New Zealand and Peter Jackson

[Music] Hello and welcome to a new season of Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author and screenwriter, but also I run the centre with its creative writing classes and all sorts of other things we get up to. And today I'm joined by my frequent podcast partner, Jacob Rennaker, who is over the other side of the pond. I think you sit in, is it Seattle? Seattle, correct. Yeah. And Jacob, as if you've listened before, you'll know that Jacob is not only very expert on Tolkien, but he also works for Ravensburger, who creates some of those wonderful games, which no doubt you've seen and maybe even been given this back in last Christmas. So Jacob, welcome. Now, since we last spoke, I've been away in New Zealand on a fantastic, quite a long trip around both North and South Ireland. So for the very first podcast episode, I thought it would be quite good to think about New Zealand specifically and Peter Jackson and what's been happening there since, well, basically the turn of the millennium and its relationship with Tolkien, because I found the whole experience of being there absolutely fascinating, really, really fascinating. So have you got any experience of New Zealand, or is yours all through having watched the films? Mine's all through films, strictly films and special features from Lord of the Rings Extended Edition. So I haven't yet, that's on my pilgrimage site, but I haven't quite made it there. So I'm really interested to hear more about your experience there and what you found both while you were there, how it's influenced how you think the world views Middle Earth, and while you were there you saw this film series impacting New Zealand in general. Yeah, I think that's probably the first place to start with it because it's very clear, even now. So when was the filming? The filming for the very first set of films was 1999 to 2000, 2001. It's that kind of era. So we're talking almost 25 years ago now. And what is fascinating is to see how through a series of white episodes it's a mix of being really determined to make this, and some luck in getting funding in Hollywood, and all sorts of little elements that came into being. Peter Jackson went from being this kind of indie, slightly offbeat filmmaker of these kind of horror pieces and offbeat indie films to being a major director. So if you now go to Hollywood Boulevard, his star is pretty much outside the Oscar venue, the Dolby Theatre. So he's gone from obscurity to being central. And in the sort of slipstream of the Peter Jackson phenomenon, he's built a whole Hollywood in New Zealand. In fact, I think there's a sign in Wellington where his base, Wellywood or something, they know this. So it's not just that he's built a sort of film studio there in an old paint factory in other places, right on top of the airport there. He's also a major investor in Weta Workshop. And Weta Workshop itself is now one of the two leading special effects places. There's them and Industrial Light and Magic, which is George Lucas. I mean, there are lots of other places around the world that do this, but these are two really big players. So they're working on Avatar, they've done King Kong. I mean, they've just done lots and lots and lots of films since. And it's big. It's impressive being digital. It doesn't matter where you are in a sense, as long as you've got enough computers and talented people. So the industry is built pretty much on Peter Jackson. And the other sort of New Zealander who people know as a director is Taiko Waititi. Waititi? Have I got that right? But he doesn't have the same foothold there. I don't see him putting back into an industry yet. Maybe he's got plans. So it is very much hanging around Peter Jackson. And everywhere we went, there was people talking about him owning land, what he does in employment, some good, some bad. So it's fascinating to find a country so dominated by one name. And that one name was made by a set of films from this obscure professor. So it's quite a phenomenon, really. I read a very good book as well, which I bought at Hobbiton, by Ian Nathan called The Making of Middle Earth, which for all of you really keenies out there, I do recommend. It's quite funny because I was reading this book and how it came to be funded by Bob Shea at New Line. There's a bit of less desirable funders in the picture before. But it ends up with New Line. And then when I went on to do some meetings in Hollywood, LA, I met Bob Shea's, I think he's his nephew, who I'm working on a project with. So that was quite fun. It's not such a big world, the film world, when it gets down to it. So, yeah, it was fascinating to see how dominant Peter Jackson is, even now, 25 years on. So, yeah, if you were going to go to New Zealand, have you got any sort of, on your must-see list of things to go to? Yeah, that's hard. Yeah, having watched it. So I know that one of the reasons why New Zealand made for such a great filming location is the incredible diversity of the landscape. So you can, within an hour and a half flight, you can get to snowy mountains and forests, rolling hillsides, sparse terrain. The only thing I don't have is a desert. So any of those places, I would be tickled. I mean, Hobbiton is picturesque. And so that, of course, would be fun for more of a -- if