“One remarkable thing about reading The Lord of the Rings is ...
“... you go into this world this is a fairy tale. It’s dragons and it’s trolls and it’s Hobbits and it’s Elves. It’s amazing how authentic, how genuinely authentic, it feels. That you start to believe that it could possibly be history. That somehow Tolkien found some lost parchment, some secret parchment that we don’t know about. That he really took all this from a true historical event. It has that degree of believability about it.
“I guess the way that we tried to hint at the depth, which is all that the film could really do, was partly in our design process. While we were working on the screenplay we were able to start a team of people designing. Because the great thing about Tolkien is that all the descriptions of what you need are in the book. You don’t have to wait for the script unlike you would on a normal movie. I didn’t want movie design, I didn’t want fantasy movie, Hollywood sort of style of design. I wanted something that felt authentic. I gave a little speech to the design crew very early on. This is a little bit weird, but it was the only way I could really express myself. I said ...
„Look, we’ve been given the job of making The Lord of the Rings. From this point on, I wanna think that Lord of the Rings is real, that it was actually history, that these events happened. And more than that, I want us to imagine that we’ve been lucky enough to be able to go on location and shoot our movie where the real events happened. Those characters did exist and they wore costumes and I want the costumes to be totally accurate to what the real people wore. Hobbiton exists. It’s overgrown with weeds and it’s been rundown and neglected for the last 300, 400 years. But we’re gonna go back in there and clean it up. We’re the luckiest film crew. We can shoot in the real locations that these real events actually took place in.“
“That was effectively my speech to try to get everybody‘s head into what I actually sort of wanted in terms of a feeling of reality.”
Peter Jackson, Designing Middle-Earth, The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Appendices, Part One, From Book to Vision, Extended DVD
