Journal #18: Wellington
3/19/16
Cover Photo: “That Man on the Moon”
Sheep Spotted: ~30

A big day! Woke up to shoot the sunrise (today’s photo), did a full day Lord of the Rings tour, went to a street festival, and then shot photos again at sunset.

The guide we had for the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) tour was fantastic- which was good because unfortunately due to it being 16 years since they filmed the LOTR movies, most of the sets are completely gone and most of the locations look completely different. In particular, Rivendell and Isengard are not much to look at- that said, we did hear some awesome trivia:

1) Ian McKellen (Gandalf) is terrified of horses and refused to ride a real horse during the film, which is funny because Gandalf is always riding a horse. What they did instead is have a stunt double do all the riding scenes and then put Ian on a fake horse during the close-ups. It’s worth noting that most of the actors couldn’t ride a horse- except for….

2) Viggo Mortensen, who is a total badass. Viggo, as a method actor, purchased a horse, rode it all over town for 3 months and became an expert rider. He also refused to wear anything other than real (and very heavy) steel chainmail (most of the actors wore plastic for the majority of scenes) and also would practice his sword skills with a real steel sword in the middle of downtown Wellington (which got him arrested at least once). Also- about Viggo’s casting…

3) Poor Viggo was not even the first choice to place Aragorn- in fact, they even casted and brought Stuart Townsend to New Zealand before Peter Jackson decided he hated him. The studio then tried to hire Nicolas Cage (!) as Aragorn, but Peter Jackson shot that down too. Finally, after looking for actors in Indy films, they settled on Viggo and brought him to New Zealand.

4) Other weird casting attempts of note: Originally Sean Connery was supposed to play Gandalf and get 15% of the box office revenues, but he allegedly told Peter Jackson that he thought the books were “stupid” and turned down the role to do “League of Extraordinary Gentleman.”

5) Billy Boyd (Pippen) and Dominic Monaghan (Merry) are very similar to their movie characters and would endlessly prank their fellow actors. In particular they loved to torment poor Sean Bean (Boromir): in one instance, while helicoptering to a mountain location they discovered that Sean was afraid of heights, so they convinced the helicopter pilot to start doing stunts.
After this, Sean refused to ride in the helicopter and would hike 5 hours up the mountain every morning instead. Every time he did this, Billy and Dom would fly over and throw snowballs at him.

6) Finally last but not least- Peter Jackson is not the best at following rules. He accumulated over $3 million dollars in fines over the 2 years filming LOTR for things like: setting massive sets on fire without permission, using a massive smoke machine while filming over downtown Wellington, and endless injuries to extras.

The best filming location we went too was the Weta Workshop-which is where all of the physical props are made. Weta is now a massive studio conglomerate in New Zealand that has done all of the visual effects and props for movies like Avatar, Mad Max, LOTR, The Hobbit, District 9, and many many more.

However, they started as a small studio working almost exclusively with a small director, Peter Jackson. Together they’ve built a massive empire and pretty soon they’ll be opening a large LOTR museum where all of the sets and props will be on display (currently everything from the movies is being stored in 256 shipping containers out on a dock somewhere).

2 more days in Wellington- Today I received new underground intel on where to find some rare beers out here, so I should be back tomorrow with some excellent beer reviews!

Cheers,

-MB

P.S. I forgot to mention on Yesterday’s blog that I randomly ran into Paul and Amanda from my Routeburn Track hiking group- They chose to do a kickass honey moon in New Zealand full of hiking, helicopter rides, and horseback riding! Paul also works in the best (and most interesting) profession in the world, Software Sales ;).