BUILDING PERFECTION
Of all Tolkien’s legendarium, Rivendell was one of the tricksiest to conjure up. Production designer GRANT MAJOR explains how they made paradise in a park
F AN ESTATE agent was attempting to sell properties in Middle-earth, certain areas would present them with a tough time. Like, say, the grotty spires of Mordor (“renovation required”). Or the ruined fortress of Angband (“quirky”). Or the Dead Marshes (“convenient for transport links”). Any domicile in Rivendell, on the other hand, would surely be a doddle to shift. In the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, the Elf Shangri-la is “a perfect house, whether you like food or sleep or story-telling or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all... Merely to be there was a cure for weariness, fear, and sadness.” Talk about a des res.
Which presented the design team of The Lord Of The Rings with a formidable challenge. How do you create such an idyllic place in three dimensions, when you have to compete with the imaginations of readers? A byword for peace and quiet, Rivendell was so close to Tolkien’s heart that on Middle-earth maps he placed the location at the same exact latitude as Oxford, his hometown, in a very academic kind of in-joke. In the 1970s it inspired a famous bookshop in Placerville, California, of the same name, where hippies came and blissfully read in front of a wood-burning stove, but a film was something different. The pressure was huge.
“There was a lot of chatter back then about whether [the films] should be made at all,” remembers production designer Grant Major. “Because making something for real, as images in a movie, so often sort of deflates things.”
Peter Jackson and Major knew what they were up against. And so they got going on
Rivendell before almost any other set, two
and a half years before filming began. The fear of furious fans in elf costumes, it turns out, makes for a great motivator.
FORTUNATELY, THEY HAD A TEMPLATE
already, in the form of illustrations by Alan Lee which had run in the 1992 centenary edition of the books. Lee, who set out to make Rivendell look like a place to which he would want to retire, was hired by the production to expand his sylvan vision. “Peter was very keen to tap into that aesthetic,” Major explains. “Back in those times, Alan was still very much analogue. Pencil drawings that were huge. They’d be A1 size and so it would take him days to get through these massive drawings, which had a lot of detail in them. And from there we could work them up into fully rounded architectural set-pieces.”
A hidden valley in the foothills of the Misty Mountains, located in the north of Middle-earth, Rivendell represents everything that the elves are about. Accordingly, the roughly 20-minute pitstop that The Fellowship Of The Ring takes there had to convey a lot of information to the viewer about them, without much actual dialogue spelling it out.
“They’re a race that lives forever. They’re kind of moving away from Middle-earth; their stamp on the world is on the wane,” says Major. “It wasn’t just a sort of tourist stop on the way to Mount Doom. It was our first look at this very deep, very influential and positive culture. A whole practical world that we had to invent, with all the nuances that go into it.” At the same time, it had to be breathtaking, making the hobbit holes of The Shire look relatively basic. “It had to have that epic scope to it. It was part of a world that opens up as Frodo makes his journey into bigger and bigger and bigger places.”
To show the elves’ close relationship with nature, the boundaries between interiors and exteriors in Rivendell were deliberately blurred, with trees growing inside the buildings and bits of architecture scattered among the landscape. Lush waterfalls and softly babbling brooks were worked into the design. It had to suggest perfection, simplicity, melancholy. And an air of deliberate mystery was also baked in: like the elves themselves, their home is somewhat unpindownable, with no visible limits, a sense that it sprawls off into the distance forever.
Despite that ambitious vision, Grant and his team had limited resources. “You’ve got to understand that on the first film there was a lot more financial pressure on us,” he says. “Because there was no guarantee this project was going to be a success. So we were working very much to a strict budget for the likes of Rivendell and Bag End, before the studio had seen what they were getting and the financial constraints became a little more slackened.”
Alan Lee painted a gigantic mural of Sauron’s demise that would hang above the Shards of Narsil (for the first Hobbit film, it was tweaked to add the One Ring onto the villain’s finger; it had been forgotten the first time around). A variety of elvish furniture was hand-crafted for the Fellowship to rest their tushes on. And all kinds of other set-dressing was created, by a small army of glass-workers, metal-workers, leatherworkers, jewellers and calligraphers. “I would kluge together a sort of Romanesque stonework with Art Nouveau patination and woodwork, perhaps, if you’re looking for parallels,” Major says of the general aesthetic.
Finally, after a false start or two, the much-coveted “PJ APPROVED” red rubber stamp signed it all off. And Rivendell was ready for action.
ONE OF THE REAL-LIFE LOCATIONS
which inspired Tolkien when it came to Rivendell was Lauterbrunnental, a vast Alpine valley in Switzerland which the author had
hiked in 1911. For the movie, however, the production had to head to a slightly less grand locale: a park 50 minutes’ drive north of downtown Wellington.
Before The Lord Of The Rings came along, Kaitoke Regional Park was notable mainly for its excellent walking tracks and significant population of New Zealand falcons. That’s all changed now: the country’s tourist board now bills it on their website with the words, “Pristine rainforest and crystal-clear rivers create the magical elvish tranquility of this Lord Of The Rings filming location.” But back in late 1999, the keepers of the forest were a little suspicious of the wizards, hobbits and dwarves seeking to invade their preserve. “A certain amount of persuasion had to happen with the Conservation Department who run it,” says Major. “And part of their thing was that it had to be left the way it was found.”
Hence a huge operation was kick-started, to remove all of the delicate species of plants from the area of Kaitoke they would use. Greenhouses were erected nearby, to store them in. And then afterwards they were carefully placed back into the soil, a process that took six to eight months. The area was left, says the production designer, in a better state than that in which they had found it.
The set’s elements were trucked in or lowered down by helicopters. A self-contained water system was put in place for Rivendell’s gently rushing streams. And artificial red and brown leaves were brought in to affix to real evergreen New Zealand trees, while fake trees were put up, impossible to tell apart from the actual things. “We had to buy them from China and import them in container loads,” Major recalls. “Physically, by hand, fix them onto the trees. That was a very big job for a lot of people.”
The illusion of Rivendell would be completed later with the use of miniatures and digital extensions. But even during filming, the relatively small set, as serene as a Japanese temple, proved enchanting to cast and crew alike. “To all of a sudden be able to walk on to a set that was this paradise, this sort of garden of Eden, this tranquil, lush, beautiful environment — there was no acting required,” enthused Sean Astin at the time of Fellowship’s release, brushing off the fact he had been clonked on the head on set by a elven loom, toppled by a gust of wind. Alan Lee, meanwhile, fell so in love with the place that he even considered staying there overnight so he could sleep in Frodo’s bed, before deciding it might make the props department grumpy.
The location, which was revisited in 2012’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, albeit with more digital augmentation, remains a source of pride for Major. “By the third episode [The Return Of The King], my world of the physical environment was being eclipsed by the digital environment. But back then we’d build everything, with as many tricks as we could,” he says. “We were always very reluctant to pull the sets down, you know, because we all loved them at the end.”
ONE AFTERNOON, BEFORE RIVENDELL
was pulled down, a couple of crew members got married on the set. Proof positive that the design team had nailed the romantic, wistful aesthetic, right down to the last leaf. But the power of Rivendell didn’t wane like that of the elves. Instead, it’s become something that people have tried to emulate in the real world.
“Way after the films came out, there was actually some American gazillionaire guy [former Facebook president Sean Parker] who staged a Rivendell wedding up in Los Angeles,” Major says. “He got Ngila Dickson, the movies’ costume designer, to design all the costumes, and there were sets and all that. The idea caught on.” For those with a little less disposable income, you can visit a replica of Rivendell within the sandbox video game Minecraft (try not to topple any looms). And it seems increasingly likely that all of us might one day get to navigate the hushed elvish sanctuary, in the form of a theme park akin to The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter or Pandora — The World Of Avatar.
Until that day, Grant Major remains one of the few people to have actually experienced the enchanted aura of Elrond’s domain. And he’ll always remember the day that Peter Jackson gave it the nod. “As you can imagine there’s a lot of tension: what if it’s not right? What if he doesn’t like this, or that? But when he walked onto the set for the first time, in its virgin state, to see the look on his face, that he was totally into it, was great. It was really, really good.”