on that particular travel day I was looking to relax a little bit more and slow my pace, I think that would be great. If I was in a frenetic mood, I would perhaps want to be a little more adventurous and go hiking the path of Karadjrad. Yeah, that is quite -- that's that hike. Yeah. No, I mean, the funny thing is that even though I sort of think I'm fairly -- I did geography at school and I sort of knew a map vaguely of New Zealand and I'd watched the making of, I hadn't really grasped until I went there exactly how it all works. So if you're planning your -- Yeah, tell us. If you're planning your pilgrimage, the two islands, the South Island is sort of a rounder and fatter island. It's further south, so it's colder, and that's where the dramatic Alp-type scenery is. Not that the North Island doesn't have mountains, but it's the ones you're thinking of in the flypast. But it's also very, very sparsely populated. So it's real wilderness. You can go to places where there are no farms, there's no fences, there's no sign of people for miles and miles and miles and miles. It's quite a phenomenon. So if the population is something like -- don't quote me on this, but it's something like 5 million, only a million of those live in the South Island. The North Island, which is kind of longer and thinner, a bit like a diamond shape very roughly, with Wellington down the bottom and Auckland up the top has everybody else, and a lot of those people are in either Auckland, which is the biggest city, and Wellington. So it reminded me a bit actually of Iceland. Iceland has a similar thing, except east to west, where lots of people live around Reykjavik, and the rest of the country is fairly empty. So it had that feel to it, and no wonder both places are used for fantasy films, because they have so many places you can set up a camera and do a 360 pan without seeing anything else. So if you're actually planning to do your Lord of the Rings tour, we did it an unconventional way. Most people start up in Auckland and make their way down to Queenstown. I actually did it the other way around. Why not? So I would say my top five places to go would be, in order of visiting them, this is. I would go to the lakes around Lake Tekapo, which is quite near Christchurch. So you're on the South Island. And Lake Tekapo and the lake next door to it, whose name escapes me just now, are the lake--there you see them in the Hobbit for Lake Town. It's that sort of amazing, really, really blue, wonderful lake, very beautiful, also a great place to stargaze. Then going down, I'd go to Queenstown, which is like number one. Queenstown is almost everything. It's almost everything. The Remarkable Mountains, there's a range called the Remarkables, are used again and again. The barrier mountains from Mordor, they pop up loads of times. They're used for part of the retreat where they go up into the hills in Rohan and they get the sword. I'm just trying to remember what that place is, near the Paths of the Dead. And then, of course, up near Queenstown, if you go along the lake to a place called Glenorchy, this is a couple of hours' drive, right up towards the foot of the mountains, there you see Caradhras, there you see Zirak Ziggul, where Gandalf fought the Balrog, there you see Beorn's house. I mean, it was multipurpose. Bits of Lothlorien. It's absolutely beautiful. I've got it as my desktop saver because it's such a beautiful place. So I highly recommend Queenstown. I mean, there are other places around there. Deer Heights, Deer Park Heights, which is right on the edge of the town. I mean, you can see the town from there. That was used again and again for where the Wargs attacked and where the people are escaping to Helm's Deep, wending their way through landscape. There's some of those big shots all around there. So Queenstown, you're spoilt for choice. Oh, it's also got the Argonath. You know, I could go on. Now, were you doing a kind of self-guided tour around? Mainly, but we did do a Lord of the Rings Safari that day and run by people there who actually do that. And all of their jeeps have like Arwen or Saruman as their number plates. And I would say that I totally loved the morning. This was New Year's Day. It was the best New Year's Day our family have ever had, where we went off and dressed up and ran at each other with swords. Good family bonding stuff with a great guy called Justin, who when he found out I knew about Tolkien, got really into us as a family, and he just was milking me for information about Tolkien. My family would get like, "Shut up, Mum. I want to talk to you." Yes. But he was really, really good. The afternoon was less fun because we lost Justin and it was... I preferred the morning. So if I was going to do a half-day tour from Queenstown, I'd definitely go to Glenorchy rather than to Arrowtown, which is what we did in the afternoon. Anyway, so that's probably a bit too minutiae for people, but you never know. You might be listening to this thinking, "I've got half a day. Where should I go? That's where to go. I'm going to go up to Paradise. It's literally called Paradise." So that's the second place I'd go. And then the other places are on the North Island. So Wellington is spot number three. Wellington has Weta Workshop, where you can do a tour of the special effects studio. It's