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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.