sir." "We'll just hook you up from the back before you get up." "Ian would, you know, do as many physical things as he could." "O'GORMAN:" "Ian McKellen sets a pretty good precedent, like, he works a lot." "He takes it all with good grace." "MAN:" "Action." "INGRAM:" "Ian, you know, he just killed it, you know, so" "Did everything perfectly, enjoyed it, and said thanks at the end of the day." "JACKSON:" "And cut it." "Good." "I think that's great, Ian." "All the actors from then were like:" ""Oh, well, I'm gonna enjoy it, then." You know, "I can do it."" "The eagle." " Now you ride an eagle and look cool." "O'GORMAN:" "Yeah." "Well, that's good." "Oh." "JACKSON:" "Okay, here we go." "All right, and action." "I can't believe" "JACKSON:" "Can somebody just step in and grab Adam's trouser leg?" "Pull it down a bit." "Not you." "You can take your hands off his trousers." "[BOTH LAUGHING]" "JACKSON:" "That looks good." "It's a bit more of a Bilbo-ish kind of eagle flight..." " ...than a Harley-Davidson sort of ride." " Okay." "Sure." "[LAUGHING]" "It was great fun because it was on hydraulics." "And Bifur, of course, being a little abnormal decides to stand up on his eagle." "NESBITT:" "Bifur!" "KIRCHER:" "And Bofur looks out and goes, you know:" ""Get down, get down." Drags him down." "I did it with Bill Kircher." "And he was, of course, going bananas, you know." "And that's" " So I was just trying to make sure that I could also be seen in shot." "Which is often a challenge with Bill Kircher." "Peter and Andy Serkis, and saying, you know:" ""We'll be talking you through the various emotions you'll be feeling."" "And it was just a great kind of marriage of what your acting imagination can do beside an extraordinary and unusual constructive bit of machinery." "And I love that." "Really great." "It's fireworks." "Good." "Pretend fireworks." "That's what you have to do." "It's the first day of being Hobbits, and we are shooting on a stage." "We have been filming at Old Took's party, which is when Bilbo is 4 years old." "Look at his hair." "Look at his hair." "It's a scene where Gandalf actually lays eyes on a young Bilbo Baggins and so we wanted a lot of children." "I'm gonna go "three, two, one," kaboom." "And Gandalfs gonna let off a particularly big firework right up above us in the sky here." "And another one, bang!" "[CROWD GASPS]" "Maybe you lock arms." "Lock arms." "Let's see." "[SCATTING AND GIGGLING]" "Maybe not." "Ha, ha, ha, we tried that one." "Peter said to me, "You know, Dan, how would you like to be Old Took?" "You could be Old Took."" "And I said, "Oh, you--"." "Well, what a great opportunity." "I must say, it's interesting to be able to see your nose." " Yes." " Ha, ha, ha." "HENNAH:" "Peter's sense of humor wouldn't let my nose just be a big nose." "It had to be a huge nose." "Good morning, sir." " Especially made for you?" " It was especially made for me." "I think Peter had a hand in making my nose." "[BOTH LAUGHING]" "Well, I gave him about the biggest nose of all." " But you don't need a wig." " No, I don't need a wig." "I think you may be the only character in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit not to wear a wig." " Interesting." " A good quiz question." "I should check that one out." "Of all the people on the films, his appearance has changed the least over the 13 years." "There's still a mass of unruly white hair and the beard and mustache and always a ready smile." "He's one of the most comfortable people to have around." "So to see him all dressed up and smiling even more broadly was very pleasant." "[LAUGHING]" "HENNAH:" "Hello." "Hello." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "Look at Grandpa." "GIRL:" "Take your nose off." "I can't take it off." "It's gotta stay on all day." "Oh, my goodness, the whole day?" "HENNAH: it was a great experience to be in a set that we've created." "And Dan, you plop yourself down there." "You're the biggest Punch and Judy fan." "You're watching a Punch and Judy show and you're kind of enjoying it more than the kids." "The whole thing was just exciting, and lots of energy, lots of laughter." "No, I won't." "All right, you can have-- All right, you can have it." "Amazing how being on a family show where you have access to all these children to work as actors." "And they're all beautiful and wonderful and know how to perform." "Hi, darling." "How are you?" "So there I was at the mercy of three monstrous trolls." " Hey, darling." " Hi." "It's great, because he's working so much throughout the day I don't get to see him." "So when I do come on the set and I'm able to kind of work with him, it's just great." "I think I've got the biggest Hobbit feet." " Holy Mary." " Out of everyone." " It's bigger than the boys' as well." " Holy God." "FREEMAN:" "Oh, my gosh." "Was that the plan, that you've got really big feet?" " No." "No, not at all." " Right." " It's just my feet size." "GIRL:" "Yeah." "[ALL LAUGHING AND CHATTERING]" "JACKSON:" "Let's put Amelia down in the front here too." "My main memory of that day is, A, we had to hire a clown to entertain the children." "So we were all about the clown in the production office." "Hi." "Heh, heh." "That wasn't me, by the way." "I didn't do that smell." " Let's look at Harry." "HENNAH:" "Yes." "JACKSON:" "And then fireworks." "GANDALPH:" "Look up!" "Oh, ho!" "It was a crazy day because that was the day we were packing to go on location." "MAN:" "Off we go." "YORKE:" "Production wasn't concerned about what was actually going on on set apart from the clown." "Peter drove up in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that day." "I think that really set the tone for that day." "JACKSON:" "I've got the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car." "It's one of my prized possessions." "So on that day, we had all the kids and I brought the car in." "Incredibly magical day." "You turn up to work there's the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car, just sitting in the parking lot." "The keys are in it." "Let's go around the block." "JACKSON: it was interesting, very few of the kids were interested in the car but all the 40- and 50-year-olds went crazy about it." "WOMAN:" "He wants to meet the car." " That is so awesome, man." " It's pretty awesome." "MAN:" "Yep." "JACKSON:" "Thank you very much, everybody." "Thank you very much, Hobbits." " Thank you." "WOMAN:" "Finished." "[ALL APPLAUDING]" "YORKE:" "it kind of had a holiday feel about it that we were going on the road which is the bit everyone looked forward to the most." "You've been in the studio for so long, you're finally getting outside." "I mean, that's the part of filming that everyone just loves, is being on location." "Hi there." "Good to see you all back again." "Uh, here we are at Hobbiton." "That's another one down, yeah." "Only 16 to go." "We got security on the gate just to stop any infiltrators." "There's plenty of people who will give it a go." "Up on the corner there is one place where we invariably find somebody packed up." "Just gonna walk across the field there." "We get suspicious as soon as we see a car, if any of my spies see a car." "We've catch them halfway in." "The other day we caught them three-quarters of the way in." "Hello, hello, hello." "What's going on here?" "So we escorted them off but they'd had a look, and they're quite pleased with their..." "Their adventure, that's for sure." "[ALL CHATTERING]" "Shall we go for a wander, eh?" "Let's go down to Bag End." "Actually, coming down into Bag End." "Yes." "Bilbo has no privacy." "WOMAN:" "Look at that." "MAN:" "Yeah." "When we shot Ian in London, we kind of" "The idea was that he came out of this doorway." "Ha, ha, ha." "He wouldn't miss a chance to let off his Whizpoppers." " You know, stood here..." "MAN:" "Yup." "...and then Frodo was gonna run off down that hill." "But we've also got the other one-- The earlier shot of Frodo collecting mail." "WOMAN:" "That's what we're doing." "Yeah." "JACKSON:" "Right." "WOMAN:" "Go." " Heh, hey, dude." "JACKSON:" "Heh, heh, heh." "Made it." "[BOTH LAUGHING]" "WOMAN:" "All right, we're shooting." "MAN 1:" "He'll never make it to the east." "MAN 2:" "Yeah." "MAN 3:" "Here we go." "MAN 4:" "Ready." "MAN 3:" "And action!" "WOOD:" "The experience of making Rings and the friendships forged making it and the growth that I experienced in making it will always be one of the greatest experiences of my life." "It's incredible to be back." "I think when we finished pick-ups of Return of the King in 2003 I didn't anticipate playing Frodo again or ever returning to Middle-earth." "And, in a way, it kind of feels like vacation for me because I get to return to New Zealand and see old friends, so it's just all fun." "I have none of the, heh, responsibility that I had before." "Of the stress, of the weight of the entire story." "FREEMAN:" "And I'm older than Elijah and certainly I'm older now than he was." "There's quite an age difference between what I'm going through in Hobbiton and what he was going through." "What ultimately those three films meant for him in his life and what they're going to mean for me in my life." "[CHATTERING]" " Action." "WOMAN:" "Action." "For him, you could tell it was weird." "He was saying, "This is weird for me."" "Do you think he'll come?" "It's a mixture of nostalgia and surrealism and, uh..." "Not being able to process it." " Okay." "We're all good, aren't we?" "MAN:" "Yes." "Shall we--?" "Do you wanna do a rehearsal with this or do you wanna shoot it?" "JACKSON:" "Should we rehearse on" " Why don't we do that?" "WOMAN:" "Action!" "The thing I loved about it is it so cleverly sits us right back in a moment that happens just before we see them in Fellowship." " Do you think he'll come?" "BILBO:" "Who?" "Gandalf." "WOOD:" "He has a book in his hand and he's going to the East-farthing Woods to wait for Gandalf." "And the first moment you meet Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring is sitting in the tree, reading the book, hearing Gandalfs arrival, meeting Gandalf." "So it's just so cleverly constructed." "So I think you come back and you look at that sign and then you realize Bilbo is there and" "That feeling of asking about Gandalf should be sort of slightly excited..." "...but a bit tentative, you know" " Yeah." "It's a bit sort of childish, but you're kind of excited about doing it anyway, so" " You know, that sort of feeling will be great." " Okay." "JACKSON:" "Here we go, please." "Rehearsal time." "And action!" " What, it's Elijah's last shot?" "Last shot." " Ha, ha, ha." " Is it?" " "Last shot" last shot." "Oh..." " Is it?" " I remember the last" "Last time we did this in Lord of the Rings, it wasn't fun." "One of the lasting memories of The Lord of the Rings is the last day of the shoot and actually shooting Elijah's last shot." "It's been four years to the day since Weathertop, Sam." "It has never really healed." "JACKSON:" "And having this rather devastating feeling that I would never work with Elijah as Frodo Baggins again..." "And cut." "Lovely." "Lovely last shot." "WOOD:" "Thank you." "JACKSON:" "Take good care, all right?" "WOOD: it's been so amazing, Peter." "JACKSON:" "You've been so amazing." "You did great." "Thank you very, very much." " What a shot to go out on, huh?" " Yeah." " Right, then." "I'm off." "BILBO:" "Off to where?" "East-farthing Woods." "I'm going to surprise him." "BILBO:" "Well, go on, then." "You don't want to be late." "So, everybody, that was Elijah's last shot." "[ALL CHEERING]" "MCKELLEN:" "I mean, "Oh!"" "WOOD:" "I didn't quite know how to react." "MAN:" "Elijah Wood." " Whoa!" "All right?" "WOOD:" "What a treat." "Who would've thought it would ever happen again?" " I know." " Another last day." " Indeed." " There's not too many last days." "We have to make this the "last" last day apart from the next time we have a last day." "It was kind of like stepping back into time and connecting with your family and having a kind of family reunion." "Where were you running off to?" " To see you." " Intimate- intimate moment too." "WOOD:" "That's right." "JACKSON:" "To the trilogy." "WOOD:" "Yeah." "Running off into 1999." "I know." "When they called last shot, I didn't-- I didn't know how to" "Ha, I didn't know how to process it." " I turned 19 at this location." " Did you?" "WOMAN 1:" "Yes, I do." "WOMAN 2:" "Birthday boy." "Mwah!" " Happy birthday." "MAN:" "Yes, well, of course." "WOMAN 1:" "Nineteen today." "I'm 30 now." " Jesus." " Ha, ha, ha, ha!" " That puts things into perspective." " Oh, God." "Here we go." "We can film something." " Say hello." " Hello." "Goodbye." "[BOTH LAUGHING]" "JACKSON:" "Elijah's last shot." " Yes." " We were here" " And the sun came out for it." " The sun came out for it." "We were here in 1999." "And it's 2011." "My God." "Same location." "WOOD:" "And it looks no different." "There's a few more extra Hobbit-holes this time around." "JACKSON:" "Right." " That's it." "The scary thing is you look no different, Elijah." "[WOOD LAUGHS]" "JACKSON:" "Very good." "The market in Hobbiton." "Day one." " He means" " Oh, sorry." "Cheers." " Cheers." "Good morning, Hobbits." "Thank you for coming." "My name's Carol." "This, of course, is Peter." "This is Bilbo." "Hello." " Good morning." " Good morning." "We're just chatting." "[ALL GIGGLING]" "We love casting Hobbits." "Casting Hobbits is always a really fun casting." "Hobbit-type people are really close to their characters." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "They're really lovely and sweet and chatty and gorgeous." "They're Hobbits." "My daughter wanted to go to the auditions and so I went to keep her company." "And she didn't get to be a Hobbit, but I did." "And I was so thrilled." "Because she's a lady, she can choose which husband she wants." " Oh, okay." " I can't do that." "Have the good-looking one." " I'm too short to reach" " Ha, ha, ha!" " Perhaps" "They're short and round and cheerful and they have round eyes and round cheeks." "[CHUCKLES]" " I'm a natural." "MAN:" "Guys, you ready?" "And they have a naughty twinkle in their eye I tell you." "MAN:" "Sweep that up." "I've smoked better stuff." "[CHUCKLING]" "When we cast extras, we always like to use locals from the area." "It makes a lot of sense to use people who live nearby to the set." "I auditioned in Matamata." "I actually went for a friend who wanted some company and unfortunately he didn't get in, but I did." "So I feel slightly bad about that." "And if he's watching, I'm terribly sorry." "I thought my mom was joking at the start." "She was serious when she said:" ""You should audition to be a Hobbit."" "And I think after about two and a half thousand people here we are." "Fantastic." "A lot of people turned up saying, "I've always been told by my friends I was a Hobbit."" "Hello." "I've always wanted to be a Hobbit." " Yeah." "Just random." " All my life." "And all my friends, they're jealous, and I can't tell them anything or I'd have to kill them." "We had some familiar old faces who are now really old." "A few that had originally been in Lord of the Rings you know, turned up." "Gorgeous." "The Lord of the Rings, we had-- We were on as a Hobbit quite a bit." "There was more main actors and more, you know..." " With this, we have people say-- MAN:" "There's more of everything." "JACKSON:" "Have a bit of fun, here we go!" "Okay, background, action." "Go!" "And action." "WOMAN:" "What's your name?" "Sometimes the shots are so wide and there's so many extras Carol, the first AD wants to communicate with someone on set, in frame to adjust the position of the extras if need be." " I'm gonna send you later." " Okay." "So the timing is gonna be better." "So we're dressed as Hobbits because they keep telling me I look like a Hobbit anyway." "They're like, "Put a costume on."" "WOMAN:" "He makes a good Hobbit." "They'll never know." "MAN:" "He does make a good Hobbit." "What I love about working with Peter and Fran is that" " And Philippa is that they get this whole family thing." "It's really lovely when people can get their children and crew members can get their little cameos." "Hi." "RIVERS: it really makes it feel like you own the project." "That made it such a special day for us all." "MAN:" "You wanna tell us what you're doing?" " Behind the scene!" "Absolutely best day of their lives." "WOMAN:" "How's that look?" " This is Terry and Ruby." " Guys, this is Martin." "FREEMAN:" "Yes." "Hello, both of you." "You're beautiful." "One of the things I'm really pleased about that this production does is give fans a chance to come onto the set." "A lot of stuff with the Make-A-Wish Foundation." "And there was a woman in a wheelchair who came in and she was made up as a Hobbit and she was" "You know, she could barely move." "And she communicated, I think, through..." "I'm not sure if it was through blinking." "You see just in her eyes the joy that she had being on set on The Hobbit." "It's actually very hard to sort of work on things when you know" "You think, "We're making a film." "It's really important."" "Then you see something that's really important and you go, "Oh, Jesus." "God."" "But... it is important because..." "Because it's important to them." "And so" " You know, I really" "Oh, God, I feel such idiotic" "But this is how" " You know, this is how it sort of made me feel." "That's what I really remember from that marketplace scene, actually." "That this is her wish, and..." "I'm very proud of" " I don't know." "How we looked after them." "I'm such a dufus." "[CHUCKLES]" "JACKSON:" "How are you?" " Yeah." "You know, good." " So how's your week been?" " It's been a great week." " Yeah?" " It's been good." "We got everything done." " Great." " Haven't left you too many bits to tidy up." "You've only got your wonderful shots you have to do first, but not" " Ha, ha, ha." " Not much clean-up work to have to do." "We'd sometimes bump into where Main Unit were leaving." "So Second Unit would literally come in as Main Unit were pulling away." "JACKSON:" "One of the other shots you could do could be running out of the door of Bag End." "He should just slam the door behind him." "Don't have him be too fussy, you know?" "He's really kind of racing-- And he's got the contract in his hand." "Comes bounding out through the gate and racing down this path." "We're supposed to be doing some shots in beautiful sunshine but as you can see, that it ain't." "Not today." "What we're shooting at the moment is the moments leading up to Bilbo's departure." "Action." "JACKSON:" "I think this is the one." "So it's the sense of everyday mundane life in Hobbiton and a dawning realization that, "Is this gonna be it?" "Is this as good as it gets?"" "MAN:" "Action!" "SERKIS:" "The dawn shots and the dusk shots have been fantastic." "And we did one the other night and" "People coming home from the fields." "The Green Dragon door should open, people are making their way back along that path." "All the supporting artists have become fully into character and they're gonna find it hard to leave, I suspect when they go back to their normal lives." "It's rather sad." "But we've decided we'd have this party on the last day just to celebrate and put the Green Dragon to good use." "So cheers." "Mm." "GANDALF:" "This way, you fools!" "THORIN:" "Come on, move!" "[WARGS HOWLING]" "JACKSON:" "We wanted to use this location primarily because it's a chase." "The dynamics of everyone running, weaving in and out of rocks with helicopter shots zooming over the top and Wargs coming through the rock formations." "We just thought that would give us a dynamic kind of energy and be the right landscape for this." "BROPHY:" "it looks very otherworldly." "Perfect for running." "You go from one rock formation, and you sprint between that rock formation and the next one." "And it seemed to be just a series of 100-meter sprints." "JACKSON:" "We've got you guys, we got all the stunt doubles here." "We can go whichever way we want." "So we're here, I figured we'll just use people until they start falling over and then we'll bring the next lot on in." "And, um, ha, ha..." "MAN:" "Action!" "KIRCHER:" "We did a lot of running on Strath Taieri." "And that was part of, again, scene 88, which has become famous." "The ongoing scene 88 was never-ending." "MAN 1:" "Come on." "MAN 2:" "Run." "Oh, my gosh." "Scene 88, we ran and we ran and we ran." "Up mountains, through streams, we ran and ran and ran." " Not only Dwarves can fight." " We can run." "And we ran some more from Wargs." "A long way." "Probably the length of the country." "Ha-ha-ha." "I don't know." "We need you to be powering like an Olympic athlete." "That scene went on forever." "Go, run." "JACKSON:" "Run." "Look back over your shoulder." "Run." "FREEMAN:" "Jesus Christ, it was tedious." "First days, okay." "But it just seemed to go on and on and on." "Quick!" "Your lives depend on it." "JACKSON:" "Down you come." "Keep moving." "MAN 1:" "And cut." "MAN 2:" "Cut." "MAN 3:" "We're just gonna find out what we're doing next." " I guess it's gonna be