A Fantasy Fan Visits The Hobbit

In the middle of an empty lot in a movie studio in Miramar, New Zealand (it’s a suburb of Wellington), a bunch of people are standing on a rock. Some of the people are famous–Martin Freeman, for example, who at the moment is doing a little dance to keep warm between takes. It’s June, but New Zealand is opposite-land, so it’s winter here.

These are most of the principal cast of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the second movie in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, to be released Dec. 13. Freeman plays the hero, Bilbo Baggins; the other actors play a band of dwarfs out to reclaim their homeland. Everyone is dressed in full Middle-earth regalia. I’m hanging around watching them work.

Being on the set of The Hobbit is an exhilarating and almost indescribably weird experience, especially if you are, like me, not just a journalist but also a fan. Most people grow up reading fantasy; some, like me, never grow out of it. I still read fantasy novels; I’ve even written a couple. So visiting the set of a big-budget fantasy movie is both enchanting and disenchanting. This is where the magic gets made, but making magic turns out to be like making sausages or laws: not always a pretty sight.

Take that rock. It’s not a real rock; it’s a meticulous full-scale model of a rock that is 100 or so kilometers west of here, on the Pelorus River. But that rock was in a gully that flooded before they could finish the scene. So–as one does–Jackson caused to be built an exact replica of the rock, back at the studio, and he’s shooting on that. The final scene will be a digital blend of real and unreal.

The actors are not in Middle-earth; they’re barely in regular earth. There’s nothing behind them except, at the edge of the asphalt, a four-story Day-Glo green wall that will be digitally painted over with lush green landscapes. Around them are concentric rings of tents, craft tables, folding chairs, milk crates full of gear, cameras, tripods, monitors and cables, cables, cables–the entire set is veined with them. Fantasy, it turns out, comes with a lot of infrastructure.

Every few takes, a small army of technicians bearing compacts and spray bottles descends on the actors–two or three per actor–to primp and groom them. The weather is too sunny to match what’s already been shot, so far overhead vast fabric screens are being winched back and forth on cables to simulate a cloudy day. Obviously when you see The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug–and I fully intend to–you know it isn’t real. But somehow I hadn’t quite realized how unreal it all was.

Here’s how you turn a human into a dwarf. The dwarfs in the Hobbit movies aren’t played by actual dwarfs, à la Tyrion Lannister or Time Bandits. They’re played by regular-size people who are made, by numerous cinematic sleights of hand, to look smaller than they are. But dwarfs aren’t just smaller; their entire bodies are differently proportioned. Their hands, feet and heads are larger relative to their bodies. So the human actors must be rebuilt.

It starts with their clothes. “Tummies changed,” says Bob Buck, the movie’s costume designer. “We built shoulders out, we built their legs out, we built their bums out. Everything is all distorted and manipulated to become a different sort of form.” Waistlines were lowered. The actors were issued giant boots, which not only made their feet bigger but also forced them to walk differently. More dwarfishly.

In fact, although it’s not obvious onscreen, the actors playing dwarfs are almost entirely covered in prosthetics. Their heads are enlarged with latex. Their arms are sheathed in latex sleeves ending in sausage-fingered latex gloves–each actor has multiple hands and arms lined up on metal racks, carefully labeled, to the point where the set looks like a Civil War–era field hospital. Viewed close-up, the arms are works of art: the skin is painstakingly mottled and scarred and scabbed and in some cases (Dwalin’s in particular) even tattooed. There’s dirt worked into the lines on the palms. Each arm is carefully furred with dwarf hair.

Speaking of which: there is almost no natural hair in The Hobbit. It’s not just the dwarfs–every single character is wearing a wig. “Middle-earth is very hairy,” says Peter King, who designed the hair and makeup. In the novel the dwarfs have multicolored beards, which they keep tucked into their belts. King hasn’t gone that far, but his dwarfs do have extremely elaborate hairdos and beards. That takes a lot of hair, so King used yak hair instead of human. “Yak is quite coarse,” he explains. “It’s very crinkly, so it’s a great way of bulking things up very quickly, especially for facial hair and big beards.”

Once they were clothed and coiffed, the actors attended a dwarf-movement clinic with a former Cirque du Soleil performer who told them to imagine they had cannonballs in their guts. “It’s not just about being shorter,” says Richard Armitage, who plays Thorin Oakenshield, king of the dwarfs, and who in real life is 6 ft. 2 in. (188 cm) tall. “I use the bison as an animal idea of it: that big heavy upper body, that powerful stampede thing. It’s a sense of being very grounded. It’s also an emotional thing for the dwarfs. They’re heavy in their souls as well as their bodies.”

Being a dwarf requires a certain amount of Zen. Summer shoots were so hot that electric cooling units had to be sewn into the costumes. “We are, if you like, encased in dwarfdom,” says Mark Hadlow, who plays Dori. “You can struggle with the prosthetics and the beard and the mask, the weight of the clothing, the weight of the weapons, the weight of the shoes. But if you accept it, inwardly–then it’s so easy to play a dwarf.”

