Producers of ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’ on putting the film together
MANILA, Philippines – The Lord of the Rings franchise has just gotten a new addition, and it’s none other than the anime film, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
Slated for a December 11 premiere in the Philippines, the anime film is directed by Kenji Kamiyama, known for TV series such as Blade Runner: Black Lotus and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
It’s set 183 years before the timeline of the original trilogy and tells the story of the House of Helm Hammerhand, the legendary King of Rohan. Fueled by vengeance, Wulf stages an attack that forces Helm and his people to “make a daring last stand” in Hornburg, otherwise known as Helm’s Deep. Helm’s daughter, Héra, is then left to lead a resistance to protect their people from Wulf.
In this question-and-answer feature, the film’s producers Philippa Boyens, Jason DeMarco, and Joseph Chou expound more on how it came to be, from reimagining J.R.R. Tolkien’s world in anime form to casting the voice actors that gave life to the characters.
On designing the world of Tolkien through anime
Boyens: I have to say, the animation was a learning process for me because you do have to trust the process a lot more, obviously, than what you’re seeing when you’re going and sitting and seeing rushes with live action. But I already had a really strong sense of what a visual master Kenji Kamiyama is, so I had a lot of faith that I knew that that world was going to be realized. I don’t think I knew how beautifully it was going to be realized, though. That’s one of the great things when you work with a really great director. Their imagination always exceeds your own, which is a good thing, I think. One of the interesting things that happened in the creation of this film is that the form came first, the suggestion of doing an anime Lord of the Rings made me think of this particular story. So, it wasn’t a case of, “We’ve got the story.” What form of animation are we going to tell it in? There was something about this particular story of the Rohirrim that felt intrinsically right for that great tradition of Japanese filmmaking that is anime.
DeMarco: We worked very hard to make this film feel like it fits into the world as established by Peter Jackson’s wonderful movies. We want this to feel like you are firmly in that world, that version of Lord of the Rings, even though it’s animated. That meant we made sure the accents are right for people that are in Rohan, similar to how they were in the films. That meant using the original designs of the Hornburg or Helm’s Deep as it became. We are telling this story as set forth in the appendices, and we are hitting all the major beats that Tolkien wrote in our story. But we used our knowledge of what he wrote in terms of his world so that when we do color outside the lines, as it were, we came up with things that are plausible to the rules set forth by Tolkien himself.
Chou: Anime actually is not one certain, specific thing. Anime is like a film, it has all kinds of genres. In anime there’s horror, comedy, love story, drama, fantasy, samurai, ninja for kids…. I mean, there are all kinds. It’s got action, it’s got cute animal titles, there’s a lot of toy commercial-like anime. Anything can become anime, so I didn’t particularly think, “Can this become an anime?” I thought, “How do we adapt it?” That was the biggest question. The challenge was really not just to do animation but to do something that was faithful to this universe. To do that, we needed so many animators and resources. It was a monumental task to gather enough animators to take this on. I think we worked with more than 60 companies from around the world. The ingenious idea that Kenji Kamiyama came up with was to utilize motion capture, highly detailed models, and hand-drawn animation — this allowed us to have, for instance, 2,000 horses running in a scene.
On discovering the story through Héra
PB: One of the things that attracted us immediately to the story in the appendices was this unnamed daughter, which I have to say as a female screenwriter myself, I found that really intriguing and interesting. She is so central to the conflict and yet she remains unnamed. Now, I don’t think that was in any way Professor Tolkien dismissing her, I think he simply didn’t get around to telling that part of the story. So, it was really interesting for us to be able to go and explore her. And immediately, when you think about this girl who would have been caught in this conflict, where she is basically this point of contention in this power struggle because who she marries may have serious implications for who might end up ruling Rohan, you begin to understand she was this pawn. What agency did she have or could she have had? We wanted to stay true to the story elements that Professor Tolkien may have turned to had he expanded on this character, who, by the way, Fran Walsh named Héra (for this amazing Icelandic actress, Héra Hilmar), because we had Helm and his sons, Háma and Haleth, we knew it had to be an H. And once we went into the story, and we started to think, “What if she had had a personal relationship with Freca’s son, who is the young lord who offers for her hand?” As soon as we started to play around with that piece of storytelling — whereas “What if they were friends when they were younger?” — it just started to blossom.
