Peter Jackson's art of war

By RUSSELL BAILLIE



Those who have flocked to its first sessions will already know The Return of the King isn't just the end of a very big fairytale, it's a monster of a war movie.

Its battle scenes are bigger and gutsier than its immediate predecessors and much of its summer blockbuster competition -- even if Master and Commander and The Last Samurai are grounded in military history and supposedly, the real world.

As a war flick, The Return of the King has the lot. There's a scene which echoes -- of all things -- Saving Private Ryan, which was one of the films Jackson would watch on his occasional Sundays off from filming to help recharge his cinematic imagination. There's the devastating siege of the high-walled city of Gondor, Minas Tirith.

There's a king's rallying cry to his troops that should give even the most ardent pacifist goosebumps. And then there's the heavy brigade as the elephant-like Mumakils lead a counter-attack against the warriors of Rohan. It's mighty exciting.

On a technical level, it's some piece of work too, considering the battlefield action was filmed in tundra country outside Twizel, the Minas Tirith set was built in a quarry in Lower Hutt and replicated in miniature in a warehouse metres away from Wellington airport's runway and then the whole shebang glued together into seamless whole inside the computers of Weta Digital.

But as director Peter Jackson told TimeOut, he left much of his war footage out.

"The one thing I learned in battles - and obviously I hadn't shot battles before Lord of the Rings - I have realised how boring they can get very, very quickly.

"We do try very hard to make the battles about the characters, which is something we've learned the hard way. We've got a lot of battle shots we've never used because it gets dull very fast. There is only a certain amount of spectacle you can put up with until you need to go back to Gandalf or Pippin or Frodo or Sam and I've very much aware of that."

Pure spectacle aside, the most memorable scene in this part of the movie is the speech of King Theoden (Bernard Hill) as he leads his Rohan warriors into the fray.

He ends the rousing address - on horseback - by galloping before the mounted ranks of his men, touching each of their spears with his sword.

Veteran English actor Hill came up with the idea for what may become a classic scene.

"The first couple of stays I was here I was down at Weta and Richard Taylor took me down to the workshop and said, 'This is the Rohan section and these are the spears for Pelennor Fields'. And there were all these spears in a rack at an angle in an aisle.

I was walking down thinking 'That's interesting, imagine that at Pelennor Fields. Everybody would be touched by the king's sword and it would all be yahoo, yahoo, victory and valour and bravery and Rohan'."

Hill told Jackson and co-writers Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens and the scene went in.

Only then did it sink in that he had better improve his riding skills to pull it off.

"I had done some riding but couldn't have ridden one-handed holding a sword and gallop along the front rank of 200 horse people. I wasn't a good enough a rider.

I thought, 'Okay I'm not going to drop the idea. I'm just going to have to upgrade myself. I used to go to the stables and train for 20 hours a week'."

But when it came to the big scene, Hill's designated steed, Snowy, didn't want to know.

"When we rehearsed that bit he just went crazy. It was obvious that he was really, really unhappy. So it was getting dangerous. I was fine but people were getting frightened looking at it."

So Hill swapped him for another mount named Deep End - "he was called that because he was thrown in the deep end, but then he became Dependable.

"He would stand there all day while they threw Orcs at me, Uruk-Hai at me, whatever you like. He would just stand there. I would just squeeze him and he'd go 'Okay we're going somewhere else now' and off we'd go."