running." "MAN 4:" "Oh, really?" "MAN:" "Action!" "[ALL GRUNTING AND SHOUTING]" "I've got a singlet, "Middle-earth Fun Run, proudly sponsored by scene 88."" "Scene 88 became like a full-length feature in itself." "And took as long to make as some films." "I think there was another movie somewhere called Warg, which is scene 88." "Brain Warg, Warg dead." "Heavenly Wargs." "Warg creatures." "And the list goes on." "If you said, "Jed, do you wanna do 10 push-ups?"" "He'd go, "I'd love to." He'll do 10 push-ups." "He loves being active and moving around." "So he became like our canary in the mine." "I remember Jed bent over, he looked at me and he goes:" ""I don't know if I can do another take." Ha, ha." "I thought for Jed to say that then we must be pretty close to, you know, calling it quits." "But then we did do another take, and we did another couple, another couple." "Peter likes to do one more for safety or one more for light." "And we were very safe on that day." "JACKSON:" "Whoa." "Oh, careful." "Hard work on difficult terrain." "You have to watch your step." "Come on." "McKELLEN:" "And sometimes when Gandalf is striding over the tussocks leading the Dwarves, even running, it may not be me because we need to distinguish between the heights of Dwarves and Wizards." "Therefore, you have to have a Big Paul." "Big Paul used to be a policeman." "Still is a policeman." "He was spotted on the street because how could he not be?" "He's nearly 7 feet tall." "JACKSON:" "Top of the hat, please." "Top of the hat." "Pull his hat." "WOMAN:" "Nobody can reach, Pete." "Turned out to be a very difficult sequence to shoot." "There was a lot of shots and it had to be split between main unit and second unit." "You know, it required previs that we did beforehand so we had to do some quite tricky camera moves to put the Wargs in it." "Pete's brief was he wanted a large-scale cat-and-mouse chase across a landscape." "The Dwarves are kind of being smart in using gullies and hiding behind rocks." "And these Wargs are kind of tearing across the landscape looking for them." "Fran actually called them on this, and goes, "They're dogs, predators." "They'll just smell them and find them."" "So they introduced Radagast." "So he's actually trying to lead them away." "You know, other Wargs show up and he has to turn, and he actually inadvertently ends up bringing them across the trail of the Dwarves." "It was what I call a jigsaw puzzle scene where you're just shooting a little piece here and there over a long period of time." "The chase starts in one environment and it moves through another and it ends in a third environment." "And these were hundreds of miles apart these different locations." "For the actors, it's like, "Hey, we gotta do more running for scene 88, guys."" "Then a week or two later, "We gotta do more running for scene 88."" "That kind of went on and on." "I'd never had the time or the energy to go back and look, but maybe one day I will to see how many times it actually appeared on a call sheet." "Particularly second unit's call sheet." "[ALL CHATTERING]" "SERKIS:" "As we pan off from Wargs here." "Coming in to here, rise up above, and Wargs are running in the distance." "WONG:" "We were helicoptered on top of peaks and mountains, nowhere." "And it'd be, "What we're gonna do is we're gonna fly over you and you're gonna run as far as you can."" "And there'd be days and days and days of that." "We've got running for the next 10 days or so." "Hopefully the helicopters and the mountains will make up for this weather." "Do some warming up, boys, so you don't go straight into it cold." "Run, run, run." "MAN:" "Action!" "Cut there." "Cut there." "Whoo!" "Well that's our thousandth shot on second unit." "That's our thousandth shot, everyone." "[ALL CHEERING]" "One thousand shots, and we've just done an 11-minute take." "It was a bit of an experimental vibe..." "And it was a thing of beauty." "And here we all are, and we're gonna go and celebrate." "FREEMAN:" "I like location, but I-- it's not my favorite part of the job." "It's not my favorite part." "I like being in a studio, actually." "And I think I may be the only person who thinks that." "So I don't really shout about it." "Because-- if everyone else is like:" ""We're outdoors." "What are you talking about?"" "At one point, we were strewn out across the landscape and I saw all the Dwarves lined up, and Martin and" "The Hobbit." "Couldn't help but feel there was kind of a brotherhood." "That is something that will live with me for a long time because that was us." "There was the Hobbit, there was the 13 Dwarves together." "I'm like, "Yeah, but, you know, we're ******* running around again," you know." "From imaginary Wargs." "As opposed to real Wargs." "Which they didn't-- They didn't even get those in." "We had to imagine the ******* Wargs." "DORI:" "Where's Gandalf?" "He's abandoned us." "Stand your ground!" "This way, you fools!" "THORIN:" "Come on, move!" "Seven months later" " Six months later, I think we shot the pick-up back at the studio." "MAN:" "And he's quite harshly lit on the side there too." " No worries." "Right up my alley." " And, um..." "[LAUGHING]" "This way, you fools!" "That's funny." "That's very funny." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "In a bad way." "This way, you fools!" "And you can have your hand on the rock too." "THORIN [ON SCREEN]:" "Gandalf!" "McKELLEN: "Fly, you fools!"" "No. "This way, you fools."" " "This way, you fools."" " Yeah." "MAN:" ""Fly, you fools" is from the wrong movie." " We've done that." " Yes, we've done it." " Done that one 12 years ago." " Oh." "JACKSON:" "Okay." "Here we go." "And action." "This way, you fools!" "It was supposed to be, literally, a kind of part of the prologue very small kind of vignette." "Erebor." "You've come out from Erebor, but the Orcs have taken over." "So you are leading the Dwarf army into Moria." "If I remember rightly, I read in the script, a few lines..." "This was this laughable idea that we were gonna shoot that in I think two days." "It took 10." "[CHUCKLES]" "MAN:" "Three, two, one, action!" "Keep pushing forward!" "Push down the hill!" "SERKIS:" "it was amazing piece to put together." "I really, really enjoyed that." "I mean, just mayhem, fighting, crazy, crazy, crazy fighting." "ARMITAGE:" "it's an absolute slaughter." "We really tried to achieve that that they're so overwhelmed with Orcs that it's a bloodbath." "MAN:" "That looks so good." "Absolute carnage." "RIVERS:" "Most battles, everyone ends up on a flat field." "Pete wanted it on that really interesting Mt." "Hollin terrain." "[GROWLS]" "You know, he wanted just this brutal kind of skirmish." "Pete decided that it would be nice to use the same location in which we see the Fellowship running out of Moria." "A very striking environment, a limestone mountain with very distinctive rock shapes." "It was like a giant concrete pimple in the middle of the studio." "So it was this sort of domey, rocky mound that was the battle area." "[GRUNTING AND SHOUTING]" "BOSWELL:" "We actually purposely made it so people couldn't swing their weapons." "They used different parts of their weapons to fight." "It was so congested." "MAN 1:" "What are we on?" "MAN 2: it's on concrete." " Really?" " Yeah, really." "So I just make sure somebody's under me." "Hopefully one of these scalers, mate." "[LAUGHING]" "Scale became quite an issue." "Because you've got Orcs and Dwarves." "And Dwarves are usually smaller than Orcs." "So there was a lot of full-sized stuntmen doing a lot of the principal fighting." "But also quite a few of the scale doubles." "WOMAN:" "How are you feeling, girls?" " Hairy." " Yeah." "We're a bunch of sexy ladies." " Yeah." "I don't know how guys can grow a beard." "My husband will never look at me the same." "MAN 1:" "Look." "MAN 2:" "Seriously." "No way." "Because when Dwarves start painting their nails, it gets weird." "They actually did an excellent job, and they loved it anyway because a lot of times they're waiting just to get into a fight." "Heh." "I was hoping to die as soon as possible, so you just get to lay down." "It was really funny because once they fell down, they found it very hard to get up." "I'm kind of a bit like a turtle at the moment." "I can't really get up properly." "So I'll just chill out here." "This guy has been working his socks off." "He's been here since yesterday." "And he's so Method, I can't tell you." "He won't go to lunch, he won't, um-- You know." "He came in, lay down, did his thing." "He's not complained once." "I mean, I think it's all gone to his head, really." "This armor was actually designed originally for the Battle of the Five Armies." "We had been designing and starting to manufacture these characters." "But the story idea of the Battle of Moria came to the fore and Pete was enjoying these suits of armor so much and we would just come up with new suits of armor for the battles yet to happen." "The neat thing is that because of their proportions we could make them almost tank-like." "Aside from the Goblins, the Dwarves in armor is the worst." "The hottest, heaviest." "They can barely move, and you can't see." "You got these little slots for-- You know, to see through." "And a lot of times the camera would just be moving back and forth finding random cool shots that worked and they would just keep going." "They would just keep going." "The guys'd just keep repeating stuff." "And finally when they call "cut," it's like, phew." "And cut." "[GRUNTING]" "Wow." "I'm really old." "I'm so old." "What is that?" "Oh, heh, heh." "WILSON:" "We got out there, obviously, it's supposed to be a battle." "So we started off the day a few spritzes of blood here and there, you know." "And then we got the, "More blood."" "it's like this is the-- The echoey voice came from afar." "MAN:" "Blood, guts." "Blood everywhere." "A few more, "No, more blood."" "So it was, "Oh, okay, I'll get a little cup and throw that."" ""More blood." So literally in the end, there were these drums of blood being thrown over this giant pimple that just began running blood all down it everywhere." "[LAUGHING]" "SERKIS:" "As each shot kind of went by the floor got covered in more and more blood and more and more blood." "To the point where everyone was sticking to the floor." "It was like this bloody battlefield." "It just looked horrendous." "Ladies and gents, we'll be back at Moria Gate tomorrow." "Battle of Moria became Second Unit's own private hell, I think." "It definitely became bigger than anyone expected." "BOSWELL:" "Turned out like our scene 88." "Every time you say "gates of Moria" to the stunt guys they all cringe, "Oh, no!" "Oh, no!"" "B marker." "MAN:" "Action!" " Action!" "MAN:" "Action!" "Advance down the hill, Orcs!" "If you're having trouble breathing, just put your hand up." "And we'll come and get you." "MAN:" "Action!" "[GRUNTING]" " Reset, reset." "MAN:" "Action!" "And cut!" "MAN 1:" "Catch it." "MAN 2:" "Okay, baby." "ALL:" "Oh!" "MAN 3:" "I'm out of here." "Yeah." "MAN 4:" "That was nice." "MAN 5:" "Yeah." "[GRUNTING]" " Boom, that was a great hit, that one." " Yeah." "We really wanted to go for a sense of really dirty, messy street fighting." "How do you feel about having two people jump on your back for that foot stab?" "Two people?" "Yep." "[GRUNTING]" "McTAVISH:" "That's" " That last two beats they're supposed to sever his jugular." "JACKSON:" "Right." " And then bury it in his chest." " Right, right, right." "So that's the intention." " As you do." " As you do." "What are you doing?" "What am I doing?" "I'm doing the Battle of Moria." "Why do you have this big tufty on your head?" "My big tufty on my head is because I'm younger." "This is the younger Dwalin." "So Dwalin wasn't bald when he was younger." "He lost his hair through stress." "I was interviewed by my own daughter." "She asked some pretty good questions, if I remember rightly." "Why are you fighting the Battle of Moria?" "Uh, that is a very good question, Anna." "The Battle of Moria is in a sort of flashback in the film to when we were desperately fighting to stay alive and we were nearly losing the battle." "And then Thorin turns the tide of the battle and we rally and we defeat the Orcs." "[THORIN SHOUTING IN DWARVISH]" "I remember having a big shield." "[GRUNTING]" "Every single time, I managed to bounce this shield off of an Orc and hit myself in the face." "And one take, I actually smashed myself in the lip and kind of put my teeth through my bottom lip." "I remember Andy coming up and going-- And sort of calling Tammy over and saying:" ""You know, the makeup's changed." "The makeup's changed."" "And Tammy was like, "No, no, no." "He's just bit half of his face off."" "I didn't need any Orcs to take me out." "I was doing a good job of hitting myself in the face." "[GRUNTING]" "Some of the scale doubles we used played their parts as their younger selves." "So Mark, as Thorin, played a younger Thorin." "As did Stephen as Balin and also Gareth as Dwalin." "So they went through the whole rigmarole of getting into prosthetics." "Yeah, see you out there, big boy." "Mark was used quite a lot for the actual fight sequence itself." "He learned the sequence completely." "As you're doing it now, just flick it across your body." "Tshh!" "Flick it, grab the" " Yeah." "Bam." "Bwoosh." "WOMAN:" "Action!" "[GRUNTING]" "Ran out of gas at the end, though, I have to say." "I swung the sword, and the weight of the sword took me over." "WOMAN:" "I thought it was great acting." "It was great acting." "I'm actually fine." "It's Method." "MAN:" "That's it." "ATKIN:" "Just a pleasure to be able to put together those fight scenes and be really proud of the end product." "This is the birth of the legend of Thorin Oakenshield that we're shooting." "It's what we call the Oakenshield moment." " Three, and then four, boom, five, boom, six." " Three, four, five." "Unh!" "WOMAN:" "Action!" "[GRUNTING]" "ARMITAGE:" "I think it's quite important to show the character perhaps at his peak, in his defining moment because that's really what it is." "Where he earned his name, for his prowess and his bravery." "So it was great to get the chance to play that." "[YELLS]" "SERKIS:" "And then seeing Thorin Oakenshield being born." "You know, striding up the hill." "This heroic shot of him striding up the hill with his oaken shield, ready to take it all on." "[THORIN SHOUTING IN DWARVISH]" "[ALL YELLING]" "I really like your kilt." "Thank you." "Yes." "Yes, you're wearing a kilt as well." " It's nice that" " But we don't have the same kilt." "No, no." "No, that would be silly, wouldn't it?" "Do you think we buy our kilts at the same shop?" " Yes." " We do, okay." "Yeah." "Well, thank you." "It's been a pleasure being interviewed by you." " Thank you so much." " Hee, hee, hee." "[BOTH LAUGHING]" "THORIN:" "We'll take it as a sign." "A good omen." "BILBO:" "You're right." "I do believe the worst is behind us." "Something we do on every film we make is to build in what we call pickup shooting which is basically two, three, four weeks of additional shooting at the end of the main shoot of the movie." "There's a lot you don't know about the story until you see the film for the first time." "We could have an Orc flying through the air up in this shot here." "OLSSEN:" "And once you see it put together, you know, things become obvious about what's needed to clarify the story and make it work better." "Pickups are very much the process of crafting the finished film." "It's never really reshooting scenes that you didn't get right the first time." "It's usually actually inserting extra emotional beats into preexisting scenes." "And now you can fill in that card." "JACKSON:" "Thank you." "There's things like Bilbo trying to save Thorin's life when the Wargs attack." "We never had that in our original shoot." "By the end of the first film, you needed to feel that Bilbo was one of them and is actually, in his own way, extremely brave." "It's gonna be kind of vulnerable and endearing the way this little Hobbit just throws himself in there and risks his life to try to save Thorin." "So having Thorin taking on Azog by himself is great but once he gets knocked to the ground we wanted Bilbo to stand up and find his courage to be that little Hobbit who is able to step forward with a sword and tackle the Orcs." "Do the classic sort of thing, which is like a one, a two and on the third, it comes..." "Thorin has more cause than most to hate Orcs." "HENNAH:" "Often, the cutting process is taking place at the same time as the pickup shoot." "So you're only finding out today what you need tomorrow." "Just whack him in here for the time being." "So we've got two weeks to shoot all our pickups and we're spread over four stages." "And we're bouncing between each one of them or maybe even two sets in a day." "HENNAH:" "As a rule, you're not building a whole set you're building a piece of set that is sufficient to shoot one close-up of a piece of dialogue that may be needed." "ELROND:" "Have you forgotten?" "A strain of madness runs deep in that family." "His grandfather lost his mind." "His father succumbed to the same sickness." "Can you swear Thorin Oakenshield will not also fall?" "JACKSON:" "Great." "We can cut that script." "Thank you very much." "Shh." "We're not allowed to ride the bikes in the studio." "Shh." "Second unit wrapped and there were still some pickups that Peter still wanted to get so they asked me to direct the splinter unit." "We're on our fifth set up for today, picking up lots of little pieces." "A movie isn't shot until it's shot." "You got the staff and the weight forms and it goes:" "And splinter unit, we are there to do a lot of shots that Peter don't have time to do." "And it's a lot of shots that involve sometimes action." "So stunts or sometimes just insert of picking up a sword or..." "The biggest part of our day today was getting Terry Notary as the new Orc, Yazneg." "It's the last week of shooting and Peter has asked me to play Yazneg." "Go on!" "And Terry was given, I think it was something like nine Orcish phrases that we needed to record." "And he got them that morning." "So..." "Everyone needs a little help sometimes." "Even Orcs." "And it was like, "Hey, there's new lines." "Oh, great." "They're in Black Speech." "Oh, greater."" " Tolkien, baby." " Tolkien, baby." "[SPEAKING ORCISH]" "RIVERS:" "So it's fun to be shooting on Weathertop again." "I remember the first day we shot on Weathertop was actually Viggo Mortensen's first day of shoot and as Aragorn fighting the Ringwraiths." "MAN:" "And action!" "RIVERS:" "it was a long, long time ago now." "[SINGING OPERATICALLY]" "[ALL CHUCKLING]" "MAN:" "Jeez." "All right." "All right." "Standing back." "Shoot and three, two, one." "Action." "[ALL SCREAMING]" "DORI:" "We're dead!" "We're dead!" "Cut!" "Mark, you'll be on much of the wire and basically just be kind of holding his leg." "Why don't you shout?" " Because" " Why don't you ******* shout?" "[ALL LAUGHING]" "We're doing your ******* close-up." "Shut the **** up." "Take the wire out." "Have a cold glass of water, chill down." "If not, you won't be up for your stunt this afternoon." "Mark always gave me a lot of trouble but I gave him a hard back." "Adam, you should be there, grabbing his foot, and we'll do his ******* close-up." " You all right?" " It will be cut from the movie anyway." "So..." " Here we are." "That's your nose." " Lovely." "OLSSEN:" "Peter usually does a cameo in all of his films." "And he left his one for the first movie till the last minute." "I've either gotta be an Elf, which I really am not that cut out to be an Elf." "The only other options are a Hobbit or a Dwarf." "And I never got to be a Hobbit, so I've run out of choices now." "That's another sense in which this is a home movie." "Often people who work behind the camera do get their moment in front of it." "Caro called up and said Peter had suggested I do this this morning." "So yeah." "Sounded good." "I kind of do it now because everyone expects me to do it." "I get asked about it, so I kind of think the day I say, "I didn't bother doing a cameo" it somehow feels like I don't care about the movie or something." "I kind of find myself having to do these cameos now." