Pallando sends us this bit of information from UK’s Channel 4 website, Christopher Lee has been talking Star Wars: Ep 2 and TTT:
“I’ve just finished Star Wars: Episode II – Attack Of The Clones,” says the actor, who plays Darth Tyranus . “I can’t tell you much, just that I play a disillusioned former Jedi.
“That’s out in May and I’m about to go back to New Zealand to do extra work on The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers.”
Recalling his first scenes on the Tolkein blockbuster trilogy, Lee says: “They were with Ian McKellen (Gandalf). He is one of our greatest actors. I’ve never worked with him before,” he says.
“The first take is always hard but I’ve never worked with a more encouraging, helpful and agreeable actor.
“He was absolutely wonderful, even if he does fancy Ewan McGregor! He was a tremendous help to me.”
THE LORD OF THE RINGS HAS RETURNED TO ITS OWN TIMES
By Ostap Karmodi
Moscow cinemas are conquered by the ancient Middle-Earth. Delayed twice, The Lord of the Rings makes it to the screens at last.
We’ve been missing epics. Last ten years’ movies were mostly personal and small scale. Everyone was interested with the problems of the ‘little man’: little boy, little maidservant, little killer. Little piglet, for that matter. Even what could be called an epic actually was not: Gladiator and Pearl Harbor and all that were merely studies of how history strides on the backs of little people. Movies of the scale and ambition of Star Wars have become things of the past. Even the prequel of that epic has turned out to be not a saga of the Rebel struggle against the Evil Empire but a personal history of a little boy. When the smoke of the fallen Berlin Wall settled, it had seemed for a while that the History has ended — only the small purely personal histories were left.
September 11th has put that all back in place. The History stood up in full wild beauty from the ashes of fallen skyscrapers. World has once again been divided into Us and Them. Evil Empires like USSR or the Third Reich have been hard to find, but the Evil Axis has partly taken their place. People have regained the sixth sense — the sense of a fellowship, and the seventh one — a sense of fear of an unknown danger ready literally to fall down form the sky. With these feelings came a social demand for some grand work about the struggle between Good and Evil.
That’s were Peter Jackson with his The Lord of the Rings came in handy.
Jackson has of course started to think about transferring Tolkien to screen a good deal earlier than the first Boeing jet hit the Twin Towers. At that point the shooting has already been finished and editing was in progress. The director has perhaps sensed something in the air, got a glimpse of ‘political winds’ changing. Now it is only at the first look strange how not Spielberg or Lucas but a marginal from new Zealand was trusted with the Lord of the Rings. It is really very appropriate.
Peter Jackson has shot no big mainstream movie in his life. His first one was Bad Taste a picture about how two competing galactic fast food nets send their emissaries to Earth. And not to open outlets, but to refill their stock of human meat. his next movie was a wicked parody at Muppet Show, where little frogs and pigs sniff coke and have chaotic sex after shows. A few horrors for every taste followed, then a parody at documentary which fooled half of Australia.
And then Jackson has in some incomprehensible way acquired the rights for the adaptation of Tolkien’s trilogy and set about finding money.
The Lord of the Rings has reached such a kind of status that no one except a downright marginal would think about transferring it on screen. Everyone has become used to the thought that a movie based on this book won’t be possible to shoot until 2050 or better say 3075. At the moment we don’t have the funds, or technology, or whatever other excuse that came to mind. The movie was likely to be worse than the book and thus cause a wave of criticism (the cartoon adaptation of 1978 was a disaster). Lucases, Spielbergs and the like had no desire to risk the reputation. Others apparently thought ‘Well, if such giants don’t take it what hope do we have?’
That was how it came to be that the rights were laying about and Jackson, with no fear of god or devil, had but to take them up.
