How are you doing?
I'm good. How are you doing?
I'm still in awe of this magnificent premiere.
It's fun, isn't it? It's quite daunting.
Desert Lagoon and everything.
I didn't see the lagoon yet.
I'll go check it out.
Have a dip.
Have a look. Yeah.
What was your first contact with Tokyo? What was the first?
Was it the books? Was it the films or. A bit of both.
I first read The Hobbit when I was three in Braille.
No, I'm joking.
Everyone has their own story of my dying grandmother.
Read me, Lord of the Rings
in a weekend and passed away as they, you know, went to the undying lands.
I know I read The Hobbit when I was ten or 11 years old.
It was a fantastic book, perfect age, perfect sort of captured me.
And then Lord of the Rings when I was 13 and really just took me away.
I had that copy with me and reread it before starting season one on this, most
particularly the appendices, of course, which is where we pull our stories from.
So that was my experience and
I spent time working on The Hobbit movies previously.
So this was a lovely return to New Zealand and a return to to Middle-Earth
and in a completely different way, which was amazing.
And I really hadn't, didn't know what the guys, J.D. Payne
and Patrick McKay were doing, didn't know the story and all of it.
And so it was amazing to read and be like, Oh my God, we're starting with this
and this. Oh, I know this person, but this person's new.
It was a lovely blend of stuff, so really excited.
But that my yeah. My introduction was the books. Yeah.
I mean technology has moved on a lot since that, since the films and CGI
and everything else, but it still feels a real kind of grounded core to the story.
How important was that for you guys, too, to make sure that that
that stay true to the films and to Tolkien's work?
Sure.
I think reality was very important.
Obviously, we knew we were going to lean into a lot of visual effects, work for us,
you know, epic escapes and stuff that we couldn't capture for real.
So wherever we could do stuff practically and for real, we we did
so beautiful costumes like Holly Ramsay, Avery's production design work.
I mean, everything that we did,
we really tried to pay attention to detail, our works, the prosthetics,
the makeup, the hair, all of that stuff, and where you can make that count.
And there was this idea
that we wanted that if anyone paused
at a scene and left the room and came back in, you would you would come back.
You would know immediately what world you were in.
And so shapes and lights and colors and tone, everything was important.
And hopefully we stuck with that.
And then he start shooting for hundreds of days.
Sometimes that disappears.
But I think I think we did a good job. Yeah.
I mean,
when you're dealing with literature and heroes, villains and people,
you know, whatever it is,
people always have the idea of what everything should be, what a superman
should look like, what, what, what that Jesus looks like or anything like that.
How important for you guys was it to make sure, just stay true
to the to the work and let that speak for itself?
Well, I think there was a mantra just when in doubt, return to Tolkien,
return to the text, return to that.
That's our grounding
heartbeat in all of this.
And follow that and then look for the lines that might reference this
or might reference that to give us detail that we can work on
and then just a purity of that passion of being fans of his work.
And I think J.D.
and Patrick are that.
So it's all comes from a good place.
It all comes from a heart.
And that was so nice to follow and that was their work ethic for us
on set as well. Every single day.
Super open, super friendly.
You enjoyed coming to work.
I'm back for season two.
You know, it's it's you need that sense of family
and support and they provided it every day which was which is lovely to get behind.
Yes, I did.
They did some interviews earlier with the cast
and a lot of them talk about Bear McCreary's score. I just wanted to ask you about that.
I mean, how how important was he once you had him as part of the jigsaw puzzle
to bring this story to like, oh, well, the music is amazing.
I mean, it's as you know,
Walter Murch
said, it's the it's the only part of the filmmaking process
that touches you physically as an audience member.
It touches your sound.
So I was talking to Bear actually
this evening about that, and he was, you know, so excited.
He's going to be reading our season two scripts shortly and
and starting his process properly from the get go.
So that's going to be super exciting when you're acting and producing
and performing the day to day, the actors disappear, of course.
So they've gone away for a year and we've been busy in the cutting room
and putting it together and making green screens turn into like
amazing worlds and adding music and cutting
huge performances out of their work or whatever.
But so it feels new.
And I mean, I must have seen it 30 times and tonight will be new again.
I will notice things that I forgot were in there.
I love that.
I wish you the best night. Thanks so much for your time. Pleasure.