In Mount Doom, what is CGI and what is miniature? And where was that location?

DH: Mount Doom we did a lot in pick-ups - we shot quite a lot of that this year on stage. Particularly the Gollum fight sequence where Sam eventually smacks him and Frodo runs off. We made a rubber set, basically, about 8 meters high and 15 meters wide that sloped down 45 degrees in a series of steps and we made it all a rubber mold of rock. It had to match the stuff shot up in the mountains of Rai-Pu in the wild. We had to blend into that a wee bit.

The gates of Sene-Gal - that was largely miniature. We built a walkway that runs above the flowing lava - and the rock they land on - of course we built that. That was all set pieces, but the lava flow...

GM: We actually shot a lot of it up in Rai-Pu which is a volcano in the middle of the north island which is an army training area. During the winter months it's a ski area, and during the summer all the snow is gone, and there is very delicate mountain flora on it and we had big troubles with conservationists who were really on to preserve all that stuff - for obvious reasons - we had to be very careful in shooting those sequences.

DH: How many yards of carpet? We had to lay out these carpets of mosses over the mountain to kind of prove that a crew of three or four hundred could stomp around and not hurt anything.

GM: It took our greenspeople a year to get it to sign off. We were lucky to be on the film there.

It's a testament to the quality of these films that no technical aspect of these movies overwhelm the rest. What's the key to accomplishing that?

GM: For me, the whole look of this thing was pretty disciplined from the word ‘go'. It was particularly early with the John Howell (?) look and secondly Peter took a huge amount of time - particularly in the early stages - to think and workshop ideas for armor, architectural stuff - we were working together on this stuff. It wasn't like we were all working in separate little rooms wheedling away on our own ideas. Peter actually had this stamp - "PJ Approved..."

And this is from a creative point of view - from a budget level, in much the same sort of way, we really had to watch what we spent. Even though there may have been a lot of money in one instance, it was actually spread across the whole thing, so we didn't have a lot of money to spend on this thing. We had to be careful what we built and what we couldn't build. It was a very close-knit community.

DH: It's about every department being interlocked. Peter was obviously the catalyst there. It was about creative meetings where we discussed how this would work and how that would work and all the creative meetings involved all departments. To a certain degree - there were morning meetings at 6:00 - before we started work for the day, we'd talk through the storyboards and who was doing what and what road we were going down.

There were no egos that were big enough - "Right, I'm doing this" - it was all about how we could all operate to achieve one look.

Was there ever any of the storyboards that you saw that you never thought would be able to be done?

GM: Often. Robert Enjon (the storyboard artist) got into the habit of drawing these concepts and they'd put figures in them.

DH: You'd look at them at first and say, "Oh that's not too bad" and then it'd be whoosh! (laughs) The first one I saw was the Mines of Moria - the Great Hall.

When did you first find out about the DVDs? When did you first get to realize, "Oh, it doesn't matter if this gets cut out because it will end up on the DVD"?

DH: We knew from very early on that Peter had a mind to make an extended version. He said it wasn't going to be a director's cut - the director's cut is the film - but there was so much material and so much good material that he wanted to make an extended version.

GM: I remember him saying, "I'm looking forward to sitting down and watching the 12 hours of this." We weren't really involved with what was going to be on the DVD, and obviously Peter didn't know until weeks before the release on his final cut. We just treated everything the same way.

DH: It's a very organic process in terms of what ended up being cut. We shot 18 weeks of pick-ups this year - stuff that essentially was going to be in the cut, and a hell of a lot of it wasn't, but I saw a rough cut 3 or 4 months ago that was about 4 _ hours long. It had everything in it. There's plenty more. I heard from New Line that they're doing another box after these with even more stuff that's even longer.

GM: I hope they bring out the cinema versions - I think the DVD is paced differently. That'd be great for aficionados to watch the cinematic release.

DH: Of the extended version.

GM: Right.

DH: What I'd like to see is the extended version in cinemas.
Sean Astin said that on some sets there would be shale and things actually brought in from the locations you were trying to replicate to help the actors get back to those locations. How much of that was actually stuff you'd bring from the site?

DH: We would usually be using about 10%. We created the big elements out of traditional building materials and then we dressed them with real foliage or real rock or real grass.

GM: We used as much real stuff as we possibly could. All the greenspeople would be trolling around the real locations finding grasses and mosses and things that matched. It was a matter of mixing and matching and looking at the stuff we'd shot - because a lot of the stuff we'd shot at different times, so you'd have to match those shots.

Grant, have you been enlisted for King Kong? Are there any secrets you can reveal for us?

DH: We haven't had too many discussions with Peter yet. It's about getting a relationship going with a group of people.

GM: Peter looks for new faces. That he's brought us and a whole bunch of people from Lord of the Rings is fantastic - I suppose he's expecting a similar sort of thing. It's a smaller movie. And it is going to surprise people.