Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Richard Taylor's mission for LOTR 2 was to re-create Tolkien's "heightened reality" by melding the real world—and real actors—with the digital world - Special Effects - Interview

Post, Jan, 2003 by Ken McGorry

NEW YORK -- Bad guys. They're the centerpiece of classic epics like Paradise Lost or The Inferno, and they're the key to the blockbuster film franchise based on another classic work of literary fantasy, The Lord of the Rings. Carefully following the 1940s work of author JRR Tolkien, director Peter Jackson's second installment is The Two Towers. Here, the lead bad guys unite; turncoat wizard Saruman and disembodied soul-of-evil Sauron work in concert, each from his own forbiddingly precipitous tower.

They have a lot of help. We see Saruman churning out armies of Orcs and Uruk-Hai, which are quasi-cloned deep in the wizard's foundry, a hellish place fueled by entire forests of harvested trees.

The plan is to devastate the world known as Middle-earth. They want to rid the land of a new, upstart race called men.

Of course, there are also plenty of good guys and antiheroes, and characters of questionable intentions, running around the film. The ring-obsessed Gollum is the creation of actor Andy Serkis and the Weta 3D animation team working with Alias\Wavefront Maya 4.0. Still, without the seemingly endless availability of really good bad guys, the good guys wouldn't have a whole lot to do.

As head of Wellington-based Weta, New Zealander Richard Taylor is known for his fanatical devotion to mastering the exquisitely detailed look of Lord of the Rings. And with the Academy Awards he's started to collect (along with partner Tania Rodger) for practical makeup and for visual effects, Taylor's obviously on the right track. He was in New York last month when Post Magazine caught up with him.

POST: Your job straddles both the practical world of props and prosthetics and the digital world where anything goes. How much fun was it to populate a whole new world for film?

TAYLOR: We had a great amount of enjoyment creating both the evil and good races of Middle-earth, but invariably its always the evil ones that are the most fun. We had to create a very cohesive world where it felt as though the creatures had manufactured the armor they're wearing. Because Tolkien's writing is so descriptive, because he has written a "bible" that is Middle-earth, it was imperative that we understood that the world [of fans] already had a preconceived idea of what Middle-earth should look like.

A character like Gollum is a good example. The world knows what Gollum should look like, We wanted to bring our own vision to Gollum and wanted to inherit Peter's vision into Gollum, but at all times there was a parameter there that had to be understood and appreciated.

We actually found that [readers familiarity] actually elevated our design because Tolkien wrote of fantasy but also of heightened reality. And that was a world where the creatures felt extremely real. The Cave Troll had all of the physical attributes of a character from his own world, as did every other character that we'd created.

POST: Describe how Gollum was created?

TAYLOR: Although Gollum was already so carefully mapped out in Tolkien's written words, he still was one of the incredibly subtle complexities. Gollum went through a four-to-five-year design phase, ever changing, ever shifting -- we produced over a thousand illustrations and over 100 sculptures of Gollum before we started to commit our ideas to a complete design and scannable maquette. We sculpted Gollum two times life size in the "Leonardo pose" -- it was after all this massive preparatory work that we started honing him down to something that we felt could work. We'd committed him through scanning and into the computer and a huge amount of work had already been done in the preparatory building of Gollum and his muscle structure, his fat dynamics, his facial animation -- we likened him to a sort of peeled spider monkey But, only on the arrival of Andy Serkis in New Zealand and the realization that Andy could indeed also play Smeagol, the schizophrenic alter ego of Gollum, did we realize that it was imperativ e again that Gollum go through another design stage. Only with the deadline looming only nine months away did we throw ourselves wholeheartedly into a whole other design phase that was embraced by all involved to make sure that the essence and physical structures of Andy's face were brought to bear on Gollum.

POST: Would Andy appreciate that?

TAYLOR: I think he'd appreciate it greatly -- because deep in Andy we can find a little bit of Gollum. We were very lucky that Andy brought to bear his immense acting attributes onto that character, We have a saying at Weta -- "It's about heartware, not hardware." It's imperative that a character has soul and people have asked often, "Why does Gollum work where possibly other characters haven't captured the heart of the audience?" I really think, in no way taking anything away from the technical attributes of the people involved in the creation of Gollum, ultimately it has to come back to the soul that an actor puts into that character and the technological advancements that have been able to transmit that soul into a digital character onscreen.