And to everyone’s benefit, not counting Lucas or Spielberg, of course. These guys got themselves a real competitor. With the first part of the epic out Jackson has instantly gained a star status. Perhaps the New Zealander’s good knowledge of the forces of evil is to thank for it — orcs and goblins were very convincing. The bad guys are shot with care and love — one can see that much painstaking work has went into their costumes and choreography. One of them is even reminiscent of Jackson’s fellow islanders, Maori, in battle coloring. And when, accompanied by the dull sound of hoofs, the Black Riders step into the picture, it’s seems quite like they are the main characters here. On the other hand, perhaps the decision to employ British actors has contributed — they can, as New York Times put it, pronounce the word ‘evil’ as if it had at least three syllables.
Perhaps the reason for the success is that the New Zealander does not completely belong to either American or European cinematic traditions and shoots every scene as required by the developing story and not as ‘it is done’. Also, beside telling the bare plot as the creators of Harry Potter did, Jackson has attempted to convey the very spirit of trilogy, sacrificing entire characters and plot lines (he had to: the movie is three hours as it stands).
But the crucial thing that the book had, the involvement of the reader (and now the watcher) in the Main Battle of good and Evil, has remained.
The only thing that one cut put up criticism for is a somewhat sketchy Frodo with a rather empty stare of sky-blue eyes possessing no psychological depth. Of course, Legolas and Gandalf, fat bumpkin of a Sam, and especially the brutal unkempt Boromir look more convincing. But even that criticism is easily overcome. Many won’t agree, but Frodo is not too convincing in the book as well. It is not required of him, for he is not a sovereign character but a conductor of that very same History. That hobbit legs are not hairy enough is not so easy to argue with. Well they aren’t, and it’s only left to put up with. Of course, the book is significantly stronger and deeper. But to transfer it on the screen better than Jackson did is apparently impossible. That said, those who have not read the book will like it, too. It has the everything that is required of a fantasy movie: dungeons, long and bloody sword fights, magic staffs…
The horde of critics prepared to take the ‘sacrilegious’ motion picture to pieces fell silent in astonishment and then exploded with an unrestrained hosanna. From now on the tolkienists will have to put up with The Lord of the Rings being associated not with one name as it was before, but with two: Tolkien and Jackson. Or even Jackson and Tolkien. Perhaps that is unfair. But it is still better than it would be had the movie not been shot. Or if it had been shot by someone other. Especially here and now.
Starting February 7th in Aurora, Almaz, America Cinema, Warshawa, Karo 1 and 2, Kodak Kinomir, Orbita, Pervomaisky, Pobeda, Pyat Zvezd, Pushkinsky, Rolan, Ekran, Electron, and the theater of CHL.
So you know what categories Fellowship of the Ring was nominated in, but who and what is Peter Jackson up against? Check out this comprehensive list of the categories Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and who it comes head to head with.
Actor In A Supporting Role Jim Broadbent Ethan Hawke Ben Kingsley Ian McKellen Jon Voight
Art Direction Amélie Gosford Park Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Moulin Rouge
Cinematography Amélie Black Hawk Down The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring The Man Who Wasn’t There Moulin Rouge
Costume Design The Affair of The Necklace Gosford Park Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
Directing A Beautiful Mind Black Hawk Down Gosford Park The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Mulholland Drive
Film Editing A Beautiful Mind Black Hawk Down The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Memento Moulin Rouge
Makeup A Beautiful Mind The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Moulin Rouge
Music (Score) A.I. Artificial Intelligence A Beautiful Mind Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Monsters, Inc.
Music (Song) Kate & Leopold The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Monsters, Inc. Pearl Harbour Vanilla Sky
Best Picture A Beautiful Mind Gosford Park In The Bedroom The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Moulin Rouge
Sound Amélie Black Hawk Down The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Moulin Rouge Pearl Harbour
Visual Effects A.I. Artifical Intelligence The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Pearl Harbour
Writing (Adapted Screenplay) A Beautiful Mind Ghost World In The Bedroom The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Shrek
For more information, visit the official website for the Academy Awards, http://www.Oscars.com
This great report came in from Robert Marks, a fantasy author:
“I just returned from the Ad Astra convention in Toronto this weekend, where the artist guests of honor were John Howe and Ted Nasmith. I had the pleasure of spending a fair amount of time with them both.
