Inauspicious beginning leads to Rings partnership

By MIKE HOULAHAN

Richard Taylor first met Peter Jackson for less than a minute on the set of a commercial for an insurance company.

Hardly an auspicious place for the beginning of a partnership which has seen Taylor win an Oscar and Jackson create film history as the pair collaborated on bringing JRR Tolkien's fantasy classic The Lord Of The Rings to the big screen.

Some time after that passing handshake Taylor took a call from the curious visitor asking him if he wanted to work on a movie with him.

From that call began an enduring partnership which has seen Taylor, his partner Tania Rodger, Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh work together on three feature films, the mockumentary Forgotten Silver, and now the three Lord Of The Rings films.

"We hit it off and we have been good friends ever since...we could never have imagined where it has taken us and we have been truly blessed," Taylor told NZPA.

"The same guy who is now in charge of huge forces was using that same tenacity and passion and enthusiasm back then. He was driving smaller forces, he had fewer resources, but the same guy is still there."

The special effects in Return Of The King -- which has its world premiere in Taylor and Jackson's hometown of Wellington tomorrow -- are astonishing, ranging from the huge massed battle outside the city of Minas Tirith, to Sam and Frodo's much smaller but equally as captivating struggle with the fearsome spider Shelob.

Jackson's ability to switch focus from the grandiose stage to a smallscale conflict without missing a beat makes both scenes work effortlessly, Taylor says.

"He can build the epic like very few people can, but in the massive scope and the massive world that is Middle Earth, he can draw you back down very firmly to the intimate, to characters you have grown to know and love, to the stories you so desperately want to see fulfilled."

Shelob was a digital character. Taylor says he originally tried building animatronic sections of the giant spider -- just as he had done in creating the tree creatures the Ents -- but quickly discarded the idea as impractical given the frenetic actions they wanted her to perform.

"Shelob was a very difficult design job because we wanted her to be totally real, something that would scare Peter -- being the arachnaphobe that he is -- but still having a very complex, matriachal feel to her.

"We were still designing Shelob, easily well into the final year of production, to get the final nuances of what Peter saw in her as a character."

Taylor says while he remains proud of the major battle scenes in the first two films, he's happy to call Pelennor Fields the highlight of the three major battle sequences created for The Lord Of The Rings.

"Pelennor Fields will possibly go down as one of the great battle scenes in film making. It was incredibly difficult to achieve," Taylor says.

"Large sections of it, such as the cavalry charge, were achieved largely as a physical piece of film making, on location in Twizel, utilising every possible horseperson who could be found in the district and in the surrounding area.

"Being on set and experiencing that charge was as awe-inspiring as seeing it in the movie. It was incredible and very, very exciting. Pelennor Fields is an amazing and elaborate combination of techniques and trickery, and Weta Digital has ultimately stitched all of those elements together. In some cases they have created it completely from scratch: there are many shots in Pelennor Fields where there isn't a single real item in the shot."

Despite all the wondrous effects in the Return Of The King, Taylor still rates bringing the character of Gollum to the screen as the biggest technical achievement across the whole trilogy.

"Unlike any digital characters which have gone before him, he has transcended the need for the audience to analyse him as a technical achievement.

"We no longer sit there thinking 'Wow, that's a really clever piece of digital work' as we may have with other creations, and just accept him as an actor alongside Sean Astin and Elijah Wood."

- NZPA


* Return Of The King opens in New Zealand on Dec. 18.

Herald Feature: Lord of the Rings