WHAT WENT WRONG - The Lord Of The Rings (Part 3)

Episode Date: September 25, 2023

In part 3 of our coverage of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, Chris & Lizzie explore how Andy Serkis paved the way for Avatar, the pitfalls of an on-set gimp-suit, and why you should never cut one of Christopher Lee’s favorite scenes.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next?*CORRECTIONS: *"Weta" is not the nickname of the many species of New Zealand giant crickets but rather their common name, stemming from the Maori word "Wētā".*Viggo Mortensen used Super Glue, not gum, to re-attach his chipped tooth during filming (specifically Hot Stuff Super T Medium Instant CA Glue - 1oz HST-7)*Chris referred to second-unit director Geoff Murphy as a young director, he was, in fact, one of the oldest directors on set (and quite well known in New Zealand for the road show "Good Bye Pork Pie").*According to Weta employee Raymond Massa the Gothmog mask (designed by Bill Hunt) was not designed to look like Harvey Weinstein. Rather, there was a pull-over mask used for background orcs that resembled Weinstein. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to the third episode of season five of what went wrong. But if you listened to the first two when they came out, this is like sort of the second week. We're back. Anyway, it doesn't matter. We're excited. We are back for the conclusion of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Chris is so excited. Those are some Middle Earthian raphorns.

You might not have known about them, but they are special. The horns of Gondor are calling us. Orns of Gondor. I can't wait. Welcome back to part three of our three-part coverage of Peter Jackson's, the Lord of the Rings, Caledar, Return of the King, a little long, too many endings, but wonderful nonetheless. Again, if you haven't listened to parts one and two, check it out. Last we saw our heroes, they had just shown the world a taste of middle. Earth at Cannes.

And it knocked their forkin socks off. Literally, all the socks were off like Hobbits. They screen 26 minutes of the films, including a 15-minute extended sequence, the cave troll fight from Moria, for a very select audience of tastemakers and journalists at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 2001. New Line then threw a $2 million party that was bonkers. Listen to our second episode to learn. more about that. And then they quickly went into a publicity blackout in order to generate maximum

hype for the release of Fellowship of the Ring in December of 2001. Of course, our heroes had a lot of work to get done, specifically figuring out how to bring Gollum to life for a modern audience. Quick reminder, everybody out there, please go pick up a copy of Ian Nathan's. Anything you can imagine Peter Jackson in the making of Middle Earth. This has been my primary resource for these episodes. It's really an incredible book. 500 remarkably well-researched pages on the making of these films,

along with, of course, Andy Circus' book on Gallum. Gollum, How We Made Movie Magic. Also a really fun read. Very personal. A lot about him and his relationship with his then partner, his daughter, and his son who was born in between

his first two stints of shooting on this film. And it's really, really cool. and personal, and of course, along with the wonderful DVD extras from the film and various internet articles. Okay, after melting the minds of their audience, New Line sent Jackson back to New Zealand and said, Pete, we set you up, don't fuck it up. So, he said, no problem, just going to go figure out this Gollum, fella. Now, for those who may be unaware, Ghalom was first introduced in John rattled Rood Tolkien's The Hobbit. He was once a Hobbit himself, a store hobbit, a relative of the hobbits that live in the Shire, by the name of Schmeagle.

However, he had like Shmere. Isn't his friend's name Deagle too? J.R. Tolkien's super creative. Yeah, it's his cousin, I believe. He's fallen under the spell of the one ring, and then he murdered his. cousin friend, brother cousin friend, Degel, sure. Diggle, sure.

Diggle. And their mother, legal, and their father, Cheegel, in order to possess the one ring, he then slowly lost his mind, referring to the ring as,

my precious. The ring gave him an unnaturally extended life, and he began to refer to himself as, that gross sound that would come out of the bottom of his throat as he would swallow. Well, that was terrible. That's better than mine. I'm not going to try to do it again.

This is going to get really gross. Yours made me uncomfortable. Yeah, maybe that means it worked. Long story short, as Fran Walsh would later put it, Ghalm is an addict. He lives both to possess the ring and try to rid himself of it. He lost the ring to Bilbo Baggins in the Hobbit, then reappears in the Lord of the Rings as he attempts to repossess it,

agreeing to guide Sam and Frodo into Mordor in order to do so. Gollum is a shadow foil to Frodo's character showing the audience the risk that Frodo takes in holding on to the ring. He is, I would argue, maybe the second most important character. Yeah. In the last two films, I mean, he is...

It's a huge part. Yeah, huge, huge part. Wild that they have not figured him out at this point because the amount, just the amount of screen time he has, like, is a lot. Yeah, and they had a sense, to be fair, they had a sense of what they were doing. They hadn't just entirely figured it out.

Sure. Yeah. So what follows, again, is pulled primarily from Ian Nathan's book, anything you can imagine, but also Andy Circus's great chronicle of bringing Gallum to life. One more plug. Gollum, how he made movie magic. It's really fun. Andy Circus seems like a really, really cool, creative person.

I interviewed him once. He was very, very nice. Also, pretty handsome. I know he plays very weird characters. Very handsome man. Okay. Initially, Jackson and Walsh set out just to find a voice actor for Gullum. So not unlike Howard the Duck, listen to our episode.

They think, well, it's ultimately going to be either a CGI or puppeteered character, so we just need a voice actor. They'd done some early tests with a Gullum puppet. So think something not unlike the Dark Crystal or a different Jim Henson production. And remember, Richard Taylor and Tanya Roger, the husband and wife duo who had started Weta Workshop, with Jackson, they had done all of the puppets for Meet the Feebles, Peter Jackson's acid hellscape of a Muppet movie from a few years prior.

That didn't really work. So then Richard Taylor put forth the idea, why don't we use an actor in makeup, and then we'll exaggerate that actor's features with CGI. But the problem is they couldn't find an actor that was scrawny enough to fit the bill because they couldn't use forced perspective tricks. Like when they did Gandalf with Frodo and Sam, they needed him to be the same size.

Right. And also because, like, he's not, he is not a human shape. Like, it's very different. He's been very warped over time. Yeah, he's wasted away. So they decided they would settle on an actor, providing a vocal performance. And then Weta, who had done remarkable work, bringing the cave troll to life, for example, would create an animated character, a computer-generated character that would be laid into the

scenes after the fact. So it was going to be keyframe animated after the fact. That was the idea. So unlike a number of creatures in Tolkien's canon, the artist felt a lot of pressure in creating Gollum because he's a character that is better described than a number of others in Tolkien's lore. He's small and slimy. His eyes have taken on a, quote, lamp-like quality in order to adapt to the dark. You actually see that in the Pellowship of the Ring, but it never comes back in the later episodes because they actually redesigned him. Isn't that when he's in Moria

and he pops his little head up over the ladder and he goes like, n-knie, it does the little blinks and you see his little headlight eyes. And there's one other time where he kind of, I think it's in the prologue, maybe he turns to the camera and you see the yellow of his eyes. They're retro-reflective like a cat. They actually removed that later on to make him feel more human.

So Alan Lee, of course, created a number of wonderful renditions of the things. character for Jackson and the animators at Weta to work from. However, the kind of consistent critique of the early designs was that he seemed undead. He kind of seemed like a zombie. That seemed to be what they always were going toward was that he was this kind of zambified creature. He had almost no nose that kind of like two holes, the sinus entry, instead of a full nose, giant eyes, fang-like teeth. Okay, so real Voldemorti is what I'm hearing. Yeah, real Baltimore. or she kind of vibe.

And that's actually the design you see in the Fellowship of the Ring. You just don't see him very much. So there are six shots of Gollum in the first film, like you mentioned most in Moria, most hidden in shadow. Then you also see him being tortured in Baradour. Right, just his arms. And you see his fingers. Yeah, in his arms.

He apparently also was a different color at first. He was actually a shade of olive green at that point in the production. That makes sense because the arms are a totally different color. And I always wondered, is it because he's like in tar or something? thing, but yeah. Yeah. No, they actually, the model was a different color at that point in time. And he also, you don't see this, but he had a pale underbelly like a frog, apparently.

So again, giving him a more reptilian amphibious feel. So during the casting process, Andy Circus, an actor in the UK, received a call from his agent with a very vague and unexciting offer, a voice acting part for an animated character in this new Lord of the Rings movie series being shot in New Zealand. It would be apparently three weeks of work, and it would probably be remote. So he'd probably just record it for three weeks in London and be done. And apparently he was really bummed. So Circus was kind of an up-and-coming actor. He was actually up for a role in Oliver Twist that he would end up getting. And he was like, can't I be on camera for this movie? Like this, can't you give me one of those roles? And his agent said, you know, they're kind of booked up a lot of

those roles, they're really just looking for a voice and you have a great voice. So he thought about passing on the role. Wow. Much like Vigo Mortensen. He goes home to his then girlfriend, who would be his later wife and actress as well, Lorraine Ashburn. And he said, she's like, you know, what's going on? And I'm not going to do an Andy Circus voice because I will not do well with it. But he basically said, yeah, I got, you know, the chance to do this role for Lord of the Rings, but I think I'm going to pass on it. It's pretty small. And she's like, which role? And he says, Add says, Ghalm. She's like, you have to do it.

She says, why? She's like, you don't understand. Gollum's one of the best characters in the entire thing. So it turns out Lorraine Ashburn, big Lord of the Rings fan, that's the main reason Circus took the audition. Man, these fans are coming through. They really are. So Circus at this point was primarily a stage in television actor.