On the cast
PB: One of the things that happens when you start casting a character is the actor starts bringing their own take to how they’re going to bring this character to life, and one of the great gifts I think that came to us was Gaia Wise playing the character of Héra. Gaia is someone who is innately curious and interested and quick. She’s got this ready laugh. She is very physically able, and she’s also just got this incredible heart. She’s very giving as an actor, and what started to happen was Héra started to become more and more real the more we got to work with Gaia. I’ve got to give a lot of that credit to Phoebe Gittins, who’s one of the screenwriters on this project, in that we had a young female writer writing a young character for this great young female actress, and I think that you can feel that coming through.
JD: In addition to our veterans like Brian Cox and Miranda Otto, we discovered so many amazing talents. There are a lot of undiscovered actors in terms of film, there are a lot of stage actors, and everyone brought their A-game because they’re part of a Lord of the Rings film, they were excited about being a part of it. As a producer, or the writers or the artists, you can write a character and you can have a drawing of it in the concept of who they are, but they aren’t really fleshed out until the actor embodies them; they will bring shades that you didn’t even think about, which is the beauty of the whole collaborative process.
JC: Brian Cox, I worked with him just before this film on a series called Blade Runner: Black Lotus, and he was actually recording inside his own closet in his apartment, I think, back then, because it was during the pandemic, and nobody could get out and go to the studio. But I was really ecstatic that we got him back after the smashing success of his own series, Succession. And he really brought the kind of gravitas that we needed for the character of Helm Hammerhand. I thought he was wonderful. Gaia Wise was just amazing as Héra — she brought the innocence and the sensibility of this hero that basically starts from a princess to really a queen-like figure. She really played that arc wonderfully, and I thought she was just perfectly cast as is everyone else, which was just really thrilling.
On what is in store for audiences when they see The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
PB: I think Lord of the Rings fans should expect something in the great tradition of the best of the live action films. I definitely think they should, there’s some special little Easter eggs in there that only they will appreciate, and I cannot wait for those to be discovered.
JD: We — and that includes Philippa, Fran, and Peter — did not set out to make an animated version of a Peter Jackson film; we wanted to make a Kenji Kamiyama anime feature film that lives within that world. Before we were even halfway through the process, it was already one of the most exciting projects I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on. As a lifelong Lord of the Rings fan, a lifelong animation fan, and a part of the anime industry for 25 years, making this film made me feel like a kid again, discovering this world for the first time, and I can’t wait for audiences to experience it.
JC: When we made this film, we were very conscious of the fact that we were part of the Peter Jackson trilogy of the Lord of the Rings films. We were coming in as a prequel to those films. And not only that, we did our utmost to try to stay faithful to the text that Tolkien wrote. When it comes to design as well, there’s a close collaboration with Weta, who’s done all the designs, and also the art director, Daniel Falconer, who worked on all six films. He worked with us to make sure that we stayed consistent. When you see armor, clothes, or buildings in our animation, it’s basically how we extrapolated what it looked like in Two Towers, what it would look like a couple hundred years earlier. Again, that was done in very close collaboration with Peter Jackson’s team and Weta, which really was an honor. And so, we hope that the fans of the films will come enjoy it, the fans of the novels will also come and enjoy it, fans of movies generally will enjoy it, and everyone will recognize it as part of the Lord of the Rings world. We tried to pay our utmost respect to the source material and the films and we hope it is recognized as such. – Rappler.com
The quotes in this feature are from a Q&A with Philippa Boyens, Jason DeMarco, and Joseph Chou provided by a PR agency.