BUILDING A WORLD
“These are Tolkien’s characters, and we take our cues from him...Every single decision we made goes back to the text. We just wanted this show to be true to Tolkien.”
it was the best landscape possible to shoot this story. But at the same time, we could see how difficult things were in the rest of the world.” Nevertheless, shooting commenced across the two islands of New Zealand, alongside a painstaking post-production process. “They set up an incredible facility with editors, with VFX, with sound, with music, all in New Zealand,” Charlotte Brändström remembers. “Even while we were shooting we would go and look at scenes cut together and see what worked and what didn’t, and discuss it.” This allowed the production to keep to its targets, despite the real-world disruption. “We met every deadline,” Lindsey Weber reveals. “I’m really proud of that because it was not easy.” TRUE TO TOLKIEN For Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne, it was all about respecting the source material. “We don’t own these characters,” McKay stresses. “These are Tolkien’s characters, and we take our cues from him.” Payne agrees wholeheartedly. “Every single decision we made goes back to the text. We just wanted this show to be true to Tolkien.” Following an epic journey of creation and myth- making, The Rings of Power was finally ready to be shown to the world. Weber, for one, is thrilled by what the team achieved. “You’ve got love stories and friendships and heartbreak and horror,” she says, “and some of the best action that you’ve ever seen. I think it’s really special.”
With any show set in a fantasy world, the figures on screen are only part of the magic. “We had to ask ourselves, what does this world feel like?” Weber remembers. “What are the colors? What’s the smell? Then you not only have to dream it and imagine it, you have to build it.” That was the job of Production Designer Ramsey Avery, who relished the chance to create an entire visual world for the series. “The amount of work that falls to the production designer on a show like this is almost impossible to communicate,” Weber says. “But Ramsey is another huge Tolkien fan, so for him this was a childhood dream. You could see it—when the cast and crew walked onto one of his sets, it felt magical. It was inspiring to all of us.” For J.A. Bayona, physical things like sets, props, and costumes weren’t just part of the background, they were a central element of the story. “Beauty is one of the main subjects of this story,” he explains. “The Elves are trying to fight the forces of evil through beauty. So every single detail, every single object, every single costume needs to reflect that.” A MYTHICAL LANDSCAPE To shoot the series, the cast and crew headed for New Zealand, a land famed for its spectacular landscapes and world-class filmmaking facilities. But they’d barely started work when the global pandemic struck. “It was kind of bittersweet,” Bayona recalls. “New Zealand did an amazing job of managing the situation with coronavirus, and
— J.D. Payne, Showrunner
“Nothing is evil in the beginning. There was a time when the world was so young. There had not yet been a sunrise. But even then, there was light.”
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