Despite its singular title, “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” is actually about a collective of small guys, most of whom are not hobbits, but dwarves. And dwarves, director Peter Jackson says, are far more raucous.
“The way [author J.R.R.] Tolkien writes them, and my own perception of them, is that they’re sort of a chaotic rugby team,” Jackson tells The Post. “They’re guys that work really hard, they’re focused, they get the job done, but at night — boy, do they like to let their hair down and get completely drunk!”
Whereas Jackson’s first “Lord of the Rings” trilogy featured just one dwarf — the wisecracking Gimli — Friday’s new film (and two chapters to follow) sees a band of dwarves fight to take back their homeland from a usurping dragon, Smaug. On the way, they battle trolls, goblins, orcs and other Middle Earth baddies.
“They’re pretty rough,” says screenwriter Philippa Boyens. “I love when you see them do things like fight the trolls. They’re like a defensive line going in to play.”
“You wouldn’t ideally have 13 dwarves in a screenplay,” she admits, “but there’s actually too few of them for what they need to do. And 13 is unlucky, so they take Bilbo on as a lucky number.”
That would be Bilbo Baggins, the titular hobbit played by Martin Freeman, proclaimed by Jackson to be the ideal man for the role.
“All I’d heard from them is, ‘Martin, you are Bilbo, you’re perfect.’ What do you make of that?” says the actor, who starred in the original British version of “The Office” and plays Dr. Watson in the BBC series “Sherlock.” “I was like, ‘Yeah, but am I?’ ”
Despite Freeman’s doubts, he was offered the role, and came into his own hobbit-ness during a training session in which he and the actors playing the dwarves were flown to New Zealand months before shooting began to learn how to talk and move. The crew called it “Dwarf Boot Camp.”
“It was literally boots, and it was quite camp,” says Richard Armitage, the actor who plays the head dwarf, warrior prince Thorin Oakenshield. “They had these huge boots they’d designed, because we needed to walk and move in a certain, heavier way. We wore these weight belts so that our center of gravity was lower.”
Then there were the prosthetics.
“If you take a 6-foot person and reduce them [digitally] to 4 feet, they just look like a little person, they don’t look like one of Tolkien’s characters,” says Jackson. “It’s only by changing the proportions of the human body does that reduction start to feel like a dwarf.”
In order to transform the actors into tank-like dwarves, each wore a latex head covering that expanded the size of his head and his ears, as well as a substantial wig and (for most) a beard, plus various amounts of fat-suit padding. While those trappings were being custom-designed, says Armitage, “We learned to wrestle. We did archery. We did horseback riding. Dwarves aren’t natural riders, so we had to find a way of riding that didn’t look too good.”
Freeman, meanwhile, was learning to walk in hobbit feet — 6 inches longer than human feet — which included, on the inside, a pair of latex athletic shoes with toes. The shoes made his feet more comfortable, but didn’t really help when it came to filming most scenes.
In one, he’s violently sneezed on by a giant troll. “It’s not a lot of fun to spend days and days in gelatinous snot makeup,” Freeman says. “Because of continuity, you’ve got to be in wet snot and then the remnants of drying snot. That’s a lot of days. It’s kind of like a hair gel. Sticky. Very cold. Not comfortable.”
Less comfortable still was the scene in which Bilbo and the dwarves find themselves stuck on a mountain ledge while two rock-monsters hurl boulders at each other.
“We’re coming into wind machines, on full blast. Big f - - king wind machines,” Freeman recalls. “Horizontal rain, right in my eyes. Wetter than you’ve ever been. Wig glue streaming into my eyes. The wind machines are louder than an earthquake. And Pete’s on the loudspeaker going, ‘Martin, can you open your eyes more?’ No, I f - - king can’t. I literally cannot open my eyes!”
For Armitage and his fellow dwarves, the entire shoot was an endurance test.
“I found if I’d consumed too much alcohol the night before, it was even more difficult,” Armitage says. “I had to live quite cleanly throughout the period, because you’d just constantly sweat. You’d get bubbles of sweat inside the prosthetic forehead. My makeup artist used to come up to me with a pin and pop them, and a huge jet of water would gush out.”
At least the dwarves were suffering in good company, sweating it out for key footage.
Using cutting-edge technology designed by Jackson and his team, many scenes were shot in dwarf and hobbit scale, and the human-size characters — like Ian McKellen’s towering wizard Gandalf — were placed in the frame simultaneously from a different, human-size set. The process, which they call “slave motion control,” uses two sets of cameras running exactly in tandem to film two sets of actors.