a small tour. It's not anything on the scale of a studio tour in LA or even the Harry Potter tour in London, but it's an interesting tour. It's like the working... Where it all comes from. And just by there in Wellington, you can go up and see the places where they did some of the early filming in Victoria Park. So the very first shots of Lord of the Rings, where they're leaving the Shire, were filmed just in the backyard of Weta Workshop. It makes you realise just how local everything was. And then I would... So that's number... We've got to number three, haven't we? Three, right. Number four, I'd actually... So this is where it gets tricky, because I know what number five is. There's quite a few places I'd love to go, but I think number four might be Rivendell, which is quite close to Wellington. But I just thought the combination of the River Valley and the woods, which were sort of a beautiful, fresh green, were very atmospheric. It really felt a beautiful... I mean, you can see why they chose it for Rivendell, because, of course, Rivendell is that place we all want to go. And I love that very much. And then the absolute top, joint top with Queenstown is Hobbiton. Hobbiton was so much better than I expected. I mean, just 100% better. I had gone thinking it would be a... ...Urzak's kind of Disney experience. I kind of half feared they might have people walking around as hobbits or something. But no, it was really, really well done. They... You meet outside the village, outside Hobbiton, and they take you through in well-timed coach loads. So you never feel bunched up or crowded. I was there on a beautiful hot day, and it looked amazing. They have a team of gardeners who keep it all running beautifully, and they've developed it so that it's not just front doors in a hillside. Since December, they've opened up a Hobbit hole. So that was never a Peter Jackson location, because the inside places are all built in studios. They've actually replicated their own version of a Hobbit hole, and it's huge. It's as big as my house on one floor. It's got a living room, a bedroom, a bathroom, a dining room, a kitchen, a study. I mean, it's just really, really wonderful. And you can touch everything. You can sit on the beds. You can look at the little props they've made, because it is all props. It's nothing is valuable in a sort of... It's been in a movie sense, but it was wonderful. And then you finish at the Green Dragon, which brews its own beer and cider and non-alcoholic drinks, and that was really nice, really decent beer. So that whole experience was far better. I live in a village which is a bit like a kind of Hobbiton village. We have thatched houses and thatched walls, and I guess we're all a bit Hobbity with our gardens. And I was going thinking I was going to be a bit kind of, "Oh, well, you know, I should have stayed at home." But actually I thought, "No, no, no. This is really well done and highly recommended." So if there's just one thing that you do in New Zealand involving Lord of the Rings, do go to Hobbiton. It's well worth it. It really is. Excellent. Well, that sounds great. I'm really interested to hear maybe what struck you when you were looking at some of those different locations that you knew so well from the film. What sort of additional insight, dealing, perspective did you get when you were at, say, like you talked about Lothlorien in particular and Hobbiton, so some of these places, what were their meaningful, I don't want to say like differences, or things that in your imagination are from where we saw it through the camera. What was different from that experience versus actually being there on the ground that struck you? I mean, I don't know what you think about the difference between the first trilogy and the second trilogy, so Lord of the Rings versus The Hobbit. It really brought to mind how important it is to actually go into locations. So, for example, in Rivendell, a lot of it in the studio doesn't work as well for me as the bits when they're outside. And even with the best kind of lighting, you still get that sense of expansiveness and like a breath of fresh air when it is actually in the real place and they're standing in a location. So obviously, there's no longer any of this. The sets have gone, you know, because it's a natural beauty spot. But you can sort of put them back in in your mind and see how they pieced it together. And it made me think that one of my problems with The Hobbit, I mean, there's several things with The Hobbit. One was the very overextended storytelling, which is probably its fatal flaw. But there was also the punched up colours because of the particular frame rate that was used, which also made it feel a bit unreal. Having said that, colours in New Zealand do sometimes feel unreal because they're so... I mean, I've printed them off and put them on the wall. I thought, hang on, that looks like I put a filter on them. But no, they do come out like that. But also the use of a lot of computer generated scenery and interiors and characters running through like a sort of video game style. And it made me just think, oh, it's so much better doing it old style where somebody is actually in a muddy field or in a local park. I just thought that that approach the first time around, I know it was hard, hard for