In the much anticipated second season of The Rings of Power, audiences are invited back to Middle-earth as evil descends across the land. Set before the epic events of The Lord of the Rings, the series is filled with all the extraordinary locations and fantastical creatures the franchise is famous for.
Louise Hooper, a director on the new season, spoke to us about how she approached directing such an iconic world, and how the whole team came together to make the impossible, possible.
Read our conversation below.
The Lord of the Rings is a famously rich universe, with so many books, films, and more to draw on. How did this affect the way you approached your role as a director for season two?
Tolkien is a titan of English literature, and The Lord of the Rings is world building at its most impressive — epic and extraordinary, full of history, lore and landscapes. As a director it’s thrilling to enter into this very cinematic arena. Naturally, you want to ensure you pay homage to the essence of his writing, to continue to build this much-loved world whilst also bringing your own energy and vision to the mix.
Key for me is developing the choreography of the actors alongside the choreography of the camera. I know that sounds pretty standard for a director’s role, but with such enormous sets and distinct realms and kingdoms, finding the right movement, pace, and scale to emotionally tell the story is everything. On a show like this the sky really is the limit. We have time to prep in depth, so everything is carefully considered, from the detail, weight, look and feel of the smallest prop to the most epic wire rig set ups, that span a great distance and can be used for some eye-popping camera moves!
Having directed on The Witcher and Sandman before, I truly revel in the fantasy genre as you really can go big! On Rings Of Power the ambition of the show means that you’re working with some of the best HoDs and crew in the industry, plus incredible tech & equipment, so you can dream up some tantalizingly impressive and seemingly impossible sequences. The scripts are brought to life through pouring over models and designs, drawing up storyboards with the amazing DoP Laurie Rose, and a ton of production meetings until we have a cunning plan to make it all possible. It’s a joy collaborating with so many brilliant minds, all experts in their own field, to conjure up something that feels epic, original and befitting the expectation of the show.
This season sees the iconic Tom Bombadil finally making his way to the screen. I'm sure a lot of work went into presenting his character, what was that process like?
I was delighted to help create the first glimpse of Rory Kinnear playing Tom Bombadil. The first thing we did was to go back to the books and read everything about him, his look, his songs, his relationship with nature. Tom Bombadil is the embodiment of all that is nature and all that is good, so we wanted to ensure that the sets gave a significant nod to that. In the books he lives in the depths of the Old Forest, but at this point in season two he has ventured out into the desert to see the extent of the destruction by the dark wizard. Even though we were in a desert landscape we wanted Tom’s dwelling to be surrounded by an oasis, literally buzzing with nature, lemon trees, bougainvillea, beehives and goats! The costume, hair and make-up department used Tolkien’s description to guide their depiction of him, with apple red, rosy cheeks and yellow boots, and Rory worked with the fabulous voice coach Leith McPherson to find the perfect lyrical dialect.
Similarly, the Barrow Wights receive their first screen outing during this season. What was the process for bringing these creatures to screen?
The Barrow Wights sequence was awesome to direct, like making a mini thriller/horror film! At night Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), Elrond (Robert Aramayo) and the Elves chance upon an old burial ground where ancient kings and lords have been entombed, undisturbed for a very long time. Now, they are awoken and spirited alive by evil forces.
There are so many stages before a sequence like this can be filmed and then brought to life in the final cut. First, we had to think about how the Barrow Wights would look. How gaunt, how gruesome, eyeballs or not? This was a wonderful process, looking at prototypes with the Head of Prosthetics Barrie Gower, then with Head of Costume Luca Mosca we looked at distressing very rich garments intertwined with jewels and long thin chains, that would be later used to ensnare their victims, this was all discussed with VFX supervisor Jason Smith and of course all the creatives & show runners, Patrick McKay and JD Payne.
We didn’t want the Barrow Wights to look like ghosts or zombies but something utterly strange, spectral, majestic and ethereal. We discussed how they might move; considered their physicality, how attached they’d be to the physical laws of gravity. We worked with amazing dancers and contortionists to play the Barrow Wights and Movement Co-ordinator Tallulah Holly-Massey helped choreograph the way they moved — as if their skeletons were puppeteered back to life but their joints didn’t fully connect. The actors wore green body suits under their broken down, distressed costumes so we could capture their real movements and then use CGI to augment their skeletal look underneath.
The Barrows themselves were beautifully designed by Kristian Milstead and his team, to look ancient, bedded into the landscape, but large enough for our stunt wire pulls and camera equipment to see our unsuspecting elves dragged inside of them!
The stunt department, led by Ben Cooke, naturally spends weeks, even months preparing for these brilliant action sequences. With the Barrow Wights it was exciting to have an action sequence and jump scares that isn’t fast paced. Counterintuitively, it can be more frightening to see monsters that are ethereal and slow moving.
Scale work must be so important to get right with all the creatures that are a part of this world. How experienced were you with this before, and what techniques did you use in the most recent season?
Directing scale sequences is a big part of The Lord of the Rings, and I was delighted to have many fabulous scenes between the dwarves and the elves. For the finale of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, I directed a sequence with the same actor playing a male and a female version of themselves in a dance, which was mostly done with a lock off camera and split screen. What we were about to get into on The Rings of Power was a lot more complicated, but just as fun!
It started off with a scale workshop with the wizard of VFX, the supervisor and all-time genius Jason Smith. We learnt all the different ways and methods that you can work with the actors to create illusions of scale. It’s quite geeky, takes a lot of mathematical calculations, a lot of patience, tenacity, and perseverance on the day, but I really loved it. Sometimes it’s fun to have a specific way of working thrust upon you and then you can see how to play with it, even turning it to your advantage.
One approach is to use a motion control camera to repeat movements and then scale the exact same movement but from a different position & focal point. We worked closely with the VFX department to breakdown these shots, and then I enjoyed seeing how far we could push the set ups, ultimately doing some complicated, long takes to film as many scale beats as possible all from one track and crane position. The actors were brilliant in helping us achieve these shots, often having to deliver their lines to a moving stand, marked for an eye line and the voice of the other actor just in their ear. Scale filming naturally needs a lot of preparation but once it’s all nailed down it’s really exciting — and to see the results almost instantly as the images are layered over each other is very satisfying.
It must have been so special to get to work on this show. Is there anything you learnt during filming that you'll take forward in your work as a director?
The Rings of Power was one of the most fun shows I’ve ever worked on. Of course a lot of that is to do with the brilliant team, as well as the scale and ambition of the project. What I went into the show feeling, and what I feel even more now, is that the sky’s the limit. There are so many talented people around to help make the impossible, possible. I want to continue to keep thinking even bigger and bolder, to explore all the creative possibilities and ways to film to the maximum. There is an opportunity and an expectation to create something mind blowing, so I love to bring my double-A game. No holding back!
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