A Lord of the Rings Special: An interview with Weta Workshop's Richard Taylor

Concerning Hobbits…

Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy stands tall as one of the very best book-to-movie adaptations ever made, bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s breathtaking stories to life on the big screen with aplomb. The trilogy recently celebrated its 20th anniversary last year, as The Fellowship of the Ring originally hit theaters all the way back in 2001. Yes, you really are that old. 

To celebrate the occasion, we caught up with Richard Taylor, the founder and creative director of Weta, whose team worked directly with Peter Jackson to create the special effects makeup, visual effects and costume designs that have since gone down in history. He talked to us about Liv Tyler’s frequent visits to the studio, an unforgettable dinner with Christopher Lee, how Weta translated J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision of Middle-earth from text to screen and what filming the siege of Minis Tirith was like.

Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Two years into designing the creature Gollum, Andy Serkis stepped in to do motion capture. The special effects company behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Weta Workshop, then suddenly had to redesign Gollum to more closely resemble Serkis over the span of just two and a half months. Prior to Serkis’ arrival, Weta’s founder Richard Taylor and his team came up with around 3040 designs of Gollum. They sculpted a six-foot-tall scannable maquette with acrylic eyes in a T-pose. 

A lot of work had been put into Gollum at this point by the team, who had a well-formed concept of what the creature would look like. And then Andy Serkis arrived. Taylor says:

I arrived on set and this actor was sitting in one of the couches, and I sat next to him and we got chatting, and it turned out to be Andy Serkis, who I had only heard as a voice that Peter [Jackson] had shared with me beforehand. He’d told me about this wonderful actor that he had found to be the voice of Gollum. And sitting next to him, I just realized that he entirely engendered the spirit of Gollum in his facial features, the way he was expressing himself. He went up on set for the first day and it became entirely clear to the crew and to Peter, that this person imbued the spirit of Gollum in his very being. It became evident very quickly that we needed to revisit our design.

As Andy Serkis would also have to play Smeagol the hobbit before his eventual transformation into Gollum, Peter Jackson decided that Gollum would have to be redesigned for the films to resemble the actor more closely. The rest, as they say, is history. The role has cemented Serkis as an icon in motion capture acting, and Gollum himself has become so popular as to warrant a spin-off videogame of his very own. 

Richard Taylor has fond memories of being on set at The Lord of the Rings - particularly because the long periods of filming took him to breathtaking places in New Zealand, though they were somewhat marred by bloody fantastical battles at the time. Specifically, he recalls seeing the Uruk Hai come to life at the Queenstown-Lakes District in New Zealand - before yelling at the lot of them in the hot sun. 

Every location I had the good fortune of getting to was thrilling for me. You're suddenly on set surrounded by characters from your imagination, and this was overwhelming to me. The first major location that I went down to was shooting the Uruk Hai attacking the Fellowship at Amon Hen. I was watching the morning’s filming and I was getting anxious that the Uruk Hai just weren’t in that almost maniacal, obsessive kill mode. Something just came over me and I walked out in front of them all. I picked up a sword and a shield and I started yelling at, like, 100 men dressed in costume in the hot sun. It was incredibly hot. It was so hot and I stood there, and I was yelling at them to get them into this bloodlust of berserker aggression. It worked, thankfully, and I felt a bit daft in front of the crew and Peter. But having developed the Uruk Hai for years, and then to desire to see them as I imagined… I just couldn't help myself. 

At this point, it should be obvious that Taylor adored the Lord of the Rings long before it was adapted into a trilogy of movies that took the world by storm. Being a fan of the books himself, he and his workshop put a lot of work into Tolkien’s stories to bring these creatures, weapons and armour pieces to life over the course of seven and a half years. The process involved, “the design, fabrication and onset operation of armor, weapons, creatures, miniatures, and special makeup effects and prosthetics,” which means that they didn’t just have to create the props - but monitor their usage on set. 

We built 72 Miniatures over about six years, 48,000 separate items for the trilogy of movies. We built 10,000 weapons, 100,000 arrows, 1200 to 1400 suits of armor, and then a huge amount of other things. We had 38 people in our company when we started, and we ultimately hired 158 People, of which only one-eighth had ever worked on a film or TV show before. 

Taylor further explains that the team had to be trained before even working on these props but, “Being predominantly Kiwis, that was no problem, because there's a real can-do attitude in New Zealand. And everyone just threw themselves at the tasks and mobilised to achieve what was needed, and the workshop ran around the clock for years and years basically.”

To give you an idea of how much manpower was necessary to bring these movies to the big screen, The Lord of the Rings crew had seven units working at the height of production. There was the main unit, the second unit, the third unit, the pickup unit, a helicopter unit and two miniature units - though there was another miniature unit that saw shipping containers entering and exiting New Zealand on almost daily basis. Taylor calls it, “a big undertaking,” but, “never difficult to the point of not being enjoyable.”

Even though it was tough, I never, ever questioned for one hour of one day, why I would be doing this or why I would not be at home, or not seeing my family, etc, etc. You just had this incredible sense that you were involved in something so special and life changing, that you only wanted to do it and do it for the maximum number of hours. I always regretted having to go home late at night from the workshop to sleep for a while because I'd have to leave a project behind to pick up again the next morning. 

‘A big undertaking’ indeed. Taylor even describes falling into a funk once production was over, even when the team headed right into production of The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “I just felt this deep sense of loss, almost like you had been told to leave home and you didn't really want to, and it took me months to get over it and get back into normal life.”