the actors, unreliable weather. You can see why people take these choices, but it did make it feel so much more authentic to the book because the book is all about moving through a landscape and the difficulties of walking, the sore feet, the roots poking you in the back, all those things, which make it feel a very grounded fantasy. So yeah, going there made me think, oh yeah, they got it right the first time around, didn't they? I think that was my feeling. That's great. Yeah. The difference between filming on location and filming in front of a green screen, you're right. There's a lot of different factors that come into play. And certainly with fantasy films in particular is oftentimes dependent upon spectacle, computer generated images. So it's more convenient sometimes, but certainly there's a different feel. And I know that since the Peter Jackson film, Lord of the Rings there, that more films have filmed in New Zealand, ones that would be perhaps relevant to this audience. The first two Chronicles of Narnia films were filmed in New Zealand as were the first two Avatar films. So when they did, although Avatar does heavily, heavily in CGI, Chronicles of Narnia, not so much, right. But utilizing that landscape for a kind of a more fantastic heightened sense of reality. There's something, yes, yes, you can create that digitally, but you're right. There just seems to be kind of a different feel, just as it seems to be a different feel when you have practical puppets that you're working with that you're acting alongside and not just somebody holding a tennis ball, which is where the Andy Serkis and in that book that you mentioned, it talks about what his process and how transformative that was for the actors to actually have him there in the scene and not just have, not just tell the actors, look in this general direction, this person's going to be talking to you, but actually having the person there to interact with that, that is tremendously helpful. As a person, as a human being who's conditioned to respond to physical environment and stimuli like that, you can't help but lose something when you're filming and just having to just imagine it versus feeling, like you said, kind of like feeling the sun, feeling the wind and being there with your feet on firm ground and actual trees and rocks and mountains around you. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to take it away from the very clever people who build sets and the people who do the digital effects. I mean, they do an amazing job. And I imagine there are quite a few things I don't notice, which I think are real and actually were never there because they've got so good. But I think in terms of performance, that feeling of water being wet and sun being hot, it just brings something else out, I think, in performance. Anyway, so I think one of the other things which I wanted to ask you about is, do you think actually such a strong association between New Zealand and Middle Earth is a good thing for readers of Tolkien? Because in a way it skewed our... Whereas before we all had our own private little imaginations about what Middle Earth was like. Unless you've... I think it's almost impossible to avoid any imagery from films now. But almost all of us now are seeing it through a New Zealand lens. Do you think that's a bad thing or a good thing? Well, it's an interesting question because I know with Rings of Power, they started filming in New Zealand because of that culturally embedded tie between Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, and New Zealand. But then they moved filming to the UK and that there was an uproar among certain loud segments of Lord of the Rings fans on how could you possibly move it from New Zealand and it's the one true and living embodiment of Middle Earth. So I think there's certainly people who would want that. Like you said, it's impossible to get around that imagery. If you're coming to Tolkien through the films first, then of course that's going to color how you imagine the words themselves of the book. But even vice versa, having read the books first, it's still hard to sometimes disentangle your purely self-generated imagery, which is much like what AI is doing. When you're reading a book and you're putting images in your mind, you're just scraping all of your previous memories from films, from places you've been, and you're creating some sort of imaginary composite in your own mind for what this book would look like in your mind's eye. So it's hard if you're going back and revisiting that, it's hard to keep that original, pristine, self-amalgamated image of what this looked like with what you've seen on the big screen because it's so visually powerful and arresting, especially if you saw it on the big screen it's even more probably imprinted on your retinas and imagination because of the scope and scale that you saw it at. So it's hard to disentangle those. So I think it's yet inevitable that there will be a connection there. But the scope and the audience, right? Just the sheer number of people that saw those films versus Rings of Power, which there's a significantly fewer audience base. And so in them moving their filming to the UK, I don't know that it'll have as big of a cultural impact in how we view Middle Earth. And especially, there's really a