When making the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson treated scouting for
locations like casting actors. He knew, like Tolkien did,
that the locations of Middle-earth are as unique and distinctive as the characters that live there.
So casting them properly was an essential part of bringing the world to life on film.
Which is why Edoras was filmed here,
on Mount Sunday in the South Island of New Zealand.
After Hobbiton, Edoras is probably the single most iconic location of the entire trilogy,
but unlike Hobbiton, it was also one of the most difficult,
inaccessible, and remote locations of the entire shoot.
Epic as this landscape is, it really is in the middle of nowhere.
As in, the name of this part of New Zealand is literally just nowhere spelled backwards.
This place is over an hour’s drive from the nearest town,
but somehow hundreds of people needed somewhere to eat,
go to the bathroom, store equipment, get their costumes ready,
park their cars, stable their horses, keep their cameras dry,
watch dailies, communicate with the second and third units
elsewhere in the country, and do a million more things
involved with running one of the largest and most complicated film shoots of all time.
But first, they had a to build a life-size medieval city
on a site that is still on conservation land which,
in New Zealand is a pretty big deal. And they had to do all of this in a place that,
at the time of filming, didn’t even have roads,
let alone cell phone reception. And even after they got all that
sorted, there was another problem. If you’re wondering why I’m talking
to you in a voiceover, well… [furious wind noises]
Yeah, good luck recording dialogue here,
let alone building a set that’ll withstand those winds.
And did I mention that all of that construction needed to be done in winter,
when the place looks like this? It begs the question…why?
Why the hell did they choose a spot as inaccessible and as difficult as this for Edoras?
Why add so much difficulty and complexity to an already difficult and complex production?
Why did they have to build it in winter? Well, most importantly, was the fact that Tolkien
vividly and specifically described Edoras in the Two Towers:
Legolas gazed ahead, shading his eyes from the level shafts of the new-risen sun.
'I see a white stream that comes down from the snows,' he said.
'Where it issues from the shadow of the vale a green hill rises upon the east.
A dike and mighty wall and thorny fence encircle it.
Within there rise the roofs of houses; and in the midst, set upon a green terrace,
there stands aloft a great hall of Men. 'Edoras those courts are called,' said Gandalf,
'and Meduseld is that golden hall. There dwells Théoden son of Thengel,
King of the Mark of Rohan. We are come with the rising
of the day.’ So there it is.
The requirements for the location are clear. A hill standing like a lone sentinel before
the great mountains of the South, a river at its base and a golden hall
gleaming in the dawn light at its summit. Tolkien described it in black and white,
so it was up to the location scouts to find a place that matched this description.
Now, that might sound easy to find in a country as mountainous as New Zealand,
but it really wasn’t. The team scoured the country in
search of a solitary hill near the mountains, but all they found were flat glacial plains,
or the small rocky hillocks that make up other parts of Rohan.
If there was a hill close to the mountains, it would usually be near a lake, like this.
Beautiful, yes, but not suitable for Edoras. But finally, art director Dan Hennah spotted
this hill right here. Mount Sunday.
He passed over the Rangitata river valley by helicopter
and saw this great slab of rock that had somehow resisted the eroding force of the
glacier that once carved this valley. Peter Jackson led a recce to the site.
He immediately approved the location, but felt that a life-sized set
would need building there for real, to properly capture this epic landscape.
It wouldn’t be enough to build a miniature like Minas Tirith,
or to digitally add the city, like they did with Weathertop.
With dozens of crucial scenes taking place in and around the city over the second two movies,
Peter Jackson knew that in order to feel real, Edoras had to be real.
The scale and majesty of this landscape couldn’t be replicated by greenscreen.
Concept designer Alan Lee did a first pass of what Edoras would look like
by placing tracing paper over a photo of the hill and sketching what the city might look like.
In designing Rohan, Lee knew that Tolkien’s inspiration for Edoras,
and Rohan in general was Anglo-Saxon culture and language.
Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon for much of his life,
and this passion shone through most clearly in Rohan.
As with a lot of his work, the connections are strongest in the language and names.
The word Edoras itself means ‘courts,’ while the ‘Eoh’ in both Eomer and Eowyn’s
names comes from the Old English word for horse. But like Edoras itself, the Golden Hall
of Meduseld stands over all of this. Not only is Meduseld the name of the Golden
Hall in the language of Rohan, but it is also the Old
English word for ‘mead hall.’ The hall was directly inspired by Heorot,
the mead hall in the epic poem Beowulf a poem Tolkien loved so much he translated
it himself years before writing the Hobbit. And if you needed more proof of the connection,
compare how that hall is described in Beowulf to the same passage from the Two Towers.
