A Word on the One Ring...

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

December 22nd, 2000 marks the end of Principal Photography for The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. A fourteen month ordeal, starting on October 11, 1999, the shooting has captured the equivalent of more than 1400 pages on reels of celluloid. Running across three films and more than seven hours of screen time, The Lord of the Rings represents many things.

The fourteen month shooting schedule is the longest ever done by a film crew. Reports have called it a light-hearted, good-natured crew to work with. The entire countryside in which it is being filmed is backing every effort of the production. Just imagine for a moment the vision that is required to shoot upwards of seven hours of screen time. I find myself astounded by the vision required for a single feature length film, let alone three. Add in the fact that the three Lord of the Rings films are not being shot in sequence, and you have perhaps the most demanding vision ever required by a director. The fore-sightedness and the pre-production work had to have been extensive to stay on time and stay on budget within the fourteen month schedule.

A quick bit of technical information regarding the production. The studio, New Line Cinema, has reportedly handed out nearly $270 million to finance the entire trilogy. That's approximately $90 million dollars each film. That's big by today's epic film standards. But, most important is what it buys. The $90 million translates to approximately two and one-half times that much in New Zealand dollars, transforming the budget from big to enormous. Judging from what has been seen so far in the astounding internet preview and the pictures that have leaked from the set, that money is not going to waste.

Considering the difficulty of the subject matter, and especially because it is perhaps the most beloved book ever written, the best word to describe such a project belongs somewhere between ambitious and insane. It is because of the source's popularity that the director, Peter Jackson, took it upon himself to produce what he hopes to be the quintessential works based on Tolkien's novels. Jackson is one of the biggest fans of the novels himself, and has a dizzying familiarity with the trilogy of books. In the depressingly few interviews he has given since his work on the films began, he willfully spouts his creative vision, giving eager fans a glimpse of the final products we'll see in Christmas 2001, 2002, and 2003. Let's just hope that the expectations that arise from such a project doesn't overwhelm the already exhausted crew.

$270 million to rule them all, three films to find them,
One book to bring them all, and in the expectations bury them

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Comments Written by Collin Thornber on 12/18/00