In a scenes at Bilbo’s hobbit home in Bag End, small characters worked on one set, leaving McKellen all alone on another, much to the 73-year-old actor’s consternation.
“It really did drive Ian crazy,” Jackson says. “He’d just arrived in New Zealand, and hadn’t even got a chance to meet these other people, really. And he had to sit off, out of their sight all by himself, about 50 feet away, and perform long scenes. Every actor likes to feed off their fellow actors, so when you’re in a vacuum, it’s tough.”
“I felt for him,” says Andy Serkis, who plays Gollum and also served as second unit director. “Ian just had the faces of the dwarves on these little light boxes that would light up when they were talking, so he’d be able to turn to them and get the right eyeline.”
McKellen adapted better to subsequent scenes that could be shot simply by redirecting the actor’s eyelines. The dwarves looked at the tip of McKellen’s hat, and he looked down at their chests.
For Freeman, his introduction to the high-technology world of Jackson’s “Hobbit” was shooting his very first scene (though it comes late in the film) with another diminutive Middle Earth resident: Serkis’ creepy Gollum.
An animated character who’s spent hundreds of years wasting away due to his devotion to a gold ring (“my precious,” he calls it), Gollum crosses paths with Bilbo when the hobbit is lost in the Misty Mountains and plays a game of riddles with him.
And the technology has finally caught up. Whereas Serkis’ performance in the “Lord of the Rings” movies was assembled in pieces — the character was animated over Serkis’ basic movements — now he can be filmed with “performance capture” that allows him to fully inhabit the role.
“Gollum was kind of a homecoming for us,” says visual-effects supervisor Joe Letteri, who also worked on “King Kong” with Serkis and on the groundbreaking technology in “Avatar.”
For “The Lord of the Rings,” Letteri says, “we couldn’t do Andy’s face. We were thinking, wouldn’t it be great if we could just capture all this while he’s here? And in 10 years we’ve been working toward that. With ‘King Kong,’ we learned how to do facial animation. With ‘Avatar,’ we learned how to do full-on performance capture.
“It started with Andy, and it was nice to come back to it — just to have the opportunity to put that kind of realism into it. This is my favorite scene in the film.”
As it no doubt will be for many “LOTR” fans — who, if they’re sharp, can also spot Jackson himself putting in a little time as a dwarf.
“I did a cameo in the first few minutes of the film, in the prologue,” the director says. “I put on some of the dwarf makeup at the very end of the shoot, the last couple of days. It was bloody uncomfortable. I’m glad I didn’t put it on in the beginning, because I’d have felt sorry for them. It was much easier for me not having that guilt on my conscience!”
3 precious ways to see Gollum
One of the most controversial aspects of “The Hobbit” — other than splitting the book into three two-hour-plus installments — is director Peter Jackson’s decision to shoot and show the 3-D film at a groundbreaking 48 frames per second (fps), as opposed to the industry standard of 24 fps. Higher frame rates result in crisper images and less blurry action scenes — all the better to take in Gollum’s hideous complexion.
Reactions have been mixed, with some viewers put off by the film’s hyper-real look and others claiming it’s motion sickness-inducing. The “Hobbit” guys, however, say it’s the way of the future.
“It does give you a different look, because you’re getting more information than you ever had in the past,” says visual effects supervisor Joe Letteri.
Jackson, meanwhile says: “I like my fantasy real. I don’t like it to be too artificial. I mean, it’s all artificial, but I want it to feel like it’s the real world.”
Audiences get to choose by selecting which theater they go to. Listings will tell you if it’s HFR (high frame rate) 3-D at 48 fps, 3-D at the typical 24 fps or regular old 2-D.
1. To make actors of normal height appear to be as much as 2 feet smaller, director Peter Jackson used a grabbag of techniques. The most groundbreaking is a new camera method used in Bilbo’s home, where the hobbit and his dwarf guests were shot on one set, and Gandalf was filmed simultaneously on a green-screen set and superimposed into the frame in real time. It worked for everybody except Ian McKellen, who missed the camaraderie.
2. An old-school trick was using little people and small women as doubles, complete with scaled-down props, for Bilbo and crew.
3. The dwarves’ costumes — including these outsized, heavy boots — accentuated their stature. The actors also wore padded suits and weight belts to emphasize stoutness and make their movement more believable. At a “Dwarf Boot Camp,” they rehearsed walking, fighting and horseback riding for two months.