The production designers were deeply conscious of this connection,
and employed designs, materials and techniques from the Anglo-Saxon era
when bringing the Rohirric culture to life. This is evident in their costumes,
as well as in the design of Edoras city itself. Drawing inspiration from both the landscape
itself and Anglo-Saxon architecture, much of Edoras was constructed from wood,
while the roofs were thatched from the same tussock grass that grows abundantly
in this part of New Zealand. But this is all very well and
good to draw on paper. It doesn’t solve the
problem of how remote Mount Sunday is, or how difficult it was going to be to
build a medieval city and film a movie here. The first thing that needed building was a road.
But not just by some random construction crew. Nope, it had to be built by the New Zealand Army.
Remember how I said this was conservation land? Well that’s a pretty big deal in New Zealand,
so they couldn’t just run a bulldozer through here.
No, they had to uplift and account for every square meter of land
and relocate it to a nursey for about a year so that the landscape could be returned to exactly
the same condition it was in prior to filming. Like I said, New Zealand takes
conservation land seriously. Accommodation for the cast and crew
was found in the town of Methven an hour’s drive away,
while extras were bussed in at four in the morning from the nearest city
a full three hours away. Trust me, it’s a long way.
I have to drive back there tonight, so why don’t you subscribe to make me
feel like the trip was worth it. Thanks!
Anyway, because of the high winds, the main structures had to be built from steel frames,
which were then dressed with the other materials. They did this for two reasons.
Not only did the buildings need to be able to withstand
the location’s ferocious winds and weather, but they were also going to double as the offices
and headquarters for the film shoot itself. See, because all of the interior scenes of
Edoras were filmed on sets built on a sound stage in Wellington,
the interior of these buildings were put to practical use by the film-makers
to solve many of the location’s logistical challenges.
I mean, sure a sort of base camp was set up down near where that carpark is,
Can you see the carpark? Yeah, exactly.
Think about how long it’d take for everyone to break for lunch
if they had to hike all the way there and back again?
That’s not a very efficient use of time, so the Golden Hall building
was used as the catering tent. But even though you see the full city in the film,
I should clarify that only some of it was built for real.
The cluster of buildings around the main gate was built for real at the base of the hill,
along with a street of houses at the top that could be filmed from various angles
and dressed in different ways to represent different parts of the city.
Finally the twelve meter tall Golden Hall sat here,
its thatched roof gleaming in the sun exactly like Tolkien described.
All of these other parts of the city were added digitally later,
but this is one of the reasons the visual effects of the Lord
of the Rings still hold up twenty years later
the use of digital to compliment, not replace the practical.
In this shot, the cameras focus is on the Golden Hall and the real sets,
but at the start, it includes many of the digital houses.
Can you tell where they end and the real ones begin?
Anyway, after eleven months of construction, much of it through the southern hemisphere winter,
the set was finished and ready for filming in September 2000.
See, the set had to be built during winter because the shoot was going to be in the spring,
when the snow has cleared from the hill and valley but was still on the mountain peaks
so that it looked pretty. I’m filming this in the middle of summer
which is why it looks nowhere near as good. But these drone shots are better, right?
Anyway, after working in this remote, cold, windy and isolated place for almost a year,
the shoot itself was in and out in eight days. That’s right.
Eleven months of work, for just eight days of shooting.
That’s the level of commitment the filmmakers had to bringing Middle-earth to life in a way that
would do justice to Tolkien’s vision. But it was worth it.
When Eowyn walks out of the great hall and gazes out over the valley,
she is looking out over that same view, right there.
Thank god they did not do try and it with a green screen.
And it is in fact in this moment that the location brought its own flourish to the scene,
like any good actor would. In this shot of Eowyn, the flag was
not meant to rip from its pole and fly past. But it was such an evocative moment
that the accompanying shots of Aragorn reacting were filmed so
that it could be worked into the final cut. Despite its remoteness, you can see why
this was one of the favourite locations for the cast and crew.
But today, there is no trace a film was ever made here.
True to their word, the set was completely dismantled,
and the conservation land was returned to its pristine, natural state.
Some tourism infrastructure has been put in place like the road, carpark,
and the bridge I filmed this from, but this place is still in a pretty
remote part of the country so doesn’t get too many people coming through.
But there is no mistaking this landscape, or this mountain,
and thanks to the commitment and dedication of the countless people who
were determined to go the extra mile to bring Tolkien’s vision to life,
this epic and unique location will live forever in the films.
So, standing here now in this spectacular, but empty landscape,
I will farewell you with the Lament of the Rohirrim
Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.