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "[ALL CHEERING]" "I'm taking one for the team here, I tell you." "And then we'll go into the sword pulling." "I mean, if you just start that action it'll give us a cut into what will be done." " And testing." " Thank you." "I've gotta get my direction from Peter, if you could send Peter in." " Who is this?" " I'm a little wanker." "WOMAN:" "He's a stand-in." " That little wanker is taking some time off." " Did you?" "Jesus." "That's like Kiran." " We've got a real man now." "I was directing the splinter unit when Peter and Jabez do cameos as Dwarven refugees." "It's complicated directing the director of the film in his own film." "You wanna be tracking with me for a while." "We were thinking we'd spend a lot of time on you." "If you get some Richard that's fine." "I mean, Richard is not so important." "Pete's a wonderful performer and he gives it a lot of energy." "But sometimes he purposefully manages to find ways to hog the screen time." " If you could look more worried." " More worried?" " But carefree." " Carefree but worried." " Yeah." " Okay." "All right." "Thank you very much." "Go away." "Thank you." "[ALL LAUGHING]" " Camera set." "MAN:" "Action." "Quickly!" "Run for your lives!" "Not only does he have a limp but he actually turns towards camera and stays looking past camera, then reveals Thorin." "JACKSON:" "There's Richard pushing me out a bit too quickly." "You ought to linger on me a bit longer." "MAN 1:" "Linger longer?" "MAN 2:" "Yeah." "Come on." "There's a mischief to him, which I have not seen in other directors which I think is maybe what defines him a wee bit from other directors." "WOMAN:" "Pete, stop it." "[SNARLING]" "[ALL LAUGHING]" "We were hoping for a bigger fright, Victoria." "Oh, sorry." "I've worked in the movies too long." "JACKSON [WHISPERING]:" "Gandalfs asleep." "MAN:" "Poke him in the ear." " And action." "JACKSON:" "Action." "[ALL CHUCKLING]" "Peter, I always called the 12-year-old with the beard." "Because he is just doing what he wanted to do pre-beard." "You know what I mean?" "And probably with no difference." "He's just got more toys." "You know what I mean?" "Don't wanna end up the back here." "There's room on my horse for two." "Two little boys had two little toys" "Each had a wooden horse" "[HUMMING]" "There is room on my horse for two" "Would you like to be wetted down now?" "[JACKSON LAUGHS]" " That's what I'd say." "Quick, get the hose." " Get the hose out." "It was fun." "It was relaxed." "It was collaborative." "It's a long shoot but it was enjoyable." "Every single day was kind of fun." "You can go just as fast with two." "I can go just as fast with two" "[WHISTLING]" "We shot for 266 days." "And, you know, it's a big piece of your life that you spend making these films." "The end was in sight so I just wanted to make sure that we ended on an up note, really." "You're not a volunteer, you're conscripted." " Where do you want me?" " Anywhere you want to make yourself comfortable." "JACKSON:" "I loved everyone that I worked with." "We had a great cast, great crew and we were in a kind of a giddy mood." "MAN:" "Go on action too." "MAN:" "Okay, all right." "WOMAN:" "Let's do it." " The last sun." "MAN:" "The last sun." "So we are on the last day of shoot and we're shooting the last scene of film one." "We have a very emotional scene where Thorin realizes that Bilbo is a hero." "And they turn around and they look to their future, which is Erebor." "Only a few more hours to go, guys and you never have to wear these fat suits again till next year." "Last day of pickups." "Very exciting." "It was the actual last shot in the movie, it's a really nice way for everyone to finish." "And you've kind of all gone on this journey, not just the characters in the movie." "We'd all gone on this journey and come to this really nice, hopeful ending." "Everyone was in a very joyful mood that day." "[LAUGHING] Yay!" " How many set ups left after this?" " Well, we've got this one." "Go napping all year." "Production manager has Gandalfs staff." "I'm a bit worried." "She might steal it." "I got my eyes on her." "Shh." "FREEMAN:" "She's doing balls like Columbia." "MAN:" "Yeah." "Like a flaming torch." "HENNAH:" "What's interesting is that on these huge shoots with way, way more people the camaraderie doesn't develop over 6 weeks or 10 weeks it develops over 262 days." "MAN:" "Just go back into the hug for me, please." "Just hold that for a moment." " You want a little ding under there?" " Okay." "HENNAH:" "Finally reaches a point it feels comfortable with your brothers and sisters." "You cannot get as close as we've all got on a film like this." "Whether people like each other or not, the emotions are still there." "It was a very happy environment on set." "Generally it always was, but everyone was pretty happy to have made it to the end." "Especially the cast." " Glad we made it." "MAN:" "Getting really cold." "This is it." "Last shot. 2012." "The Hobbit was our life for two years." "It was very, very long." "Thank you." "So when the shoot come to an end you've got all that excitement but it's sadness as well." "YORKE:" "You look around and think, "We got here."" "We're all still here." "We're all standing." "It's a great feeling." " Thank you." " You too, man." "Gee, it's too much." "The dynamic on this film, I think has been quite, I hope, egalitarian among the cast." "I mean, the crew are scum, so we don't treat them well." " Yeah, definitely." " I hope I see you gain." "That probably won't happen." "Don't delude." "I mean, it's unfair." "It's unfair." "Just cut" " No, I won't call you." "Drinks are only for the cast and crew, okay?" "You are now moribund." "FREEMAN:" "But among the actors it's been quite equal, I hope." "That much testosterone and that much male ego around the place it would be very, very easy to get frayed with each other but we haven't." "It's been really, really good." "[GRUNTING]" "WOMAN:" "My God, that's so funny." "Literally, I suggest you use the peak of Ian's hat plus another three or four inches to be where you look." "Don't look Ian in the eye." "Just above his head." "Never look him in the eye." "JACKSON:" "Above his head." "He's on his contract." "He doesn't wanna make any eye contact with anyone." "McKELLEN:" "Thank you, Peter." "Shall we give it a go?" "So it's..." "WOMAN:" "Bye now." "Thank you." "MAN:" "Love you." " All right." "Here we go." "MAN:" "Okay." "MAN:" "Okay." "HAMBLETON:" "That was an amazing day." "Towards the end, we realized that a lot of people were gathering in the studio space other members of the crew and production team." "So it was an important, almost sacred moment, the final shot." "YORKE:" "I think there was hundreds of people hidden behind Peter's tent watching the monitors." "You couldn't move." "Everyone standing, waiting." "JACKSON:" "Last thing we had to do when we were done with the shot, end of the movie end of the shooting and the Dwarves came up to me." "They said they wanted to do something special for Martin." "I was aware of the fact that we hadn't really done anything where we just kind of had somebody on." " Has nobody told you what we're doing?" " No, nobody's told me." "We set this thing where we had a code from Peter and that it was the last take." "Because Peter was always saying, "Just one more for luck."" "Let's just do one last for luck." "Should we just do one more for luck, Richard?" "That's great." "Just do one last one for luck." "One last for luck." "Let's do it." "I said instead of that, without telling anyone, "Can we just do one more for extra luck?"" "One more for extra luck." "So the code is extra luck." "When you hear that you know that this is the one we're gonna do it on." "So I thought it would be really nice, without telling Martin, to give him a bit of a send off and say thank you for doing such an amazing job being a Hobbit." "All right, here we go." "I guess we call this one more for extra luck." "JACKSON:" "Ready, steady." "Here we go and action." "And we played the whole sequence out so Thorin, Richard, went up and hugged Bilbo." "THORIN:" "Did I not say you were a burden?" "That you would not survive in the Wild?" "That you had no place amongst us?" "I have never been so wrong in all my life." "Party group hug!" "HAMBLETON:" "And it was a fantastic moment." "And then Peter came up on the set and we all embraced." "Whoa, whoa, whoa." "[ALL CHEERING]" "MAN 1:" "Well done, Pete." "MAN 2:" "Well done." "MAN 3:" "Well done, mate." "Well done." " Oh, you guys have been amazing." "MAN 4:" "Cheers, Pete." "I must admit when I had my little experience as a Dwarf, I absolutely hated it." "Very uncomfortable and hot." "So I don't know how you guys did it." "MAN 5:" "Thank you." "HAMBLETON:" "So a lot of hilarity broke out." "And it was a really lovely celebratory way to express the last shot." "It's been such a huge journey for myself and all my brothers." "And we are brothers, all the Dwarves." "It'll be a part of my life that I'll never forget." "MAN:" "Galadriel, well done." "God, you've had to put up with some shit." "It's going." "It's going." "I'm taking it off." "I'm taking it off." "[ALL CLAPPING AND CHEERING]" "You know, to top it all off, the entire crew is there and we are given some absolute treasures." "We were given a reverential remembrance of a piece of equipment important to us." "I was given my boar spear, which I loved." " Just what you always wanted." " I love that." " It's the sling shot." " I think it might be." "Thank you very much." "Thank you, sir." "JACKSON:" "And this is a very, very special gift." " Lego Bifur." " Lego Bifur." "One of the most exciting things for me was Lego Bifur." "The hottest two Dwarves on the planet." "It's so huge." "McTAVISH:" "And I showed it to my daughter when I got home but she's not allowed to play with it." "It's mine." "We all got our back of these chairs with our name on it." "All I need now is a chair to go with it." "MAN:" "I'm sorry." "To the leader of our company, Thorin Oakenshield." "Thorin got given Orcrist which is that special sword that Thorin has for battling all of the goblins." "Apart from wanting to say thank you to Pete in front of Phil I just wanna say I've never seen a crew work as hard as you guys have." "And I apologize for being so grumpy all the time." "I've never seen anything like it and I can't wait to come back next year and see you all again." "So thank you." "We've all been working long and hard on a movie called The Hobbit." "And here he is." "MAN:" "Jesus Christ." "Is that Kiran?" "[ALL LAUGH]" "MAN:" "You wish." "This has been my home for 18 months and if I've gotta be away from home which I have, that's contractual I couldn't imagine anywhere that would make me feel more welcome and more warm with a lot of people, cast and crew, production." "And that's a hard gig when we're on the other side of the world." "So thank you so, so much." "I've had a real blast with my fellow actors." "As Richard said, the crew has been ******* outstanding." "And I get this." "So thank you so, so much and thanks for the Holy Trinity." "We've had an incredible cast and now we have to say goodbye to somebody who is, I think, one of the world's most beloved and fantastic actors." "Ian." "When I first met Peter in London with Fran you know, it did cross my mind that they were a little bit Hobbity." "And then when we came to do this second lot of films I thought, "Well, no, because he's not a Hobbit, he's a Dwarf."" "But actually the truth is that he's a wizard." "And the greatest wizard of them all." "And working with you, Peter, and everybody here and completing these films is better than winning a gold medal at the Olympics." "THRANDUIL:" "Where does your journey end?" "MAN:" "if you can't see me, I can't see you." "I want everyone to represent." "Okay, here we go." "And now." "Awesome, thank you." "All done." "[ALL CLAPPING AND CHEERING]" "That is not the end." "That is not the end by a long ways." "It's the last day, but it's not the last day, you know." "So it's hard to know where the emotions are at then." " We're here next year" " Get into a harness." "For several months, so" " You know." "Between now and then, we'll just be drinking." "That's it." " Still more time with these idiots." "Yeah." "MAN:" "You guys" " Ha, ha." "It is a slow goodbye." "We wrap and then we do pickups, and there's the premiere but each day, it gets less and less, you know." "There's less and less to do." "And I think, you know" "I think I'll miss the people." "[CHUCKLES]" "Aw..." "Getting through principal photography and then the pickups in the first film certainly" "You know, you feel like you" "[JACKSON CHUCKLES]" "You're not at the top of the mountain yet, but at least the peak's in sight." "You've got oxygen, a bit of food." "You think you can actually get there now." "I don't remember the first day." "It was before my 21st birthday." "Every film was a challenge to craft it and so by the time we're done with our photography we've shot, you know, essentially three movies, plus the pickups of the first film." "You really" " All your focus and attention just goes onto that first film at that point." "OLSSEN: it's always good to get out of the shoot and get into the cutting room and get the director there and start focusing just on the editing." "[YELLING AND GRUNTING]" "JACKSON:" "Dean is making his own sound effects." "MAN:" "Yeah." "It saves the sound guy a week." "If all the actors do that..." "...we would save so much time." " Well, quite a few actors do do it." "You don't really think too much about the fact you've got two more." "There's so much at stake now to get that first film out the door and to make it as good a film as you can possibly, you know, make." "There's too many." "We can't fight them." "Only one thing will save us, daylight!" "JACKSON:" "What do you think, Fran?" "FRAN:" "An improvement." "JACKSON:" "Good." "Premiere." "A week to go until the premiere." "Seven days, it said on The Embassy when we went there." "If we snuck in there, put up a sign saying "10 days"..." "MAN:" "Yeah, yeah." "...we might be able to buy ourselves a few extra days, which would be quite good." "The clock is ticking." "[TROLL GROANS AND SOUND EFFECTS]" "SAINDON:" "Digitally we started off 800-shot movie, really." "That's what the original idea was for the movie and we went up to about 2400 shots." "So the movie crew, just from day to day... if I was younger, more new to this game I might have been more terrified." "Because the task that we had set to us was huge." "The number of shots we delivered in the time frame that we've delivered them has been phenomenal." "WETA was working around the clock thousands of technicians, trying to get these shots in." "Little Goblins I've added here." "Awesome stuff." "Pete wasn't liking this or that." "LEVINSON:" "This last shot that we had to" "We were chasing is a shot of the dragon." "That was a huge shot." "It was a big, long shot." "We were pulling through millions of gold coins and revealing Smaug in close-up detail and an eye that we had not yet seen before in the film." "We did all-nighter after all-nighter on that last shot." "It was the last shot we worked on." "It was down to the wire." "I just had to jump in and do it myself because we had no time." "I think it's working okay now." "We delivered that last shot the day of the premiere, essentially." "As long as we've got some petrol in the car and we can drive the movie to The Embassy on time, we're okay." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "MAN:" "Good morning." "[PEOPLE CHATTERING AND CLAMORING]" "We launched a premiere in style, with half a kilometer of red carpet and tens of thousands of fans lining the red carpet." "[ALL CHEERING]" " I hope you enjoy it, guys." " Thank you." "I didn't think that many people were interested but when you're walking down the red carpet people were just screaming and so excited." "WOMAN:" "Thank you." "And we got" " Only have two more to go." "Ha-ha-ha!" "Unfortunately I fell asleep at the premiere from all the all-nighters, heh, heh, before." "[PEOPLE CHEERING]" "JACKSON:" "it's one thing to be working on a project that no one's ever seen and you don't know what anyone's-- How anyone's gonna react." "Once that first movie's out there, it's doing okay, people are enjoying it you kind of get a lot more excited about the second and third." "You're thinking of ways you can improve it." "All right, shall we shoot?" "I mean" "I'm really excited about The Desolation of Smaug." "It's the middle film, which is often the hardest film to write." "But actually, in this instance, it hasn't been." "It's been great." " You get to meet all these new characters." " Shh." "Welcome." "Welcome." "The question of how many of those you can eat" " And keep down, that's the key." " Yeah." "And then afterwards" "That was probably one of the least pleasant scenes I've ever had to do." " It's disgusting trouble." " Yes." "Look at him, with his little pointy crown." "BLOOM: it's a good look, Dad." " Thanks, son." "BLOOM:" "Okay." "I've done a fantastic amount of Orc slaying again." "Let's do this." "MAN:" "Action!" "BLOOM:" "I've lost count, but it works out really well." "BLOOM:" "Oh!" "Whoa!" "A bit of Elf/Orc love?" "[YELLS THEN LAUGHS]" "LILLY:" "We were killing Orcs and chasing after Dwarves and" "Just generally looking badass." "We were hacking and slashing to make up for the Elves with their fancy moves." "We need to get some of our-- Get some Dwarf style in there" " Wah!" "Not a sight that you see every day, is it?" "[ALL GROANING]" "I've been eating these mushrooms and I'm hallucinating." "I feel like I'm..." " You're on the wrong set, old bean." "FREEMAN:" "Are you ******* serious?" "I've been there, I've been..." "[ALL LAUGHING]" "I am concentrating in this film." "It's just there's a lot of bears and Wargs and Orcs." "This is a very heavy book." "MAN:" "Hold on, guys!" "Aah, it's gonna go!" "WOMAN:" "Reset." " Look at his little face." "WOMAN:" "Reset." "We completed a 70-meter circuit in just over 20 seconds." "It was just mayhem." "[ALL CHEER]" "We get to the mountain." "We get to our goal." "Right where this rock is just imagine a huge foot either side and a statue that rises up and everyone is searching for the secret entrance." " There must be a way." "MAN:" "Shake." "Was that an earthquake?" "BALIN:" "That, my lad was a dragon." "The Smaug that I worked with was a tennis ball on the end of a stick with an angry face drawn on it." "I just kept thinking of Benedict Cumberbatch's face." "Not good because it's not gonna look like Benedict Cumberbatch, ha-ha-ha!" "There will be nudity." "This is not your usual ADR session." "Uh..." "Smaug likes to slither about in and amongst lamb wool." "And I wonder why I get into trouble." "[GROWLING]" "JACKSON:" "I mean, there's a lot more work to do on both the second and the third." "The second's obviously coming up pretty soon after people see this but the third is another year away." "It sort of becomes a bit more fun actually than it does when you go back two years and you haven't shot a thing." "Because you are now aware that there's so many people looking forward to the second movie." "Which is a pressure, but it's also-- it's a motivator." "It sort of energizes you to really wanna make that second and third film as good as they can possibly be." "You wouldn't wanna wake up to that in the morning, would you?" "[ALL CHUCKLING]" "MAN:" "Quick." "Quicker!" "[YELLS]" "MAN:" "Very good." "Whatever comes, stay on the path." "Don't leave the path." "Wait, Gandalf." "It might be a trap." "I thought I was rather good in that." "[PEOPLE LAUGHING]" "JACKSON:" "The challenge with The Hobbit, really is we wanted to be the same filmmakers going back into Middle-earth shooting a movie in much the same style." "But a lot of the events of The Hobbit are actually establishing the world that is later developed in The Lord of the Rings." "HOWE:" "Tolkien was still exploring Middle-earth when writing The Hobbit and I don't believe he had himself a very clear idea of what Middle-earth was going to become which provides an increased latitude on the filmmaker's part to actually delve a little deeper than it was possible in Lord of the Rings." "That's quite interesting." "VINCENT:" "We could cross-reference Peter's descriptions with Tolkien's original writing to create a unique vision which became a sort of Art Department collective idea." "JACKSON:" "it was important, visually, with The Hobbit that it feels like a slightly more idyllic time." "I mean, the darkness that descends on this world in The Lord of the Rings it's brewing, but it hasn't yet expanded to the levels that it's going to." "So the world is a more innocent, simple place and we wanted to reflect that in the photography and the design." "It should look like everyone's notion of what Sherwood Forest would be like on a sunny day." "Peter felt that the whimsy and the delight of it should be apparent in everything we do." "And it just needs to be just that little bit of something extra." "LEE:" "Every new project is a challenge." "And The Hobbit hasn't really disappointed in that respect." "NARRATOR:" "Forty leagues it stretched from the Far Downs to the Brandywine Bridge and 50 from the northern moors to the marshes in the south." "The Hobbits named it the Shire." "HENNAH:" "Hobbiton is something that we've established pretty extensively so you can't really mess with that too much except it's 60 years earlier and it's midsummer." "This was a slightly more innocent time so that, in turn, affected our color treatments." "HENNAH:" "Everything is lush, the grass is all green, the flowers are all blooming." "Ah." "Smell that." "It's beautiful." "VINCENT:" "Hobbiton's a pretty special place." "It has all of the elements of good design." "It had to be a working