THE LAST RING
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At 11am on June 21 in Wellington as in the rest of the world, the Fifth book of Harry Potter is out: in the very same day Frodo, protected by Sam, was fighting for his life in the enormous spider Shelob’s lair, in an ambush setup by Gollum, during the traditional Pick-ups. Harry Potter was, at least in the cinema, the best rival for The Lord Of The Rings, at least until the second installment gained less then the first one. The opposite was true for The Two Towers, which overcame FotR by many millions of dollars. If it will run all as anticipated, The Return Of The King, the last installment, should gain more than a billion dollars overseas.
It’s been seven years that Peter Jackson has worked on what he always considered a whole, one movie, divided in three parts, exactly like Tolkien’s novels, divided in three books by the editor. And it’s been seven years that he say he lives his personal ‘marmot’s day’, that is to live the same day every day, as in the 1993 Bill Murray movie ‘Groundhog Day’. I.e., today, June 22, he woke up at 5am, put on his very famous shorts, began the shooting at 8am, and, in spite of the rain, moved from a set to another, as usual on his red bicycle Challenge model, recognizable by the skull on the handle. The skull is a souvenir from Shelob’s lair, where there are also some dangling, mummified corpses, which are imprisoned in synthetic webs made by an elasticized fiber of boiled-vegetal-oil (220°C!!!).
Frodo and Sam continue to fight her in front of a Blue Screen, because Shelob, female spider, it’s under ‘gestation’ in Weta Digital! During the years she is continuously changed (the movies were shot at the same time in 274 days between 1999 and 2000). At the beginning, she was a little 30-cm model who didn’t frighten anybody. In the end, she will be a 5-meters high monster, destined to frighten first of all Peter Jackson, who loves splatter movies but is arachnophobic (like Tolkien too!). The last model is a NZ spider called Tunnel Web, that is little and innocuous, but was super-sized by the computer! Shelob, who is different from the other spiders of the cinema, will be really fast, but stops in a second to fix her eyes on her prey.
Jackson’s pickups are not re-shootings, but little additions, sometime only a sentence, a glance, looking for a psychological deepening. Jackson says: ‘RotK is the movie that has to justify the other two installments’. He shoots every scene ten times, from multiple angles. He decided this in the very beginning of the production, inserting this ‘vice’ in the production budget of $310 millions. In the end he will exceed 500 hours of film, reducing them to only 10 hours.
Every Friday the troupe organize a raffle with prizes taken from
merchandising, but every month of pick-ups (they will end on July 10) was a long feast. Every time an actor came back home, they had a party and gifts. It’s happened with Arwen (Liv Tyler), Eowyn (Miranda Otto), Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), Gandalf (Ian McKellen). The 4 hobbits have to do another week, while Saruman (Christopher Lee) has not arrived yet. It’s a soft atmosphere, like in the end of the movie when most of the characters leave Middle Earth in the Grey Heavens. Elijah Wood, who promised an annual assembly with all the members of the cast and crew, says: ‘Do you know when I could shoot another time the most important movie of my life?’
The RotK is PJ most-liked part of the trilogy. Producer Barrie Osborne
says ‘go to the cinema with tissues!’. Hobbit Merry (Dominic Monaghan), who saw a pre-edited copy of the movie, cried during the whole last 8 minutes. The plot is full of weddings, coronations, ambushes, suicides, betrayal, but also the biggest battle of the history of cinema: 200,000 orcs in Pelennor field! We’ll see a new, sophisticated city (Minas Tirith) and a new race: The Pirates (oriental in origin). Faramir will have his 15 minutes of fame, while a new entry, Denethor (Australian actor John Noble), steward of Gondor, is a Shakespearian-tragic character. We will see him in the longer version of TTT (47 minutes longer!!) which contains three key- scenes: Eowyn’s declaration of love to Aragorn, Aragorn’s declaration of age (87 years old!) and the growth of 10 cm. of Marry and Pippin after drinking an Ent-drink. If we had a ‘The Middle Earth Times’, here we would have the last news:
-World premiere of RotK on December 1
-European premiere on December 10 in Berlin
-Italian premiere in Rome on December 13
After LotR, Peter Jackson is going to direct a remake: King Kong, the most famous gorilla of the planet. It will be a digital creature, but humanized like Gollum: voices speak about the same actor to give life to Kong: Andy Serkis.
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Maria translated this article from the Danish newspaper ‘Fyns Stiftstidende’ about Viggo Mortensen’s recent trip to Denmark. [More]
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When Viggo read out loud
ART: The actor Viggo Mortensen was nearly appreciated
for his poems
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By: Karsten ,. Nielsen
Photo: Kim Rune
Translation by: Maria Hagbjärn Ringer Spy: Saga
ODENSE: They’re at the door. Dressed in yellow. “Control” is says on their shirts, like it was a logo from an expensive clothing line. Five harsh looking men are to keep the women away. Nothing is left unnoticed when a star comes to town. Not even when it’s the third day he’s there- nor when the occasion is something as harmless as poetry.
Autographs
Slowly the big crowd of press people and women of all ages are let in to Magasinet – in to Viggo, who everybody calls the world-famous star from the Lord of the Rings films, Viggo Mortensen. But one is kept standing and waiting. It’s Connie Albrechtsen. Next to two tables by the stairs she’s standing handing out notes.
– It’s in case people want autographs. Then they get a piece of paper to write their names on. It’s easier for Viggo if the name is already written, so he can spell it correctly, she says. And only two autographs each. There’s no time for any more.