I suppose I should start with John Howe. John is a very gentle, soft-spoken man. He’s a bit on the thin side, with dark hair and a beard with a touch of grey in it. During his Guest of Honor hour, he talked a bit about the role he and Alan Lee played in the production design of the movies, including the interest he took in the swords. One of the more interesting tidbits he dropped was that the model for Barad-dur (Sauron’s Tower), was ten meters high. No wonder it looks great and awe inspiring.
Ted Nasmith was also a very kind and interesting man. He has an average build, with dark hair and a goatee. He began with architectural rendering, and branched out into freelancing. For this convention, he brought a slide show that included some previous art, and some of the artwork that convinced Christopher Tolkien to allow an illustrated version of the Silmarillion in the first place.
After some interesting panels, I ended up doing my own signing at a table with John Howe, and Ted Nasmith was nearby. Ted signs very much like an author…on my copy of the Silmarillion, he wrote “To Rob: With Warm Regards”. John, on the other hand, actually sketches something on whatever he is signing, and then signs his name to it. As he puts it, he believes that an illustrator should give a fan more than just a signature. Regardless, the end result was that it took him about three or four minutes to sign anything, and that what he signed ended up becoming a John Howe original.
Sunday ended in a very good way for me: Ted Nasmith and I went to the restaurant pub to grab some food and drinks, and John Howe joined us. The conversation was long and varied, with Ted talking about how he managed to get the commission for the Silmarillion, and all of us sharing our opinions on the movie. At this point, I discovered one thing that John Howe was not soft-spoken about: Medieval recreationism. A very enthusiastic conversation developed regarding replica swords, authentic swords, and various other issues. For me, it was a high point for the entire convention.
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. John had to go and pack (he lives in Switzerland, and he was heading to the airport earlier that evening), Ted had to get going as well, and my lift to Kingston was waiting for me. My only regret is that I didn’t come out of it with a John Howe original; I had left my hardcover copy of Lord of the Rings at home because it was too heavy with everything else I was carrying.
For those who are interested, the Artist Guest of Honor for next year’s Ad Astra will be Alan Lee, and Ted said that he was going to try to make it.”
nina_glyndwr writes: This article is from Linguist, the magazine of the Institute of Linguists in London, UK
Inside the raggedy plastic bag on the table is one of the most closely guarded secrets in Hollywood: the script for all three Lord of the Rings movies. Dialogue coach Andre Jack shouldn’t have brought it along, but he wants to show me how he taught Elvish to some of Hollywood’s biggest stars. I’m honoured. Once upon a time even the identity of the actors was shrouded in secrecy, and amongst the million-or-so Lord of the Rings fans around the world, there are those who would fight Sauron to get their paws on the original script.
Scribbled in the margin are notes on pronunciation, additional speeches in Elvish, and details of linguistic mistakes for every take. Jack uprooted to New Zealand for the shoot, dedicating 18 months to the trilogy, instead of a usual four weeks per film, and for the actors the language training required an extra six weeks’ work. Jack and assistant coach Róis’n Carty sat with the actors in make up every day, talking them through a series of facial exercises and sounds designed to prepare their muscles for the invented language dialogues. Picture the dressing-room scene: John Rhys-Davies (Gimli) booming orders in Dwarvish, Elijah Wood (Frodo) muttering strange Elvish sounds and the pixie features of Liv Tyler (Arwen) contorted in a facial work-out.
Released in December, The Fellowship of the Ring tells the first third of Frodo Baggins’s epic journey through Middle Earth to protect the one ring of power from the darklord (sic) Sauron. Pursued by undead Ringwratihs Frodo leaves the cosy world of the Shire for a terrifying world of wizards, Trolls, Balrogs and Dwarves. In the Mines of Moria, Frodo and Aragorn are left stranded over a bottomless abyss when a flight of stone steps collapses beneath them, escaping only to find themselves on a crumbling bridge chased by a fiery harbinger of doom. The action is paced to heart-stopping perfection and the special effects are spectacular as the camera sweeps vertiginously over the labyrinthine tower of Mordor where Orc workers manufacture evil for their dark master.