environment for a film crew but it also needed to be fully immersive and believable." "Fortunately, this is the time where it just sort of" "Just starts to do its magical thing." "WOOD: it's just one of those sets that's the epitome of the magic of the creation of Middle-earth." "Like, it exists." "And you can kind of walk around and forget you're in a movie set." "And the cool thing is is this time around they built it for real." "This is the second incarnation of Hobbiton." "We built this 10 years ago for Lord of the Rings and at the end of that shoot, we removed the whole set." "We took away all their Hobbit holes, we took away the whole thing and just left it as a pasture, farmland." "Because initially, as the story goes, the farmer actually didn't really want the film production to leave anything here so he was quite happy when the film production decided to, you know:" ""Look, we're gonna build it, but we're gonna tear it down."" "And over the years, as the Lord of the Rings films got released this place became really popular." "People came here as a holiday destination, as a fan destination." "There wasn't an awful lot left." "We went to visit, I believe, in November 2008 and most of the Hobbit holes were gone." "Bag End was a facade in plywood, painted white with a round hole and small round windows." "Even that became popular with tourists who just wanted to see where Hobbiton used to be." "And when The Hobbit came around and we needed Hobbiton again obviously we went straight back to the Alexanders, to the owners of the farm and said, "Listen, do you mind if we rebuild Hobbiton again?" "We need to come back here again."" "ALEXANDER: it was probably five years ago that Peter sent us a letter and said he's interested in making The Hobbit again and wanting to come back." "JACKSON: it was an idea I had of, "Look, you know, why don't we build it out of permanent materials this time, not polystyrene?"" "Because so many people had been to visit that farm, and I thought:" ""Well, it's an opportunity to actually have Hobbiton there now."" "Peter wanted to do Hobbiton properly and so we were using real wood and real slate and real materials that were gonna be there for years to come." "This is the remaining Hobbit hole, original Hobbit hole and looking back." "So where we might take shortcuts do a small retaining wall for the structure of these Hobbit holes, there was none of that." "We had to excavate these holes fully retain them in accordance with the local requirements." "You can see the bracing into the hillside, five meters into the hill." "The tieback system." "We have these steel rods going into the hill." " Good day, Dave." "DAVE:" "Hey, mate." "Good." " How goes it?" " Excellent." "BRIGHT:" "As far as the construction side of things, it was more complicated, no doubt but where the trick really lay was in completing Hobbiton in reasonable time before the shoot." "HENNAH:" "On Lord of the Rings, we set ourselves up with a year for Hobbiton to grow in and this time around, we weren't gonna be nearly so lucky." "BRIGHT:" "We were due to shoot Hobbiton in February which is the end of New Zealand summer, so we had a limited amount of time to do it." "And we were a little concerned because Hobbiton had only been in the ground for six months at that stage." "VINCENT:" "And the grass wasn't quite long enough at that point and we were thinking: "Ooh."" "We were a little bit nervous that it just wasn't quite gonna be lush enough." "But then there was a slight delay." "We got wind that" " Of Peter's illness, and so Hobbiton went off the schedule." "VINCENT:" "We missed an opportunity to film during the summertime and it wasn't going to be any good if we didn't have Hobbiton at its full bloom." "So they had to push this particular set a year on." "Really great." " This is a great spot." "YORKE:" "Yeah, it's fantastic." "It's probably the most stacked up." "There's another one down by the lake." "JACKSON:" "There's another down by the lake, yeah." "HENNAH:" "There was nothing better for Hobbiton than to have been delayed." "I mean, much as Peter had to get sick to do it and we all feel sorry for that it certainly helped us in that we got a whole year of growth, regrowth." "There was an amazing difference between when we were ready to shoot the first time and when we actually shot the second time." "VINCENT:" "What happened is we left all the objects on the set and let nature just sort of grab them and they incorporated them into this sort of really comfortable landscape." "BRIGHT:" "All these vines and creepers and grasses they weren't just this big, they were this big." "This arrangement's been sitting here for a year." "It's just got all the grass and all the gorgeous stuff growing up through it." "It's almost melted into the landscape, which is really lovely." "Time gives you something that really good planning just can't give you." "A sort of authenticity that we couldn't have even hoped for." "Hi, welcome to Bag End, the home of Bilbo Baggins." "The flushest Hobbit hole in the Shire." "Just check his mail here." "Bit of junk mail." "Take that in for him." "This is Bilbo's garden." "Hobbits generally have to grow their own produce because there aren't any supermarkets in Hobbiton." "And he does a pretty good job with help from Sam Gamgee and the Greens Department." "So I've just been visiting Gaffer Gamgee." "This is 3 Bagshot Row Sam Gamgee's house in about 60 years' time." "You know, one of the lovely things about Hobbiton is that there are 44 homes that Hobbits live in in the immediate Hobbiton area." "And like any society, there are rich people, there are poor people." "There's middle-class people." "There's sort of all that in between." "So we tried to bring that to Hobbiton." "You have to look at each Hobbit hole as, "Who lives here?" "What do they do?"" "This is a woodchopper Hobbit." "He supplies all of the wood for the fireplaces for the entire dell area the neighborhood here." "You can also see up there, the washing station." "So all the Hobbits in this neighborhood get together and do their washing." "VINCENT:" "The work ethic of a Hobbit means that their laundry probably stays out for a couple of weeks before it gets changed around." "[CHICKEN CLUCKING]" "WHALE:" "This is the chicken farmer's house here in Hobbiton." "We come in and just add a few details like the nest here awning, all the little hand tools and things." "Bell." "[RINGING]" "As you go further over towards the lakeside they're much more fishermen's dwellings." "VINCENT:" "This is the fishing village lane." "There's a lot of eels in Green Dragon Lake." "There are, in fact, some quite big ones in there." "These are plastic ones, of course." "This is a Hobbit coracle, the most basic of vessels." "Doesn't get a lot of use because Hobbits don't like water, of course." "Although there was a time when we were first introduced to Sméagol and he had a coracle that was quite similar." "And of course, he was into fishing." "MAN:" "ls everything here?" "Was it all the same?" "Is there more now--?" "There's more, apparently." "Well, there's meant to be more up on the hill." "BRIGHT: if you're looking at the hillside where Bag End is to the right of those, there's five extra holes that we built and put in there that weren't there on Lord of the Rings." "This is the new subdivision." "It's just popped up in the last hundred years or so." "What we've got here is a potter." "VINCENT:" "From a distance, you wouldn't think that there was much going on there except he's got this huge chimney attached to the front of the house." "And there's an opening in the front of the chimney and it's just chockablock with fresh clay pots baking in the sun." "Originally, Guillermo wanted Bilbo to race out and run past those Hobbit holes off down the side of the hill but Peter has him turn a hard right and jump down the bank." "So this is Gandalfs cutting." "It's where Gandalf first came to Hobbiton and it's also where the guys came back after Lord of the Rings the four Hobbits on their ponies, and so it's a big reveal of Hobbiton." "So I think this is one of the nicest angles to look at Hobbiton from..." "All the produce is real." "Cabbages, lettuces, carrots, artichokes." "All sorts." "And spread throughout with flowers." "And in Hobbiton, even overgrown dandelions are pretty." "There is one beautifully sculpted rubber tree with silk leaves and it sits on top of Bag End." "BRIGHT: it's actually bigger than our first oak from Lord of the Rings up there and far stronger." "So that needed some serious structure within it because we have to cater for high winds and the longevity of it being up there for 25 years." "So that's the only non-deciduous oak tree in the world, I bet." "Ha-ha-ha." "VINCENT:" "There's a boundary around Hobbiton." "It's basically to the horizon in every direction." "WOOD:" "There's nothing to break the illusion." "Because if you look out over the hills all you see is effectively what is the Shire." "VINCENT:" "There's no denying it." "It's beautiful from every angle and it also has the sound effects to boot." "[BIRDS CHIRPING]" "MAN:" "Good day." " Hey, how are you?" " Good, thanks." " Good." " Good, thanks." "Yeah." " Nice to meet you." " Good to meet you." " Ha-ha." "How far away is the Green Dragon?" "So here we are at the Green Dragon, the local pub here in Hobbiton." "This is where the Hobbits like to come and have a drink after a hard day's work." "HENNAH:" "This time around, we've had the opportunity to rebuild it as a permanent structure and we're looking at putting a little bar in there so it really is the Green Dragon." "So we did that, and that's basically inside and outside is fully themed and so now people go there and they have their pint in the Green Dragon pub." "But I've worked up a bit of a thirst, so I'm gonna help myself to a beer here." "Cheers." "VINCENT:" "Hobbiton, the location, has finally succumbed to its destiny, really in that it has gone from film set to actually kind of turned into Hobbiton for real now." "JACKSON:" "We've actually, you know, left something behind that's permanent, that represents one of the settings of the movie and I think it's really cool." "It's one of those places-- And I understand now why people, you know, cross the world to make a pilgrimage to Hobbiton." "It's kind of like going home." "[INDISTINCT CHATTER]" "[BELL RINGS]" "We completely rebuilt the Bag End sets on B-Stage which is a very small low stage." "YORKE:" "B-Stage is the last remaining tin shed here at Stone Street but it's where we shot Bag End on Lord of the Rings." "So it has historical" " A historical place." " Gandalf." " Bilbo Baggins." "[BILBO LAUGHS]" "Come on." "Come in." "It is like walking into the universe of Middle-earth." "It's so incredible, the detail in that place." "I could spend hours and hours and hours looking through books and going into all the rooms." "Our very first day on the job before we started filming we went and we had a whole tour of Bag End." "MAN 1:" "All right." "MAN 2:" "Make yourselves comfortable." "MAN 3:" "Oh, my God." "HUNTER:" "That was cool." "That was the coolest day." "It's just so detailed, all the rooms." "BROWN:" "We've seen it all in The Fellowship of the Rings but actually to walk on it and walk around the set was just pretty mind-blowing." "The first impression was:" ""Crikey, wouldn't it be lovely to live in this house?"" "it created an atmosphere immediately, do you know what I mean?" "You're not having to conjure up, "What sort of place was Bilbo living?" "All I'm looking at is a green studio." You knew exactly where he was." "You can't underestimate the effect that something like that has on you." "It's quite emotional going in there." "Very easy to remember moments." "I was sitting by the fire and I said-- I took hold of the fire tongs which are still there, and said:" ""Look, there's the ring."" "it's quite cool." ""It's quite cool." Ha-ha." "Being a fan, the fact that I was in Bag End at all was a level of joy that I can't even, you know" "Every day, I just walk around and have a look at a little-- "Ooh, wow." "Look."" "And you're looking at April, the calendar that he had and he's doing this on this particular day." "And everywhere you look, there is depth to the reality that you had invested in." "I really used to enjoy to just go into Bag End and just look around and just imagine." "It's such an odd place." "It's shaped like a womb anyway, isn't it?" "It's all round and friendly and it's got all the qualities that we can't have with our quite rectangular environments." "HENNAH:" "On Lord of the Rings, Bilbo was older and so was Bag End." "VINCENT:" "Bilbo had obviously been on an adventure because his hallways were piled high with books and scrolls and wonderful things all falling out of drawers and sort of trinkets from other places." "HENNAH:" "There was an Orc helmet and a couple of old swords hanging on the wall and-- You know, slightly more random." "VINCENT:" "Which was the older, wiser Bilbo Baggins." "HENNAH:" "But now Bilbo's a young man." "He still has a sort of semblance of tidiness." "Everything was a lot more organized." "Everything had its place and put back where it should go." "Plates were all stacked nicely in the kitchen, the books were all on the bookshelves." "You know, the floors were clean." "HENNAH:" "it's not quite as dusty and dirty." "But it's still very Hobbity." "The things we didn't do in Bag End in Lord of the Rings is we didn't go into his bedroom, we didn't go into his dining room and we didn't go into his pantry." "So those were new areas that we had some design license for." "I designed a pantry 10 years ago, but it wasn't needed for the movie." "So this was an opportunity to go back and do a little more work." "You know, the pantry is stacked full of food." "HENNAH:" "Very inviting sort of place." "You look in there and you just want to eat something immediately." "The walnuts are fresh." "From an art-direction point of view, the pantry was a huge challenge for us." "You wanted the food to have quite an extravagance to it." "HENNAH:" "Well, you know, the food is really important that you get it right." "You're not just feeding the mouth or the stomach, you're feeding the eye." "With Hobbit food, even more so than normal." "And we spent weeks poring over ideas for this sort of pie and that sort of roast." "It was an involved effort on our food stylist's part." "We're here in my Portacom." "I've got this stationed as a temporary kitchen next to B-Stage where we're shooting so that I can deliver the food as fast as possible." "So all the ham hocks, black pudding, leg of mutton, that leg of ham..." "All the food had to be real because you didn't know when someone was going to pick something up and bite it." "[CHATTERING]" "And you have to be prepared for when Peter says:" ""I like the look of that cheese up there." "Let's use that."" "One of the Dwarves picks it up and goes, "Mm." "What's this smelly stuff?"" "And throws it" " Oh." "Sorry." "I didn't mean to do that." "He does throw it over his shoulder." "Yeah, that way." "We're in the pantry in Bag End, and we're redressing the entire pantry back to how it was probably only two days ago." "Feels more like about two years ago." "But Deborah has supplied all the food and if you wanna hang around a little bit, you'll see it all be put into place." "[ELMS CHUCKLES]" "This is the seventh time I've reset it." "MILSOM:" "Pretty phenomenal when you stand in the middle of it and it's all these cured meats and cheeses, and not a piece of shelf space free." "You know, you could survive several nuclear winters and you'd be fine." "[CHUCKLES]" "Smells like real beer." "[CHATTERING]" " Have you been giving them real beer?" " Is it really Graham's one?" "MAN 1:" "Yeah." "MAN 2:" "Now come out and be a director." "HENNAH:" "We did build a dining room for Bag End in the early days of Lord of the Rings but we never shot it." " It's sort of" " You know, when you" "It's good, I like" "Yeah, I like" " The height here is good, sort of with the Dwarves and stuff with their big heads." "JACKSON:" "The dining room was very carefully constructed because we wanted 13 Dwarves and a Hobbit and a Wizard to feel very squished in there." "So we made the dimensions of the room fit around them." "I wouldn't make the table any smaller, though because it's good that everyone's sort of-- The distance apart is good." "HOWE:" "We changed the size of the dining room umpteen times to make it big enough for all the Dwarves, then small enough so they had to crowd in." "MAN 1:" "We'll be turning and you actually have more..." "WOMAN:" "About to sit on-- MAN 2:" "Just got repetition." "VINCENT:" "We dressed the dining room with some really subtle materials." "We used gorgeous parchment paper for a lot of the artwork on the walls." "And the glass plates were all hand-painted." "Things that I think about and get excited about were all the crockery in there." "Our potter on this was just an absolute champion." "He produced so much work." "There was close to maybe 2000 items all up, so, yeah, it was intense." "GRAY:" "I think he got the award for the most tons of props and Bag End would have been probably the place where he shined the most." " I mean, he's got a pretty nice place." " He's got a damn fine place." " Yeah." " Yeah." "Yes." "He's done well." "Bilbo's bedroom was always going to be a little more than just a hole in the ground." "The idea was that he would" "You know, he'd have a four-poster bed and he'd have a fireplace in there and obviously a window that looked out over Hobbiton." "MILSOM:" "There was a little bit more of a feeling of opulence." "You know, there's a bit of wealth in the Baggins family and the bedroom was the place where we had this bed that had a real sense of royalty, sort of character to it." "You imagine not every Hobbit would have a bed like that." "It may have seemed crazy at the time to hand-stitch a lot of the fabric but the moment we saw it next to Bilbo Baggins' face lying in the bed that was kind of the payoff." "Ninety percent of the work that you do doesn't really get seen but the 10 percent that does make it in made it all worthwhile." "Bag End was the greatest thing we could have done at the beginning because, you know, as a set, it's iconic." "It's such a familiar place." "And once we walked in there and the lights were there and the camera crew was squeezed in, it really didn't feel that we had been away." "HOWE:" "it's such a magical spot." "It really is very, very beautiful." "You could almost imagine living there." "I could imagine myself living in Bag End, honestly." "It is a great set." "I think of all the sets that I've had the pleasure of walking through in the films I've made, I think Bag End would be my absolute favorite." "Thank you." "NARRATOR: it was Radagast the Brown who had one time dwelt in Rhosgobel near the borders of Mirkwood." "He is one of my order, but I had not seen him for many a year." "HOWE:" "Rhosgobel, which was Radagast's house was the first original set that we built specifically for The Hobbit." "The sets that were built prior to that were the reconstructing of Rivendell pieces of Rivendell, the reconstructing of Bag End." "There was something whimsical and something colorful and awed about it." "Radagast's house is only alluded to by Tolkien, so it was quite wide open, actually." "LEE:" "I was very much working with a clean slate because there were no images of it or ideas of it." "And neither John nor myself had ever drawn it before." "JACKSON:" "I always imagine Rhosgobel to be that cozy little den in the middle of the woods." "I mean, I just had, you know, a very fairy-tale idea of what it would be like." "And then we talked about integrating sort of trees into the design so that Radagast would build his house by a tree and the tree would be part of his house." "And that was where we started and a lot of sketches were done." "I believe we designed Radagast's house at least four or five times." "One design put him under the roots of a tree in kind of a house that he'd built underneath." "And Peter came up with the novel idea that his house isn't built under a tree or next to a tree." "It's got a tree growing up through the middle of it." "JACKSON:" "And this is Radagast's house." "This is your lovely little cottage." "See, the idea with the house is that you built the house" "You know, originally, it looked quite good." "And then a little acorn got dropped on the floor one day out of your pocket..." "...and it sprouted in a bit of dirt on the floor." " Yeah." "And it grew, and you didn't have the heart to tear it up because you don't destroy things." "So the acorn turned into an enormous tree..." "...which split your house in half." " Yes." "And it was just a silly little whimsical idea that kind of grew in the design." "BRIGHT:" "Radagast's house was a complicated build." "Structurally, it doesn't work, heh." "You know, visually, structurally, it doesn't work so you had to do all these compensatory measures to make it work." "MASSEY:" "We