He was just starting to get into some features. He had actually originally studied visual. arts and stage design. I guess his dad actually is a doctor and he had spent his childhood split between the UK and Iraq. Wow. Where his dad was splitting time, practicing medicine. So circus had come from stage design. So he had actually come from behind the scenes sort of approach to production. And then he'd gotten the acting bug and started slowly falling into the world of acting. This will be important later. Circus now is a very successful director. Yeah. largely because of the relationship he formed with Peter Jackson on these movies.

So, Circus has to audition, and much like Sean Aston, he does not have time to read all of the Lord of the Rings. He has about a week to prepare. And he's a new father. His daughter, Ruby, had just been born. So he focused on one chapter. This chapter is called The Shadow of the Past. And this is the chapter in which Gandalf explains Ghalm to Frodo in the most compassionate terms. Gollum was a hobbit.

Smygo, who killed his cousin. Bigel in order to possess the ring He was shunned Retreated to the Misty Mountains grew more and more isolated Until he took on the name Ghalem You know the rest of the story

Circus rehearsed and rehearsed And finally settled on the voice For the character When his cat Diz coughed up a hairball Next to him And if you've ever heard a cat coughing of a hairball Every night

It really looks like Ghalam Yes it does These cats Bob and Viv I kick my cat of that house When she's coughing a hairball Circus sent in a tape and he waited to hear back. Down in New Zealand, Jackson and the team at Wedda got Circus's tape and they're like, this guy's voice is pretty great.

And they laid it in against an early animation test video that they put together for the character and it was a creepy match made in Middle Earth. So Jackson and Walsh flew to London in April of 1999 for a round of auditions and they asked to meet with Andy Circus. He arrived and Peter Jackson explained that though Ghalem would be CGI, he, quote, wanted him to be the most emotionally truthful, complex, and interactive CG character that had ever been seen in a live-action film.

Nailed it. Jackson turned on the camera. Andy Circus took off his shirt and started crawling all over the furniture. It was love at first sight. After Circus left, Jackson turned to Walsh and reportedly said, wouldn't it be great to have him on set? What was going to be a three-week voice acting gig turned into the next four years of Andy Circus's life

and actually an entirely new trajectory in his career, as we will get into, as he became the pioneering actor of the burgeoning art of motion capture performance. Hell yeah. Now, despite Peter Jackson's confidence, New Line Cinema was a bit just trustful of the way to Digital Team. The idea that they were going to create an entirely digital character that would appear in dozens and dozens of scenes,

and Kerry, arguably, a lot of the emotional heft of two out of three of a multi-hundred million dollar trilogy did not sit well with Bob Shea. He insisted that a bigger house like ILM, Industrial Light and Magic, needed to execute Gollum. So remember, they'd never seen fully CG characters at this point with the exception of Casper, the friendly ghost, a few years prior. Nothing at the scope, scale, or level of a mode of detail as Gollum had been done before. And ironically, ILM had just delivered arguably the most hated CGI character of all time.

Lizzie, do you know who this is? Oh, Jar Jar-Jar Banks. Jar-Jar Binks. The hapless Gungan. He looked good. Did he go back and rewatch it? I won't. I don't want to. Yeah. In George Lucas's Star Wars prequels.

In early 2000, Jackson and Weta put together a proof of concept to prove to Bob Shea that they could do Gollum better than anybody in the world. They showed him two shots. One, Gollum sneaking up on Sam and Frodo. Two, a headshot of Gollum speaking lip synced to Andy Circus's pre-recorded ADR. Neither used motion capture. Both were entirely keyframe animated by the animators at Weta. Bob Shea was blown away. Weta, you can do Ghalem.

So the initial plan is not necessarily to use motion capture. It's primarily to lean on keyframe animation, meaning every muscle movement has to be meticulously executed by an artist frame by frame when they're creating this character. So Andy Circus shows up. His first day on set is April 13, 2000. So the rest of the crew's been shooting for about six months at this point. They're shooting on the slopes of Mount Doom.

And according to Circus, from his book, he arrived to shoot Scene 256, where Gollum leads Frodo and Sam out of Iman Mule. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it. Specifically, they were starting with a shot where Gollum, quote, crawls ahead up a rocky gulley and calls back, It's safe, Hobbitz, it's safe.

As they're going to go with him. I thought that was actually pretty good. That's pretty good. He had shaved his head to get into character, and they didn't have a mocap outfit. They didn't know what to put him in. So he had put in a homemade tie-dye unitarred that covered his entire out body

and made him look like a nude eunuch. What? Yes. So the cast and crew referred to it as the gimp suit. Oh, no. Because he looked like an albino version of the gimp in pulp fiction. That would be, like, in some ways harder than acting against a tennis ball. Because, like, what, how do you not crack up?

So he shows up on set. Everyone's in meticulous costumes that have been designed for months and years, and he is wearing, like, a nude body suit, effectively. And he knows he's going to be entirely replaced. The crew had no idea what to think. Everyone's like laughing at him, and he's thinking to himself, oh my God, I've shown up six months after everyone else, everyone else is bonded, everyone's laughing at me, I'm a joke,

I'm literally going to get replaced. At least Peter Jackson will tell them to shut up and be serious when he arrives. Apparently Peter Jackson shows up, takes one look at him, and starts cracking up himself. So circus is not feeling great. Now, there was a method to this madness. The initial suiting plan was designed to maximize flexibility for the animators in post. It's remarkable what they went through for this.

So each scene, including Ghalm, required them to execute every camera move three times exactly the same way each time using a motion-controlled camera rig. This is obviously very similar to what they did on The Mummy. We talked about that the Brennan Fraser saw it when he's fighting all the mummies, except they're doing this for every single shot that Gullum is appearing. It's crazy. He's in so much of these movies. So they first do a reference pass, quote, reference pass. This was Andy Circus on camera in the Gimp suit, performing the scene with Elijah Wood and Sean Ashton.

Second, they would, quote, shoot the real take. That's Andy Circus off camera performing his dialogue, and now Wood and Ashton are trying to perform eye lines correctly to where he was during the reference take. And then they would shoot a clean pass, and that's where they would just do the camera movement with no actors present. But they had to do it forever the length of time was for the take

so that they could layer in the correct composited materials in the final composited shot. So what was obviously especially challenging was knowing when to deliver what performance. So obviously when Circus was on set, meaning in the shot, Elijah Wood and Sean Ashton had an easier time performing. But that's not the shot that was being referred to as the real take. Right. So they struggled, like, should we bring it in the reference take or in the real take?

or in the real take. Despite that, they learned to quickly react to him off camera while still performing to where he would have been when he was on camera, they're professionals. However, for Circus, it was obviously an extremely vulnerable and daunting experience. Now, this was also because he realized he didn't fully own the character.

So whatever he was doing on set was ultimately going to be interpreted by an entire team of animators and could be changed in any way that they saw fit. So he was not in control of the most basic elements of his performance. And for an actor, you're obviously relinquishing a great deal of control to all of the other aspects of production,

including the director, obviously, who's deciding which aspects of your performance he's going to use in the final edit. He's not even getting to control the options that the director is ultimately getting in his mind because he's going to be animated over. Second, Peter Jackson invited everybody every day after set to come watch rushes, to come watch the dailies from the day before. He couldn't go watch himself at Daly's because he was in a gimp suit the whole time

and he couldn't take his performance seriously. So Andy Circus quickly learned to vent his frustration by heading out into the wilderness. He would force himself into an isolation that mirrored golems, spending often days at a time in some of New Zealand's most famous national parks and natural locales, splanking caves, hiking, and camping. Further, though he did bond with the cast, he was at a remove with them. before Hobbit had been on set for months before he'd arrived, and he would never act across the majority of the other actors in this movie.

So he never acted across Ian McKellen, Brad Dorff, Christopher Lee, Bigel Mortensen, Liv Tyler, Orlando Bloom, John Rees-Davies, or Sean Beam. Wow. He was a man apart. Further, he really resented the fact that the takes he was on camera for were referred to as reference and didn't seem to be taken seriously. he only got one or two reference take. Then he would be told to leave camera

so Elijah Wood and Sean Ashton could quote, do the take for real. The attitude from the crew seemed to be at first that the reference passes didn't matter. And apparently this led to a bit of a boiling point between Circus, Wood, and Aston. He was tired of them phoning it in for reference takes, and apparently they started giggling during one of his reference takes

at his costume, and he snapped at them, basically saying, I only get one chance to define my performance. And to their credit, they apologized. And apparently after that, the three became very close and everything went much more smoothly after that. But it took people a long time to kind of understand what circus was being asked to do on set and how difficult it was. Well, it had never been done before.

Like, this would be really hard to understand even what you are. Like, the bad version of this is cats, right? Where you're hearing the actors trying to explain what it is that they think they're going to look like, but they have no idea. So, like, you know this can go horribly. Horribly wrong. It can go horribly. Yeah.

Of course, in the end, ironically, Peter Jackson often used the reference passes because they had the best energy from Wood and Aston, which was driven by Circus's presence on set. He would then have the animators paint over Andy Circus's body in the reference pass and add in the digital Gollum anyway. So it just goes to show you. You never know.

After two weeks of shooting, the crew took Easter break, and Andy Circus decided to let off some steam by going on a three-day canoe expedition alone, without having packed a tent, food, or water. Oh, my God. The guy he rented his canoe from, offered him some veggies from the garden, a loaf of bread, and a jar of vegemite. Circus took off on his own, expecting some easy drifting down 200 miles of river. What he didn't realize was that between his starting point, Wakaharo and his destination, Pippi Riki, pronounce those wrong, there were 121 rapids. He hit the first one, and he nearly drowned.