“It’s exciting because there are all these wonderful creatures who have languages of their own,” says Jack. “Languages are an important part of the story.” There was never any question that Tolkein’s languages would appear in the films despite the hug commitment involved. They were ‘the foundation’ of Tolkein’s work and in The Lord of the Rings he tried to recreate a world of myths and culture which he believed England had lost. As thick as the average novella, Tokein’s appendices carefully record the grammatical rules and accents of languages like Khûzdul, Rohirric and Black Speech in minute detail. “Tolkein’s notes on pronunciation are so extensive it felt like he was actually encouraging us to make the movie!” says Jack. These languages were made to be spoken.
When it came to the Elvish tongues of Sindarin and Quenya, Tolkein created legitimate languages with their own etymologies and structures, so it was possible to include plausible dialogues that did not appear in the book. Jackson enlisted the help of Elvish expert David Salo to find accurate translations. “Often when we were working on set someone would say ‘why don’t we do this bit in Elvish?’ Off went the email (sic) to Salo, who’d send back a translated version. The actors would do it on set in Elvish that same afternoon,” explains Jack.
The film opens with Cate Banchett speaking in Elvish. The languorous Sindarin lilt sounds a lot like Welsh. “You have to hold on to each syllable in Sindarin, like you do in Welsh. So if there are two ‘m’s you hand on to the ‘mmm’ sound,” says Jack. “Elvish is a very poetic language.” In The Fellowship of the Ring the biggest chunk of Sindarin is spoken between lovers. When Arwen and Aragorn meet in the rural paradise of Rivendell they speak in dulcet Elvish tones – a conversation unintelligible to the audience (but for the addition of subtitles) and all the more romantic for it.
The poetic nature of Elvish created its own problems, making it difficult for the actors to find the appropriate rhythm of speech. “It’s very hard to know how to act something if you don’t know exactly what it means, so we had to find out the direct translation, as well as the poetic translation,” explains Jack.
But the biggest problem was that the entire crew pronounced many of the names incorrectly and the actors got used to the incorrect pronunciation. “It got so bad they started saying things wrong on set. For example, there are creatures called mumakil and the singular form is mumak, but people were saying ‘there’s a mumakil over there’ and the actors got really confused.” With thousands of die-hard fans and countless websites dedicated to The Lord of the Rings and its languages, it was important to get the details right. Because the books is so well known everybody has their own idea of how names and words should be said, and not all of them have taken the trouble to study Tolkein’s notes. “Some people were bound to be disappointed with the way things were pronounced in the film, but we were determined that their disappointment would be with Tolkein and not with us,” says Jack.
Jack and Carty often worked a six-day week, travelling between locations on their day off. Towards the end of the shoot there were up to six units shooting dialogues simultaneously and the coaches dashed manically from scene to scene to pick up any linguistic mistakes and note down deviations from the original script. Because so much of the trilogy was filmed outside most of the dialogue was revoiced in the studio at the end of the shoot, and Jack’s main concern was that the lip movements were correct so there could be continuity at the dubbing stage. The details of every take had to be recorded on the scripts.
It was a mammoth job, but well worth the effort. In the United States the film took £32m in its first weekend and in Britain it had the second most successful opening weekend in cinema history, just behind Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. By far the most popular film over Christmas, it has been nominated for two Golden Globes, and praised almost unanimously by the critics.
With such enormous success, Jack can’t help feeling some ghostly intervention has been going on. “Some very spooky things happened,” he says. On one occasion Orlando Bloom fluffed his line, only to discover later that there was a mistake in the script and he had inadvertently used the correct word. “You have to wonder where Orlando got the right word from,” says Jack. The whole ‘Hand of Tolkein’ theory sounds somewhat unlikely. Tokein famously hated Hollywood. When he received a film proposal in 1958 he condemned the script for deviating from the original book and only sold the film rights to pay off a bad debt. But Jack is convinced. “I like to think that Tokein is looking down at us from above approvingly. In fact, I’m certain of it.”
Miscellanea text by Miranda Moore. Pages 21-22
From The Linguist – the magazine of the Institute of Linguists, London, UK February-March 200 (Volume 41, 1)