actually used the tree, which had a central steel in it to actually hold the house up." "And of course, because the tree was actually dictating how things looked there wasn't a vertical straight line on it." "So that basically, it looked precarious, but it wasn't precarious." "That house is really as cluttered and as convoluted as Radagast's mind." "He experiments with things that give him more knowledge of the world around him." "He's like an astrologer." "There's definitely a touch of T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone and The Book of Merlyn which bore certain similarities to the interior of Radagast's." "Just an accumulation of curiosities." "Rhosgobel is so full of quirky, interesting props." "If you were to walk into his house you would see a good, functioning, working environment." "But then there's this layer of chaos that sits over the top of it." "He had a writing place for writing spells and scales for measuring different ground powders." "You can be fussy and frustrated-- You know, and eccentric and kind of" "Yes." "It was kind of like this crazy chemist's and scientist's." "And he hoarded things." "He hoarded remedies and herbs and would make these natural concoctions to cure sick animals." "HENNAH:" "You know, Radagast loves all things of nature." "And he wouldn't hurt a flea." "He certainly wouldn't hurt a tree." "We've tried to cut out a bit of worn wood which was designed for your hat to sort of slide through that shape." "McCOY:" "Yes, I can see it." "Yes." " Do you know what I mean?" "On the interior, there's a branch at head height that he walks past and over the eons of him walking backwards and forwards he has worn a complete silhouette out through the branch where his hat fits perfectly through this branch." "So this is a chair for Radagast." "Sometimes he's had to just repair it with bits of wood or something that he's found around the place." "It all looks quite organic and quite natural, quite makeshift." "I mean, of course, we have our specialized prop makers but we needed to make Radagast's house a little bit more spontaneous so we had some art students and a couple of truck drivers to do some wonderful little crazy weavings." "These people have never done any weaving before." "And they all wove the most outrageously bizarre baskets you'd ever seen." "Which was great, because it breathes life into environments like that." "It is definitely Radagast's house." "There's no doubt about that." "HOWE:" "This lovely little house which looked exactly like the piece of concept art." "There it is." "It's magical when that happens." "When an idea can come from Peter through us and then be built by this amazing team of people." "[BIRDS CHIRPING]" "NARRATOR:" "The last homely house east of the sea." "That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported a perfect house." "Whether you like food or sleep or storytelling or singing." "Or just sitting and thinking best." "Or a pleasant mixture of them all." "Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness." "Rivendell." "AITKEN:" "Peter had a very clear vision for what he wanted Rivendell to look like." "It had to look beautiful, seductive." "I mean, really, it has to be the place that, ultimately, Bilbo is gonna want to come back to and live in." "You are very welcome to stay here if that is your wish." "FRODO:" "Bilbo!" " Hello, Frodo, my lad." "So it has to be beautiful, it has to be comfortable, sumptuous ornate, attractive." "All those great things." "Because it's an Elven environment, it's beautiful and elegant and stylish." "All the things that Dwarves hate." "On Lord of the Rings, Rivendell was tired." "It was really dying." "The Elves are leaving." "So in terms of the color we tended to stay with a lot of silvers and grays underlying color but very muted." "If you could put them side by side The Lord of the Rings Rivendell and The Hobbit Rivendell summer and autumn, you can immediately tell the difference." "In The Hobbit, Rivendell is in full swing." "So once again, more richness in the colors, more detail, more depth." "And more full of life." "VINCENT:" "it was bathed in golden light." "But the architecture was this sort of vividly light blue with gold highlights which lifted the whole thing quite dramatically." "HENNAH:" "Elrond's chamber was one of the sets that Peter had decided to keep at the end of Lord of the Rings." "So we were able to resurrect a lot of it." "A lot of the statuary was exactly the same." "All the architectural elements, balustrades, things like that." "We've brought some fabric into the designs so that it felt just a little more homely, I guess." "BRIGHT: it was such a lovely feeling to walk through Elrond's chamber." "And it has some history because we were there 10 years ago." "HENNAH:" "Up on the balcony in Elrond's chamber behind the statue of Narsil, with the broken Narsil sword was the original Alan Lee painting of Sauron." "You couldn't really see the ring on his finger and it became really important that you could see the ring on his finger." "When I painted this for The Fellowship of the Ring last time, 10 years ago I didn't actually put the ring in." "And so in order to get that little, like, cue in the story now I'm putting in the ring here and that will be used for the close-up." "Ha-ha-ha." "Original art." "Well, they do it all the time, you know." "Put a smile on the Mona Lisa." "Heh." "LEE:" "Well, we wanted Rivendell to kind of have a new life in this film and there'll be certain areas that we'll be going to that we didn't go to in The Fellowship." "We never saw the entrance to Rivendell in The Lord of the Rings because the way we get to Rivendell, of course is that Frodo loses consciousness at the banks of the river." "And then he wakes up and he's in a bed." "LEE:" "Our entry to Rivendell this time is actually a little bit closer to the way that Tolkien described it." "NARRATOR:" "They saw a valley far below." "They could hear the voice of hurrying water in a rocky bed at the bottom." "The scent of trees was in the air." "And there was a light on the valley-side across the water." "LEE:" "Looking down on the bridge, you'll see" " Go into this kind of courtyard area which we don't see any of that in The Fellowship." "Rivendell is a classic environment to do a set with digital extensions." "You can't build vast sets that would fill three sound stages." "You have to judiciously choose and build small portions of them but you're imagining the entire space." "SAINDON:" "We had a full map." "Everything about Rivendell was designed out by Alan Lee and John Howe." "HOWE:" "This time around, there was much more latitude to make Rivendell a slightly grander place." "Add all of these wonderful vistas that were just impossible to do at the time." "You know, in the time of Lord of the Rings, which is only 10 years ago Rivendell was created almost exclusively as a miniature which was filmed on a miniature shooting stage particularly for wide shots." "But we knew that in The Hobbit, we'd have to be moving through it a lot more." "So if you can go completely digital and still make it look real it gives you a lot of flexibility in how you can design your shots." "What having a digital environment does is it frees me up as a filmmaker to go anywhere and do anything I want with my camera." "AITKEN:" "By building this whole world you can take footage of Martin as Bilbo on a green screen stage where there's no set at all." "We were able to take that footage and place it wherever Peter likes." "So as Bilbo's exploring Rivendell we can make the most of that by showing the best of the environment." "And I just love the fact that in many of those shots there are detailed water simulations happening quite close to camera that I think are just completely convincing." "The observatory is the one place where you can read moon runes." "The brief for the observatory is that it looks out over the valley." "It's this location that kind of amplifies the moonlight coming in." "The thing that was interesting about that sequence was we had to establish the mechanics of how the moonlight on this particular night could enable these runes to manifest themselves." "Rather than having Elrond holding it in the light, which is a bit kind of awkward if he places it on something and then, voom, these beams kind of" "What if the table was like an extrusion of crystal coming up through the rock?" "JACKSON:" "Yeah." "Yep." "Peter decided that he wanted to use a crystal." "So we drew a crystal that was kind of embedded into this rock." "They built the basic structure on set." "This is the crystal that has moonlight coming up through it." "And" " But we had to wet the set down because it's in amongst a whole lot of waterfalls." "So you'd always wanna feel as though there's moisture in the air moisture on the floor." "MAN:" "Yeah." "HENNAH:" "it'll all just be slightly reflective." " So do you wanna see a bit of real magic?" " Yes, please." "Can you see the Dwarf runes?" "The" " The moon runes?" "Ah." "JACKSON:" "The moon runes." "WEAVING:" "Well, I suspect the moon runes might be in here." "FREEMAN:" "Hang on a second." "Hang on." "WEAVING:" "Because it sort of" "ALL:" "Oh!" "JACKSON:" "Look at that." "FREEMAN:" "Wow-wee." " Well, it's very clever, isn't it?" "McKELLEN: it is." "I know, I like it." "LEE:" "One of the other places we go to is the White Council chamber." "The actual shape of that derives from something that we built for the miniature in The Fellowship." "Once that you're gonna have the Council of Elrond inside a specially constructed building." "We adapted that for the idea of the White Council chamber." "HENNAH:" "And that was always a piece that we wanted to build for Rings but, of course, it was never written into the picture." "So suddenly here was a council chamber and an opportunity to use that design." "LEE:" "We have streams of water kind of flowing through this circular building." "It was surrounded by a series of arches, so you get views all the way around." "HENNAH:" "One of the thoughts was that the council would be surrounded by these diaphanous beauties." "We want them to be as proportionally correct as possible so our sculptor decided to sculpt the figures as nudes and then apply the clothing in layers of clay over that." "LEE:" "And they had this elaborate kind of Elven design." "So it felt like a sacred space." "All right, so, what we were gonna do, Cate, this first shot we're gonna have you standing up behind the camera there." " They've built steps especially for your frock." " Yes, I know." "JACKSON:" "Have you heard about that?" "BLANCHETT:" "Heh-heh-heh." "Peter actually built the steps on which I'm standing for my first reveal specifically to accommodate the frock that Ann designed." "The reveal of Galadriel would be that" "With her standing on this promontory." "We built it and painted it, and it was all looking pretty cool." "And they sent us over a photograph of the costume, which was stunning." "The photograph was taken in the wardrobe room." "There are these steps up to a stage where they present the costumes." "And then as she turns..." "WOMAN 1:" "There it is." "Just like that." "WOMAN 2:" "Yeah." "WOMAN 1:" "That's amazing." "It just does it." "WOMAN 2:" "Yeah." "WOMAN 2:" "The fabric is fantastic." "MAN: it's great." "WOMAN 3: it looks amazing." "MAN: it is beautiful, yeah?" "WOMAN 2:" "Yeah." "MASKREY:" "As you can see, this costume's got a really long train which I've always been fond of, but not everyone can make it work." "Cate beautifully did the most perfect turn." " Just don't ask me to walk anywhere." "ALL:" "Ha-ha-ha." "And Fran and Philippa both said, "This is it." "This is it." "This is fantastic." "We need these steps, you know."" "it was a Ziegfeld moment, I think." "It was a" " And quite, quite hard." "I had to make sure that it worked because the steps had been built and the frock was so extraordinary, not to wobble." "You can't wobble, you can't trip, and you can't blink if you're an Elf." "What can you do?" "It just made sense that we would build steps up to the promontory for the reveal and so thank God we had enough height in our archways to achieve that." "What we were presented with in Rivendell as sets they were brilliant." "Rivendell is a highlight." "Always gonna be a highlight." "It's beautiful and it's clean and it's fresh and it's amazing." "A lot's happened to all of us in the last 12 years." "And you think, "Have I polished these memories?" "Have I made them more special than they are?"" "And when you walk on the set, you think, "No, it actually is special."" "it actually is incredibly special." "NARRATOR:" "He saw that across the valley, the Stone-Giants were out and hurling rocks at one another for a game and catching them and tossing them down in the darkness." "[ROCKS RUMBLING]" "THORIN [SINGING]:" "Far over the misty mountains cold" "To dungeons deep" "And caverns old" "With the Misty Mountains, we're returning to a place that we visited in Lord of the Rings." "It's actually the amazing mountain range of the Remarkables near Queenstown." "But this time, we're going to a very different part." "This is where the Stone-Giants live." "I think I was just always intrigued by that little episode in the book in which the Stone-Giants are mentioned just in passing." "It's just a description that Tolkien writes of these battling, warring Stone-Giants which are creating a thunderstorm." "And I just think, "Wow, that would look pretty amazing in a movie."" "LEE:" "In the book, I guess they are a kind of almost a metaphorical idea of a mountain storm, really with avalanches and lightning." "But we weren't dealing with it as a metaphor." "We were actually, you know, creating something for real." "So, for me, it just started with this drawing of the company kind of making their way along a mountain path and then sketching faces in the cliff in quite a distorted and abstracted way." "You know, the image that I had in my mind was part of a mountain coming alive in a vaguely humanoid shape." "But they are the bones of the mountain." "And there's probably many more of them." "The mountains are probably made up of many, many giants and, at times, some of them come to life." "We sort of experimented between more humanoid-looking giants versus more kind of just lumps of mountain." "Alan Lee had done some great artwork showing them just sort of part of the mountainsides and kind of emerging out of them." "I suppose it was the idea that they're kind of so compressed by time and they've been sleeping in the same position for hundreds of years." "Their bodies were kind of distorted by their own weight essentially." "So if they raise their face, their face would actually be flat on one side like when your mother tells you if you pull that face you'll stay that way." "We wanted to get the sense of these characters just ripping themselves out of the rock mountain." "And right off the bat, that spoke to us as being digital." "The Stone-Giants, I think they're 127 meters tall." "They're pretty big." "So of course, from an animation perspective, that meant not letting them move too fast." "There's one scene where the giant sort of emerges out of the rock and wakes up." "And we just had to make sure that, you know, each thing was moving successively." "You know, an arm, a shoulder, a head." "And then a look, just to kind of play out each of those beats one by one." "To help with the sense of scale Chris White and his team would add effects, debris falling out of joints, like you know, just say a joint moved, the rocks would tumble out and they'd be falling quite slowly from a distance." "But then when you cut down to see what the Dwarves are doing they're flying by." "If they're on their knee, they're moving in incredible speed." "But when you cut wide, it just looks like these two giant mountains interacting with each other." "So it was quite cool to have that kind of range within the one sequence." "MAN:" "The rocks..." "The Stone-Giants sequence is complicated because it required, you know, a real amalgam of live-action filming with the actors on a mountain ledge, plus the giants and the storm and the CG." "So the best way to approach a scene like that is to previs it and to plan it very carefully." "Yeah, you should just be pulling back and the impact, bang." "Peter just loved the idea of this big kind of brawl happening in the mountains." "CLAYTON:" "So in order to come up with ideas for dynamic fight shots we really just left it to the imaginations of the animators." "It started out with a big punch." "Peter would go, "Are we really getting the most out of this shot?" "Show me some options."" "And Joe Letteri came up with a headbutt idea." "I said to Peter, "How about if we have them headbutt each other?"" "And he said, "Sure, try it," so..." "Ha-ha-ha." "You know, just looking for something different for them to do." "It's like, "Well, these are giants, so if they're gonna get into a physical fight they're gonna headbutt."" "LEE:" "They also thought that maybe the rocks that they were kind of grabbing weren't necessarily just boulders." "Maybe they turned out to be the head of another giant." "So if you look really carefully as the rock's flying through the air there's just a tiny hint of a face that's carved into this rock." "The other thing we were looking to do in the sequence was to keep the giants very shadowed and almost mysterious." "So they were just large forms that kind of played against the brightness of the sky behind them." "CLAYTON:" "Because you've only got a limited range of motion within each shot you have to pick good, clear, dynamic poses that are readable." "Often, there'd be lightning striking in the background, casting them into silhouette." "WHITE:" "We treat the giants as if they're part of the landscape." "So instead of lighting them as a character or as a creature they would pick up more the tones in the lighting of a mountain, say for instance." "So the light is very dappled." "It comes through in certain areas and it breaks up in other areas." "Some of the things we had to develop for these shots is elements like fog and rain to make sure you had that sense of the Dwarves traveling through the storm." "And, you know, the scene that was shot ultimately was very, very similar to the original animatic." "The Stone-Giants sequence doesn't really have any impact on the story, really." "I suppose you could argue it does force them to shelter in a cave which actually does have ramifications." "So, you know, they do actually have a part to play, but nonetheless it's just cool." "I mean, if I was going to a Tolkien movie, I'd wanna see the Stone-Giants." "And I'm just lucky because I get to make the movie, so" "The Stone-Giants are there." "It's just that's the type of fantasy, the type of escapism I love." "NARRATOR:" "it was deep, deep dark such as only Goblins that have taken to living in the heart of mountains can see through." "HOWE:" "Goblin-town in the book is sort of a dark, horrible place with a very fat king sitting on a stone and that's really all that Tolkien tells us." "I mean, they're in the mountains." "What does Goblin-town look like?" "How did they build it?" "Is it a stone city?" "And we didn't really wanna do a stone city." "It's coming up with something that isn't" " That feels fresh and new that we haven't seen before too, which is a bit tricky." "You know, you got the sense that Peter wanted something unique and Alan and John were doing lots of sketches for it." "It's like cracking the code of what it is that makes it cool to look at." "This is interesting, isn't it?" "With Peter, there'd be certain drawings that really work for him." "And there was one drawing of mine in particular which showed this chasm just full of very temporary structures all kind of balanced precariously along the side of this canyon of rotted rock." "It was this idea that you just kind of came in to Goblin-town and you saw these Goblins sort of all around you in this kind of almost shantytown built into the sides of the cavern." "These Goblins have colonized a little bit like lice in the seams of clothing." "Their purpose in life, what these Goblins do, is they scavenge and they take prisoners." "They're sort of the highwaymen of Middle-earth in a way." "So we came up with the idea that everything in there is scavenged from the outside world that they go on raiding parties at night and they steal bits of architecture." "They steal stuff that's lying around farmhouses." "They probably kill the farmers and they bring the stuff back." "LETTERI:" "This is evil." "This is what comes into your house at night you know, when you don't want it to." "And this is where all of it goes." "LEE:" "And Peter had the idea that they would use this stuff but they would use it in the wrong way." "They wouldn't really quite understand the purpose." "So you might get a piece of a cart that was built into a walkway." "And the wheels of the cart to roll a rope around so they could haul something up." "They were kind of imitating