A JOURNEY BACK TO MIDDLE-EARTH
Its massive budget makes ‘The Rings of Power’ bigger and grander than anything seen on TV screens before as the epic saga of the prequel of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is unleashed
It began with money; lots of it. In 2017 Amazon paid a whopping $250m (about R4.2bn) for the TV rights to JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, committing to a five-season series that at $1bn would make it the most expensive show ever made. In 2018 it was announced that showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay had been hired to develop their story, set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, a few thousand years before the events related by Tolkien in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, for Amazon’s Prime Video platform.
Now, after four years and a “ginormous” production that involved thousands of cast and crew working in New Zealand during the pandemic, the first two episodes of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power have arrived.
They land in the long shadow of what is perhaps the most influential, well-known and bestselling literary fantasy creation in history; the “one adaptation to rule them all” trilogy of multi-Oscar-winning, $2bngrossing film adaptations directed by Peter Jackson in the early 2000s and his subsequent trilogy of Hobbit adaptations; and, of course, the global phenomenon that’s been HBO’s Game of Thrones series, which that network is betting big on keeping alive with’its It s been new 85 spin-off years since readers were Dragon.
House of the introduced to Middle-earth in The Hobbit — and it’s calling us back again. The stakes are higher than ever now with nitpicking Tolkien loyalists already over-analysing the minutiae of teasers and trailers that have released online, finding fault in the “too-modern” embrace of diversity of the show’s casting.
They’re ready to fight from their keyboards with the ferocity of Aragorn at the Battle of Helm’s Deep to defend their interpretations of the literary creations of their South Africa-born hero, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
Off to Middle-earth
Payne and McKay grew up together outside Washington DC where they met on the debate team at their high school and then began writing and directing original plays. Later they moved on to the world of film, where they’ve worked on projects ranging from producer JJ Abrams’s Star Trek Beyond to Walt Disney Studios’ Jungle Cruise.
When the pair heard that Amazon had acquired the rights and were working with the Tolkien estate, McKay says: “We raised our hands as often, as loudly as we could because we knew there was this terrific story to be told in the books. When you think about the breadth and depth of the mythology Tolkien created, it’s vast and bottomless — it’s the Mariana Trench of ideas.”
As Payne points out: “Tolkien talked about this feeling that even though he was the author of these works he always felt he was discovering a thing that already existed. For us it was even more so. We had clues left behind — like when you find dinosaur bones in the soil and put them together. There’ sa structure that feels organic and alive. We tried to find what that is.”
What they settled on — and what Amazon bought into — was the idea of a series that would not attempt to readapt Tolkien’s published and already adapted Middle-earth books. They would instead focus on a new on-screen vision of the earlier history of Middle-earth’s fabled “Second Age”, alluded to in Tolkien’s work and appendices to the books, dealing with the period before and leading up to the forging of the rings of power that provide the expositional opening of Jackson’s trilogy.
For Payne, it’s an idea that allows them to explore a new set of questions: “What were these cultures like before the rings and what might have been happening in them that would make the rings an attractive offer?
Also, what problems were the rings solving and what tendencies and characteristics within the races of Middle-earth did the rings exacerbate or help or bring out?”
He’s keen to let Jackson fans know that he and McKay are enormous admirers. “That’s how we were introduced to Tolkien. From the start, one of our goals was to not let the production feel like a nostalgia play where the only reason to watch is to feel something you’ve enjoyed before.
“We didn’t want to do a prequel where the audience had to know what was coming to enjoy what they were seeing. We said it had to be a story that stands on its own and deserves to be told in its own right. So we tried to find things that were deep, compelling and dramatic so that if you’d never seen the films, read the books or put on a ring, you’d still get sucked into the drama and emotions of the story and, hopefully, fall in love with Middle-earth and then go and see everything else.”
For producer Ron Ames, whose previous credits include everything from Star Trek, to Avengers and Avatar, and whose job on the series included producing the visual effects, post-production, sound, music, the technical colour pipeline, the final digital intermediate mix and getting it all onto platform and on air, the show provided his biggest challenge to date.
“It was”, he says, “eight hours of feature quality production and thousands of visual effects and eight hours of orchestrated music. It was huge! That’s what I’m most proud of. We had more than 9,000 visual effects; we had thousands of assets tracked, it was humungous.”
He hopes people will recognise that it’s as true to Tolkien as they could be. “We had complete respect for the work done before
and I think people will feel they’ve been to Middle-earth. What Tolkien did with his writing we hoped to do with our show, which is to show how our human beings and creatures are interconnected.”
Director Wayne Chip, who helmed four of the eight episodes of the first season, is also a Tolkien fan who grew up in Oxford, where the author spent much of his life. He says the experience of working on the show was as clichéd as it may sound: “A dream come true. There were many moments when I had to pinch myself and take a moment to smile and take it all in.”
He believes there’s no way to translate Tolkien to screen perfectly. “It’s impossible and one shouldn’t even try.”
Chip does, however, think he’s managed to capture something of the spirit of Tolkien’s writing on-screen and that the show “will be a companion piece to everything else related to the trilogy that exists and will exist in the future”.
With season two already in production in a new location in the UK, executive producer Lindsey Weber says she and the team know a lot about what’s going to happen in the second season. She says it’s fun to look back at season one and say: “That thing we set up here, the audience is really going to be surprised when it comes back around this other way.”
McKay hopes audiences will see the mythology as having a lot of complexity. “It has such richness to it, we knew we needed a larger cast. We wanted to tell a story that’s sprawling with the pace and adventure you’d get in a big feature but which also takes its time in places and lets you sink in with the characters to learn more about them and their worlds. We dug a lot deeper into those books to find enough story to motor what we hope is going to be a 50hour ‘mega epic’.”
The first two episodes of ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ are streaming on Prime Video. New episodes added weekly.
What were these cultures like before the rings and what might have been happening in them that would make the rings an attractive offer?
JD Payne Executive producer