lot of heavy reliance on CGI, especially when you're looking at different cities, Numenor in particular, right? So you have the striking visuals that are entirely CGI because unfortunately we don't have large scale settings. We don't have base in Atlantis anywhere. Right, right, exactly. So yeah, so it's a good question. So is that a good thing that skews our imagination or our knowledge of Toki and how we view it? I imagine, as we're reading the books, it's a personal individualized experience. Even if you've seen the films, it's hard not to, or even Rings of Power, it's hard not to use those images to fill your own imagination, which is useful. I think any more grist for the mill of your imagination is a good thing. And then it's just, I guess, yeah, it's inevitable at this point, just because of the culturally, how far those images kind of seep. So I'd be interested to see how, if as they're producing additional Lord of the Rings films, how much the imagery that they use there and their filming locations play into the larger kind of cultural imagination of Tolkien, which has evolved over the past 40 plus years. So I'd be very interested to see how it continues to evolve with additional films, including animated Tolkien films. Well, that's true. I mean, of course we should also put in this space, the huge influence that John Howard and Alan Lee had on the, Alan Lee, is that the right? Yeah. Just hang on a moment. I think, is that the right name? Had on the way it was then interpreted. So it's come, it's as though they drew it, and then New Zealand found it on in the, in the, and you know, it's that kind of combination. So it did start off as a painterly approach. And of course, anybody who's bought Tolkien books or calendars over the years will know there are other artists available who do a different version of, so there are other ways of imagining Middle Earth that can be sort of laid upon our imaginations as well. It's hard to get away from it though. I find it easier to kick to the curb character faces of some of the characters because the Hobbits weren't cast as they are in the book. You know, Frodo's too young. Sam's too American, frankly. You know, his sensibility isn't quite, you know, I can quite easily make him into something else in my head because I already had quite a firm view. Harder with Gollum, because Gollum seemed a more spot on performance, though I am quite fond of the BBC audio drama version as well. Yeah. So, but the landscapes are tricky and I'd actually really welcome in my lifetime, it sounds a bit dramatic, I would welcome a different place to stand in for Middle Earth just so that we can break the, I don't, I mean, it'd be really nice to see somebody else interpret the books in a new way, finding just so that we can sort of have more than one version of this in our head. A bit like you don't want just one Hamlet performance or one with Summer Night's Dream. It's fun to see it set one place and then another place. And one of the things that I have always, obvious easy gains for me would be to actually take seriously that these are places where people live. So, Edoras, though it's an amazing location, it doesn't seem to be, it's very, very isolated and there's not much sense of a lived landscape around it. And that's even so true of Minas Tirith, which we know from the book has a wall around it and farms. It's much more like the Battle of Waterloo happening on an existing series of farms. So you could actually go more historic and actually have traces of people in the landscape more rather than these vast plains, which I know are easier to animate. They haven't got pesky things in the way, but that's not how it's described in the books. Also, I think the other thing I would do, which is taken from living in a landscape, which has lots and lots of layers of history in it. When they do put history in the landscape there, it's very much, oh, here's a bit of architecture that's been left behind. But actually in the book, you're dealing with old roads and you get the old faults, but you've got the barrows. And I live near some old Roman roads, which are sort of hidden under the grass, but there is a discernible road there. So you could quite easily think again, I think it's doing the more historic version as opposed to the fantasy version. That'd be fun to see. And for me, that would be a fresh take, more believable, and it perhaps could help give me another version to think about. Just set up in Scotland or the Isle of Skye, got some nice pointy mountains up there. I think Tolkien himself was partly inspired by a visit to the Alps. So you could actually have some of the Alpine mountains as your amazing landscapes. That's not so very far away. What about in America? You've got a lot of stuff you could be set. Yeah. It's a big country. I think one of the landscapes that has the greatest diversity, Utah is great for incredibly high mountains, arid deserts, forest spaces. So there's a reason why a lot of films are set there. And again, it depends on the type of film, but for Lord of the Rings in particular, the more harsh, dramatic imagery does work well. So there, forests and whatnot, if you're in the Eastern United States, Atlanta, Georgia, is another popular filming location for a lot of shows where there's emphasis on woods. That's good. And just north of the United States, just north of Seattle, Vancouver is another popular... Oh, pop into Canada. Yes. