Thanks Wow. I don't know if the members of this august community are aware, but director Peter Jackson has just finished filming three sequential movies covering the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, presumably one film per book. The first one is to be released in December this year.
It was mostly filmed in the Wellington region, although various sequences were shot all over New Zealand. A call went out about 18 months ago for descriptions of areas of the country which might be "Tolkienesque" in character. I contributed a couple myself, although I have no idea whether anything ever come of it.
Half of Wellington seem to have been extras in the films. I applied, but they were all full up for trolls
... no, I didn't, but the son of a friend of ours was one of the Elven lords and appears in all three films in several places. I think he got a total of two lines of script, however. A couple of guys from work took off for a week to be orcs, and one of them probably wouldn't have needed much makeup ...
You'll be happy to know that Helm's Deep is actually still a going concern and has been transferred (probably by a rich Texan troll who thought he was buying London Bridge) to a quarry on Haywards Hill in Upper Hutt. They built Hobbiton in the Waikato. It's certainly been fun watching it all happen, and I'm rather sad that it's all over bar the editing.
I suppose I should be grateful that Bollywood has taken up Wellington as a suitable venue for filming those mind-numbing musical extravaganzas that they are so enamoured of ... but then again, why should I?
FWIW