Oh, my God. Only 120 to go. Lucky for circus during his first night camping, during which he had no tent, sleeping bag, or flashlight, he was discovered by four Wellington City counselors who shared their tent and food with him and then completed the rest of the journey with him. Again, New Zealanders saving the cast and crew of the Lord of the Rings

every step of the way. Yeah, seriously. Nothing's ever made me want to move to New Zealand more. So Circus survived Easter break, and he returned to set to learn the full extent of Jackson's plan for Ghalm. He also returned with his partner, Lorraine Ashburn, his daughter, Ruby, and newly born baby boy, Sonny. Yes, this was a family fair, much like Sean Aston, who also had his wife and daughter there.

Now, unbeknownst to Circus, when he joined the production, Peter Jackson had been experimenting with motion capture, a nascent technology that took what the actor did physically and converted it into a computer-generated model. They hadn't used it on set, but they had done some tests in the studio, and Jackson, after watching Circus on set, realized that his performance was visually remarkable and you wanted to harness it in the rawest way possible. His face, too. You watch the videos of this and it's not just the way he's moving. Yeah, it's absolutely his face.

So he realized, meaning Peter Jackson, that they're going to need more firepower. So VFX supervisor Jim Rijal brought in FX veteran Joe Lettery to aid in bringing Gallum to the screen. So Letterie's resume included Jurassic Park, the Abyss. And I don't know if this is a brag or not, creating the CGI Java and the special edition of a new hope. Lettery would be responsible for ensuring that Circus's performance

and what as animators melded seamlessly to create a truly unforgettable character. So, according to Andy Circus, the first motion capture work began on May 1, 2000. So the MoCap team was kind of created in secret. A lot of people were really worried about mocap

in kind of the same way that I feel like people are talking about AI now. It was much the same discussion about motion capture amongst actors at that time. It was, are we just providing them information so that we can be replaced, that we can be, you know, that we can be improved upon? Are we giving up our autonomy? And Andy Sergis, by doing this, wasn't sure where he was going to fall in that discussion. Was he going to be, you know, viewed as a pioneer or as a traitor? So the initial tests were done kind of largely in secret. They brought in a very eclectic team. Obviously,

video game designers, computer programmers, but they also brought in a puppeteer, they brought in stuntmen, and then Patrick Runyon, who was like a former onset animal specialist, particularly dealing with big cats to try to help Circus with the way that he would move his body. So the introduction of motion capture

didn't change the way that they approached it on set for the entirety of principal photography. So for all of principal photography, it's Andy Circus, on set, in a body suit, not doing motion capture when he's on set, and they're shooting the reference pass, they're shooting the real take, and they're shooting the clean pass. So what happened was that they started setting up a motion capture stage

back at the studio in Wellington. And what they would do is they would recreate the camera move inside the studio with a motion capture rig set up, and they would have Andy Circus perform the stage. scene for the animators in the motion capture stage after they had already shot the scene with him, Elijah Wood and Sean Aston. This is crazy. So he's doing it by himself, I have to assume, that they're not there with him, Wood and Aston.

No, they couldn't because they had to be filming other parts of the movie. Right. And then also just the precision, like he would have to be hitting those moves pretty much exactly the same in all of these passes. That's right. I mean, they could correct him because obviously he's programming a model that they could then correct. But yeah, it required a lot of accuracy. And he was having to repeat his performance up to 18 months later, as you mentioned, with no one to play off of. So this was not as simple as

shooting Andy Circus on set in a motion capture suit. No one had done that yet. And actually, it wouldn't be until the end of the production that they would think to have that idea. No one had thought to do that before. That's so crazy. I had assumed the whole time that he would be in a suit. No, no, not not when he was on set for the majority of shooting. So Once they moved into motion capture, listen, you mentioned his facial expressions. So what they quickly realized was that the design of the character was actually too different from Andy Circus's face to take advantage of how expressive Andy Circus was. So what they realized is we need to match the facial features of our character more closely to Andy Circus's facial features. And it does.

And it totally looks like him. Yeah. This is very funny. So basically they need to blend Ghalem with Circus. So Christian Rivers, who we mentioned, he's. Jackson's protege, storyboard artist, would go on to be a director himself. He took a photo of Circus and a drawing of Gollum provided by Alan Lee. He brought it in a Photoshop and he melded them.

They then showed it to Peter Jackson. He made some tweaks. They gave it to one of the sculptures. They sculpted a maquette, one of the rough sculptures out of it, and they had a new creature. Apparently, they then showed it to Andy Circus and he said, He looks just like my father. He was very disturbed by it. So that's how they came up with the final design of Gowlum.

They had to kind of create the Andy Circus Gollum baby that would end up existing in two towers. Ultimately, the true third author behind Gullum after Andy Circus and the wonderful animators at Weta was really not Peter Jackson, but Fran Walsh. So Walsh had really been the one that cracked the interpretation of the character that would be their guiding light. It was Walsh who went to Weta did. alongside Andy Circus and explained to the 120 or so animators there that the two towers was a film about addiction and Gollum was a ring junkie. Circus and Walsh implored the animators to remember that Gollum had to be legitimately sympathetic. Walsh and Boyans further spearheaded the ADR for the film and they often directed Circus's vocal performance while Peter Jackson was out directing principal photography. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Speaking of that vocal performance, Circus quickly realized he wouldn't be able to bring the right energy standing stock still at a microphone. The physical aspects of the performance were tied to the auditory aspects, so they put a mic on the floor, another one on his body, and they let him crawl around spitting and coughing up his lines like a cat with a hairball. Boy, he spits a lot.

There's a lot of golem spittle that's, yeah. The voice itself was very taxis. so they created a, quote, Gollum juice of lemon, honey, ginger, and hot water. Doesn't sound too bad. No, it sounds fine. Which circus downed by the gallon to keep things well-oiled. Now, ultimately, compared to the way we think of motion capture now with films like Avatar, James Cameron famously said it was when he saw Gollum that he realized his film about

nine-foot blue aliens was makeable. Point is, Gollum was not entirely motion capture, as I've said. He was a delicate marriage between motion capture, keyframe animation, and digital puppetry. The animators ultimately used Andy Circus's reference footage to create 675 digitally sculpted expressions and 9,000 unique muscle shapes for the character. Fran Walsh then oversaw a creation of a library of the most common expressions that Ghalham would use, which were programmed with preset sliders to save time. And those are based on Circus' actually.

And those are based on circus's actual facial expressions. So they also pioneered new CGI tools like subsurface scattering. This is a simulation of how light actually passes through the first layer of skin in mammals and reflects across veins and the other layers of skin underneath it. So when they were doing like the Tyrannosaurus rex in Jurassic Park, for example, the skin of a T.Rex is so thick, hard, and leathery that light bounces off instantly. But when light hits a human face, it actually... bounces underneath your skin, and that's what gives your skin the glow.

I assume that's also what makes fur so difficult because you don't have the ability to bounce light the same way. Yeah, and so this simulator, this subsurface scattering is now standardly used in doing any skin for humans now. Of course, Gollum's defining moment comes in the two towers. No longer obscured by shadow, there's a three-minute model. monologue scene, I'm sure you remember, that was painstakingly split into two competing personalities by Fran Walsh and Andy Circus. And this is obviously Smeagle versus Gollum. It's like, probably the funniest scene in all of the movies, I would argue. Gallum's got some pretty funny lines. I mean, I did laugh out loud every time he referred to Sam as

the Fat Hobbit. It just gets me. Gets me every time. But yeah, the scene is incredible. I loved how they creep into the camera work in this? They don't immediately go to the different camera angles for the different... But by the end, it's just quick cuts back and forth between the two of them. It's very funny. Yeah. At first, he's generating the change by turning, et cetera. And then by the end, it's just the two of them talking to themselves.

And it's very funny. The performance is obviously hilarious and heartbreaking. And it didn't use any of the usual cinematic trickery to obscure the CGI. That's the big thing, right? This isn't a T-Rex in silhouette with rain coming down. This is a character in full soft light talking to himself for three minutes. Right. It is like twilight, but yeah.

Yeah, of course. But the point is it's easy to see him. He is well lit at this point in time. And this scene totally works. And it was actually directed by Fran Walsh. So, yeah. This scene was shot in the first scheduled set of supplementary shooting days. So it wasn't part of the initial principal photography block,

but between fellowship and two towers and then two towers and Return to the King, they had pickups to shoot additional footage that they needed. So it was shot in June of 2002. Fun fact, Fran Walsh, who directed a lot of the second unit photography in these movies, had developed a fun nickname from Billy Boyd because apparently she demanded a lot more takes than Peter Jackson. And that is Franley Kubrick, which I did think was pretty funny. Franley Kubrick, perhaps. I did.

Apparently, especially Sean asked. and developed a real fondness for the way that she directed, saying that she was extremely sensitive and very tuned into the emotions of the characters, which I thought was really sweet. Fran. Of course, what she and Andy Circus achieved was remarkable and changed the course of cinema forever.

They didn't know it at the time. It also changed the course of the films themselves. So Gollum would become such a success and audience favorite that he showed up at the MTV Movie Awards. I don't know if you remember. It's Peter Jackson on screen talking about the films, and then Gollum pops over his shoulder. He had to have, like, convinced Weta to animate this while they were working on...

Oh, my God. You know they were like, please leave me alone. Yeah, it took like three weeks of time away from them. But, of course, the unexpected way in which Gallum made his presence known was Peter Jackson's decision to open the Return of the King with the Smeagel-Degel flashback. Yeah. So that was actually a scene shot for the two-tenths. And they had not found the right moment to slide it into the narrative.

