The most challenging aspect of working on The Lord of the Rings
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Transcript
Student:
What was the hardest thing you found about doing Lord of the Rings, like, what was the most challenging aspect?
Richard:
People often ask me that question, and it would be, people naturally expect I'm gonna say, it was creating the Uruk'hai or bringing the elves to screen or … What was the hardest thing was finding the number of people in New Zealand that had the skills necessary to make a movie of this scale.
At the Weta workshop alone (this is excluding the props department, the construction department, the wardrobe department and all the other departments) we had 148 people. Of that 148 people, only 28 people had ever worked on a film or TV show before. So the other 120 people had to be found from throughout New Zealand from schools just like your own, er and trained up.
These swords, for instance, these have been made by a guy that was a computer programmer once and he just decided one day that he wanted to teach himself how to make swords.
This piece of armour has been made by a guy that was just doing it as a hobby in a shed in Palmerston North and he had taught himself this craft.
So, it was an incredible undertaking to go throughout New Zealand and find people in the most rural backblocks of New Zealand. About 80 percent of our workshop came from rural upbringings and they brought this incredible craft to our workshop.
It didn't matter that they'd never worked in film before. All that mattered was that they had the ability to make things with their hands and that was really the trickiest thing. But ultimately, as the film shows today, we were thankfully successful. In all we built 48 thousand separate things at Weta, by those group of people that joined us and had a passion to go on that journey.