A Kiwi Middle-Earth

Designer Grant Major talks to LINDA HERRICK about making Tolkien's imaginary world a reality.

The Lord of the Rings production designer, Grant Major, laughs at the suggestion New Zealanders will be able to play a special little game of spot-the-place when the first of Peter Jackson's epic trilogy rolls out on the big screen.

"Well, you might recognise the Remarkables, but that'll be about it," he says. "Everything else about the film will be Middle-earth."

Major, responsible for the look of all of the film's interior and exterior sets, worked with Jackson on Heavenly Creatures (for which he received best design award in the 1995 NZ Film and Television Awards) and The Frighteners.

This time around, he had a first-class reference tool: J. R. R. Tolkien's meticulously detailed descriptive writing.

"We constantly referred to the book throughout the whole process of making the sets," says Major. "We got Alan Lee and John Howe, who illustrated the HarperCollins books, in early on. They created hundreds of sketches of this whole world the hobbits lived in and ventured out into. The idea was to make everything look real, make a world you could believe in."

Major's vision for Hobbiton, the shire of Bilbo Baggins as he prepares for his "eleventy-first" birthday party, was medieval English countryside.

"Our location scouts eventually found this farmland near Cambridge that had lots of old oak trees and gently rolling land. We started preparing it a year before the shoot. The Army came in and helped us to create the mounds which would form the hobbits' underground hillside homes.

"We planted grass all over them to form the roofs. We planted 5000 cubic metres of flowers and made the vegetable plots that are so vital to the hobbits' way of life."

Major says the interiors of Bilbo Baggins' Bag End home reflect the physique of the hobbit: small, round and built for comfort. "The front door is round and the hallway is round, too. The emphasis is on what the hobbits see as essential for a good life - the warmth of the fireplace, frequent eating and a good pipe.

"It is very comfortable, secure and easy, which is why it is such an enormous step for Frodo to leave it behind and go out on his mission." As with many of the sets, two interior Bag Ends were built to give the right sense of scale for the arrival of Gandalf.

The hobbits - supposedly no taller than one metre - acted in normal-size sets. When Gandalf came on the scene, the smaller sets gave the illusion of the wizard towering over his tiny friends in their diminutive dwellings.

A key place in the early stage of Frodo's journey is his sojourn at the Elven city of Rivendell, where he recovers from an attack by the Riders and where the Council of Elrond rules on the fate of the fellowship.

"The look of Rivendell is that of a people who are deeply connected to the forest and nature," explains Major. "The buildings are more like part of the forest than separated from it. The huge windows are a connection to the outside and the ceilings are lofty, like looking up at the roof of the forest. The colours are browns and greens, and there are leaf motifs everywhere. We made a lot of furniture from oak.

"You get the feeling that this is a place of ancient culture and serenity, but there's also a feeling that this is a people who know their time in this world is passing. And it is the Last Homely House before Frodo's journey into terror."

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Feature: Lord of the Rings