It seemed to always... The two towers is very propulsive, and it always seemed to slow things down. So, instead, Peter Jackson, despite having opened the first two films with very action-oriented sequences, obviously the prologue as a giant battle. And then in the two towers, we see Gandalf fighting the Balrog to open those films. He opens with the very understated flashback of Smeagel. becoming Ghalm. This scene was Fran Walsh's idea again,

and she also brought it to life. Peter Jackson had this to say about the sequence. Quote, the Smeagel to Gollum sequence wasn't in our original screenplay. It was something we decided to do while we were shooting. Fran directed it because as it wasn't in our schedule, there was no time available for me to shoot it. Fran and Andy really worked very closely together to shoot this little sequence that showed him becoming Gowlum.

We wanted to make it very clear that Gollum wasn't always the way he is. And this is what happens if the ring ends up overpowering you and you're unable to give it up. We felt showing the audience this transformation was ultimately going to be the most potent way of selling the idea to the audience. So the scene, as I mentioned, was intended for the two towers. Fran Walsh was supposed to direct all of it, but she only directed most of it because one of the shooting days she came down with a migraine. So Peter Jackson pulled Andy's circus aside and said, how do you feel about directing your own flashback? Oh, wow. That was Andy Circus's first opportunity to direct.

It went so well that Peter Jackson, of course, would invite Andy Circus to come be a second unit director on The Hobbit, and he directed a number of the battle scenes. And then Andy Circus would, of course, go on to become a feature film director of his own, including Breathe with Andrew Garfield, Mogley, that Jungle Book adaptation, and Venom let there be carnage. So you never know what opportunities are going to lead to. A few other fun gollum facts before we get back to the general hubbub of production.

The little song he sings to himself as he beats the fish he's caught from the forbidden. Yes, yes. So Circus wrote that. You made it up and wrote it. Great. He was like, I feel like we need to show that this is the happiest he's ever been right before he thinks Proto's betrayed him. And so he wrote that song. Very funny.

As I mentioned, the vast majority of motion capture work was done on stages. is, however, toward the end of production, in that last production block for the Return of the King, Circus asked Jackson offhand, have you ever considered setting the mocap cameras up on set, not on stage? And this led to the use of onset motion capture technology, and that's what's used now for, like, Planet of the Apes and Avatar, et cetera. That's crazy.

I can't believe they didn't... Well, they thought it just had to be so perfectly controlled. And then the technology had advanced, and the computers had gotten good enough that they could do it on set. Now, as I mentioned, the only actors that Andy Circus worked with of the primary cast

were Elijah Wood, Sean Aston, Thomas Robbins, who played Deagle, his cousin, and David Wenham, who played Faramere. Right.

And he only had two days with him. Wow. During Circus's last days on production, this is in April of 2003, very emotional. Peter Jackson pulled him aside, and just very coily, asked. You ever consider playing King Kong? And then more on that later. Oh. Now, there's so much more to

Gallum, guys. I couldn't fit it all in here. Check out Andy Circus's book, Lord of the Rings, Ghalom, How We Made Movie Magic. It's a really, really fun, very personal book. And it just, I don't know, it gave me good vibes and good feels as I was reading it. And I highly recommend it. Okay. Before we get to post-production, a few other fun production facts I'd be loathe not to include. a couple of which are specific to the later shoots, the pickups for the second and third film. Obviously, the shoot was arduous and dangerous. We've talked about a few of the injuries.

A couple more to hit. Sam famously sliced his foot open as he was going from the canoe back to the shore for the scene that takes place for the end of the first film. He joked that he would always get injured, and Elijah Woods seemed to literally walk on water and never got hurt ever. Apparently, Elijah Wood also could fall asleep anywhere,

and so he would just constantly be napping between takes. Sean Ashton said he could literally fall asleep standing up for like five minutes, and Ashton was such a worrywart. He never got any sleep throughout the whole thing. While filming the two towers, Vigo Mortensen famously broke two toes when he kicked an orc helmet. Yep. This was the scene where he, Legolas and Gimli, find the remains of the Urachai,

then been hunting. Yeah, you can see it. The take is in the movie, so you can see it. Furthermore, Orlando Bloom, fell off his horse and broke three ribs during the two towers. Now, this ironically led to Orlando Bloom getting increasingly absurd acrobatic acts throughout the films. So because he broke his ribs, they couldn't shoot him getting onto the horse to go into the Hornberg

in the Battle of Helms Deep. So they had to use a digy double to swing him onto the horse. So it's a digital leg of loss. And when Peter Jackson was like, wow, that looks cool. Where else can we do? And so they called them leggy moments. And so because Legolas was such a big fan hit with young women in the first movie,

that's the reason we have, like, him jumping on a shield and, like, surfing down the stairs, firing at orcs, and then him fighting a mumma kill and killing that giant elephant in the third film is because he had broken his ribs and they were like, let's just do it digitally. And then they realized the extent of what they could do with his character because he was an elf and anyone would believe

that he could do anything at this point. Yes. I loved it. Brett Beattie, who was Reese Davis' stunt double for Gimley dislocated his knee during the Battle of Helm's Deep. Basically, everyone got murdered during Helm's deep. Bernard Hills, Theodin's ear

was slashed. The sequence took three months to film. It was shot almost entirely at night under constant rain pour from 10,000 gallon water trucks, featured over 500 extras. It was brutal.

And it was also shot almost entirely by second unit director, John Mahaffi. I want to just emphasize his name. He shot basically the entire Battle of Helms-deep, of course, working from Jackson's storyboards and their conversations. That's crazy. That is an enormous undertaking. I mean, it's so cool.

It's also, like, most of the Tudjoujowers. It's probably the last third of that movie. I think it's 40 minutes of the, yeah, of constant battle. So according to Orlando Bloom, Vigo, Figo Mordenstein was, like, really into the stuntmen. So these stuntmen were awesome. So these were mostly Maori stuntmen. So, like, Polynesian stuntman that came in.

They're, like, very muscular. A lot of them were cricket and rugby players. And they would do that the Hakka-Haka, like tribal dance, like, pump themselves up as the Urukai. And Vigo Mordensen, like, loved how intense they were. And so he would get really into it with them. And Orlando Bloom said that he actually was constantly taking stuntmen out to beers because he was injuring them during the shoot. Because he was going so hard.

He also, if you remember, he wouldn't use his stunt sword. He used his hero sword the whole time. The chance of black speech that the Urachai roar outside of the Hornberg were actually recorded during a cricket match. In February of 2002, New Zealand was playing England. Peter Jackson went to the middle of the field with a bunch of microphones during a break, and he conducted the 25,000-person crowd in attendance to call out in black speech to follow scroll that they put on the Jumbotron at the stadium, which I thought was so cool. That's amazing. So I mentioned the local stuntmen used for the Urukai were mostly Maori men.

These were very athletic, very strong guys. They apparently just were recycled over and over again. So when they found someone that was good, they would kill them constantly. They'd have them run up to Aragorn. They'd get kicked off the tower. They'd have to climb back up the ladder. They'd get stabbed in the chest. They'd have to go back down.

They would compare how many times they had been killed by each person with each other. And apparently they developed a real comrade. And there was actually, like, by the end of the three months, there was true animosity between the extras playing the Uriqai and the extras playing the elves because the Uriqi were getting like beats a shit and in the mud and the elves were like clean and prissy on top of the tower, which I did think was very funny. They would often headbutt each other as a greeting when they were in makeup to get psyched up for the challenging scenes.

So taking a cue from them, Vigo Mortensen apparently headbutted Orlando Bloom in greeting of one of the nights, which apparently nearly knocked him out and left a big, read well on his forehead that the makeup artist had to cover up. Of course, New Zealanders, they filled out the extras in nearly every aspect of this film. I mentioned that in the Battle of Black Gates, they shot in that desert that had been filled with Army ordinance. So, of course, they used military members to fill out their ranks in that instance. Lizzie, we've talked about this.

Nearly 250 volunteer horse riders came out to participate as the riders of Rohan in the ride of the Roheum at Pelinor Fields. many of whom were women, so there were a number of very, very skilled female writers in New Zealand. They all showed up, and they're like, well, we can't not use them, but Aowin is supposed to be the only woman, so they gave them all facial hair and said, let's ride.

And you can actually see, if you look really carefully, I feel like, is that the fairer sex? Maybe. I'm not sure. Of course, none of these massive battle scenes in Lord of the Rings would be possible without massive. The pioneering software used to generate thousands of soldiers able to think and operate on their own. As we mentioned in the first episode, Stephen Regalus, a self-taught programmer who'd found his way to Weta during the Frighteners, was convinced that computer animation could be used to mimic living ecosystems.

