There may be one ring to rule them all, but it’s hard to find one series that will convince everyone. Those responsible for the series knew that. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and they experienced it with the first season. Amazon Prime Video publicly celebrated the good reception of the premiere of what is one of the most expensive and ambitious television productions in history, but the critical reception was not unanimous. The new episodes, which premiere on Thursday, August 29 on Prime Video, pick up the story where it left off, with the discovery of Sauron’s true identity, a Galadriel devastated by the deception she has suffered, and evil beginning to emerge in a Middle Earth that had long been at peace. After having introduced the elves, dwarves, hairy men and sorcerers who are the protagonists of this story based on the universe created by JRR Tolkien, the second season begins by looking back to review the path of the Dark Lord until he acquires his new disguise and approaches the making of the rings.
Patrick McKay and JD Payne, the show’s top executives, are not concerned about those criticisms, and even assumed they would exist. “It’s a series for everyone, for fans and for non-fans alike,” he said. The Lord of the Rings. “Season 2, I would say, is for fans and non-fans of the show itself,” McKay said in a video interview in mid-June. “In a scene in season 1, Galadriel’s brother asks her why a rock sinks and a ship doesn’t, and she says it’s because the rock looks down and is terrified of the darkness and the ship keeps its gaze on the stars. Yes, there’s a lot of darkness and criticism, but we prefer to keep our gaze up,” Payne adds.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power This is the first series that the duo of writers have been responsible for. “We were very lucky that this was our first series because we didn’t know what couldn’t be done or what would be too complicated. We just stayed true to the material and how we thought it needed to be adapted to the screen without having in mind how complicated it might be. Let’s say that in the first season we were learning how to build a pyramid without having ever done it before, or anyone else having done it before. By the second season we already knew a thing or two about building pyramids and I hope we built a second one that was better,” explains McKay.
The rise of the villains will be the focus of the plot of the new chapters, as the creators advance. After the peace that reigned in Middle Earth at the beginning of the series, the darkness is expanding, and all the characters and all the kingdoms are affected. The scriptwriters highlight the momentum that Pharazôn gains in Númenor and Adar in Mordor, with his army of orcs, in addition to Sauron’s maneuvers to manipulate the elf Celebrimbor. This last is one of the plots that Payne highlights in the next chapters: how Sauron will approach the elf to even drive him mad. “It’s like a thriller psychological, a kind of cat and mouse game. It’s very dark, but that’s the modus operandi “Sauron: while many villains can see your weakness and exploit it, Sauron sees your strengths, your desire to do good, and exploits them for his own ends,” Payne explains. To counteract this darkness, the new episodes incorporate an element that has not been represented on screen until now, Tom Bombadil, here played by Londoner Rory Kinnear, an enigmatic character who, according to the scriptwriters, will bring “music, poetry and humour” and whose scenes were filmed in Tenerife.
Adapting Tolkien’s material to the audiovisual format is a task that few have dared to undertake and that entails many risks due to the legion of followers that the British writer has. McKay and Payne face it as an opportunity. “Middle Earth is vast and full of countless strange creatures, as Tolkien writes. Condensing that into a series is exciting and a challenge. In the first season we wanted to show that breadth and depth with what seems like many different stories. In future seasons starting with the second (the scriptwriters refer on several occasions in this conversation to a five-season plan), those plots begin to intertwine and you realize that what you are seeing is a single story, that of the resurgence of Sauron and how Middle Earth, despite having such different interests, unites to try to defeat him,” answers McKay.
“There is a quote from a letter from Tolkien to his editor, Milton Waldman, that we like to highlight, which says that he had an ambition to create Middle-earth as a vast mythological tapestry, but he also wanted to leave room for other minds and other hands, whether in painting, music or drama, to continue to expand Middle-earth. Tolkien only gave a few hints about the Second Age (the era in which the series is set, prior to the novels of The Lord of the Rings“It’s like there are some stars in the sky but they haven’t been fully formed. Our job is to connect the dots or the stars and fill it with something that looks like Tolkien might have painted it,” Payne explains. “We’re trying to make a show for fans, but also for people who have never heard of Tolkien for whom it can be a human drama with stories of fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, mothers and daughters, star-crossed lovers, grief, loss and redemption – human stories that you can enjoy whether you like fantasy or not.”
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is Amazon Prime Video’s flagship television project. And it’s no wonder, considering its budget. In 2017, the platform acquired the adaptation rights, for which it is estimated that it paid around 300 million dollars (around 274 million euros). To this we must add the production cost of each season, which in the first batch of chapters was calculated at around 58 million dollars per episode (around 53 million euros). The second has moved its filming from New Zealand to the outskirts of London with the intention of reducing costs.
Asking them about the challenges of handling such an ambitious production brings out laughter in Payne and McKay. “There are 50 challenges every day,” JD Payne begins. “Often we are shooting with four units at once. (Speaks in Spanish) This year we were in the Canary Islands and it was fantastic. (Switches back to English) But while one of us was there, the other was here. We shoot during the day, at night, there is the visual effects unit, the specialists… We write, we do pre-production, we shoot, we do post-production, we have to coordinate between us, they bring us 10 possible costume designs, we have to build sets, tear down sets to make room for the new ones… It is a constant dance of creation and destruction and logistics,” he says. “Of course, solving problems and overcoming challenges is the job of a film director.” showrunnerand we have them for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But we like them,” McKay concludes.
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