Though being a Hobbit is easier. it’s mostly about ears, feet and regular old acting. If dwarfs are bison, then Bilbo, according to Freeman, is a meerkat. “Pete always thinks I’m very hobbity,” he says, “and I don’t really want to argue about it, but I don’t really know why. I’m a bit bolder than Bilbo, to be fair. I’m not quite as reticent about everything as he is.”

Likewise, a lot of being an elf is about the physicality. Actors playing elves go to elf camp, where they learn to fight like elves and to ride elk. “There’s kind of a feline quality to the character–he’s light of foot,” says Orlando Bloom, who’s reprising his role as Legolas from The Lord of the Rings. “You think about the way they move, the gait. We tend to walk heel-ball-toe, whereas if you walk toe-ball-heel, it automatically does something.” (To create that sleek, glossy elf look, elves get to wear human-hair wigs.)

Legolas isn’t actually in Tolkien’s Hobbit, but Jackson and his co-writers, his wife Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, wanted to use some Lord of the Rings mythology, and for that they needed more elf characters. Hence Legolas. They also needed women: “Fran and I were writing the script,” Boyens says, “and we began to feel very quickly the sheer weight of the fact that there were no female characters.” So they created a new elf from scratch: Tauriel, a lethal fighter played by Lost’s Evangeline Lilly. Even more than Legolas, Tauriel is already separating the casual fans from the hardcore. “We’ve done whatever we’ve done in terms of altering, embellishing, complicating, in order to make a better movie,” Jackson says. “To make a better film, and to make a better Tolkien film.” Full stop. There’s no point in being a purist on the set of The Hobbit.

For a Tolkien nerd, purist or otherwise, walking around the studio is like exploring a weird, scrambled mashup of Middle-earth. The green-veined marble facade of Erebor is leaned up next to a pile of huge fake trees from Mirkwood, which are spray-painted psychedelic rainbow colors. “Once you’re in Mirkwood,” Dan Hennah, the production designer, explains, “and you’re getting the toxins from the mushrooms, the spores in the air, you start to hallucinate slightly–they do a bit of tripping, all those little dwarfs.”

There’s Lake-town, an entire fishing village built inside a flooded warehouse, complete with real rotting fish. There’s an army’s worth of weapons, not just from Middle-earth but also from Narnia–Weta, Jackson’s workshop, did those movies too. I spend an afternoon watching Bilbo, Thorin and Balin being pursued down a hallway by the great dragon Smaug, who will eventually be voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch but who is played here by a giant fan on wheels and a big rack of blinking lights. An expert on Middle-earth linguistics stands by to ensure that everybody pronounces Smaug correctly: not like smog but with the au sounding like the ow in howl.

Those are the sets that are actually built. When you’re seeing closeup shots or characters interacting with a set, what you’re looking at is really there. If not, it’s probably digital–ironically enough, the entirely untechnological world of Middle-earth is increasingly computer-generated. “If we didn’t need the actors, we didn’t keep the set,” says Joe Letteri, the movie’s senior visual-effects supervisor.

CGI is gradually eating the actors too. “Basically, if you don’t see the dwarfs or the actors in closeup, we’ve pretty much replaced them with digital doubles,” Letteri says, “because we were creating the environments anyway.” Azog–the orc chieftain who killed Thorin’s father–began life as an actor in a suit, but he was replaced by a virtual orc. Same with the Great Goblin. Sometimes even the crew gets confused about what’s real or not. “They still talk about putting the prosthetics on Barry Humphries,” Letteri says. “They don’t realize there’s no there there.”

For Jackson all this monumental effort and obsessive detail is, in part, about redeeming fantasy as a genre. “In terms of cinema, fantasy was always cheap,” Jackson says. “It was relatively crude effects, and it was treated as a bit of a joke.” He’s trying to give fantasy the serious, gritty treatment it never got before. “We’re approaching it as though these are events that actually took place. They’re as real as Columbus discovering America. It really is treating fantasy with respect.” (Realism does have its limits. “You don’t see anyone ablute in Middle-earth,” notes Sir Ian McKellen, who plays Gandalf, “or any of the ordinary physical things that we all need.”)

I spend one afternoon at Gol Duldur, standing by while McKellen writhes in the grip of an unspeakable, as yet invisible evil that will be added in postproduction. Afterward, smoking and drinking coffee in his trailer, still in full Gandalf costume, he reflects on the strangeness of it all. “The filmgoers don’t want to know that what I’m seeing as Sauron is actually a ball on top of a pole,” he says. “It’s the eye of Sauron, and it’s the most dangerous thing imaginable. You just have to use your imagination. It’s make-believe, isn’t it? It’s just pretend.”

And that’s the really funny thing about being on the set of The Hobbit: it doesn’t put you any closer to Tolkien’s magic, but it doesn’t put you farther away either. The more technical it all gets, the more unreal, the more everybody ends up relying on their imaginations, the same as all the rest of us do. McKellen is just a bit better at it than most of us. “I don’t really think of this as fantasy at all,” he says. “The characters in the story don’t think it’s fantasy. For them it’s life or death, isn’t it?”