Specifically, he was frustrated at how much manual labor was required for CGI. Keyframe animation meant that every frame had to be animated. manually. He wanted to create a program where he could set the parameters and then let the digital actors act out the scene in a way that was organic. So he built a program that he called plod, PLOD, but then another programmer suggested massive instead, and that was way cooler. So he called it massive. I call it plod. You should call it massive, mate. So he called it massive. And then he actually reverse engineered the acronym, multiple agent simulation system in a virtual environment. So what massive allows filmmakers to do is create armies in which each soldier has its own

digital brain, the battle is then set up, and the soldiers can make their own decisions, such as fighting to the death. Now, some people say that it was the moment when they saw soldiers fleeing the battle in a simulation, that that's when they realized the software was so effective. Actually, Regulus said that was just an error. What happened was the soldier didn't recognize that there was an enemy near enough, so it just set off in one direction. It's kind of like if you've seen that Werner-Urtzog documentary on Penguins

and one penguin just keeps running in the wrong direction. He's like, is the penguin insane? Will it run a thousand miles? It was like that. But Regalus's point was, even though it was a flaw, the flaw looked organic. And so he had achieved his goal. That's awesome. Yeah, so he's put

in charge of an entire massive department at Weta. They made hundreds of types of soldiers, obviously different races, and then within the races, are they operating the pikes? Are they bowmen? Are they going to be the berserkers, et cetera? So they then programmed in fight moves and movements based on what the choreographers and stuntmen from the production were teaching to all of the casts and extras. So there was consistency between the way that the Uriqai moved in the real physical plate shots and then the way that they moved in the digital shots. And that's part of what gives it such a seamless look, is that everyone's working in

concert with one another. So they first put this technology really to the test, obviously, during the prologue of the Fellowship of the Ring. And this was a battle that features 80,000 fighters. And this is when the last alliance of men and elves marched guns on the slopes of Mount Doom. But of course, over the course of the two towers and the between the king, the program got much more sophisticated. So Regulus had started working on the program in 1996, when Jackson was first developing the movie with Harvey Weinstein back in the day. And then by 1998, it was powerful enough that they could start to use it in the movies. And of course, by time of the Return of the King, they were doing battles with 300,000 characters involved. But they didn't

just use it for these massive battle scenes. So they were also able to program in horses, which I thought was really cool. So a lot of the writers of Rohan are obviously digital, and they used massive to do that. They also used it to program Saramon's flock of crows, the Crabane, I think they're called. Crabein. They also did, what, Krabbein from Dunland. Kravine from Dunland, yeah, exactly. Sure, nerd. So they also did the orcs and goblins of Moria.

And actually, they even used the program to program members of the fellowship running in certain wide shots. So it was more natural to just plug in the parameters of how. they moved, and then they could add in the different, they had a cloth simulator, they could add in their clothes, et cetera. So in a very canny business move, Stephen made sure his contract stipulated that he owned Massive, which he'd started to develop before he worked at Weta. And so he actually was technically leasing it to them. So he left the production midway through post on the two towers, making sure they were in good hands, to turn Massive into its own company. The software has now been used on a ton of films,

including the Planet of the Apes, Avatar, Kingdom of Heaven, World War Z. Wow. Obviously, with all the zombies, and many, many more. Of course, Jackson would push massive and Weta to their limits in return to the king. He wanted to really escalate from Helms Deep,

and so he said that we needed 300,000 orcs in the Battle of Pelinor Fields. Oh, my God. That is 30 times as many. So there had been 10,000 Uriqui at Helms Deep, 30x for Return of the King. Furthermore, the Battle of Pelinor Fields,

which was originally going to be about 100 VFX shots, quickly ballooned to 250 VFX shots. And so there's going to be one fell beast riding over the battlefield. No, no, no, let's have there be five. Apparently, it got pretty tense with Weta towards the end, where Jackson would often say,

well, you don't have to do it. It's optional. And there was like a running joke of like, what exactly is optional? Yeah. In Return of the King, Peter Jackson also up the ante on the orcs, adding tumors and boils to their faces. We talked about one of these characters in our first episode,

and that's, I believe it's Grogmoth or Gorgmoth, a real nasty fellow. He's like the orc general outside of Minas Tiroth. You will recognize him. He kind of looks like, what's the character from the Goonies? Yeah, it does look like that. I can't remember. A little bit.

Later, it was confirmed by Wood, Aston Boyd, and Monaghan to have been made to look like Harvey Weinstein. It does. It does look like Harvey Weinstein. I knew exactly which one it was as soon as you said that they based one on him. It's very boil-ly. Confirmed by the Hobbits. Extra boyly.

As I mentioned, Legolas was given increasingly over-the-top action moments, specifically because he had become such a fan favorite with, especially young women in the franchise. Lizzie Bassett. One Lizzie Bassett. In the end, as I mentioned, the first stretch of production lasted 274 days.

This was, of course, supplemented with multiple weeks of reshoots between the release of each film. So each film got multiple weeks of reshoots. So in the end, they shot well over 300 days. Furthermore, the miniatures unit shot for over a thousand days, operating in parallel to the main unit for almost four years straight.

So the miniatures unit, so combine the miniatures unit and the main production unit. And then if you think about how many units they have, they shot so many days. It's mind-boggling on this movie. Yeah, that's nuts. Let's talk about music a little bit, Lizzie. So before production began, Jackson and Walsh decided to test some music against some of their storyboards. Walsh quickly realized that most of what she'd tempt with had come from one composer. I think I know who it is.

Canadian-born. Oh, no, I'm wrong. Who did you think it was? Well, I thought, because I remember when you were talking about that, you'd said that they'd used some gladiator to tempt in... They had. But it is Howard Shore, obviously. Yeah, so they'd used some gladiator, and they had also used some last of the Mohicans in their test footage. Right.

But when they were actually temping against the storyboards and they didn't have to deliver on action, for example, they were using a lot of Howard Shore. Now, apparently Walsh is a very accomplished musician. She played piano, bass, guitar. She dropped out of college in the 80s and started a post-punk band called The Wall Sockets. I mean, what can't Fran do? Well, I can tell you what she could also do, which is scream her lungs out because her screams. is what they use for the NASGOL throughout the films, which is very cool.

I had like an unillustrated, like, photograph book because I loved this so much. I, like, bought everything, and that's one of the fun facts I remember. They showed the ring wraiths at the top of the tower. Weathertop. Yes, weather top. Yeah, great scream.

I did see some sources online that stated that Danny Elfman and James Horner were approached for the score, but what I read in Ian Nathan's book is that Fran Walsh was, adamant they only ever wanted and approached Howard Shore. I also read online that Daniel Day Lewis was offered the role of Aragorn, but that I've heard is also a rumor. It was a rumor from the time. It would make sense. It would, but I don't know. I'm not sure how. Take that one with a grand assault audience. Just wanted to throw it out there. Howard Short, he was born in Canada and was an early musical prodigy. He had a winding road to film scoring.

He studied at the Berkeley School of Music, but it was a friendship he'd made at summer camp during his early teen years with Lauren Michaels. Oh, oh, that's right. He did the SNL. That led to early career success as the band leader on Saturday Night Live. He was also part of the band Lighthouse from 1969 to 72, I think. He reached out in 1978 to David Cronenberg, asking if he could collaborate with him on one of his films and ended up scoring 1979's The Brute. He then went on to do all of Cronenberg's films, and in many ways, his career actually mimics Jackson's. He started in horror with offbeat films like The Fly, and then Martin Scorsese is not horror, but after hours, one of his more unusual films. And then 1991's Brilliant Silence of the Lambs served as his kind of real breakout, not unlike heavenly creatures, for Peter Jackson.

Around the same time, too. Three years earlier. Close enough. It was the 90s. So Shore began scoring in earnest for the films in October of 2000. However, he'd been on the project since the end of 1999, spending extended periods in New Zealand both on set and in the wild, searching for the sounds of the film.

So cool. He was spending a ton of time with Philip O'Boyans as well, trying to figure out how to incorporate the elements of the six languages that they were incorporating into the movie and also how he would use this different musical sounds of all. our world to create the different themes and tonalities for the world of Middle Earth. Now, Jackson and Walsh had given him a directive, we want the score to a serious film, not

unlike a historical drama, not to a fantasy film, but they didn't really understand how monumental his score was going to be until they were putting together the sequence for Cannes that included the Moria stretch with the cave troll. Now, as I mentioned, they did use some Braveheart and some Last of the Mohicans during the montages that open and end that can test footage, but they wanted to show the world Howard Shore's score for that middle 15 minutes. And this is when they first really heard his music in earnest. So what would later, I think it's called Kazah Dume, that track in the later score. They laid it over the scene and they realized that this music might actually transcend the movies themselves, which I think it does in a way.

Totally. It's remarkable. So in the end, Howard Shore created over 90 specific themes for the movies. He incorporated all six of the Middle Earth languages that are present in the film, and he used a choir of Maori singers to perform the Dwarven parts. one unusual aspect of the trilogy that I had actually forgotten until I re-watched them

is that each film ends with an original song. Yeah, first one, Enya. Second one, a lady who's not Bjork but sounds like Bjork. Third one, Annie Lennox. Italian Bjork. Italian Bjorca. So first one, may it be

for the Fellowship of the Ring, sung by Enya, written by Enya and her writing partner, I believe. And then Ghalem's song, which was written by Shore and Boyans who had written lyrics, and that was sung by Emiliana Torini, Italian Bjork.

They actually reference how she sounds like Bjork in the book. Well, didn't they try to get Bjork, and Bjork had to, like, pull out, and then they... Oh, maybe. I didn't read that. I think they did. Oh, I believe it. I read that they just went to her. I mean, it's like written...

It's written for Bjork. For Bjork, yeah, exactly. So I totally believe that they went to Bjork first. And then obviously, Annie Lennox, lead singer Eurythmics for the third film Into the West is the name of that song. Yeah, I had no idea. I mean, meaning I totally forgotten

that had this original music. And that was apparently Peter Jackson's idea. He wanted to put something a little more universally accessible at the end of the films, even though I feel like typically it's like rom-coms that get, you know, songs over the credits at the very end. Or James Bond, yeah. Or James Bond, right, yeah.

Never say never to die, whatever they do at the end of all this. That's a good James Bond. movie. Never say never to die. Take notes. Barbara Brockley. Take notes. Take notes, brockle. Post-production on the Lord of the Rings was an obviously enormous endeavor. Officially, the final cut of the film didn't belong with either Jackson or New Line. It was actually kind of left ambiguous intentionally. Hopefully they would come to a consensus. In order to finish the films on time, Jackson had three different editors working at once. So John Gilbert would edit the Fellowship of the Ring.

