How Lord of the Rings lives on with Rings of Power
It’s been almost 20 years since the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy of films concluded. Now, the “timeless” tale of adventure, hobbits, dwarves, elves and other Middle-earth creatures is making an onscreen comeback via the prequel series, The Rings of Power.
Dubbed by the US media as possibly the “most expensive” show ever made, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power will premiere on Amazon’s streaming service Prime Video in over 240 countries and territories, including the Philippines, as well as in multiple languages on Sept. 2 (Friday) with new episodes dropped weekly.
As of writing, screeners have not been made available nor details about the plot. But this is what we know so far from the brief primer: The Rings of Power is set during the Second Age of Middle-earth or thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and LOTR. The tale will take viewers back to the era where “great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads, and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness.” The show also promises kingdoms and characters, both familiar and new, that “will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.”
LOTR’s dedicated fandom would know that this was promised or foretold by Bilbo Baggins, one of the heroes of the LOTR saga: “Don’t adventures ever have an end? I suppose not. Someone else always has to carry on the story.”
Carrying on the story and taking audiences “there and back again” are The Rings of Power showrunners and executive producers JD Payne and Patrick McKay.
A little backstory on the duo: JD and Patrick have been writing together for nearly 25 years after meeting on their high school debate team. Payne finished English Literature, with honors, at Yale University, while McKay is a graduate of Stonehill College, where he studied Theater Arts, and American University, where he earned an MFA in Creative Writing.
They have since collaborated on over 20 screenplays, including Star Trek Beyond for producer J.J. Abrams, Jungle Cruise for Walt Disney Studios, and their original 2017 Blacklist script Escape. They’ve done scripts for Sony, Warner Bros, Legendary, 20th Century Fox, Legendary and Paramount Pictures.
The Philippine STAR had a virtual one-on-one with JD to talk more about what it took them to create this already widely-anticipated show. He disclosed that when they made the pitch to Amazon, they drew a Middle-Earth map on a whiteboard, indicating which areas were already seen in previous adaptations and which ones were not.
“We also pitched this idea of going to the Second Age and they got really excited about it and so did we from the beginning because we just felt like our appetite as storytellers matched their ambition as a studio. And we realized that they could put resources into realizing Tolkien’s vision in the most wonderful way possible,” he said.
Below are more excerpts from the recent interview.
How does it feel that it’s just a few days away from the premiere?
“I feel extremely excited. Both myself and a whole group of people, a thousand-strong at this point, have been working for many years to bring Tolkien’s Second Age to life and the opportunity to now share it with the world and have people come and see, some of whom have never experienced Tolkien before. We designed this in such a way that people who had never read the books or seen the movies could just come in fresh to Middle-earth and experience these very emotional stories. We’re very excited for fans to really get to see what this is all about.”
Why did you decide to base the series on Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales (of Numenor and Middle-earth) volumes?
“Amazon got the rights to the three (LOTR) books, the appendices and The Hobbit also. And so within that, there were 9,000 years of possible history. We actually don’t have the rights to The Unfinished Tales, The Silmarillion but we have the rights to sort of like all that time period. And we said, what really feels like it’s a story that wants to be told and that deserves to be told on this big, epic canvas?
“And when we started looking around, very quickly we set it on the Second Age because, you know, it’s these iconic stories of the forging of the Rings of Power, the rise of the Dark Lord Sauron, the fall of Numenor, the last alliance of elves and men, these are stories that have never really been seen, done in long form, in this format before.
“So, we started getting really excited, feeling like, you know, there’s a 50-hour canvas here. You can go so deep, get into the histories, the cultures, the mythologies and the relationships in such a cool way. We just felt like it was a story whose time had come.”
In creating Middle-earth, how much of it was “real” and how much was CGI?
“From very early on, our ambition was to do as much that was practical and real as possible. We passionately both are students of classic Hollywood cinema and love the beauty of a world that you can really go and be in. And so as much as we could, we built these worlds. We built an entire wharf in a working dock in Numenor. And really multiple city blocks. We constructed the forest that is the elf-Kingdom of Lindon so much that the trees were actually built, carved and sculpted. Obviously, Middle-earth is such a wondrous place that there are some places where CGI will be necessary to expand and to realize that the world is full. But we always wanted it to be difficult to tell where one stops and the other starts.
“With our characters, we want to go practical wherever possible. We didn’t want to use heavily CGI characters. We would use practical makeup and even with like, creating our dwarves, we didn’t want to bury them in tons of prosthetics to make it something hard for actors to react and emote. We wanted to find people who have interesting faces that already lent themselves towards a certain kind of character, so that when they came in to perform, there was nothing between you and them as a character and you could feel their emotions very directly. So, we were fortunate to work with some of the best prosthetics and hair and makeup people and also, visual effects artists do really bring together a whole vision for Middle-earth.”
Why do you think LOTR remains timeless and relevant to audiences today?
“That’s a beautiful question. It deals with these timeless themes that resonate across cultures and generations. It’s these stories of friendship, and great friendship overcoming great evil. It’s the stories of underdogs, who are given these adventures and monumental tasks that they have to achieve, even when they don’t feel up to it. It’s a story of the corrupting nature of power. It’s the timeless stories of good and evil. And, you know, these are our themes that resonate with everyone. And it’s one of the reasons why audiences have been connecting with Tolkien for so many years. We really hope that they will also connect with our vision of his Second Age.”
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