'Lord of the Rings' resizes actors with special effects
Associated Press
CANNES, France — Just how did filmmaker Peter Jackson manage to put 3 1/2-foot-high hobbits alongside full-scale humans and a towering wizard for the upcoming movie trilogy "The Lord of the Rings"?
Associated Press
Sean Astin, who plays the hobbit Sam in the adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy masterpiece, has an "Alice in Wonderland" answer: "Peter gave us these little blue pills he cooked up and told us to start taking them with water six weeks before we began shooting," joked Astin.
Sean Astin, left, and Elijah Wood star in "The Lord of the Rings" movie, adapted from the J.R.R. Tolkien classic.
Jackson and cast and crew members gathered at the Cannes Film Festival last week to show off the first big chunk of footage from the trilogy, one of the most eagerly awaited literary adaptations.
Part one, "The Fellowship of the Ring," hits theaters in December. The film takes viewers to Middle-earth, where a band of hobbits, humans, dwarves and elves must destroy the ring of power the dark Lord Sauron covets. Depicting the various-sized characters was done through a combination of elaborate special effects and tricky but low-tech camera angles.
Besides a montage from the first film, journalists were shown several minutes of material from Parts Two and Three, due in theaters around Christmas 2002 and 2003. The centerpiece of the footage was a 14-minute segment of the heroes' harrowing journey through the mines of Moria, where they face legions of fierce goblins called orcs, a giant troll and a monstrous creature known as a balrog.
The scenes included a striking tableau of the "fellowship of the ring": the hobbit Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood) and hobbit companions Sam, Merry and Pippin (Astin, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd); the wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen); the human warriors Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and Boromir (Sean Bean); the elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom); and the dwarf Gimli (John Rhys-Davies).
"It's an interesting challenge to make it believable and also for it not to take you out of the film and make you too self-conscious that these people are so small," Wood said.
The trilogy also stars Ian Holm as hobbit Bilbo Baggins, Cate Blanchett as the elf Lady Galadriel, Liv Tyler as the elf Arwen and Christopher Lee as the dark wizard.
Film franchises generally are shot one movie at a time, with studios making decisions on sequels based on the performance of the previous installment. But New Line took the gamble of shooting all three at once over 15 months in New Zealand, finishing last December. Executive producer Mark Ordesky, president of New Line's arthouse label Fine Line, said there's such a huge fan base for "Lord of the Rings" that the studio felt confident going ahead with all three.