He'd been an associate editor on Frighteners. Michael Horton handled the two towers. He had edited Forgotten Silver, the mockumentary that Jackson had produced, and Jamie Selkirk, who had been Jackson's longtime editor, chose to do the Return of the King, while also being the supervisor and the post-production supervisor for all three films. Wow. So they had six Avid machines,

and Avid had been used for a few years now, but this is really in the early era of digital editing, running at all times, and they had to process 40,000 feet of film per day on average. So I don't know the exact film stock they were running, but 1,000 feet of film is roughly 11 minutes, so that's just over seven hours of footage per day that they're processing from up to seven different camera units.

That's a lot of organization that they have to keep track of. So Peter Jackson smartly invited New Line executive Mark Ordesky to sit with him during the editing sessions, wisely getting Mark on his side in advance of disputes with the studio over the edit. Mark was, as we mentioned, his big champion in New Line

who had helped get the movie set up to begin with. Now, it seems like they did have some disputes, but they didn't get out of control on these films. They tended to run long, and the studio wanted him to cut them down. However, after the success of the first film, they really pulled back a great deal. And Jackson was given a pretty good amount of free reign.

Further, the compromising decision to do extended additions after the release of the theatrical cuts really alleviated the tension on the running time because Jackson knew, well, if the fans are mad that it doesn't show up in the theatrical cut, they're going to see it in the extended cut. One example, though, that is mentioned in Ian's book that I did think was very,

because it's actually one thing I don't like in the first movie, and I could never make a movie this good. I'm not, it's not criticism. It's just personal taste. But Galadriel, when she goes all fireface on Frodo, New Line actually said they didn't want to use CGI in that scene. So they advised Jackson to just use Blanchette's natural performance to show how terrifying the character could be,

and they didn't feel that the added CGI glow and kind of spectral presence was required to show the audience what she was capable of. And I agree. I don't like that beat in the movie. I mean, I like it. I guess I never thought about what it would have looked like otherwise. But as soon as you said that, it's like, yeah, I would have loved to have just seen what Cape Lancet did. I guess that's my point. When I watch it, it's not one of the CGI moments that feels natural or that feels like it has aged.

as well as some of the other aspects of the film. In place of a dark lord, you would have a queen. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a good scene. In the John Borman version, they actually had sex after that. That's right. Weird that we missed that one. Great.

Anyway, Jackson held firm, and he got his scary, angry, gladriel. Now, there are a number of, there's so much in post-production I couldn't get you, but a few other things that are worth mentioning. The Fellowship of the Ring originally had a very different ending. Sam and Frodo get in the canoe and there's a final Urukai that leaps up into the canoe and drags one of them into the water.

Yes, it's like Friday the 13th. That's what they said. Apparently they were really nervous that the movie was ending on too much of a subdued downbeat so they wanted to put a little action in at the end of the film and they later cut that

and Fran Walsh directed the new version where Sam runs out and nearly drowns trying to get into the boat, which is both funny, sweet, and touching and like a perfect ending to the movie. The first cut, Jackson's first cut of Fellowship of the Ring was four hours long. New Line called Mark Rodesky and asked him about it.

Nordeski said, well, it's four hours long, but don't worry, by the time you get here in eight weeks, it'll be way shorter. Bob Shea showed up eight weeks later, and it was still four hours long, but Peter Jackson assured him it was a very different four hours, gold. They did

finally get the movie down to three hours. They had, New Line had wanted to get it down to two and a half. They kind of wanted each movie to be two and a half, but they eventually relented. And they were like, as long as it's under three. I think it's like under two hours and 47 and they can still get the number of

screen times in each day. It's 247 or 251, and they wanted to hit that number. Peter Jackson, of course, likes the extended cuts because it offers additional footage for fans, but he has backed up my belief that the theatrical versions are the better versions and the definitive versions. And here is the quote from Peter Jackson, quote, I did the extended versions for the fans. The theatrical versions are very carefully worked out.

We spent a whole year trying to get the best possible cut. I did the extended cuts because we had 30 to 40 minutes of footage that fans of the books might be interested in, but I was aware that every time I put something in, the momentum of the scene was going to be slow. Every time I did it, I thought I'm spoiling the film. So Peter Jackson, Belieman, Gatural Cuts. Vigo Mortensen prefers the extended cuts. Why am I not surprised? He likes the slower pace.

Was he headbutton the extended cuts? He's just, it's just headbutts. That's the whole time. It's just him headbutton people. Just 40 minutes of Vigalorses of headbutting every cast and crew member. That's right. The films required exhaustive ADR, as well. The locations they filmed in were extremely noisy on the sides of mountains with

gale force winds, near military installations with unexploded landmines. The sound stages they were often on weren't really sound stages. They had converted old factories, et cetera, into shooting locations. They shot in the squash court of a hotel. Philip of Boyens was largely in charge of a lot of the ADR, accompanied, of course, by Jackson and Walsh when they were available. It was Boyans, though, who suggested that they add in the elvish version of Gladriel's opening lines in the prologue for a bit of mystery, a touch that I think is really nice. Yeah. So on December 19, 2001, the Fellowship of the Ring opened worldwide. It made $315.5 million in the United States alone, ending its four-month theatrical run at 860s.

million dollars worldwide. Despite a growing production budget that would end up between $350 and $375 million, the first film had grossed enough money that they knew that the trilogy was in the black before the second film had even been released, which is really cool. So not only was it a commercial success, which the movie was tracking very well. So that it was not, it was a surprise that it made almost a billion dollars, but it was not a surprise that it was a hit. But what was unexpected was that it was going to be a critical hit and that it was going to get some Oscar nominations. Should have gotten more.

Well, in terms of nominations, it got about as many as you can get. So the Fellowship of the Ring was nominated for a record tying 13 Academy Awards. Is it tied the Titanic? Titanic. Here are the nominations. Best picture, best director, best supporting actor for Ian McKellen, best adapted screenplay, best art direction, best cinematography, best costume design, best film editing, best makeup, best original score, best original song, best sound, and best visual effects.

I should also mention for best costume design and best best makeup, Richard Taylor was nominated in both of those categories, which I think is pretty cool. I think it's kind of BS that there weren't more acting nominations from fellowship. We'll get to that. That is the big beef with these movies. So it won Best Cinematography, Best Makeup, and Howard Shore won Best Original Score for Fellowship of the Ring. Very well deserved, I think. Yes. It was after the release of the Fellowship of the Ring, as Peter Jackson was diving into post-production, on the two towers and beginning to plan the reshoots that they would need for that film, that Mary Parent, the new head of production at Universal, called his manager, Ken Kamens, and asked,

Would Peter be open to rekindling King Kong? Oh, how the suitors come crawling back! Pete, you dirty dog! If you haven't listened to our first episode, Universal had been developing King Kong with Peter Jackson until the frighteners flopped, and they realized Roland Emmerich was made. making Godzilla, and so they had canceled the project. But of course, following the success of Fellowship of the Ring, he became the hottest director in Hollywood.

Now, the reshoes for the two towers led to over 25 minutes of the finished material that you see in the final film. So a lot of that movie needed to get worked out in the supplemental shooting. One of the biggest changes in post was obviously Arwin's reduced role in the second film. So she was initially fighting at Helms Deep. They shot her fighting at Helms Deep, and they removed her digitally. So she's actually painted out of those scenes.

Why? Like, do we know... Why? Or, like, what it was that didn't work as well? So I think the problem was that by the second film, they wanted to start establishing Aowin's character, and they felt that the two were stepping on each other narratively, and so they wanted to focus on one instead of the other.

So I think that Arwen is... the main female presence in the first film, and then A-O-N in the second and third, and then obviously R.O.N., though, gets her Elvin cameos, you know, kind of away from the action that you don't really need, and I'm guessing those were part of the supplemental shooting materials as well, as they were working out what to do with her character.

I don't... I think probably Walsh and Boyans would both say, like, they never fully figured out what the balance between those two characters should be, but... I feel like it was probably the right move what they did. Anywho, because originally she was supposed to be at Pelinor Fields as well. That's right. And they wisely left that to AOLN.

And that's a more impactful moment. So the two towers were released on December 18, 2002, to an even higher gross of $926.5 million worldwide. And it actually received slightly higher critical praise. I think it's great. A lot of critics that, you know, it deepened the themes from the first film. it became even more serious.

It's less of a fantasy film. Ghalem is such an accomplishment. However, despite this fact, it actually had the least successful Oscars run of all three of the films. Which is total bullshit that Andy Circus did not get nominated, especially for that one.

Well, this is, there was a lot of anti-motion capture, anti-CGI sentiment, specifically in the acting block of the voters for the academy. So there's a lot of belief that while the academy was starting to embrace fantasy in some of these other departments, directors realizing, holy shit, how did he direct this?

Producers really, holy. That actors were pretty staunchly against the work that had been done in this movie, and they didn't take it seriously. I feel like it's a lack of understanding of how much input he had into the final product, which I guess is understandable. And Circus, he became the spokesperson for motion capture. and he's really responsible for the way in which it's been accepted now, and he has been the person that has tried to explain to actors

that this is just a new form of authorship over your performance. And it's really, he's been a one-man advertising campaign for a long time in showing what is possible with this technology. So it was dominated for six Academy Awards, best picture, art direction, film editing, sound, sound editing, and visual effects. And it won sound editing, but did not win any of the other awards that it was nominated for. So the reshoots for Return of the King included Erdogan's coronation scenes.