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's again, because like the woods, the scenery a little less populated, so it's easier to film there. So all of those locations have places where you can film without running into loads of people and having to remove them digitally. But it does seem, in thinking about adaptations that for Hollywood films, for big, big budget films, that the more dramatic the landscape, the better, right? The more arresting the visuals, whereas where you're looking at the kind of like long form television or limited series, you don't need to have as much dramatic environment because there's more emphasis on individual characters and you can spread out with more characters. So it seems like if you're looking at the farmland that's surrounding Minnesota, that it'd be easier if you're to do kind of like a limited series or turn a lot of things into televisions, into a series instead of films, that you could spend more time on the ground and looking at some of those slower scenes, landscapes that aren't as visually jarring, arresting, or particularly memorable, but there is something tonally that happens when you slow down and can focus on character interactions in a different setting like that. So yeah, I think it would be fun. I agree with you. That'd be fun to see someone else do a different take on the Lord of the Rings, where it is placed visually. There's certain elements in the book itself that certainly deserve to be highlighted there that could help shape how we view the story and what the characters are experiencing. That's a very good rationale actually, because in a way I feel the film's such a good version that it's very hard to go into competition with them. Whereas the rationale of having a long-form TV series where you're not needing to do your sort of huge David Lean, you know, sweeping landscapes. You would put them in, but you don't need to have them every three minutes or whatever the hit rate is. I don't know. It's probably a bit more than that. Ten minutes. Okay, well that's very helpful. Thanks. That's a really good idea. And we are both available. [laughter] To organize the locations for the next version of this between us. I'm sure we can come up with a good list. Right. We're going to finish on our top fantasy tip. So, Jacob, where would you say is in your backyard? And I'm allowing you the whole of the United States as your backyard. Oh, wow. That's quite generous. Where's the place you've gone and thought, wow, this feels so much like something I've read in Tolkien? Yeah, I think it would actually be, again, in the United States, it's actually in the Pacific Northwest of Seattle area, which is the Olympic Peninsula. It's an actual natural rainforest in North America. So, just giant trees, just a really ancient feel to it. So, parts of it, Fanghorn Forest, even parts Lothlorien-esque, but just in terms of the natural green, just the hum of living natural world is certainly present there. And close runner up, the Redwood Forest in California, where they have those Redwoods, massive. So, those in terms of spectacle and scale, just massive, ancient trees, different feel. And then, of course, there's the Redwood Forest in the North West, which is a little bit more, I think, more of a desert-like feel to it. And then, of course, the Redwood Forest in the North West, which is a little bit more, I think, more of a desert-like feel to it. And then, of course, the Redwood Forest in the North West, which is a little bit more, I'm not going to spoil my New Zealand tips, but actually in my own backyard, and literally in my backyard where I walk my dog every day, is the Downs. That's what's missing in New Zealand, because the Downs are a huge part of the Fellowship of the Ring. So, you've got fog on the Downs, the barrow, white and so on. And even actually, Rohan is quite like the Downs. So, if you're in your backyard, where you go if you were Tolkien living in Oxford, you can drive out to see the Downs. And what the Downs are, are rolling green hills. And on top of the hill is an ancient track called the Ridgeway, which was an old droving road. And there are lots of Roman forts and, well, an old temple, in fact, and burial mounds and things still left in the landscape. So, even though we're in a densely populated part of the world, you can still find views where you don't see hardly anything. In fact, just at the back of my village where I live now, they filmed the battle scenes for Napoleon, the recent film, because you could do this, point a camera and run horses across the fields without there being anything in the shot. And I'm only not that far from London. So, it's one of those little pockets of landscapes. So, I'd suggest going to the Downs. Not spectacular, but very Tolkien-esque, very atmospheric. Right, well, thank you very much, Jacob. And thank you for talking to me about Peter Jackson and Middle-earth and many other locations scouting between us as well. Thank you. Thanks for listening to Mythmakers Podcast. Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, in-person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe, wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide.