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Lauding The Rings
A s The Return Of The King, third and final film in the Lord
Of The Rings trilogy, tells a more internal story than the first two films, director Peter
Jackson and director of photography Andrew Lesnie tightened the focus to intimately capture the human emotion in the cast’s performances.
Though the film is comprised of numerous elements at the same time – from miniatures to visual effects to motion capture – the unifying factor was always the emotions of the scene.
“The strength of this project has always been the script and the per- formance, not the effects, not the loca- tions, no matter how amazing they are, but the cast,” Oscar-winning Lesnie comments.
“Peter managed to draw an amaz- ing cast that audiences relate to on a human level. The priorities for me are to just watch the performances more carefully and be more critical about the coverage in terms of trying to draw the subtext out of every scene.”
In moments that Jackson would conceivably use a wide two-shot, he often re-envisioned the scene using only close-ups.
“The moment you film a close-up of Ian McKellen, you don’t want to cut to a wide shot anymore because Ian is so compelling,” Jackson notes, “and when you cut to Elijah his eyes are conveying so much information and emotion that you now want to film the scene as two close-ups. Though it was a nice idea at the time, the wide shot doesn’t matter anymore.”
This need to maintain focus on the characters was never more important than in the large-scale battle sequences.
“Battles have to tell a story,” com- ments Jackson. “And fortunately, we have a lot of our principal characters involved in Pelennor Fields – Gandalf, Pippin, Merry, Eowyn, Theoden, Eomer, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli. We really wanted to focus on those char- acters and their stories within the spectacle of the battle. You never want it to be just a faceless battle. It’s got to be personal.”
The challenge for such a sprawling production hit on issues of organisa- tion and stamina.
“The logistics of keeping track of so many units during principal pho- tography is awesome; it’s of a scale that I’ve never encountered before,” Lesnie says. “You’re not only doing the cinematography, you’re doing quite a lot of management.”
To establish the general look of the film, Jackson initially storyboarded, then created an “animatic” representation of each film to help design sequences, par- ticularly the more challenging scenes such as the Paths of the Dead and the Battle of Pelennor Fields. “They’re like a dry run of the film before you actually do it for real,” Jackson describes.
As early as November 2002, Lesnie, along with the core filmmaking team, watched a preliminary cut of the film. From that, Lesnie and supervising digital colorist Peter Doyle put together a “Look Bible” – a half-hour
miniature representation of the film, which helps them establish the looks, flows and visual rhythms of major sequences.
Photographing The Return of the King was once again collaboration between director Jackson, Lesnie and miniatures director of photography Alex Funke.
“During principal pho- tography, I would view all of Alex’s stuff and Alex would see a good percentage of our stuff,” Lesnie describes.
“We talked about lighting styles early on, the ratios and character- istics that I wanted to try and achieve in particular locations, and the look of various things.
And then he would watch my footage, and I would watch his.
We got into sync with each other incredibly quickly.” ■
The Lord Of The Rings trilogy is distributed world-wide on Fuji Positive stock (35mm POS 3513D)
Cardiff Screen Festival 2003
T his year’s Cardiff Screen Festival 2003 – which runs
until November 22 – is the first to be organised by Sgrîn Cymru Wales, who’ve princi-
pally funded the event since 1997. Launched in 1989, the event has
grown rapidly, moving from Aberystwyth to Cardiff in 1998, and it attracts much work from around the world, as well as being the main focus for new Welsh audio-visual and cine- matography works both in the English and Welsh languages.
The DM Davies Award, the single largest short film prize in Europe, is presented to the director of the Best Short Film and he/she must be of Welsh ori- gin or have been a native of Wales for two or more years.
Fujifilm are once again spon- soring the Award, providing rolls of Fujicolor Motion Picture stock to the winning director. Best of luck to all 28 entrants: details of the winner will be included in the next issue of EXPOSURE. ■
Fuji Motion Picture And Professional Video • Exposure • 31
festivals & events