So that's why that scene's so freaking long. Scenes are part of the reason it has so many endings. They reshot the Grey Havens, I guess, like three times. One time it was out of focus. This movie has the most endings. I know. The Grey Havens thing, like one time it was out of focus. One time Sam was actually in the wrong costumes.

They held the third time. They reshot some scenes involving Sam and Frodo on Mount Doom, and then also they wanted to give Bernard Hill a better death scene. I guess Theodin's death scene had been kind of rushed, and I'm glad that they took the time to redo that. Originally, Frodo straight up murdered Ghalm. So Ghalm gets the ring, and Frodo throws him into the fires of Mount Doom. And they felt like it actually was too dark a turn for Frodo at the end,

and they thought it was better if Golm instead kind of basically leaps, falls to his own death, you know, chasing the ring. so it's more of a self-destruction as opposed to murder. That, they also, their last shot of the film was actually shot after they had finished these pickups on June 27, 2003, including Peter Jackson realized he was missing like one reaction from Ghalm, as Gowem realizes that Frodo intends to destroy the ring.

And so Jackson just brought Andy Circus to his house and shot Andy Circus's reaction and then sent that to Weta. And then they, like, animated over just Andy Circus shot in Peter Jackson's house, which I thought was pretty cool. Now, there were a number of cuts for the Return of the King that were considered very controversial, both by the cast and fans. And I think the highest on that list is that Saramon's death is never shown in the theatrical releases of the films. So they had filmed Saramon's death. Obviously, you see it in the extended edition of Return of the King at the top of Orthank, Warm Tongue, Stabs. Saraman, Christopher Lee, he then falls from the tower and is impaled on one of the industrial

devices that's down below. Apparently that, him being impaled was very much an homage to one of the deaths of Christopher Lee's vampire character in the Hammer horror films that he had done before. And Lee was really looking forward to giving his character this send-off in the films. And as you know, he is a Tolkien scholar. And so he really felt that Saramon was an important character and that Saraman had been increasingly sidelined in the second and third films. And so when he realized that his character's death was not included,

Lee was actually very vocal about how displeased he was, doing several interviews, criticizing the film and that decision. Oh, wow. Yeah, apparently things were very icy between him and Peter Jackson, until Jackson brought him back for The Hobbit, and they reconciled at that point. But he was not happy, and fans weren't happy either, and actually an online petition went around

with some idiots wanting. Peter Jackson to like change the edit of his movie. Like, guys, go find something else better to do. Anyway, Sean Aston also had a bit of a sour taste in his mouth when the Return of the King was released. So I think of all of the actors, maybe Andy Circus was the most snubbed. But I think that Circus understood that the world wasn't ready for what he was doing yet. Yeah.

And I think he understood that. And he knew that it was his job right now to help usher in this technology and not scare people with it, Sean Ashton put it all on the line with these movies. And I do think it's the best performance of his whole career. And I do think he's a very good actor, but I think what he does in these movies is somebody going beyond what you might expect from them. It's so pure. It's great.

And he had gotten, I think, probably for the first time in years, real critical praise for his performance in the Two Towers specifically. when audiences realized this character isn't comic relief, this character is actually the moral compass of the entire series. He didn't get a nomination for the two towers, but there was buzz. And I think he really thought, and he's admitted, I think, that he really thought maybe he could get nominated for Return of the King. And then when the movie was released, and he had also been so proud of his performance.

So, like, famously, in some of these final scenes in the film, like Peter Jackson would come up to him after taking. And Aston himself would break down during the ADR sessions. Like everyone agreed he was amazing. Yeah, he's great. Also, he's not on the upswing of his career. He was in a plateau or even like a ravine when he got these movies. So this is a comeback opportunity for him.

And when he finally saw Return to the King at the premiere, he realized that only about he said 20% of his, performance and scenes had been kept in the final film. Oh, man. And he was pretty upset, and apparently he let it slip during an interview, that he was disappointed that the audience was only able to see 20% of his performance. And apparently Fran Walsh emailed him shortly after saying that Peter Jackson had been pretty hurt by these comments, because, of course, Jackson was having to juggle an entire franchise.

I'm sure he didn't want to cut Sean Asson just for that sake. And it seems like everything is fine between them now. But it just goes to say that everyone's putting so much into this. And ultimately, Jackson has to deliver something. Yes, it can be three and a half hours, but it can't be four and a half hours. No one's going to want to sit through that. So Jackson didn't have time to completely finish Return of the King. So according to the DVD commentary, he really only locked five

out of 10 of the reels before they were under the gun. And they didn't finalize picture until November 12, 2003. And this film premiered in Wellington on December 1st. So they had to cram three reels. And with the film this long, it's about 20 minutes a reel. So that's 60 minutes of editing in the last three weeks of editing. In fact, Peter Jackson didn't see the fully finished film with score and sound from beginning to end until the premiere in Wellington.

on December 1st, 2003. And according to Elijah Wood, Peter Jackson, after the movie, turned to him and said, yep, it's good. It's pretty good because he had not seen it from start to finish. Oh, my God. I mean, it is the only one of the three that you're kind of like, yeah, this, you know, it's still great, but it's- It loses a little energy at the end, I think, compared to the other two.

But, of course, it's still a wonderful accomplishment. Now, the Return of the King contained nearly 1,500 VFX shots. That's three times as many as fellowship, twice as many as two towers. And again, they're delivering these on an annual cadence. It also contains 1,500 endings. I'm just joking. One of the major unexpected VFX jobs was eliminating Sauron from the Battle of the Black Gates. I mentioned this in our first episode.

In the script, Aragorn was supposed to fight Sauron at the Battle of the Black Gate. So Sauron was going to lead his army forth, and it was Aragorn going head to head. They actually filmed that. You can go on YouTube and see the behind-the-scene footage of Saran fighting Aragorn on set. So Tall Paul was their big actor who played the larger ringways, and he was in the Saran get-up, and they filmed Aragorn fighting Saran. Jackson realized that that actually took the focus away from Sam and Frodo. Yeah. The whole point is that Aragorn can't, could never defeat Sauron in person.

that's not how you defeat Sauron. It's only by destroying the ring. So dramatically, it lowered the stakes for Sam and Frodo. So instead, he had Weta superimpose that CGI troll over Sauron in the final footage. So that's why we got that fight scene. And if it looks slightly wonky at one or two scenes, like two moments, it's because of that moment. There's also a few funny jumps in that scene. like, Aragorn's on a horse giving his speech,

and then all of a sudden he's not on a horse, and he just turns and says, For Frodo, and he runs. Like, you can tell there are a lot of cuts in that scene that don't quite make sense. You can also tell that the shot where he turns and says, For Frodo is clearly part of the much later pickups because he looks like he ages three years in, like, one edit.

Anyway, I love that scene, but there are a few janky kind of moments in it. So, the Return of the King holds its premiere in Wellington on December 1st, 2003, and it is as much a celebration of Lord of the Rings as it is a celebration of New Zealand. 100,000 people show up. That is 25% of the city's population. The film then went on to open worldwide

on December 17th, 2003. It grossed $1.147 billion. It became the 27th highest-grossing film of all time. That's as of now. It was the highest-grossing film of 2003, the second highest-grossing film of the 2000s. the highest grossing entry in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, obviously, and the highest grossing film ever to be released by New Line Cinema.

It held the record as Time Warner or Warner Brothers, highest grossing film worldwide for eight years until it was surpassed by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. Of course, now Barbie has become the highest grossing Warner Brothers film of all time. I think it's nearly $1.5 billion. Yeah. Return of the King was also a return to the Oscar glory with 11 Academy Award nominations,

Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Costume Design, Film Editing, Makeup, Score, Song, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects, No Acting Nominations. Once again, Snubbed. Did get a SAG Award for Ensemble, but no individual nominations. However, it did a clean sweep. It won every award it was nominated for. Flying Titanic with 11 wins. Wow. Yeah.

In fact, the woman who won best for the producer of the film that won best foreign language film, apparently her speech was like, I'm very glad Lord of the Rings wasn't in this category, which I did think was very funny. Because I would have lost. A little fun fact, Bernard Hill is the one actor to appear in both Lord of the Rings and Titanic. Yes, he's the captain. He's the captain. Yeah.

In Titanic. Wow. Of course, also, fun fact, Ian McKellen appeared in another great trilogy or great two films of the early 2000s with X-Men as Magneto. And then Christopher Lee in Star Wars as... That's right. Lord Duku? Whatever. Is that the stupid name?

Lord Duky. George Lucas was apparently super salty about Lord of the Rings. And like, so apparently George Lucas. was, he was, like, pretty salty because people were shitting on Star Wars and, like, Lord of the Rings was amazing. Did he watch it? Yeah, yeah, and Star Wars had shot in Australia.

Well, he, like, gave this, he gave some interviews where he was like, well, you don't understand. It's like, Peter Jackson had it easier than me. And, like, he was thinking very... George, did you watch your own movies? Sean Aston, this was really sad. Sean Aston was, like, a huge fan of Star Wars and George Lucas. So he went up to

George Lucas at the MTV Movie Awards. I think it was between the first and second film or second and third film. And he said, oh, my God, George Lucas. I am such a huge fan of Star Wars. I don't know if you know me. Like, I play, I'm Sean Ashton. I play Sam in the Lord of the Rings. I'm one of the hobbits.

