LOTR Castmember Quotes

Special Effects
Speaker
Topic
Quote
Andy
BBC Newsround, 3/21/03		 Gollum Scenes We shoot everything as you would in normal film and then it goes through a whole lot of processes, I have to re-shoot everything again in a motion capture studio and then I have to work with the animators and then re-voice everything. So all in all the process can take, with the animating process as well, some scenes have taken two and a half years to make.
Billy Effects Some of the stuff they can do is quite incredible. That's been great fun, wild stuff.
David W Set (The set) Pretty awe inspiring. Massive place. It was overwhelming the size of it...it looked exactly like the illustrations that Alan Lee had drawn many years ago...which was rather freaky but also wonderful as an actor because it wasn't hard to dispell your belief going into that world.
Elijah Hobbit Doubles That was kind of weird. You have a Frodo running around with a mask on, but early on, they had faces that didn't move. So, it was just Frodo with this blank look, and I was like, 'Oh man!' I remember that we were on top of [a] mountain, and they had a box of the faces. I opened the box and there were these hobbit faces just looking up at me, sort of dead. It was bizarre.
Elijah Hobbit Doubles It was more than a bit strange, seeing somebody four-foot high, walking around not only dressed as me, but wearing a mask of me!
Ian Balrog When I, Gandalf, was facing off this monster on the Bridge of Khazad Dum, he wasn’t actually there, I saw him when everybody else saw him, in the cinema. I had to have an eyeline, there had to be a point at the center of this monster that I could talk to, shout at. And it was, yes, a yellow tennis ball stuck on a pole. “You shall not bounce!” was a joke I made at the time. That’s the difference between acting in the theatre and the cinema. Well it’s moments like that they come very close together. An actor is a grown up kid using his imagination. Make believe, let’s pretend that this tennis ball is a monster.
Ian Saruman Fight As Gandalf, the Gray Wizard, I had this fight with Saruman, the White Wizard. Christopher Lee, who plays Saruman, points his staff at me, and I twist around on my shoulder with my legs in the air, on the ground. That was me. I achieved that with my legs in the air and a magnet keeping my shoulder on the ground. But just off the view of the camera was a chiropractor, an osteopath and a masseur.
Liv Blue Screen One of my most vivid memories is doing this horse chase in the beginning of film one. The Black Riders are chasing me—I think it's in the trailer. I was shooting a lot of stuff without anybody else there [just a blue screen so the special effects could be put in later]. I was so embarrassed, and I was having such a hard time imagining everything, and I was all crumbling inside. And when I was finished I went over to another stage and the boys were all doing something even more embarrassing [laughs]. There was some kind of explosion and they were all jumping. It put me at ease. It helped me get over myself and not be so uptight.
Liv Blue Screen Recreating scenes in a sound stage, it wasn't so easy. I had to reproduce the same emotions and expressions as on a set. Creating and imagining the scenario in my head with the river, the sound of the water, the forest, was quite challenging. There were no real set built around me.
Mike Heffernan, the construction manager for Edoras Edoras We had about 50 people in the construction department at Edoras. Two foremen, 20 odd chippies (carpenters), 10 to 15 hammer hands and 10 to 15 laborers. We had an engineer as well doing all the welding. And there were probably 10 people in the greens department for the duration. On an average day, we'd get up at about five in the morning, have breakfast and jump on the bus at about quarter to six. The bus would arrive on the site at about seven o'clock and we would start work. We had a cook on the set and at 10 o'clock we'd have breakfast. Then we'd work until about one o'clock, have lunch and work right through to six. After that, everybody would jump back on the bus and we would head into town, getting back about 7 at night.
Peter Doubles There is something inherently comic about spending all day in the company of people wearing false noses, flowing hair and ridiculously long beards. It was not uncommon to see as many as four Gandalfs in wizard regalia roaming around the studio at any one time; Gandalf stunt double, Gandalf stunt rider, Big Gandalf (a seven-foot-plus actor who was used to make our hobbits look three-and-a-half feet tall) and even -- on occasion -- Ian McKellen himself. This is not taking into account the Gandalf digital double, who took on tasks in the Mines of Moria that mere humans could not expect to survive. Ian was not the only actor to find himself with a virtual "other." All the main cast had their faces scanned and body movements captured by Weta Digital, our New Zealand-based special-effects company, which grew from a staff of 30 to more than 250 during the course of production.
Richie Cordobes, the special FX onset coordinator Pyrotechnics This project is kind of cool because I've never really worked on a fantasy project before. It's not a modern film where we're doing lots of bullet hits, lots of big explosions, car explosions, crashes, things like that, it's all more mellow, not necessarily such big stuff, such big explosions, but we have done some full structure burns. We burnt down Hobbiton and The Green Dragon; we made it look like Hobbiton was being destroyed in the dream sequence of the film. Then we've done a lot of flying, where we pull the actors up into trees, simulating the Elves grabbing them magically and lifting them off the ground.
Sean A
Official Fanclub Magazine, 2001		 Blue Screen There was a lot of blue and green screen work, tons of that. As an actor, it was almost easier to do that stuff than it was to do some of the other location work, which was really physically demanding. You cross an imaginative Rubicon, where you commit to this idea of being in an imaginative space. Peter describes the environment of Balin's Tomb. He describes this cave troll, and what the cave troll is going to be doing to you, and he shows you a drawing of it. So you close your eyes and picture it, and then it's about continuing to really believe that's in your mind's eye.
Once you give yourself over to that, it becomes fun. It's where you're really allowed to soar. It's what readers get to enjoy - their own imaginative space. As an actor, you go into that same space.

Canon Index Quote Index