Cameras, no thank you Inside the room they are waiting. On 400 chairs are women chatting like only women do. Excited, with their fingers on their cameras. In just a moment he’ll be there, the prince on the white horse. Aragorn, as he’s called in the films. Or Viggo, as everyone here calls him. The doors are closing and the excitement rises. Viggo is coming. But first a message.
– I’m asking you not to take ant photos whilst Viggo reading his poems, says Lis from Magasinet and gets startled by all the flashing cameras, when the curtains are pulled. Viggo, the prince, knows exactly what to do. He picks a flower from the flowerpot with pink roses and timidly hands in to Lis.
In three languages – and singing And so there he is. Viggo. Reading his poems. He’s barefoot, cause as a nature child he could never dream of trapping his feet inside evil shoes. His hair is messy and he hardly ever looks up. Just like the misunderstood artist he is. In Danish he tries to read the poems, that he once wrote. But then they were in English. And now they’re translated into Danish and much more difficult. He often stops, and tries again. But the message gets through. Clear as sunshine.
– I wrote this poem the first time USA attacked Iraq, he says about the poem Letters from Nebraska, before he nervously stutters the words. Later on the language changes. First to English. Then Spanish. All alone he sings something about the silence, the flowers and the evenings. In Spanish. But the women understand him. They applaud him afterwards. In audience And suddenly it’s over. There won’t be any more poems that evening. But there will be many autographs.
– If you all will get in line and get up here one by one, I’ll write on a paper, a book or wherever now you want it, Viggo lures. And the women are lured. Waving their papers they line up in the heat and watch Viggo, the prince from the Lord of the Rings. And everybody gets what they came for. Two autographs for everyone. At least.
– We won’t stop until everyone has got an autograph, says a security guard. No, nothing is spared when a world-famous star comes to town.
Translation by: Maria Hagbjärn Ringer Spy: Saga
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Our good friends Jeff Sherrill, Kris Nelson, and Paul Dunne (the Elvish 101 Guys) will be back in #TheHallofFire tonight at 8PM EDT for a lesson in Tolkien’s languages. Kris says, “We are going to go over the basic phonology, spelling, and stress of Quenya, interpret some Quenya phrases, and try to correlate everything to Sindarin as much as possible since this seems to be what people are interested in.” So stop by this evening and learn a bit of Elvish to impress/frighten your friends! The first transcript can be found [here]
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Our good friends Jeff Sherrill, Kris Nelson, and Paul Dunne (the Elvish 101 Guys) will be back in #TheHallofFire tonight at 8PM EDT for a lesson in Tolkien’s languages. Kris says, “We are going to go over the basic phonology, spelling, and stress of Quenya, interpret some Quenya phrases, and try to correlate everything to Sindarin as much as possible since this seems to be what people are interested in.” So stop by this evening and learn a bit of Elvish to impress/frighten your friends! The first transcript can be found [here]
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andrea writes: Marco Giovanni is the journalist who stayed in NZ during the re-shooting. No new photos, maybe in August issue, but some minor SPOILERS:
–Peter Jackson moved from a set to another, as usual, with his Red Bicycle ‘Challenge’ model, recognizable by the skull on the handle. It’s a Shelob-lair souvenir, where there are also some dangling, mummyfied corpses, which are imprisoned in synthetic webs made by an elasticized fiber of boiled-vegetable-oil (220°C!!!).
-Shelob will be a 5 meter-high monster, really fast, who stops in a second to fix her eyes on her prey.
-The plot will have weddings, coronations, ambushes, suicides, betrayal, but also the biggest battle of the history of cinema: 200,000 orcs in Pelennor field!”
Demosthenes here. You might recall that some time ago, Peter Jackson spoke to the LoTR Fan Magazine about the inspiration for Shelob. In part, he said:
I’ve got a real fear of spiders; I guess I have arachnophobia. Ever since I was a kid, spiders have freaked me out. There is a spider in New Zealand called a Tunnel Web spider, which is a common New Zealand spider but a very nasty, fat, pudgy one that lives in gardens.
Ever since I was a kid, I have been terrified of coming across these things. You find them under old bricks and old logs and leaves and such. It is a very evil-looking spider; it’s small—about an inch and a half long. About three weeks ago, we had a Shelob design meeting, and I looked at the designs and said, “You know, we have to make this look more like the Tunnel Web. She has to be more like this horrible spider.” Most of the CG guys that I was talking to were from the U.S., so they didn’t have a clue what a Tunnel Web was. So I turned to one of the Kiwi designers, Christian Rivers, and said, “Can we find pictures of one?”
The next morning, Christian poked around in his garden and managed to catch one in a glass jar! So right now, we have a live Tunnel Web at Weta being the model for Shelob. As far as I’m concerned, a photograph would’ve been just fine!
Xoanon promptly went and dug up the image below from the Te Papa museum website to terrify us all.
But when I saw Shelob described as being “really fast” it struck me that not only might WETA use the Tunnelweb as a static starting point, they may use its movements as a starting point for modelling the way that Shelob moves. This would make any video of a Tunnelweb in action worth gold to the thousands of spoiler-seeking LoTR fans around the world.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to disover any video of a Tunnelweb lurking on the internet. But here’s a couple more pictures of this vicious-looking beastie for you to enjoy.
I also remembered that there’s been shots of an (early) model of Shelob floating around for a while. While not new, they’ve never been scrapbooked previously. These particular ones are screencapped from The Quest for the Ring.
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