And apparently George Lucas just very dismissively said, all you hobbits look the same to me and turned and walked away. And then Sean Asston went, George Artier Pinks fucking sucks. And then he walked away, which I did think was very funny. Good for Sean Aston. Yeah, yeah. Later, Lucas Embrace.

the films and, in fact, became a very big fan of Andy Circus, specifically because Lucas was fascinated with motion capture technology. And then, of course, ends up using him. Yes, later on. In the end, Lord of the Rings grossed over $3 billion against a production budget in the end of about $375 million. So Harvey Weinstein had wanted to make it for 75. New Line said no more than 200, and in the end, it was $375 for all three. There is a rumor that even, each was made for 90, that's principal photography. Yeah. You know, that was the number.

But with the reshoots, it just ended up adding up. There's no way. And again, I think the most recent like Avengers movie was $350 million. I was going to say, for three movies at this point, that is a bargain-based deal. Great movies. Of course, this doesn't even take into account. The insane money they made on both the extended editions and the DVDs. The DVDs became literally some of the most successful DVDs ever sold.

And not only that, Peter Jackson took a lot of pride in the DVDs, and they are worth your while. They have an incredible amount of behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with Peter Jackson, where he's perfectly candid. His video diaries from these movies, and then in The Hobbit, are entertaining in and of themselves. Now, New Line Cinema found new life off of these movies, both creatively and financially. These movies underwrote their business for the next five years. Every executive involved got a five-year contract coming off of this. It really kind of became the goose that laid the golden egg for them. Later, they would fall into a lot of litigation that I'm not going to get involved in.

I'm not going to get involved in this episode. I want to talk about it when we cover The Hobbit. But they were eventually sued by the Tolkien Estate. They were also sued by Peter Jackson. And they were also sued by Saul Zenz, who had been the rights holder going into the Harvey Weinstein edition of the project. So, again, I'm not going to dive into the details of the litigation here, but it has to do with the fact that it was extremely successful, and these various parties felt that they had not been compensated per the stipulations of their contracts. For many of the cast members of the Lord of the Rings, the films would cast a long shadow over their careers, though they seem to have embraced it. This cast, I think, almost more than any other fantasy or genre film, shows up for everything.

Yeah, they do. They claim that it was Vigo Mortensen's idea to get matching tattoos for the nine members of the fellowship. That tracks, yeah. The word nine in Elvish specifically. In the end, Ian McKellen, Orlando Bloom, Sean Aston, Billy Boyd, Viggo Mortensen, Dominique Monaghan, Elijah Wood, Sean Bean, and Brett Beattie, John Rees-Davis's stunt double all got the tattoos on various body parts to celebrate the films and the bond that they had formed. over the multiple years shooting them. Davies declined to participate. It's rumored for several different reasons,

but I do like the reason that he gave because it was funny. The Elvis tattoo was designed, but as I am a professional actor, whenever there's anything dangerous or that involves blood, I sent my stunt double to do it, which I thought was a good answer. Aw. For whatever reason, he didn't want to do it. Yeah. Elijah Wood has gone on to found his own production company,

Spectrovision. He's found success both on screen and behind the camera. Ian McAllen, of course, would reprise his role of Gandalf for The Hobbit. He also enjoyed considerable acclaim for his turn as Magneto in X-Men, as I mentioned. Figo Mortensen found a fruitful collaboration with, ironically, David Cronenberg, Howard Shore's original collaborator, receiving an Oscar nod for his turn in the excellent Eastern promises. Dominique Monaghan found a great role in Charlie for the often amazing and equally frustrating lost. Yeah, something that maybe we should cover in the future episode.

Let us know listeners if you would be down to hear about a TV show because that one is a doozy. Sean Bean, of course, later returned to the genre that had served him well for the magnificent first season of Game of Thrones when he got to play, I would argue, the closest character we've seen to an Aragorn in a fantasy show with Eddard Stark. Orlando Bloom took his sword play and incredible good looks onto many leading roles. roles, including Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Troy. He actually had, I would argue, the most immediate career success off of Lord of the Rings. Sean Aston found steady work, including in Stranger Things, but never got the lead roles that I think he was maybe seeking after it. However, it was Andy Circus that I would argue has had the biggest rise overall and the biggest

impact on the film industry coming off of these movies. he would obviously go on to play King Kong and Caesar, the lead in the Planet of the Apes trilogy, then direct blockbusters in his own right, and even play Alfred and Matt Reeves' Batman reboot of this past year. And he's great. He's really good. He's super fun. Never thought Michael Cain could be tops.

And I'm not saying he has, but I really think that he does his great version of it. He does. Peter Jackson immediately went on to talk. King Kong, his childhood dream. He later did The Lovely Bones, a film much closer to heavenly creatures that I think in many ways set him back in a sense. That film was not well received. And I believe that film would warrant its own episode based on what I've read about it, including Ryan Gosling dropping out very close to production and being replaced with Mark Wahlberg. Yikes, that's a tough swap. Yeah. Jackson, of course, would later be pulled back into the world of

Tolkien with the Hobbit, I would argue largely against his own will, but of course, that's a story for another day and another episode. What changed perhaps more than anything as a result of these films, though, is a little country called New Zealand. Once a sleepy little hub with Nairie a Hollywood production, they have become an essential cog in the film world. In fact, their COVID-Zero policy allowed them to continue shooting while the rest of the world was shut down. They've been home to innumerable incredible films, including, but not limited to, Avatar, Alien Covenant, Aquaman, Bridge to Terribitia, The Chronicles of Narnia, District 9, in part, Evil Dead and Evil Dead Rise, Ghost in the Shell, The Hobbit, Cranpus, Love Cranpus.

Cranpus is fun. The Last Samurai, The Legend of Zorro, Meagin, or M-Thregan. shot in New Zealand, the Meg, mortal engines, Mulan, Pearl, the power of the dog, X, and many,

many more. All thanks to a very strange, short young man who decided that he wanted to leave his town to go on adventures, not unlike Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. And that man is Peter Jackson, who went from creating alien vomit

in his parents' basement to changing the film industry, as we would know it forever. To the people of New Zealand, thank you for these movies. And your creativity and determination, they're remarkable. They're a treasure.

I'm sure we'll put them in our library of Congress if we haven't, you know, at some point. And I just think it's a remarkable achievement, and it just goes to show there is nothing that Hollywood has a monopoly on that creative people elsewhere cannot accomplish. Absolutely. Thank you, New Zealanders.

And one wonders why it wasn't the piano that inspired an international move to New Zealand for tourism. Yeah, the piano is great. The piano is great, but I guess it doesn't make you want to visit as much when it's a lady getting dragged through the mud and having her fingers cut off. Although, like, terrifying Anna Pacquine, I'm just like, are all the children there like that? Okay, so the piano, not as good for tourism, but still good. But still an amazing movie. A really beautiful movie. Thank you, Peter Jackson.

Thank you, Peter Jackson. Thank you, Fran Walsh, Philip O'Wines, everyone involved. What an achievement. This film was so fun to research and so fun to watch. Guys, I know there are so many other facts that I did not get to. You could do 100 episodes. No, come at me in the comments. My point is go watch the DVD extras.

Read the books. It's all worth your while. All right, Lizzie. We've held off for two films. We're here for The Return of the King. You have so much to choose from what went right. I mean, I'm sorry, I have to go Andy Circus and Gallup. Andy Circus.

I have to. His face, his crazy eyes. Yeah, his performance and then what he did for cinema moving forward, it's crazy. Yeah. He also voiced one of the orcs, and I didn't mention, but John Reese Davies also voiced Treebeard. Yes. I looked that up and I was watching it because I was like, sounds familiar.

Yeah, yeah. Treebeard was a real accomplishment. I didn't talk a lot about this, but apparently, rendering the ants because they were so detailed and the way that they simulated the leaves on them was so complicated. It took between 24 and 48 hours to render one frame of the ants. Oh my God. Just to show you what they were dealing with. I'm going to go with Howard Shore, who I think was an unexpected choice for these films. I think there are more obvious, like, big filmic composers, you know, maybe not Hans Zimmer at the

the time, but like a James Horner, definitely. I think Howard Shore was an unconventional choice, but I think because of that, that's why we got something so specific and memorable for these films, not to say that those other composers aren't wonderful. I just think what he created is memorable in a way that no film score, no other film score is. I know so many themes from this movie. That's what I was going to say. They're so melodic. It's not just one. No, it's all of them. And in a way that you're right, you don't necessarily recall multiple themes from movies. It's almost the way that you think of like a symphony versus thinking of a score. Or tracks like on your favorite band's best album, you know, like, oh, that's a banger. Oh, that one is. Have you heard Casa Dume?

It's great. Casa Dune is great. So I will go with Howard Shore, but of course, there are so many other things that went right with these movies. Guys, check them out. Buy the Blu-Rays. They look great. They do. Don't just stream these movies. The Blu-rays look better.

So you can get them on Amazon. They're also a steal. They cost, like, way too little money. I know. It was like $18 for the Blu-Rays for all three of these movies. What a deal. Check them out. Any housekeeping that we should get to, Lizzie,

before we let these folks go? I don't think so. Come back in two weeks for our next episode. We're sticking with the fantasy theme. This one's going to be the Princess Bride. Come check it out. Of course, thank you to your. are full stop supporters. That's right. Chris Leal, Matthew Pabopopopal, Peltin, Tom Kristen, someone

Chinani. He's got a new book out. And Michael McGrath, thank you guys from the bottom of our hearts. We deeply appreciate your support. If you guys haven't joined our Patreon and would like to head to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast. You can now join our new $3 tier if you are interested in to our show without any ads. You will get our entire back catalog and all episodes going forward on a private RSS feed with no ads. That's all we got for you guys.

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We'll see you soon. Bye. Bye. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, video content, more. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthana Uos.