what they thought should be the good life." "Heh." "So we're now starting to see other structures on the other side." "There's not really many bridges joining them." "There are kind of, like, more buildings over there." "Maybe we could just open it up slightly here." "LETTERI:" "We start constructing this world piece by piece." "And then it gets closer and closer to the time when we have to shoot something on set." "And the question becomes, "Okay, right, what do the actors have to work with?" "How much of this can and should we build physically?"" "Now, there's seven background pieces." "Often we built pretty meticulous models which then Peter could look at and say:" ""Well, I won't be needing that bit, but I will need something over here."" "You know, so he could get his head around how his action was gonna work inside that set." "All of this is a movable face, so we can go through it and back through it and around and swoop this bit over here and put that as a bridge." "And they eventually get up onto this platform, which breaks." " So how does it break?" " Well, basically, the top pieces lift off." "This is one that drops down so they could slide down." "MAN:" "Yeah." "BRIGHT:" "We had to re-create all of these set pieces that looked randomly strapped together on stilts and poles." "Jesus!" "Have you got it?" " Yeah, I've got the bottom." "MAN:" "He's getting away." "WOMAN 1:" "I got him." "I got him." "WOMAN 2:" "He died." "MAN:" "That's fine." "HENNAH:" "We've made a lot of generic pieces walkways, rock faces, that are all interchangeable." "So our little night fairies can come in and shift the whole set around." "Bring in a rock wall, another walkway around a corner." "And we keep changing this thing around night by night." "BRIGHT:" "The shooting crew would turn up the next day and have a completely different set to work with." "[HUMMING]" "I'm sitting here on part of the Goblin set." "This is the Goblins' cave and it is an incredible set." "It was almost like a medieval vision of hell." "Everything was misshapen and grotesque and felt dangerous." "It was, of course, constructed of rubbish." "Terrible skeletons." "It's a forensic paradise." "WOMAN:" "Slime." "No one's to leave home without at least five skulls." "MAN:" "Yep." "[LAUGHING]" "There's a lot of gore, and Peter likes that stuff, you know." "He loves layers of dressing that tells a story." "WOMAN:" "Do you have nightmares?" "I do have nightmares, and then I come to work and I dress them into the set." "BRIGHT:" "And introducing all the dressings you definitely throw your mind into the way Goblins might think." "I'd have to describe the Goblin aesthetic as being drunken madmen, really." "You know, make it as rough and mental with as few skills as you could and still make the thing work." "LEE:" "I kind of exemplified that with the Goblin king's throne which was a bed essentially broken in half." "JACKSON:" "Yeah." "Right, yeah." " And it'll all be made gilt." " Double bed, you know." "JACKSON:" "Yeah, right." "Oh, I see." "MAN:" "Converted into" " Right." "JACKSON:" "A throne, yeah." "JACKSON:" "Yeah, that's fantastic." "Yeah, that's great." "LEE:" "We thought that might have belonged to some prince that was being transported in some kind of marriage train or something." "We're also gonna decorate the bed with gold leaf and little kind of rococo cupids that will play to his kind of air of sophistication." "He thought of himself as being something of a connoisseur." "JACKSON:" "I'll tell you what would be really funny." "They have a hole in the bottom and a large pot underneath which your imagination can only go to what's in the pot." "MAN 1:" "Yeah." "MAN 2:" "Yeah." "Ha, ha." "Yeah, so there's your throne and your toilet is just full below." " You see him occasionally straining." " Ha, ha, yeah." "That's right." " Yep." " Wonderful." "[JACKSON LAUGHING]" "Somewhere in Pete's mind, he's decided that the Goblin sits on this huge commode with this big pile of dump underneath it." "I never thought I'd be seeing this aspect of Kiwi life." "[WOMAN LAUGHING]" "Oh!" "Barry Humphries sitting on a throne, underneath was a pile of shit." "You know, whoa." "This is a family film but the Goblin king is, amongst other things grossly incontinent." "So from time to time, a beautifully crafted urn beneath the throne receives a complement of matter." "Who would be so bold as to come armed into my kingdom?" "SAINDON:" "The sets, a lot of them are very, very large." "But that said, we need to make everything, obviously, a lot bigger." "So when we film on these sets, we always have lots of artwork from John and Alan to have a good idea of what might be back there." "SAINDON:" "They're not only designing what was filmed but they're also designing what is built in the digital world." "After we stopped filming, we actually hired Alan and John into Weta to really help lay out and design each sequence as we go." "The point of that was finishing off the job that we had started, essentially." "A concept artist's work is never done." "It's as if you can keep conceptualizing as long as there's still a shot that has an empty spot." "So Alan and John were able to give us sketches on top of the plates of what the environment would look like." "Is there a shantytown over here?" "Is there a drop over there?" "WHITE:" "You never think about how important something as simple as rocks are." "But they're actually important for defining the environment." "A lot of the rocks in Goblin-town are actually based on photographs taken on the beach out in front of Peter's place." "MAN:" "The reference I was gonna show you for rocks was actually" "JACKSON:" "Yeah, let me look at whatever you've got." "JACKSON: it is a bit like this, isn't it?" "MAN:" "Yeah." "It was basically, to a degree, the same rocks that we used in Mordor for Lord of the Rings." "Somehow it felt perfectly natural to have this corrupted rock full of holes almost as though it was being eaten away by the corrosive nature, even, of the Goblins themselves." "It's finding stuff that looks aggressive, creepy and violent." "And I think this area's great." "Our Modeling team was able to recreate this look." "MAN:" "So, what we have to do is we have to make a real digital environment that represents John and Alan's artwork as much as possible." "And the easiest way to do that is to look at the real thing." "Rather than completely create a Goblin-town set that works from A to B to C to D you've gotta, you know, treat it like a whole lot of different sets and have the ability to change and blow out wide when you need to and close in." "So we sort of create what we call, like, a Lego set of components like bits of wall and lots of little gantries and ladders and then you sort of build them to what you need the shot to be." "[GOBLINS SCREECHING]" "I haven't abandoned sketchbooks entirely." "So this is where the Dwarves will come rushing up here onto this structure, which they cut loose and it swings across this chasm." "So the Goblins are stuck on the other side." "They actually swing across and back and then across again." "[BRIDGE GROANS]" "We kind of mapped out the path which the Dwarves would travel." "One thing that Peter asked for was that he wanted it to feel like you're traveling through and seeing these different places." "SAINDON: it was all backwards-engineered from the throne." "We knew they had to get onto a bridge at some point and fall down a cliff side and end up at the bottom of a ravine." "And then backwards-engineer everything between those two points into this huge universe." "I think Goblin-town is perhaps the most collaborative of the environments that we did." "There's bits of everybody." "SAINDON:" "And we ended up with one big digital world." "You can essentially fly a camera all the way through Goblin-town which allowed Peter to go in and put a camera anywhere he wanted and see the world." "JACKSON:" "That allows me to be a little bit more adventurous and have a bit more fun as the filmmaker." "And if the animation is done well and the lighting and compositing is done well then it just opens up so many possibilities." "[ALL YELLING]" "JACKSON: it was an absolute joy to come back to Middle-earth again." "It was almost like you're turning the page of the history book going to a new chapter and going back in that world but seeing new things, places you haven't been to before." "Middle-earth is so diverse and there's so many different environments." "You may be creating something beautiful one moment, something dangerous the next." "It's just a lot of complexity." "We had all these wonderful, wonderful people making things." "And they all gave it 100 percent in time and energy and creativity to bring Tolkien's vision to the screen." "TURNER:" "The way these sets are constructed, it's quite amazing." "I mean, you are, with the suspension of a few things you're kind of really there." "FREEMAN:" "I've run out of superlatives to describe the places we get to work in, you know." "And just how people have managed to build them." "BRIGHT:" "it was an amazing effort by so many people." "And to see the success of such a final product is really overwhelming." "This is my dream job." "Who else gets to really conceive wonderful things and have them created by some of the world's best makers and then be able to present it in a place like this film to the rest of the world?" " Bye to the fans." " Bye." "All right, see you." "Bye-bye." "JACKSON:" "The challenge with The Hobbit, really is we wanted to be the same filmmakers going back into Middle-earth shooting a movie in much the same style." "But a lot of the events of The Hobbit are actually establishing the world that is later developed in The Lord of the Rings." "HOWE:" "Tolkien was still exploring Middle-earth when writing The Hobbit and I don't believe he had himself a very clear idea of what Middle-earth was going to become which provides an increased latitude on the filmmaker's part to actually delve a little deeper than it was possible in Lord of the Rings." "That's quite interesting." "VINCENT:" "We could cross-reference Peter's descriptions with Tolkien's original writing to create a unique vision which became a sort of Art Department collective idea." "JACKSON:" "it was important, visually, with The Hobbit that it feels like a slightly more idyllic time." "I mean, the darkness that descends on this world in The Lord of the Rings it's brewing, but it hasn't yet expanded to the levels that it's going to." "So the world is a more innocent, simple place and we wanted to reflect that in the photography and the design." "It should look like everyone's notion of what Sherwood Forest would be like on a sunny day." "Peter felt that the whimsy and the delight of it should be apparent in everything we do." "And it just needs to be just that little bit of something extra." "LEE:" "Every new project is a challenge." "And The Hobbit hasn't really disappointed in that respect." "NARRATOR:" "Forty leagues it stretched from the Far Downs to the Brandywine Bridge and 50 from the northern moors to the marshes in the south." "The Hobbits named it the Shire." "HENNAH:" "Hobbiton is something that we've established pretty extensively so you can't really mess with that too much except it's 60 years earlier and it's midsummer." "This was a slightly more innocent time so that, in turn, affected our color treatments." "HENNAH:" "Everything is lush, the grass is all green, the flowers are all blooming." "Ah." "Smell that." "It's beautiful." "VINCENT:" "Hobbiton's a pretty special place." "It has all of the elements of good design." "It had to be a working environment for a film crew but it also needed to be fully immersive and believable." "Fortunately, this is the time where it just sort of" "Just starts to do its magical thing." "WOOD: it's just one of those sets that's the epitome of the magic of the creation of Middle-earth." "Like, it exists." "And you can kind of walk around and forget you're in a movie set." "And the cool thing is is this time around they built it for real." "This is the second incarnation of Hobbiton." "We built this 10 years ago for Lord of the Rings and at the end of that shoot, we removed the whole set." "We took away all their Hobbit holes, we took away the whole thing and just left it as a pasture, farmland." "Because initially, as the story goes, the farmer actually didn't really want the film production to leave anything here so he was quite happy when the film production decided to, you know:" ""Look, we're gonna build it, but we're gonna tear it down."" "And over the years, as the Lord of the Rings films got released this place became really popular." "People came here as a holiday destination, as a fan destination." "There wasn't an awful lot left." "We went to visit, I believe, in November 2008 and most of the Hobbit holes were gone." "Bag End was a facade in plywood, painted white with a round hole and small round windows." "Even that became popular with tourists who just wanted to see where Hobbiton used to be." "And when The Hobbit came around and we needed Hobbiton again obviously we went straight back to the Alexanders, to the owners of the farm and said, "Listen, do you mind if we rebuild Hobbiton again?" "We need to come back here again."" "ALEXANDER: it was probably five years ago that Peter sent us a letter and said he's interested in making The Hobbit again and wanting to come back." "JACKSON: it was an idea I had of, "Look, you know, why don't we build it out of permanent materials this time, not polystyrene?"" "Because so many people had been to visit that farm, and I thought:" ""Well, it's an opportunity to actually have Hobbiton there now."" "Peter wanted to do Hobbiton properly and so we were using real wood and real slate and real materials that were gonna be there for years to come." "This is the remaining Hobbit hole, original Hobbit hole and looking back." "So where we might take shortcuts do a small retaining wall for the structure of these Hobbit holes, there was none of that." "We had to excavate these holes fully retain them in accordance with the local requirements." "You can see the bracing into the hillside, five meters into the hill." "The tieback system." "We have these steel rods going into the hill." " Good day, Dave." "DAVE:" "Hey, mate." "Good." " How goes it?" " Excellent." "BRIGHT:" "As far as the construction side of things, it was more complicated, no doubt but where the trick really lay was in completing Hobbiton in reasonable time before the shoot." "HENNAH:" "On Lord of the Rings, we set ourselves up with a year for Hobbiton to grow in and this time around, we weren't gonna be nearly so lucky." "BRIGHT:" "We were due to shoot Hobbiton in February which is the end of New Zealand summer, so we had a limited amount of time to do it." "And we were a little concerned because Hobbiton had only been in the ground for six months at that stage." "VINCENT:" "And the grass wasn't quite long enough at that point and we were thinking: "Ooh."" "We were a little bit nervous that it just wasn't quite gonna be lush enough." "But then there was a slight delay." "We got wind that" " Of Peter's illness, and so Hobbiton went off the schedule." "VINCENT:" "We missed an opportunity to film during the summertime and it wasn't going to be any good if we didn't have Hobbiton at its full bloom." "So they had to push this particular set a year on." "Really great." " This is a great spot." "YORKE:" "Yeah, it's fantastic." "It's probably the most stacked up." "There's another one down by the lake." "JACKSON:" "There's another down by the lake, yeah." "HENNAH:" "There was nothing better for Hobbiton than to have been delayed." "I mean, much as Peter had to get sick to do it and we all feel sorry for that it certainly helped us in that we got a whole year of growth, regrowth." "There was an amazing difference between when we were ready to shoot the first time and when we actually shot the second time." "VINCENT:" "What happened is we left all the objects on the set and let nature just sort of grab them and they incorporated them into this sort of really comfortable landscape." "BRIGHT:" "All these vines and creepers and grasses they weren't just this big, they were this big." "This arrangement's been sitting here for a year." "It's just got all the grass and all the gorgeous stuff growing up through it." "It's almost melted into the landscape, which is really lovely." "Time gives you something that really good planning just can't give you." "A sort of authenticity that we couldn't have even hoped for." "Hi, welcome to Bag End, the home of Bilbo Baggins." "The flushest Hobbit hole in the Shire." "Just check his mail here." "Bit of junk mail." "Take that in for him." "This is Bilbo's garden." "Hobbits generally have to grow their own produce because there aren't any supermarkets in Hobbiton." "And he does a pretty good job with help from Sam Gamgee and the Greens Department." "So I've just been visiting Gaffer Gamgee." "This is 3 Bagshot Row Sam Gamgee's house in about 60 years' time." "You know, one of the lovely things about Hobbiton is that there are 44 homes that Hobbits live in in the immediate Hobbiton area." "And like any society, there are rich people, there are poor people." "There's middle-class people." "There's sort of all that in between." "So we tried to bring that to Hobbiton." "You have to look at each Hobbit hole as, "Who lives here?" "What do they do?"" "This is a woodchopper Hobbit." "He supplies all of the wood for the fireplaces for the entire dell area the neighborhood here." "You can also see up there, the washing station." "So all the Hobbits in this neighborhood get together and do their washing." "VINCENT:" "The work ethic of a Hobbit means that their laundry probably stays out for a couple of weeks before it gets changed around." "[CHICKEN CLUCKING]" "WHALE:" "This is the chicken farmer's house here in Hobbiton." "We come in and just add a few details like the nest here awning, all the little hand tools and things." "Bell." "[RINGING]" "As you go further over towards the lakeside they're much more fishermen's dwellings." "VINCENT:" "This is the fishing village lane." "There's a lot of eels in Green Dragon Lake." "There are, in fact, some quite big ones in there." "These are plastic ones, of course." "This is a Hobbit coracle, the most basic of vessels." "Doesn't get a lot of use because Hobbits don't like water, of course." "Although there was a time when we were first introduced to Sméagol and he had a coracle that was quite similar." "And of course, he was into fishing." "MAN:" "Is everything here?" "Was it all the same?" "Is there more now--?" "There's more, apparently." "Well, there's meant to be more up on the hill." "BRIGHT: if you're looking at the hillside where Bag End is to the right of those, there's five extra holes that we built and put in there that weren't there on Lord of the Rings." "This is the new subdivision." "It's just popped up in the last hundred years or so." "What we've got here is a potter." "VINCENT:" "From a distance, you wouldn't think that there was much going on there except he's got this huge chimney attached to the front of the house." "And there's an opening in the front of the chimney and it's just chockablock with fresh clay pots baking in the sun." "Originally, Guillermo wanted Bilbo to race out and run past those Hobbit holes off down the side of the hill but Peter has him turn a hard right and jump down the bank." "So this is Gandalfs cutting." "It's where Gandalf first came to Hobbiton and it's also where the guys came back after Lord of the Rings the four Hobbits on their ponies, and so it's a big reveal of Hobbiton." "So I think this is one of the nicest angles to look at Hobbiton from..." "All the produce is real." "Cabbages, lettuces, carrots, artichokes." "All sorts." "And spread throughout with flowers." "And in Hobbiton, even overgrown dandelions are pretty." "There is one beautifully sculpted rubber tree with silk leaves and it sits on top of Bag End." "BRIGHT: it's actually bigger than our first oak from Lord of the Rings up there and far stronger." "So that needed some serious structure within it because we have to cater for high winds and the longevity of it being up there for 25 years." "So that's the only non-deciduous oak tree in the world, I bet." "Ha-ha-ha." "VINCENT:" "There's a boundary around Hobbiton." "It's basically to the horizon in every direction." "WOOD:" "There's nothing to break the illusion." "Because if you look out over the hills all you see is effectively what is the Shire." "VINCENT:" "There's no denying it." "It's beautiful from every angle and it also has the sound effects to boot." "[BIRDS CHIRPING]" "MAN:" "Good day." " Hey, how are you?" " Good, thanks." " Good." " Good, thanks." "Yeah." " Nice to meet you." " Good to meet you." " Ha-ha." "How far away is the Green Dragon?" "So here we are at the Green Dragon, the local pub here in Hobbiton." "This is where the Hobbits like to come and have a drink after a hard day's