Flood Ruins Rings Set
A Lord of the Rings film set has been washed away by floodwater near Queenstown. About 300-400 crew and cast have been filming the $360 million film trilogy near Queenstown, Wanaka and Te Anau for the past 10 days and will be in the area until Christmas. Producer Tim Sanders said today filming was delayed in some locations because of flooding and bad weather. Some locations could still be used in the next few weeks when they dried out, but others wouldn’t be ready until the film crew returned next year.
Mr Sanders said one set of some ruins had been washed away. “It wasn’t a huge set, but we had some ruins for one of our scenes along the Kawarau River, built on a beach setting. The beach, and the ruins and the whole area were suddenly 5m under water,” he said.
“The great irony in all of this is that we had a set built in a studio here [in Queenstown] for wet weather purposes. We couldn’t reach it because we were cut off in Te Anau. Now that we’ve finally made it to Queenstown, it’s the only thing we can shoot on because all our other sets have washed away. And [today] it’s beautiful weather.” Filming in Wellington will resume about mid-January.
Here are some images from Karawau River:
Thanks to Buzz for the tip!
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Buzz chimes in:
I can confirm that set being washed away thing too. But apparently they were able to shoot some footage which actually took advantage of the conditions. 🙂 The rain curse continues!
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Could have sworn I’d posted this before, but no. The knitted armour rumour. Check it out in spy reports
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Way back when this film was first announced and Peter Jackson gave his first interviews on the subject, he mentioned that a Wellington knitting club was making the chainmail that the background extras would wear. Once sprayed with metallic spray, it would look great from a distance…at the time I thought that was pretty inventive.
A while ago I was talking to somebody in a pub who rather demanded attention, given that he was leaning on a sword that was longer than I am tall. He and his mates had gone in to an electroplating workshop here to get their armour done and there they saw racks and racks of plastic armour.
The guys at the workshop admitted it was for Lord of the Rings, and that they were going to chrome it. It would be worn by the extras in the background. My informants scoffed at the notion of plastic armour but had to admit that it looked very good and would certainly pass muster from a distance. It was made in India, according to one person I asked.
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We’d love to hear from anyone that attended the talk that Weta’s special effects gurus gave there.
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There’s an interesting snippet in the Otago Daily Times quoting Tim Bevan, who’s in NZ to address the NZ Film and TV conference that’s on in Wellington at the moment. He laments the fact that most talent in NZ goes overseas as soon as they’ve made one movie that’s sufficiently successful to get them out of here. As he himself has done. This is something that Peter Jackson mentioned in an interview years ago. The fact that Jackson is now bucking this trend is something that Bevan mentions in passing.
The full article’s available here
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