Bringing the Fellowship to life

When asked about working with the trilogy’s iconic cast, Taylor becomes an avalanche of fond stories about interacting with the actors over countless meals, workshop visits and periods of filming. “Remember, seven of the nine leads were in some form of prosthetics every day,” he reminds us, which means that Weta Workshop had to work closely with the main cast over the entire trilogy. He describes the workshop’s unexpected friendship with Liv Tyler, who plays the half-elf Arwen in the trilogy. 

Liv Tyler flew into the airport and arrived two and a half days before her first day of shooting. So she didn't even go to a hotel, she came straight to the workshop. And I [made a cast of her] within an hour of her arriving in New Zealand, I think she was about 17 or 18 years old. She asked for a cup of tea before I cast her head, and I thought I would be really civil and put white sugar in her tea instead of the normal brown sugar that I would normally use in my own tea at the time. But it turned out to be salt, which she spat back all over me. She wanted to know if I was trying to poison her. So that was not a good start.

As far as first impressions go, that wasn’t the best - but Taylor goes on to say that the actress quickly became a friend of the workshop and would come in every day to hang out with the staff, while they worked on a collectible figure of Arwen. “She was such a generous, lovely, kind person.”

Taylor can’t be stopped, and so on he goes about meeting the late Christopher Lee, who delivered a showstopper performance as the villainous Saruman. The two are alike in at least one way, as Taylor notes, “Christopher Lee sucks the air out of the room, such is his presence.” When Taylor and his family visited Christopher Lee and his wife Birgit Kroencke in London, they took several pictures together to mark the occasion. Upon processing the film rolls back at home, he discovered that Lee was posed like Dracula, looming over Taylor’s son in every picture. When they went out to dinner together, Lee recited poetry in multiple languages from Tolkien’s stories, and everyone in the restaurant, both the staff and their customers, let their meals go cold as they listened to the actor speak.

“It's actually bringing tears to my eyes, because of course, he's long since passed away. But I feel very, very blessed that he played a part in my life and especially in that film.”

The siege of Minas Tirith

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings with no small amount of description, taking care to flesh out every aspect of this fantastical world and make Middle-earth feel as real and lived-in as possible. This is undoubtedly why the books have amassed such a massive fan following to this day, since there is so much beyond the main trilogy - from short stories and historical lore to timelines, maps and other annotations - for fans to sink their teeth into. If a place is defined by its name, its people and its history, then Middle-earth is further from fiction than one might think. 

Taylor notes that it was much easier to come up with props and sets for The Lord of the Rings trilogy precisely due to Tolkien’s keen eye for detail. “For us, those descriptions were so succinct and so thorough, that it allowed us to build from the writing [,,,] I think Rivendell is probably the miniature that most succinctly captured the atmosphere of Tolkien's writing. It almost fell together during construction, such was the confidence that we understood the vision of Tolkien's writing for that place.”

Taylor considers the siege of Minas Tirith the biggest action sequence his workshop worked on throughout the trilogy. It involved the highest number of extras, involving hundreds upon hundreds of people that needed to be fitted for costumes. He even recalls attaching leg guards to a Rohan extra in her 50s, and asking her if she’d brought her own horse to set. The extra then commented that her horse had become lame after its foot got stuck in a rabbit hole the previous night. Her solution was simple: she hitchhiked up a mountain in the evening, roped in a wild horse, broke it in and rode it back to set so she could continue acting. 

“That’s commitment,” Taylor laughs. “That’s a Kiwi can-do attitude.”

The siege took weeks of filming at night-time, in forced rain, with a massive number of extras shooting arrows and charging at one another with shields raised. Taylor would work all day in the workshop and then drive out to set in the early evening to help dress the actors, continuing to stay on until 1am to 2am before finally driving home to get some sleep. The cycle would repeat the same way, for every day of filming the siege. Despite this, it was his favourite set experience of the entire trilogy:

You're charged up on coffee and Red Bull and you're in this almost hallucinogenic world of rain and these dark figures of the Uruk Hai, the blood and the explosions…it's just mind boggling. It's just overwhelmingly impactful. And, you know, when the elves march up the causeway and into the keep - ugh, it’s just so good. Helm's Deep is probably my favorite set experience from a filming perspective.

Filming the trilogy sounds like a grueling experience, though clearly Taylor looks at it with fondness today. On how he and his team avoids fatigue on big projects like these, he attributes it to, “running a marathon and never a sprint.” While studios run a sprint by filming a movie and then taking a six-month break, his workshop rolls from one movie to the next on a constant basis, doing seven-to-nine movies a year. The company is currently working on James Cameron’s Avatar 2, and future sequels in the franchise. 

You might grab a bottle of water and get a sit down over Christmas, but you're straight back into it on the second of January. You're up and running again. I can't speak for other people because everyone has different levels of stamina and ability to cope with fatigue. I try to seek enjoyment in the creative pursuit of the work. We're very privileged to work in this career and to get to do this for a living. We don't pursue perfection, because perfection is an impossible goal. You would kill yourself trying, but you can pursue excellence...and excellence is a state of mind, isn’t it?

Taylor then clarifies that their work days have improved markedly since the siege of Minas Tirith. “90% of our crew do stay within a 40 to 45-Hour workweek, because we manage the work well enough to avoid the sort of hours that we needed to do on The Lord of the Rings.”

When one sits down to binge the entire trilogy in all their extended glory as this writer often has, it can be easy to miss just how much work was put into its production. Weta Workshop was only one pivotal cog in the complex behind-the-scenes machinery that brought The Lord of the Rings to life, after all. Richard Taylor’s time with the trilogy was as physically taxing as it was emotionally fulfilling, and one thing’s clear: he wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

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Special thanks to Tourism New Zealand for making this interview possible. 

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