work." "HENNAH:" "This time around, we've had the opportunity to rebuild it as a permanent structure and we're looking at putting a little bar in there so it really is the Green Dragon." "So we did that, and that's basically inside and outside is fully themed and so now people go there and they have their pint in the Green Dragon pub." "But I've worked up a bit of a thirst, so I'm gonna help myself to a beer here." "Cheers." "VINCENT:" "Hobbiton, the location, has finally succumbed to its destiny, really in that it has gone from film set to actually kind of turned into Hobbiton for real now." "JACKSON:" "We've actually, you know, left something behind that's permanent, that represents one of the settings of the movie and I think it's really cool." "It's one of those places-- And I understand now why people, you know, cross the world to make a pilgrimage to Hobbiton." "It's kind of like going home." "[INDISTINCT CHATTER]" "[BELL RINGS]" "We completely rebuilt the Bag End sets on B-Stage which is a very small low stage." "YORKE:" "B-Stage is the last remaining tin shed here at Stone Street but it's where we shot Bag End on Lord of the Rings." "So it has historical" " A historical place." " Gandalf." " Bilbo Baggins." "[BILBO LAUGHS]" "Come on." "Come in." "It is like walking into the universe of Middle-earth." "It's so incredible, the detail in that place." "I could spend hours and hours and hours looking through books and going into all the rooms." "Our very first day on the job before we started filming we went and we had a whole tour of Bag End." "MAN 1:" "All right." "MAN 2:" "Make yourselves comfortable." "MAN 3:" "Oh, my God." "HUNTER:" "That was cool." "That was the coolest day." "It's just so detailed, all the rooms." "BROWN:" "We've seen it all in The Fellowship of the Rings but actually to walk on it and walk around the set was just pretty mind-blowing." "The first impression was:" ""Crikey, wouldn't it be lovely to live in this house?"" "it created an atmosphere immediately, do you know what I mean?" "You're not having to conjure up, "What sort of place was Bilbo living?" "All I'm looking at is a green studio." You knew exactly where he was." "You can't underestimate the effect that something like that has on you." "It's quite emotional going in there." "Very easy to remember moments." "I was sitting by the fire and I said-- I took hold of the fire tongs which are still there, and said:" ""Look, there's the ring."" "it's quite cool." ""It's quite cool." Ha-ha." "Being a fan, the fact that I was in Bag End at all was a level of joy that I can't even, you know" "Every day, I just walk around and have a look at a little-- "Ooh, wow." "Look."" "And you're looking at April, the calendar that he had and he's doing this on this particular day." "And everywhere you look, there is depth to the reality that you had invested in." "I really used to enjoy to just go into Bag End and just look around and just imagine." "It's such an odd place." "It's shaped like a womb anyway, isn't it?" "It's all round and friendly and it's got all the qualities that we can't have with our quite rectangular environments." "HENNAH:" "On Lord of the Rings, Bilbo was older and so was Bag End." "VINCENT:" "Bilbo had obviously been on an adventure because his hallways were piled high with books and scrolls and wonderful things all falling out of drawers and sort of trinkets from other places." "HENNAH:" "There was an Orc helmet and a couple of old swords hanging on the wall and-- You know, slightly more random." "VINCENT:" "Which was the older, wiser Bilbo Baggins." "HENNAH:" "But now Bilbo's a young man." "He still has a sort of semblance of tidiness." "Everything was a lot more organized." "Everything had its place and put back where it should go." "Plates were all stacked nicely in the kitchen, the books were all on the bookshelves." "You know, the floors were clean." "HENNAH:" "it's not quite as dusty and dirty." "But it's still very Hobbity." "The things we didn't do in Bag End in Lord of the Rings is we didn't go into his bedroom, we didn't go into his dining room and we didn't go into his pantry." "So those were new areas that we had some design license for." "I designed a pantry 10 years ago, but it wasn't needed for the movie." "So this was an opportunity to go back and do a little more work." "You know, the pantry is stacked full of food." "HENNAH:" "Very inviting sort of place." "You look in there and you just want to eat something immediately." "The walnuts are fresh." "From an art-direction point of view, the pantry was a huge challenge for us." "You wanted the food to have quite an extravagance to it." "HENNAH:" "Well, you know, the food is really important that you get it right." "You're not just feeding the mouth or the stomach, you're feeding the eye." "With Hobbit food, even more so than normal." "And we spent weeks poring over ideas for this sort of pie and that sort of roast." "It was an involved effort on our food stylist's part." "We're here in my Portacom." "I've got this stationed as a temporary kitchen next to B-Stage where we're shooting so that I can deliver the food as fast as possible." "So all the ham hocks, black pudding, leg of mutton, that leg of ham..." "All the food had to be real because you didn't know when someone was going to pick something up and bite it." "[CHATTERING]" "And you have to be prepared for when Peter says:" ""I like the look of that cheese up there." "Let's use that."" "One of the Dwarves picks it up and goes, "Mm." "What's this smelly stuff?"" "And throws it" " Oh." "Sorry." "I didn't mean to do that." "He does throw it over his shoulder." "Yeah, that way." "We're in the pantry in Bag End, and we're redressing the entire pantry back to how it was probably only two days ago." "Feels more like about two years ago." "But Deborah has supplied all the food and if you wanna hang around a little bit, you'll see it all be put into place." "[ELMS CHUCKLES]" "This is the seventh time I've reset it." "MILSOM:" "Pretty phenomenal when you stand in the middle of it and it's all these cured meats and cheeses, and not a piece of shelf space free." "You know, you could survive several nuclear winters and you'd be fine." "[CHUCKLES]" "Smells like real beer." "[CHATTERING]" " Have you been giving them real beer?" " Is it really Graham's one?" "MAN 1:" "Yeah." "MAN 2:" "Now come out and be a director." "HENNAH:" "We did build a dining room for Bag End in the early days of Lord of the Rings but we never shot it." " It's sort of" " You know, when you" " It's good, I like" "Yeah, I like" " The height here is good, sort of with the Dwarves and stuff with their big heads." "JACKSON:" "The dining room was very carefully constructed because we wanted 13 Dwarves and a Hobbit and a Wizard to feel very squished in there." "So we made the dimensions of the room fit around them." "I wouldn't make the table any smaller, though because it's good that everyone's sort of-- The distance apart is good." "HOWE:" "We changed the size of the dining room umpteen times to make it big enough for all the Dwarves, then small enough so they had to crowd in." "MAN 1:" "We'll be turning and you actually have more..." "WOMAN:" "About to sit on-- MAN 2:" "Just got repetition." "VINCENT:" "We dressed the dining room with some really subtle materials." "We used gorgeous parchment paper for a lot of the artwork on the walls." "And the glass plates were all hand-painted." "Things that I think about and get excited about were all the crockery in there." "Our potter on this was just an absolute champion." "He produced so much work." "There was close to maybe 2000 items all up, so, yeah, it was intense." "GRAY:" "I think he got the award for the most tons of props and Bag End would have been probably the place where he shined the most." " I mean, he's got a pretty nice place." " He's got a damn fine place." " Yeah." " Yeah." "Yes." "He's done well." "Bilbo's bedroom was always going to be a little more than just a hole in the ground." "The idea was that he would" "You know, he'd have a four-poster bed and he'd have a fireplace in there and obviously a window that looked out over Hobbiton." "MILSOM:" "There was a little bit more of a feeling of opulence." "You know, there's a bit of wealth in the Baggins family and the bedroom was the place where we had this bed that had a real sense of royalty, sort of character to it." "You imagine not every Hobbit would have a bed like that." "It may have seemed crazy at the time to hand-stitch a lot of the fabric but the moment we saw it next to Bilbo Baggins' face lying in the bed that was kind of the payoff." "Ninety percent of the work that you do doesn't really get seen but the 10 percent that does make it in made it all worthwhile." "Bag End was the greatest thing we could have done at the beginning because, you know, as a set, it's iconic." "It's such a familiar place." "And once we walked in there and the lights were there and the camera crew was squeezed in, it really didn't feel that we had been away." "HOWE:" "it's such a magical spot." "It really is very, very beautiful." "You could almost imagine living there." "I could imagine myself living in Bag End, honestly." "It is a great set." "I think of all the sets that I've had the pleasure of walking through in the films I've made, I think Bag End would be my absolute favorite." "Thank you." "NARRATOR: it was Radagast the Brown who had one time dwelt in Rhosgobel near the borders of Mirkwood." "He is one of my order, but I had not seen him for many a year." "HOWE:" "Rhosgobel, which was Radagast's house was the first original set that we built specifically for The Hobbit." "The sets that were built prior to that were the reconstructing of Rivendell pieces of Rivendell, the reconstructing of Bag End." "There was something whimsical and something colorful and awed about it." "Radagast's house is only alluded to by Tolkien, so it was quite wide open, actually." "LEE:" "I was very much working with a clean slate because there were no images of it or ideas of it." "And neither John nor myself had ever drawn it before." "JACKSON:" "I always imagine Rhosgobel to be that cozy little den in the middle of the woods." "I mean, I just had, you know, a very fairy-tale idea of what it would be like." "And then we talked about integrating sort of trees into the design so that Radagast would build his house by a tree and the tree would be part of his house." "And that was where we started and a lot of sketches were done." "I believe we designed Radagast's house at least four or five times." "One design put him under the roots of a tree in kind of a house that he'd built underneath." "And Peter came up with the novel idea that his house isn't built under a tree or next to a tree." "It's got a tree growing up through the middle of it." "JACKSON:" "And this is Radagast's house." "This is your lovely little cottage." "See, the idea with the house is that you built the house" "You know, originally, it looked quite good." "And then a little acorn got dropped on the floor one day out of your pocket..." "...and it sprouted in a bit of dirt on the floor." " Yeah." "And it grew, and you didn't have the heart to tear it up because you don't destroy things." "So the acorn turned into an enormous tree..." "...which split your house in half." " Yes." "And it was just a silly little whimsical idea that kind of grew in the design." "BRIGHT:" "Radagast's house was a complicated build." "Structurally, it doesn't work, heh." "You know, visually, structurally, it doesn't work so you had to do all these compensatory measures to make it work." "MASSEY:" "We actually used the tree, which had a central steel in it to actually hold the house up." "And of course, because the tree was actually dictating how things looked there wasn't a vertical straight line on it." "So that basically, it looked precarious, but it wasn't precarious." "That house is really as cluttered and as convoluted as Radagast's mind." "He experiments with things that give him more knowledge of the world around him." "He's like an astrologer." "There's definitely a touch of T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone and The Book of Merlyn which bore certain similarities to the interior of Radagast's." "Just an accumulation of curiosities." "Rhosgobel is so full of quirky, interesting props." "If you were to walk into his house you would see a good, functioning, working environment." "But then there's this layer of chaos that sits over the top of it." "He had a writing place for writing spells and scales for measuring different ground powders." "You can be fussy and frustrated-- You know, and eccentric and kind of" "Yes." "It was kind of like this crazy chemist's and scientist's." "And he hoarded things." "He hoarded remedies and herbs and would make these natural concoctions to cure sick animals." "HENNAH:" "You know, Radagast loves all things of nature." "And he wouldn't hurt a flea." "He certainly wouldn't hurt a tree." "We've tried to cut out a bit of worn wood which was designed for your hat to sort of slide through that shape." "McCOY:" "Yes, I can see it." "Yes." " Do you know what I mean?" "On the interior, there's a branch at head height that he walks past and over the eons of him walking backwards and forwards he has worn a complete silhouette out through the branch where his hat fits perfectly through this branch." "So this is a chair for Radagast." "Sometimes he's had to just repair it with bits of wood or something that he's found around the place." "It all looks quite organic and quite natural, quite makeshift." "I mean, of course, we have our specialized prop makers but we needed to make Radagast's house a little bit more spontaneous so we had some art students and a couple of truck drivers to do some wonderful little crazy weavings." "These people have never done any weaving before." "And they all wove the most outrageously bizarre baskets you'd ever seen." "Which was great, because it breathes life into environments like that." "It is definitely Radagast's house." "There's no doubt about that." "HOWE:" "This lovely little house which looked exactly like the piece of concept art." "There it is." "It's magical when that happens." "When an idea can come from Peter through us and then be built by this amazing team of people." "[BIRDS CHIRPING]" "NARRATOR:" "The last homely house east of the sea." "That house was, as Bilbo had long ago reported a perfect house." "Whether you like food or sleep or storytelling or singing." "Or just sitting and thinking best." "Or a pleasant mixture of them all." "Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear and sadness." "Rivendell." "AITKEN:" "Peter had a very clear vision for what he wanted Rivendell to look like." "It had to look beautiful, seductive." "I mean, really, it has to be the place that, ultimately, Bilbo is gonna want to come back to and live in." "You are very welcome to stay here if that is your wish." "FRODO:" "Bilbo!" " Hello, Frodo, my lad." "So it has to be beautiful, it has to be comfortable, sumptuous ornate, attractive." "All those great things." "Because it's an Elven environment, it's beautiful and elegant and stylish." "All the things that Dwarves hate." "On Lord of the Rings, Rivendell was tired." "It was really dying." "The Elves are leaving." "So in terms of the color we tended to stay with a lot of silvers and grays underlying color but very muted." "If you could put them side by side The Lord of the Rings Rivendell and The Hobbit Rivendell summer and autumn, you can immediately tell the difference." "In The Hobbit, Rivendell is in full swing." "So once again, more richness in the colors, more detail, more depth." "And more full of life." "VINCENT:" "it was bathed in golden light." "But the architecture was this sort of vividly light blue with gold highlights which lifted the whole thing quite dramatically." "HENNAH:" "Elrond's chamber was one of the sets that Peter had decided to keep at the end of Lord of the Rings." "So we were able to resurrect a lot of it." "A lot of the statuary was exactly the same." "All the architectural elements, balustrades, things like that." "We've brought some fabric into the designs so that it felt just a little more homely, I guess." "BRIGHT: it was such a lovely feeling to walk through Elrond's chamber." "And it has some history because we were there 10 years ago." "HENNAH:" "Up on the balcony in Elrond's chamber behind the statue of Narsil, with the broken Narsil sword was the original Alan Lee painting of Sauron." "You couldn't really see the ring on his finger and it became really important that you could see the ring on his finger." "When I painted this for The Fellowship of the Ring last time, 10 years ago I didn't actually put the ring in." "And so in order to get that little, like, cue in the story now I'm putting in the ring here and that will be used for the close-up." "Ha-ha-ha." "Original art." "Well, they do it all the time, you know." "Put a smile on the Mona Lisa." "Heh." "LEE:" "Well, we wanted Rivendell to kind of have a new life in this film and there'll be certain areas that we'll be going to that we didn't go to in The Fellowship." "We never saw the entrance to Rivendell in The Lord of the Rings because the way we get to Rivendell, of course is that Frodo loses consciousness at the banks of the river." "And then he wakes up and he's in a bed." "LEE:" "Our entry to Rivendell this time is actually a little bit closer to the way that Tolkien described it." "NARRATOR:" "They saw a valley far below." "They could hear the voice of hurrying water in a rocky bed at the bottom." "The scent of trees was in the air." "And there was a light on the valley-side across the water." "LEE:" "Looking down on the bridge, you'll see" " Go into this kind of courtyard area which we don't see any of that in The Fellowship." "Rivendell is a classic environment to do a set with digital extensions." "You can't build vast sets that would fill three sound stages." "You have to judiciously choose and build small portions of them but you're imagining the entire space." "SAINDON:" "We had a full map." "Everything about Rivendell was designed out by Alan Lee and John Howe." "HOWE:" "This time around, there was much more latitude to make Rivendell a slightly grander place." "Add all of these wonderful vistas that were just impossible to do at the time." "You know, in the time of Lord of the Rings, which is only 10 years ago Rivendell was created almost exclusively as a miniature which was filmed on a miniature shooting stage particularly for wide shots." "But we knew that in The Hobbit, we'd have to be moving through it a lot more." "So if you can go completely digital and still make it look real it gives you a lot of flexibility in how you can design your shots." "What having a digital environment does is it frees me up as a filmmaker to go anywhere and do anything I want with my camera." "AITKEN:" "By building this whole world you can take footage of Martin as Bilbo on a green screen stage where there's no set at all." "We were able to take that footage and place it wherever Peter likes." "So as Bilbo's exploring Rivendell we can make the most of that by showing the best of the environment." "And I just love the fact that in many of those shots there are detailed water simulations happening quite close to camera that I think are just completely convincing." "The observatory is the one place where you can read moon runes." "The brief for the observatory is that it looks out over the valley." "It's this location that kind of amplifies the moonlight coming in." "The thing that was interesting about that sequence was we had to establish the mechanics of how the moonlight on this particular night could enable these runes to manifest themselves." "Rather than having Elrond holding it in the light, which is a bit kind of awkward if he places it on something and then, voom, these beams kind of" "What if the table was like an extrusion of crystal coming up through the rock?" "JACKSON:" "Yeah." "Yep." "Peter decided that he wanted to use a crystal." "So we drew a crystal that was kind of embedded into this rock." "They built the basic structure on set." "This is the crystal that has moonlight coming up through it." "And" " But we had to wet the set down because it's in amongst a whole lot of waterfalls." "So you'd always wanna feel as though there's moisture in the air moisture on the floor." "MAN:" "Yeah." "HENNAH:" "it'll all just be slightly reflective." " So do you wanna see a bit of real magic?" " Yes, please." "Can you see the Dwarf runes?" "The" " The moon runes?" "Ah." "JACKSON:" "The moon runes." "WEAVING:" "Well, I suspect the moon runes might be in here." "FREEMAN:" "Hang on a second." "Hang on." "WEAVING:" "Because it sort of" "ALL:" "Oh!" "JACKSON:" "Look at that." "FREEMAN:" "Wow-wee." " Well, it's very clever, isn't it?" "McKELLEN: it is." "I know, I like it." "LEE:" "One of the other places we go to is the White Council chamber." "The actual shape of that derives from