As Professor Tolkien would put it: a perfect house.
IKE GANDALF FALLING from the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, only to re-emerge from certain death with a snazzy new makeover, epic fantasy sagas never really die. Just look at Harry Potter and The Lord Of The Rings, two franchises based on beloved children’s books which might have been expected to fade away. Instead, each has demonstrated staying power to rival Star Wars; and it seems there’s plenty more magic left in the cauldron yet.
After three Middle-earthexpanding Hobbit films, The Lord Of The Rings is transferring to TV. Having paid a whopping $250 million for the rights to the Tolkien universe, Amazon is investing an equally eye-watering amount of Bezos bucks into its hotly anticipated show set in the elf-infested realm. The budget of the first season alone is estimated to have been $150 million, with some serious talent at the helm: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s J.A. Bayona is among the first season’s directors. The series’ showrunners are a more mysterious package: JD Payne and Patrick Mckay had a credit on Star Trek: Beyond and penned Disney’s upcoming Jungle Cruise, but are otherwise unknown, giving few clues as to what to expect.
What we do know is that this is a prequel, taking place in Middle-earth’s Second Age. Rumours had swirled that the show might centre on a young Aragon, but were dispelled once and for all by an announcement in January promising a plot set “thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit”, taking viewers back to an era in which “the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness”. That tease has sparked speculation that Morgoth, the god-like mega-bastard from Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, may be the show’s prime antagonist.
Saint Maud actress Morfydd Clark and English unknown Robert Aramayo will rub shoulders with the likes of Cynthia Addairobinson
(Power) and British comedy icon Lenny Henry in the show, across famous Middle-earth locations including the island kingdom of Númenor, the Misty Mountains and the elf-capital of Lindon. Peter Jackson is not involved, despite early meetings with Amazon about the project, but there is at least one hangover from the ’00s movie trilogy: filming took place in New Zealand, after a deal to shoot in Scotland was derailed by Brexit fears. The first season will debut later this year.
Harry Potter’s future, on the other hand, for now appears to lie on the big screen. The third Fantastic Beasts movie began shooting this spring with a slated release date of July 2022. Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander and co will head off to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in this latest
instalment, said to be vaster in scale than the series’ two previous films combined, with Hannibal star Mads Mikkelsen stepping into the role of dark wizard Grindelwald after Johnny Depp’s departure. Plot details are currently shrouded in an invisibility cloak, leaving fans to speculate on where this latest chapter in the saga might take us and who it may reintroduce: rumours persist that Fantastic Beasts 3 could feature cameos from young incarnations of Tom Riddle (aka Voldemort) and Hagrid.
There will be plenty of time for cameos for those characters and other Wizarding World favourites should they not appear this time around. A further two Beasts films are currently slated for 2023 and 2025. But what about beyond that? Where might Warner Bros. take Potter next? There’s certainly no shortage of options. Might we soon get an adaptation of the popular stage play, Harry Potter And The Cursed Child? The time-travelling yarn following Harry and Ginny’s youngest son Albus as he ventures off to Hogwarts has been a giant smash in London and on Broadway. Might we get a recorded version of the play itself (like Hamilton), or even a full big-screen rethink? If the latter, The Cursed Child’s plot leaves the door open for members of the original cast to reprise their roles, in what would be a Force Awakens-level emotional reunion for fans and its stars.
Recent reports about a live-action series being created for new streaming service HBO Max have been debunked: in late January, Warner Bros. poured a barrel of Butterbeer on those rumours with a statement saying, “There are no Harry Potter series in development.” The possibilities for expanding the Wizarding World, however, remain enticing. A film based on J.K. Rowling’s Beedle The Bard, bringing to life stories from the fairy-tale-ish 2012 spin-off book, is one route the studio could choose to go. Or a look inside another school in this enchanted universe, such as Beauxbatons Academy of Magic, located in the Pyrenees mountains in France, or Uagadou, in Africa, is another.
It’s never been a better time to be a fantasy fan, with two of the biggest sagas in the genre gearing up for fresh new follies. Hold on to your wand/magical staff: The Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter aren’t going anywhere.