This interview with Jed Brophy (aka Nori) looks at the burgeoning New Zealand film industry and is a bit of a retrospective on the kiwi actor’s 25-year career and how how his path led him to develop a close working relationship with Jackson.
From tongue-in-cheek zombie splatterfest Braindead (possibly my favourite Peter Jackson film) to The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Brophy has worked on almost every Peter Jackson film.
In this podcast, Brophy recalls growing up on a large sheep and cattle farm and of how he went to college to study Sports Science while doing drama as an elective, and how he got into the industry. He also, near the end, talks a little about what’s currently going on with the final The Hobbit film. I’ve transcribed the key parts of that section just below:
Nerdvana: In the few minutes we’ve got left I’ve got to talk about The Hobbit, because you guys wrapped on the film not too long ago…
Jed Brophy: Yeah, we did our last lot of reshoots last year actually. Proper reshoots, in terms of us walking and talking and busting things up for The Battle of the Five Armies — just before the whole circus started for the second film last year.
We have got together — the actors have got together — to do some ADR. We’re doing fighting and running and dying sounds as we call it. And they quite often get us together in groups to do it because it’s easier to record and we can get some play between each other — bouncing off each other.
So that’s really… all we have left to do is the automated dialogue replacement — the ADR as they call it.
We did think… we did hope actually, a bit like with Lord of the Rings, that we would have one final hurrah shooting on the soundstages this year. But, you know, Peter obviously knew that he’d got as much of the actor stuff as he wanted, and the rest of it was going to be motion-capture.
But… all of our stunt doubles have been working doing motion capture stunt stuff for The Battle of the Five Armies. As I say, as we speak it’s still going. Yeah, we’re looking forward to seeing a cut, actually. I haven’t seen any of the third film… apart from the stuff we’ve done ADR for, we haven’t seen any, kind of, long bits shot together.
It’s gonna be a big surprise for us as well.
The interview with Brophy runs for the first 30 minutes of the podcast.