something that we built for the miniature in The Fellowship." "Once that you're gonna have the Council of Elrond inside a specially constructed building." "We adapted that for the idea of the White Council chamber." "HENNAH:" "And that was always a piece that we wanted to build for Rings but, of course, it was never written into the picture." "So suddenly here was a council chamber and an opportunity to use that design." "LEE:" "We have streams of water kind of flowing through this circular building." "It was surrounded by a series of arches, so you get views all the way around." "HENNAH:" "One of the thoughts was that the council would be surrounded by these diaphanous beauties." "We want them to be as proportionally correct as possible so our sculptor decided to sculpt the figures as nudes and then apply the clothing in layers of clay over that." "LEE:" "And they had this elaborate kind of Elven design." "So it felt like a sacred space." "All right, so, what we were gonna do, Cate, this first shot we're gonna have you standing up behind the camera there." " They've built steps especially for your frock." " Yes, I know." "JACKSON:" "Have you heard about that?" "BLANCHETT:" "Heh-heh-heh." "Peter actually built the steps on which I'm standing for my first reveal specifically to accommodate the frock that Ann designed." "The reveal of Galadriel would be that" "With her standing on this promontory." "We built it and painted it, and it was all looking pretty cool." "And they sent us over a photograph of the costume, which was stunning." "The photograph was taken in the wardrobe room." "There are these steps up to a stage where they present the costumes." "And then as she turns..." "WOMAN 1:" "There it is." "Just like that." "WOMAN 2:" "Yeah." "WOMAN 1:" "That's amazing." "It just does it." "WOMAN 2:" "Yeah." "WOMAN 2:" "The fabric is fantastic." "MAN: it's great." "WOMAN 3: it looks amazing." "MAN: it is beautiful, yeah?" "WOMAN 2:" "Yeah." "MASKREY:" "As you can see, this costume's got a really long train which I've always been fond of, but not everyone can make it work." "Cate beautifully did the most perfect turn." " Just don't ask me to walk anywhere." "ALL:" "Ha-ha-ha." "And Fran and Philippa both said, "This is it." "This is it." "This is fantastic." "We need these steps, you know."" "it was a Ziegfeld moment, I think." "It was a" " And quite, quite hard." "I had to make sure that it worked because the steps had been built and the frock was so extraordinary, not to wobble." "You can't wobble, you can't trip, and you can't blink if you're an Elf." "What can you do?" "It just made sense that we would build steps up to the promontory for the reveal and so thank God we had enough height in our archways to achieve that." "What we were presented with in Rivendell as sets they were brilliant." "Rivendell is a highlight." "Always gonna be a highlight." "It's beautiful and it's clean and it's fresh and it's amazing." "A lot's happened to all of us in the last 12 years." "And you think, "Have I polished these memories?" "Have I made them more special than they are?"" "And when you walk on the set, you think, "No, it actually is special."" "it actually is incredibly special." "NARRATOR:" "He saw that across the valley, the Stone-Giants were out and hurling rocks at one another for a game and catching them and tossing them down in the darkness." "[ROCKS RUMBLING]" "THORIN [SINGING]:" "Far over the misty mountains cold" "To dungeons deep" "And caverns old" "With the Misty Mountains, we're returning to a place that we visited in Lord of the Rings." "It's actually the amazing mountain range of the Remarkables near Queenstown." "But this time, we're going to a very different part." "This is where the Stone-Giants live." "I think I was just always intrigued by that little episode in the book in which the Stone-Giants are mentioned just in passing." "It's just a description that Tolkien writes of these battling, warring Stone-Giants which are creating a thunderstorm." "And I just think, "Wow, that would look pretty amazing in a movie."" "LEE:" "In the book, I guess they are a kind of almost a metaphorical idea of a mountain storm, really with avalanches and lightning." "But we weren't dealing with it as a metaphor." "We were actually, you know, creating something for real." "So, for me, it just started with this drawing of the company kind of making their way along a mountain path and then sketching faces in the cliff in quite a distorted and abstracted way." "You know, the image that I had in my mind was part of a mountain coming alive in a vaguely humanoid shape." "But they are the bones of the mountain." "And there's probably many more of them." "The mountains are probably made up of many, many giants and, at times, some of them come to life." "We sort of experimented between more humanoid-looking giants versus more kind of just lumps of mountain." "Alan Lee had done some great artwork showing them just sort of part of the mountainsides and kind of emerging out of them." "I suppose it was the idea that they're kind of so compressed by time and they've been sleeping in the same position for hundreds of years." "Their bodies were kind of distorted by their own weight essentially." "So if they raise their face, their face would actually be flat on one side like when your mother tells you if you pull that face you'll stay that way." "We wanted to get the sense of these characters just ripping themselves out of the rock mountain." "And right off the bat, that spoke to us as being digital." "The Stone-Giants, I think they're 127 meters tall." "They're pretty big." "So of course, from an animation perspective, that meant not letting them move too fast." "There's one scene where the giant sort of emerges out of the rock and wakes up." "And we just had to make sure that, you know, each thing was moving successively." "You know, an arm, a shoulder, a head." "And then a look, just to kind of play out each of those beats one by one." "To help with the sense of scale Chris White and his team would add effects, debris falling out of joints, like you know, just say a joint moved, the rocks would tumble out and they'd be falling quite slowly from a distance." "But then when you cut down to see what the Dwarves are doing they're flying by." "If they're on their knee, they're moving in incredible speed." "But when you cut wide, it just looks like these two giant mountains interacting with each other." "So it was quite cool to have that kind of range within the one sequence." "MAN:" "The rocks..." "The Stone-Giants sequence is complicated because it required, you know, a real amalgam of live-action filming with the actors on a mountain ledge, plus the giants and the storm and the CG." "So the best way to approach a scene like that is to previs it and to plan it very carefully." "Yeah, you should just be pulling back and the impact, bang." "Peter just loved the idea of this big kind of brawl happening in the mountains." "CLAYTON:" "So in order to come up with ideas for dynamic fight shots we really just left it to the imaginations of the animators." "It started out with a big punch." "Peter would go, "Are we really getting the most out of this shot?" "Show me some options."" "And Joe Letteri came up with a headbutt idea." "I said to Peter, "How about if we have them headbutt each other?"" "And he said, "Sure, try it," so..." "Ha-ha-ha." "You know, just looking for something different for them to do." "It's like, "Well, these are giants, so if they're gonna get into a physical fight they're gonna headbutt."" "LEE:" "They also thought that maybe the rocks that they were kind of grabbing weren't necessarily just boulders." "Maybe they turned out to be the head of another giant." "So if you look really carefully as the rock's flying through the air there's just a tiny hint of a face that's carved into this rock." "The other thing we were looking to do in the sequence was to keep the giants very shadowed and almost mysterious." "So they were just large forms that kind of played against the brightness of the sky behind them." "CLAYTON:" "Because you've only got a limited range of motion within each shot you have to pick good, clear, dynamic poses that are readable." "Often, there'd be lightning striking in the background, casting them into silhouette." "WHITE:" "We treat the giants as if they're part of the landscape." "So instead of lighting them as a character or as a creature they would pick up more the tones in the lighting of a mountain, say for instance." "So the light is very dappled." "It comes through in certain areas and it breaks up in other areas." "Some of the things we had to develop for these shots is elements like fog and rain to make sure you had that sense of the Dwarves traveling through the storm." "And, you know, the scene that was shot ultimately was very, very similar to the original animatic." "The Stone-Giants sequence doesn't really have any impact on the story, really." "I suppose you could argue it does force them to shelter in a cave which actually does have ramifications." "So, you know, they do actually have a part to play, but nonetheless it's just cool." "I mean, if I was going to a Tolkien movie, I'd wanna see the Stone-Giants." "And I'm just lucky because I get to make the movie, so" "The Stone-Giants are there." "It's just that's the type of fantasy, the type of escapism I love." "NARRATOR:" "it was deep, deep dark such as only Goblins that have taken to living in the heart of mountains can see through." "HOWE:" "Goblin-town in the book is sort of a dark, horrible place with a very fat king sitting on a stone and that's really all that Tolkien tells us." "I mean, they're in the mountains." "What does Goblin-town look like?" "How did they build it?" "Is it a stone city?" "And we didn't really wanna do a stone city." "It's coming up with something that isn't" " That feels fresh and new that we haven't seen before too, which is a bit tricky." "You know, you got the sense that Peter wanted something unique and Alan and John were doing lots of sketches for it." "It's like cracking the code of what it is that makes it cool to look at." "This is interesting, isn't it?" "With Peter, there'd be certain drawings that really work for him." "And there was one drawing of mine in particular which showed this chasm just full of very temporary structures all kind of balanced precariously along the side of this canyon of rotted rock." "It was this idea that you just kind of came in to Goblin-town and you saw these Goblins sort of all around you in this kind of almost shantytown built into the sides of the cavern." "These Goblins have colonized a little bit like lice in the seams of clothing." "Their purpose in life, what these Goblins do, is they scavenge and they take prisoners." "They're sort of the highwaymen of Middle-earth in a way." "So we came up with the idea that everything in there is scavenged from the outside world that they go on raiding parties at night and they steal bits of architecture." "They steal stuff that's lying around farmhouses." "They probably kill the farmers and they bring the stuff back." "LETTERI:" "This is evil." "This is what comes into your house at night you know, when you don't want it to." "And this is where all of it goes." "LEE:" "And Peter had the idea that they would use this stuff but they would use it in the wrong way." "They wouldn't really quite understand the purpose." "So you might get a piece of a cart that was built into a walkway." "And the wheels of the cart to roll a rope around so they could haul something up." "They were kind of imitating what they thought should be the good life." "Heh." "So we're now starting to see other structures on the other side." "There's not really many bridges joining them." "There are kind of, like, more buildings over there." "Maybe we could just open it up slightly here." "LETTERI:" "We start constructing this world piece by piece." "And then it gets closer and closer to the time when we have to shoot something on set." "And the question becomes, "Okay, right, what do the actors have to work with?" "How much of this can and should we build physically?"" "Now, there's seven background pieces." "Often we built pretty meticulous models which then Peter could look at and say:" ""Well, I won't be needing that bit, but I will need something over here."" "You know, so he could get his head around how his action was gonna work inside that set." "All of this is a movable face, so we can go through it and back through it and around and swoop this bit over here and put that as a bridge." "And they eventually get up onto this platform, which breaks." " So how does it break?" " Well, basically, the top pieces lift off." "This is one that drops down so they could slide down." "MAN:" "Yeah." "BRIGHT:" "We had to re-create all of these set pieces that looked randomly strapped together on stilts and poles." "Jesus!" "Have you got it?" " Yeah, I've got the bottom." "MAN:" "He's getting away." "WOMAN 1:" "I got him." "I got him." "WOMAN 2:" "He died." "MAN:" "That's fine." "HENNAH:" "We've made a lot of generic pieces walkways, rock faces, that are all interchangeable." "So our little night fairies can come in and shift the whole set around." "Bring in a rock wall, another walkway around a corner." "And we keep changing this thing around night by night." "BRIGHT:" "The shooting crew would turn up the next day and have a completely different set to work with." "[HUMMING]" "I'm sitting here on part of the Goblin set." "This is the Goblins' cave and it is an incredible set." "It was almost like a medieval vision of hell." "Everything was misshapen and grotesque and felt dangerous." "It was, of course, constructed of rubbish." "Terrible skeletons." "It's a forensic paradise." "WOMAN:" "Slime." "No one's to leave home without at least five skulls." "MAN:" "Yep." "[LAUGHING]" "There's a lot of gore, and Peter likes that stuff, you know." "He loves layers of dressing that tells a story." "WOMAN:" "Do you have nightmares?" "I do have nightmares, and then I come to work and I dress them into the set." "BRIGHT:" "And introducing all the dressings you definitely throw your mind into the way Goblins might think." "I'd have to describe the Goblin aesthetic as being drunken madmen, really." "You know, make it as rough and mental with as few skills as you could and still make the thing work." "LEE:" "I kind of exemplified that with the Goblin king's throne which was a bed essentially broken in half." "JACKSON:" "Yeah." "Right, yeah." " And it'll all be made gilt." " Double bed, you know." "JACKSON:" "Yeah, right." "Oh, I see." "MAN:" "Converted into" " Right." "JACKSON:" "A throne, yeah." "JACKSON:" "Yeah, that's fantastic." "Yeah, that's great." "LEE:" "We thought that might have belonged to some prince that was being transported in some kind of marriage train or something." "We're also gonna decorate the bed with gold leaf and little kind of rococo cupids that will play to his kind of air of sophistication." "He thought of himself as being something of a connoisseur." "JACKSON:" "I'll tell you what would be really funny." "They have a hole in the bottom and a large pot underneath which your imagination can only go to what's in the pot." "MAN 1:" "Yeah." "MAN 2:" "Yeah." "Ha, ha." "Yeah, so there's your throne and your toilet is just full below." " You see him occasionally straining." " Ha, ha, yeah." "That's right." " Yep." " Wonderful." "[JACKSON LAUGHING]" "Somewhere in Pete's mind, he's decided that the Goblin sits on this huge commode with this big pile of dump underneath it." "I never thought I'd be seeing this aspect of Kiwi life." "[WOMAN LAUGHING]" "Oh!" "Barry Humphries sitting on a throne, underneath was a pile of shit." "You know, whoa." "This is a family film but the Goblin king is, amongst other things grossly incontinent." "So from time to time, a beautifully crafted urn beneath the throne receives a complement of matter." "Who would be so bold as to come armed into my kingdom?" "SAINDON:" "The sets, a lot of them are very, very large." "But that said, we need to make everything, obviously, a lot bigger." "So when we film on these sets, we always have lots of artwork from John and Alan to have a good idea of what might be back there." "SAINDON:" "They're not only designing what was filmed but they're also designing what is built in the digital world." "After we stopped filming, we actually hired Alan and John into Weta to really help lay out and design each sequence as we go." "The point of that was finishing off the job that we had started, essentially." "A concept artist's work is never done." "It's as if you can keep conceptualizing as long as there's still a shot that has an empty spot." "So Alan and John were able to give us sketches on top of the plates of what the environment would look like." "Is there a shantytown over here?" "Is there a drop over there?" "WHITE:" "You never think about how important something as simple as rocks are." "But they're actually important for defining the environment." "A lot of the rocks in Goblin-town are actually based on photographs taken on the beach out in front of Peter's place." "MAN:" "The reference I was gonna show you for rocks was actually" "JACKSON:" "Yeah, let me look at whatever you've got." "JACKSON: it is a bit like this, isn't it?" "MAN:" "Yeah." "It was basically, to a degree, the same rocks that we used in Mordor for Lord of the Rings." "Somehow it felt perfectly natural to have this corrupted rock full of holes almost as though it was being eaten away by the corrosive nature, even, of the Goblins themselves." "It's finding stuff that looks aggressive, creepy and violent." "And I think this area's great." "Our Modeling team was able to recreate this look." "MAN:" "So, what we have to do is we have to make a real digital environment that represents John and Alan's artwork as much as possible." "And the easiest way to do that is to look at the real thing." "Rather than completely create a Goblin-town set that works from A to B to C to D you've gotta, you know, treat it like a whole lot of different sets and have the ability to change and blow out wide when you need to and close in." "So we sort of create what we call, like, a Lego set of components like bits of wall and lots of little gantries and ladders and then you sort of build them to what you need the shot to be." "[GOBLINS SCREECHING]" "I haven't abandoned sketchbooks entirely." "So this is where the Dwarves will come rushing up here onto this structure, which they cut loose and it swings across this chasm." "So the Goblins are stuck on the other side." "They actually swing across and back and then across again." "[BRIDGE GROANS]" "We kind of mapped out the path which the Dwarves would travel." "One thing that Peter asked for was that he wanted it to feel like you're traveling through and seeing these different places." "SAINDON: it was all backwards-engineered from the throne." "We knew they had to get onto a bridge at some point and fall down a cliff side and end up at the bottom of a ravine." "And then backwards-engineer everything between those two points into this huge universe." "I think Goblin-town is perhaps the most collaborative of the environments that we did." "There's bits of everybody." "SAINDON:" "And we ended up with one big digital world." "You can essentially fly a camera all the way through Goblin-town which allowed Peter to go in and put a camera anywhere he wanted and see the world." "JACKSON:" "That allows me to be a little bit more adventurous and have a bit more fun as the filmmaker." "And if the animation is done well and the lighting and compositing is done well then it just opens up so many possibilities." "[ALL YELLING]" "JACKSON: it was an absolute joy to come back to Middle-earth again." "It was almost like you're turning the page of the history book going to a new chapter and going back in that world but seeing new things, places you haven't been to before." "Middle-earth is so diverse and there's so many different environments." "You may be creating something beautiful one moment, something dangerous the next." "It's just a lot of complexity." "We had all these wonderful, wonderful people making things." "And they all gave it 100 percent in time and energy and creativity to bring Tolkien's vision to the screen." "TURNER:" "The way these sets are constructed, it's quite amazing." "I mean, you are, with the suspension of a few things you're kind of really there." "FREEMAN:" "I've run out of superlatives to describe the places we get to work in, you know." "And just how people have managed to build them." "BRIGHT:" "it was an amazing effort by so many people." "And to see the success of such a final product is really overwhelming." "This is my dream job." "Who else gets to really conceive wonderful things and have them created by some of the world's best makers and then be able to present it in a place like this film to the rest of the world?" " Bye to the fans." " Bye." "All right, see you." "Bye-bye."